6. Chapter VI
In which we learn why it pays to be cheerful
BODY AND MIND
THE MISSING LINK
Ancient Knowledge. People have always known that mind in some strange way carries its moods over into the body. The writer of the Book of Proverbs tells us, from that far-off day, that "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones." Jesus in His healing ministry always emphasized the place of faith in the cure of the body. "Thy faith hath made thee whole," is a frequent word on His lips, and ever since His day people have been rediscovering the truth that faith, even in the absence of a worthy object, does often make whole. Faith in the doctor, the medicine, the charm, the mineral waters, the shrine, and in the good God, has brought health to many thousands of sufferers. People have always reckoned on this bodily result from a mental state. They have intuitively known better than to tell a sick person that he is looking worse, but they have not always known why. They have known that a fit of anger is apt to bring on a headache, but they have not stopped to look for the reason, or if they have, they have often gotten themselves into a tangle. This is because there has always been, until recently, a missing link. Now the link has been found. After the last chapter, it will not be hard to understand that this connecting link, this go-between of body and mind, is nothing else than the subconscious mind. When we remember that it has the double power of knowing our thoughts and of controlling our bodies, it is not hard to see how an idea can translate itself into a pain, nor to realize with new vividness the truth of the statement that healthy mental states make for health, and unhealthy mental states for illness.
Suggestion and Emotion. There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the ways of the subconscious, but investigation has thrown a good deal of light on the problem. Two of the principles already discussed are sufficient to explain most of the phenomena. These are, first, that the subconscious is amenable to control by suggestion, and secondly, that it is greatly influenced by emotion. Tracing back the principles behind any example of the power of mind over body, one finds at the root of the matter either a suggestion or an emotion, or both. If, then, the stimulating and depressing effects of mental states are to be understood, the first Step must be a fuller understanding of the laws governing suggestion and emotion.
THE CONTAGION OF IDEAS
One of the most important points about the subconscious mind is its openness to suggestion. It likes to believe what it is told and to act accordingly. The conscious mind, too,--proud seat of reason though it may be,--shares this habit of accepting ideas without demanding too much proof of their truth. Even at his best, man is extremely susceptible to the contagion of ideas. Most of us are even less immune to this mental contagion than we are to colds or influenza; for ideas are catching. They are such subtle, insinuating things that they creep into our minds without our knowing it at all; and once there, they are as powerful as most germs.
Let a person faint in a crowded room, and a good per cent. of the women present will begin to fan themselves. The room has suddenly become insufferably close. After we have read half a hundred times that Ivory soap floats, a fair proportion of the population is likely to be seized with desire for a soap that floats,--not because they have any good reason for doing so, but simply because the suggestion has "taken." As for the harbingers of spring, they are neither the birds nor the wild flowers, but the blooming windows of the milliners, which successfully suggest in wintry February that summer is coming, and that felt and fur are out of season. It is evident that all advertising is suggestion.
The training of children, also, if it is done in the right way, is largely a matter of suggestion. The little child who falls down and bumps his head is very likely to cry if met with a sympathetic show of concern, while the same child will often take his mishaps as a joke if his elders meet them with a laugh or a diverting remark. Unlucky is the child whose mother does not know, either consciously or intuitively, that example and contagion are more powerful--and more pleasant--than command and prohibition.
Everything Suggestive. Human beings are constantly communicating, one to another. Sometimes they "get over" an idea by means of words, but often they do it in more subtle ways,--by the elevation of an eyelid, the gesture of a hand, composure of manner in a crisis, or a laugh in a delicate situation. A suggestion is merely an idea passed from one person to another, an idea that is accepted with conviction and acted upon, even though there may be no logic, no reason, no proof of its truth. It is an influence that takes hold of the mind and works itself out to fulfilment, quite apart from its worth or reasonableness. Of course, logical persuasion and argument have their place in the communication of ideas; an idea may be conveyed by other ways than suggestion. But while suggestion is not everything, it is equally true that there is suggestion in everything. The doctor may give a patient a very rational explanation of his case, but the doubtful shake of the head or the encouraging look of his eye is quite likely to color the patient's general impression. The eyes of our subconscious are always open, and they are constantly getting impressions, subtle suggestions that are implied rather than expressed.
