As I reviewed in my last blog about Harvard physician and Princeton seminarian Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv and his book CURED: The Life Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing, Dr. Rediger and I share in common an interest in researching people who have better than usual health outcomes- or what Jeff calls “health outliers,” otherwise known as “spontaneous remissions.”
Jeff and I will be co-facilitating in our ongoing Healing With The Muse community on September 20, so if you feel inspired to learn from Jeff and I regarding what we’ve learned in our area of shared study, please join us!
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A Post-2020 Disclaimer
In preparation for that, I wanted to share with you all some of the notes I took after re-reading Jeff’s book, although I’m sure he’ll do a much better job of telling you in his own words when we teach together! Right out of the gate, I’ll make a disclaimer through the lens of our post-2020 awareness, which is that Jeff and I are both aware that some of the interventions health outliers applied are the result of certain unearned privileges- and that’s not fair. Not everyone can afford to eat a healthy organic diet or quit their job and go on an extended pilgrimage or pay for a trauma therapist or faith healer or even afford to leave a toxic marriage. While we’ve both interviewed people who lacked certain privileges, it’s also true that becoming a health outlier may be a sign of a certain amount of privilege, and that sucks. We’re also aware that some in the wellness and yoga world have distorted some of these teachings about immune-boosting to resist public health measures or justifying not getting vaccinated against Covid as if engaging in behaviors that might make one more likely to be a health outlier means you’re not vulnerable to Covid and can’t spread it to those who might be more vulnerable- which is simply not true. The best way to boost your immune system so it can resist Covid is to get vaccinated- AND engage in all these health-inducing behaviors as well! These recommendations are not meant to be an alternative to whatever conventional medicine might be able to offer, but an adjunct, for those who conventional medicine has failed to help.
With that disclaimer, let me share with you some of my notes.
CURED Tip #1 Activate The Relaxation Response
As I described in detail in my book Mind Over Medicine, one of the keys to mind-body-spirit medicine in general and the field of psychoneuroimmunology specifically relies on making lifestyle changes aimed at creating nervous system regulation, flipping the nervous system from disease-inducing “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system stress responses or “freeze” dorsal vagal parasympathetic responses to the homeostatic healing state of the ventral vagal parasympathetic “relaxation response.” Meditation, prayer, making art, ritual, and being in nature can activate the relaxation response, but even more importantly, making lifestyle changes that take you out of retraumatizing situations that activate the stress responses are essential to maximizing your chances of being a health outlier.
Those with radical remissions were often VERY proactive. These healings were not usually “spontaneous.” They got treatment for longstanding traumas. They freed themselves from toxic jobs that required them to sell their soul or tolerate abusive bosses. They left or set very strong boundaries with poisonous relationships. They quit making excuses and finally went after fulfilling the dream they had long put off. They opened their hearts and engaged in radical forgiveness over grudges they had long held, which were festering in their nervous systems. They sought out spiritual counseling, engaged in intensive spiritual practice, and put their heart and soul into healing spiritual disconnection. They went all out to create a relaxation response-inducing life their bodies would love, living fully, loving well, and their efforts paid off in ways that can be measured.
New research on telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of your DNA strands that shorten with age, suggests that we have some control over how long our telomeres are. It’s no surprise then that those whose bodies live in relaxation response the majority of the time have nice long telomeres and those whose nervous systems are chronically in stress response develop short, frayed telomeres that damage both your health span and your life span. While we tend to glorify stress, even bragging about it as if stress means “I’m a busy, productive person making my mark on the world,” physiologically speaking, stress means premature disease, disability, and death, whereas relaxation equals a higher chance of reversing disease.
This doesn’t mean you can’t do intense things and still have good health. It’s all about how you perceive your situation. Two people in the same situation may have entirely different physiological responses to the same life event, depending on whether they see it as growth-inducing and feel gratitude for the initiation or whether they feel like a helpless victim at the mercy of a hostile universe. This is not about “spiritual bypassing” or emotional repression, artificially putting a silver lining on traumatic experiences that cause real suffering, or applying positive psychology principles and denying your authentic experience when you feel like shit. It’s about moving through those emotions authentically and vulnerably and then moving beyond them, rather than getting stuck in disease-inducing ways.
As Jeff describes, the degree of agency and autonomy you feel regarding stressful situations has everything to do with how you perceive those situations. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that instead of getting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the result of traumatic situations, some resilient people experience post-traumatic GROWTH in ways that can make them more likely to have exceptional health outcomes. So perception is everything when it comes to your physiology. To some degree, stressful experiences are unavoidable when you’re incarnate in a human body, and painful events inevitably cause painful feelings. We can’t avoid the inevitable, but we can be proactive about changing the things that are within our control, and then when difficult events inevitably arise, we can lean in, rising to the challenge and remind ourselves, “I’m growing here.”
CURED Tip #2 Love Heals
Just as stress responses create the hormonal cocktail of disease, love induces a margarita of healing hormones like oxytocin, endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine. Some people worry when they hear that love heals because they don’t have a partner, a tight-knit family, a roommate, or a close circle of friends, and they fear that this means there’s no hope of finding the love that heals. On top of the loneliness, they may already feel, they panic because now they’re scared they could literally die from love depletion.
The good news is that new research by Barbara Frederickson, lead researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill, suggests that from a physiological and biological standpoint, love is more available to you than you might think. In fact, love is all around, if you know how to harvest it. In the compilation of her research in the book Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, she makes the bold claim that we can find “positivity resonance” (aka “love) anywhere there are other humans receptive to sharing these sweet small moments of everyday connection- at the coffee shop, the grocery store, in the schoolyard of the kid’s school, with others in a restaurant or people in your yoga class or church or workplace. Social isolation prevents you from experiencing the benefits of this kind of healing love, but even introverts can learn to be proactive about putting themselves in situations where positivity resonance can be cultivated, enjoyed, and used medicinally. If this sounds hard, it turns out that regular loving-kindness meditation makes it easier to connect, changing the quality of even the simplest social interaction and making it ripe for nourishing moments of love.
Let’s make one thing clear. The kind of biologically measurable effects of love can only really get activated by being together in person, Frederickson says. Social media simply won’t cut it. As loneliness researcher John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago puts it, if we were to build a zoo for the human animal, we would include the instructions “Do not house in isolation.” Sure, we can have emotions that are evoked by text. We can feel what might feel like love from reading a love letter. But Frederickson says they pale in comparison to what we experience physiologically when we look in someone’s eyes and feel love in our hearts, even if only in brief moments of connection with strangers.
The past year and a half has made this very difficult for many of us to get our needs for love and intimacy met in person. It’s also been very difficult for people with developmental trauma to tolerate love and intimacy, especially if they have a certain kind of wound, as I described here...