21 Quotes by Jo Marchant

Stress influences how the brain is wired, making us extra-susceptible to future problems by destroying the very brain pathways that would help us to stay calm and in control.

What harms us is our psychological response to those circumstances; not the state of our environment, but of our mind. And that is something we can control.

I used to think the whole mind–body stuff was nonsense. But after a month of yoga class, I was hooked.’ Harvard.

The presence of the central governor may explain why interval training – short bursts of high intensity exercise interspersed by recovery periods – works so well. According to Noakes, regular sprints that push us close to our limit of maximum performance don’t just increase physical fitness, they also retrain the brain. They teach the central governor that pushing ourselves that hard was fine, so next time it’s safe to push ourselves a little bit further.

They also received much less aggressive care at the end of their lives, with fewer rounds of chemotherapy and longer hospice stays. But the researchers were surprised to find something else. The palliative care group survived for an average of 11.6 months, compared to 8.9 months for the control group.30.

In particular, he believes that always-on technologies such as email, mobile phones and Facebook can be harmful if we don’t learn how to control their effects on us.

I don’t see any placebo there at all,” says Moerman. “What I do see is a clinician wearing a uniform of some sort.” Instead of focusing on fake pills, he argues, we should be looking at those trappings of medicine that make us expect to feel better – whether it’s the white coat, stethoscope, and gleaming hospital equipment of a Western physician, or the incense and incantations of a traditional healer.

Saintey asks me to breathe in time with the blue bar – five seconds in as it fills, five seconds out as it drains. Then something striking happens. Within a few seconds, the difference between my lowest and highest heart rate is much larger than before – varying from about 60 to 90 beats per minute. And the line on the graph transforms from ugly random spikes into a smooth, snake-like curve.

What does have an effect, of course, is our psychological response to those inert substances. Neither fake acupuncture nor a fake pill is in itself capable of doing anything. But patients interpret them in different ways, and that in turn creates different changes in their symptoms.