Abnormal Suggestibility. While everybody is suggestible, nervous people are abnormally so. It may be, as McDougall suggests, that they have so large an amount of submission or negative self-feeling in their make-up that they believe anything, just because some one else says it is true. Sometimes it is lack of knowledge that makes us gullible, and at other times the cause of our suggestibility is failure to use the knowledge that we have. Sometimes our ideas are locked away in air-tight compartments with no interaction between them. The psychologists tell us that suggestion is greatly favored by a narrowing of the attention, a "contraction of the field of consciousness," a dissociation of other ideas through concentration. This all simply means that we forget to let our common sense bring to bear counter ideas that might challenge a false one; or that worry--a veritable "spasm of the attention"--has fixed upon an idea to the exclusion of all others; or that through fatigue or the dissociation of sleep or hypnosis or hysteria, our reasoning powers have been locked out and for the time being are unable to act.
It was through experiments on hypnotized subjects that scientists first learned of the suggestibility of the subconscious mind. In hypnosis a person can be made to believe almost anything and to do almost anything compatible with the safety and the moral sense of the individual. The instinct of self-preservation will not allow the most deeply hypnotized person to do anything dangerous to himself; and the moral complexes, laid in the subconscious, never permit a person to perform in earnest an act of which the waking moral sense would disapprove. Within these limits, a person in the dissociated hypnotic state can be made to accept almost any suggestion. We found in the last chapter how open to suggestion is a person in normal sleep. Of the dissociation of hysteria we shall have occasion to speak in later chapters. Although all these special states heighten suggestibility, we must not forget how susceptible each of us is in his normal waking state.
Living Its Faith. All this gathers meaning only when we realize that ideas are dynamic. They always tend to work themselves out to fulfilment. The subconscious no sooner gets a conviction than it tries to act it out. Of course it can succeed only up to a certain limit. If it believes the stomach to have cancer, it cannot make cancer, but it can make the stomach misbehave. One of my patients, on hearing of a case of brain-tumor immediately imagined this to be her trouble, and developed a pain in her head. She could not manufacture a tumor, but she could manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms.
There was another patient who was supposed to have brain-tumor. This young woman seemed to have lost almost entirely the power to keep her equilibrium in walking. Her center of gravity was never over her feet, but away out in space, so that she was continually banging from one side of the room to the other, only saving herself from injury by catching at the wall or the furniture with her hands. Several physicians who had been interested in the case had found the symptoms strongly suggestive of brain-tumor. There were, however, certain unmistakable earmarks of hysteria, such as childlike bland indifference to the awkwardness of the gait which was a grotesque caricature of several brain and spinal-cord diseases, with no accurate picture of any single one. This was evidently a case, not of actual loss of power but a dissociation of the memory-picture of walking. The patient was a trained nurse and knew in a general way the symptoms of brain-tumor. When the suggestion of brain-tumor had fixed itself in her mind she was able subconsciously to manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms of that disease.
By injecting a keen sense of disapprobation and skepticism into the hitherto placidly accepted state of disability, by flashing a mirror on the physical and moral attitudes which she was assuming, I was able to rob the pathological complex of its (altogether unconscious) pleasurable feeling-tone, and to restore to its former strength and poise a personality of exceptional native worth and beauty. After a few weeks at my house she was able to walk like a normal person and went back to her work, for good.
We have already learned enough about the inner self to see in a faint way how it works out its ideas. Since the subconscious mind runs the bodily machinery, since it regulates digestion, the building up of tissue, circulation, respiration, glandular secretion, muscular tonus, and every other process pertaining to nutrition and growth, it is not difficult to see how an idea about any of these matters can work itself out into a fact. A thought can furnish the mental machinery needed to fulfil the thought. Some one catches the suggestion: "Concentration is hard on the brain. It soon brings on brain-fag and headache." Not knowing facts to the contrary, the suggestible mind accepts the proposition. Then one day, after a little concentration, the idea begins to work. Whereupon the autonomic nervous system tightens up the blood-vessels that regulate the local blood supply, too much blood stays in the head, and lo, it aches! The next time, the suggestion comes with greater force, and soon the habit is formed,--all the result of an idea. It is a good thing to remember that constant thought about any part of the body never fails to send an over-supply of blood to that part; of course that means congestion and pain.
