21 Quotes by Jo Marchant

In other words, fatigue isn’t a physical event but a sensation or emotion, invented by the brain to prevent catastrophic harm. They called the brain system that does this the “central governor.

But she approaches mindfulness as just another experiment. “If I can’t do something, I’ll do three minutes of breathing and try again. It’s amazing what a difference it makes.

The problems with modern medicine run deep; clearly they won’t all be solved by mind–body therapies. But trying to improve medical outcomes by treating patients as the complex human beings we are, rather than simply as physical bodies, seems to me to be not such a bad place to start.

Terms like “mind–body” and “holistic” are often derided as flaky and unscientific, but in fact it’s the idea of a mind distinct from the body, an ephemeral entity that floats somewhere in the skull like a spirit or soul, that makes no scientific sense.

Relying on signs of damage in the muscles to alert us to fatigue would put us perilously close to collapse every time we exert ourselves. Shutting down physical activity in advance ensures a safe margin of error, and means we can continue to function even after an exhausting challenge.

At the heart of almost all the pathways I’ve learned about is one guiding principle: if we feel safe, cared for and in control – in a critical moment during injury or disease, or generally throughout our lives – we do better. We feel less pain, less fatigue, less sickness. Our immune system works with us instead of against us. Our bodies ease off on emergency defenses and can focus on repair and growth.

Pain relief is a billiondollar market, and drug companies have no incentive to fund trials that would reduce patients’ dependence on their products, he points out. And neither have medical insurers, because if medical costs come down, so do their profits. The trouble with hypnosis and other psychological therapies, he says, is that “there’s no intervening industry that has the interest in pushing it.

That positive attitude is in large part because of a spate of recent findings that is now forcing scientists to take meditation seriously as a phenomenon with impressive physical effects.

There are powerful evolutionary forces driving us to believe in God, or in the remedies of sympathetic healers, or to believe that our prospects are more positive than they are. The irony is that although those beliefs might be false, they do sometimes work: they make us better.