It pays to work on your attitude. Personality and outlook
contribute to changes in brain activity which supports relief of physical
symptoms. Personality traits such as being resilient, straightforward, or
altruistic assist the brain’s ability to reduce pain and other physical
symptoms. Also, having an expectation of a positive outcome boosts the
experience of relief. The brain actually produces more of its natural
painkillers (opioids, endorphins), and brain activity increases in the prefrontal
cortex and is dampened in the emotional regions of the brain.
Understanding how attitude relates to improvement helps in
treatment. A commonly used coping method, distraction, did not show a reduction
in pain during experiments. However, a focus on pain reduces pain intensity.
Approaches such as accepting a situation and tolerating it, which improve resiliency,
are proven effective in experiments on attending to pain and rating its
intensity. Self-reported reductions in symptoms are found when altering
expectation in conditions of pain, insomnia, fatigue, nausea, irritable
bowel syndrome (IBS), urinary and sexual function. An expectation of
improvement contributes significantly to the effectiveness of antidepressants
to reduce symptoms.
Research is building evidence that cultivating a positive
outlook makes a significant difference in brain function which results in
relief of many distressing symptoms. So make your daily list of gratitude,
appreciate the little things, get the most out of good moments with mindfulness,
and develop that ‘glass is half full’ attitude.
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