Hands Off! By sending messages directly to an organ through the nerve-centers or by changing circulation, the subconscious director of our bodies can make any part of us misbehave in a number of ways. All it needs is a suggestion of an interfering thought about an organ. As we have insisted before, the subconscious cannot stand interference. Sadler well says: "Man can live at the equator or exist at the poles. He can eat almost anything and everything, but he cannot long stand self-contemplation. The human mind can accomplish wonders in the way of work, but it is soon wrecked when directed into the channels of worry."[27] In other words, hands off!--or rather, minds off! Don't get ideas that make you think about your body. The surest way to disarrange any function is to think about it. It is a stout heart that will not change its beat with a frequent finger on the pulse, and a hearty stomach that will not "act up" under attention. "Judicious neglect" is a good motto for most occasions. Take no anxious thought if you would be well. Know enough about your body to counteract false suggestions; fulfil the common-sense laws of hygiene,--eight hours in bed, plenty of exercise and fresh air, and three square meals a day. Then forget all about it. "A mental representation is already a sensation,"[28] and we have enough legitimate sensations without manufacturing others.
[Footnote 27: Sadler:
Physiology of Faith and Fear.]
[Footnote 28: DuBois:
Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders.]
From Real Life. Startling indeed are the tricks that we can play on ourselves by disregarding these laws. A patient who was unnecessarily concerned about his stomach once came to me in great alarm, exhibiting a distinct, well-defined swelling about the size of a match-box in the region of his stomach. I looked at it, laughed, and told him to forget it. Whereupon it promptly disappeared. The first segment of the rectus muscle had tied itself up into a knot, under the stimulus of anxious attention.
Another patient appeared at my door one day saying, "Look here!" Examination showed that her abdomen was swollen to the size of more than a six-months pregnancy. As it happened, this woman had a friend who a short time before had developed a pseudo, or hysterical pregnancy which continued for several months. My patient, accepting the suggestion, was prepared to imitate her. I gave her a punch or two and told her to go and dress for luncheon. In the afternoon she had returned to her normal size.
Another woman, suffering from chronic constipation, was firmly convinced that her bowels could not move without a cathartic, which I refused to give. However, I did give her some strychnine pills, carefully explaining that they were not for her intestines and that they would have no effect there. She did not believe me, and promptly began to have an evacuation every day. It seems that sometimes two wrong ideas are equal to a right one.
If doctors fully realized the power of suggestion, they would be more careful than they sometimes are about suggesting symptoms by the questions they ask their patients.
A patient of mine with locomotor-ataxia suffered from the usual train of symptoms incident to that disease. It turned out, however, that many of the symptoms had been suggested by the questions of former physicians who had asked him whether he had certain symptoms and certain disabilities. The patient had answered in the negative and then promptly developed the suggested symptoms. When I told him what had happened, these false symptoms disappeared leaving only those which had a real physical foundation.
Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina pectoris. As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person, I asked her where she got such an idea. "Dr. ---- told me so last May." "Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?" I asked. She thought a minute and then answered: "Why no, I had a pain around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that consultation." The wise physician lets his patients describe their own symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his questions.
Autosuggestion. Of course we must remember that an idea cannot always work itself out immediately. Conditions are not always ripe. It often lies fallow a long time, buried in the subconscious, only to come up again as an autosuggestion, a suggestion from the self to the self. If some one tells us that nervous insomnia is disastrous, and we believe it, we shall probably store up the idea until the next time that chance conditions keep us awake. Then the autosuggestion "bobs up," common sense is side-tracked, we toss and worry--and of course stay awake. An autosuggestion often repeated becomes the strongest of suggestions, successfully opposing most outside ideas that would counteract it,--reason enough for seeing to it that our autosuggestions are of the healthful variety.
At the base of every psycho-neurosis is an unhealthful suggestion. This is never the ultimate cause. There are other forces at work. But the suggestion is the material out of which those other forces weave the neurosis. Suggestibility is one of the earmarks of nervousness. A sensible and sturdy spirit, stable enough to maintain its equilibrium, is a fairly good antidote to attack. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
WHY FEELINGS COUNT
The Emotions Again. It seems impossible to discuss any psychological principle without finally coming back to the subject of emotions. It truly seems that all roads lead to the instincts and to the emotions which drive them. And so, as we follow the trail of suggestion, we suddenly turn a corner and find ourselves back at our starting-point--the emotional life. Like all other ideas, suggestions get tied up with emotions to form complexes, of which the driving-power is the emotion.
If we look into our emotional life, we find, besides the true emotions, with which we have become familiar in Chapter III, a great number of feelings or feeling-tones which color either pleasurably or painfully our emotions and our ideas. On the one hand there are pleasure, joy, exaltation, courage, cheer, confidence, satisfaction; and on the other, pain, sorrow, depression, apprehension, gloom, distrust, and dissatisfaction. Every complex which is laid away in our subconscious is tinted, either slightly or intensely, with its specific feeling-tone.
Emotions--Tonic and Poisonous. All this is most important because of one vital fact; joyful emotions invigorate, and sorrowful emotions depress; pleasurable emotions stimulate, and painful emotions burden; satisfying emotions revitalize, and unsatisfying emotions sap the strength. In other words, our bodies are made for courage, confidence, and cheer. Any other atmosphere puts them out of their element, handicapped by abnormal conditions for which they were never fashioned. We were written in a major key, and when we try to change over into minor tones we get sadly out of tune.
There is another factor; painful emotions make us fall to pieces, while pleasant emotions bind us together. We can see why this is so when we remember that powerful emotions like fear and anger tend to dissociate all but themselves, to split up the mind into separate parts and to force out of consciousness everything but their own impulse. Morton Prince in his elaborate studies of the cases of multiple personality, Miss Beauchamp and B.C.A., found repeatedly that he had only to hypnotize the patient and replace painful, depressing complexes by healthy, happy ones to change her from a weak, worn-out person, complaining of fatigue, insomnia, and innumerable aches and pains, into a vigorous woman, for the time being completely well. On this point he says:
Exalting emotions have an intense synthesizing effect, while depressing emotions have a disintegrating effect. With the inrushing of depressive memories or ideas ... there is suddenly developed a condition of fatigue, ill-being and disintegration, followed after waking by a return or accentuation of all the neurasthenic symptoms. If on the other hand, exalting ideas and memories are introduced and brought into the limelight of attention, there is almost a magical reversal of processes. The patient feels strong and energetic, the neurasthenic symptoms disappear and he exhibits a capacity for sustained effort. He becomes re-vitalized, so to speak.[29]
[Footnote 29: Prince:
Psycho-therapeutics, Chap. I.]
In cases like this the needed strength and energy are not lost; they are merely side-tracked, but the person feels as weak as though he were physically ill.
BODILY RESPONSE TO EMOTIONAL STATES
Secretions. Let us look more carefully into some of the physiological processes involved in emotional changes. Among the most apparent of bodily responses are the various external secretions. Tears, the secretion of the lachrymal glands in response to an emotion, are too common a phenomenon to arouse comment. It is common knowledge that clammy hands and a dry mouth betray emotion. Every nursing mother knows that she dares not become too disturbed lest her milk should dry up or change in character. Most people have experienced an increase in urine in times of excitement; recently physiologists have discovered the presence of sugar in the urine of students at the time of athletic contests and difficult examinations.[30] We have seen what an important role the various internal secretions, such as the adrenal and thyroid secretions play in fitting the body for flight and combat, and how large a part fear and anger have in their production. Constant over-production of these secretions through chronic states of worry is responsible for many a distressing symptom.
[Footnote 30: Cannon.]
Most graphic evidence of the disturbance of secretions by emotion is found in the response of the salivary and gastric glands to painful or pleasurable thinking. As these are the secretions which play the largest part in the digestive processes, they lead us naturally to our next heading.
Digestion. Everybody knows that appetizing food makes the mouth water, but not everybody realizes that it makes the stomach water also. Nor do we often realize the vital place that this watering has in taking care of our food. "Well begun is half-done," is literally true of digestion. A good flow of saliva brings the food into contact with the taste-buds in the tongue. Taste sends messages to the nerve-centers in the medulla oblongata; these centers in turn flash signals to the stomach glands, which immediately "get busy" preparing the all-important gastric juice. It takes about five minutes for this juice to be made ready, and so it happens that in five minutes after the first taste, or even in some cases after the first smell, the stomach is pouring forth its "appetite juice" which determines all the rest of the digestive process, in intestines as well as in stomach. Experiments on dogs and cats by Pawlow, Cannon, and others have shown what fear and anger and even mildly unpleasant emotions do to the whole digestive process. Cannon tells of a dog who produced 66.7 cubic centimeters of pure gastric juice in the twenty minutes following five minutes of sham feeding (feeding in which food is swallowed and then dropped out of an opening in the esophagus into a bucket instead of into the stomach). Although there was no food in the stomach, the juice was produced by the enjoyment of the taste and the thought of it. On another day, after this dog had been infuriated by a cat, and then pacified, the sham feeding was given again. This time, although the dog ate eagerly, he produced only 9 cubic centimeters of gastric juice, and this rich in mucus. Evidently a good appetite and attractively served food are not more important than a cheerful mind. Spicy table talk, well mixed with laughter, is better than all the digestive tablets in the world. What is true of stomach secretions is equally true of stomach contractions. "The pleasurable taking of food" is a necessity if the required contractions of stomach and intestines are to go forward on schedule time. A little extra dose of adrenalin from a mild case of depression or worry is enough to stop all movements for many minutes. What a revelation on many a case of nervous dyspepsia! The person who dubbed it "Emotional Dyspepsia" had facts on his side.
Circulation. It is not the heart only that pumps the blood through the body. The tiny muscles of the smallest blood-vessels, by their elasticity are of the greatest importance in maintaining an even flow, and this is especially influenced by fear and depression. Blushing, pallor, cold hands and feet, are circulatory disturbances based largely on emotions. Better than a hot-water bottle or electric pads are courage and optimism. A patient of mine laughingly tells of an incident which she says happened a number of years ago, but which I have forgotten. She says that she asked me one night as she carried her hot-water bottle to bed, "Doctor, what makes cold feet?" and that I lightly answered "Cowardice!" Whereupon she threw away her beloved water-bag and has never needed it since.
There is a disturbance of the circulation which results in very marked swelling and redness of the affected part. This is known as angio-neurotic edema, or nervous swelling. I do not have to go farther than my own person for an example of this phenomenon. When I was a young woman I taught school and went home every day for luncheon. One day at luncheon, some one of the family criticized me severely. I went back to school very angry. Before I entered the school-room, the principal handed me some books which she had ordered for me. They were not at all the books I wanted, and that upset me still more. As I went into the schoolroom, I found that my face was swollen until my eyes were almost shut; it was a bright red and covered with purplish blotches. My fingers were swollen so that I could not bend the joints in the slightest degree. It was a day or two before the disturbance disappeared, and the whole of it was the result of anger.
We hear much to-day about high blood pressure. They say that a man is as old as his arteries, and now it is known that the health of the arteries depends largely on blood pressure. Since this is a matter that can be definitely measured at any minute, we have an easy way of noting the remarkable effect of shifting emotions. Sadler tells of an ex-convict with a blood pressure of 190 millimeters. It seems that he was worrying over possible rearrest. On being reassured on this point, his blood pressure began to drop within a few minutes, falling 20 mm. in three hours, and 35 mm. by the following day.
Muscular Tone. A force that affects circulation, blood pressure, respiration, nutrition of cells, secretion, and digestion, can hardly fail to have a marked effect on the tone of the muscles, internal as well as external. When we remember that heart, stomach, and intestines are made of muscular tissue, to say nothing of the skeletal muscles, we begin to realize how important is muscular tone for bodily health. Over and over again have I demonstrated that a courageous mind is the best tonic. Perhaps an example from my "flat-footed" patients will be to the point. One woman, the young mother of a family, came to me for a nervous trouble. Besides this, she had suffered for seven or eight years from severe pains in her feet and had been compelled to wear specially made shoes prescribed by a Chicago orthopedist. The shoes, however, did not seem to lessen the pain. After an ordinary day's occupation, she could not even walk across the floor at dinner-time. A walk of two blocks would incapacitate her for many days. She was convinced that her feet could never be cured and came to me only on account of nervous trouble. On the day of her arrival she flung herself down on the couch, saying that she would like to go away from everybody, where the children would never bother her again. She was sure nobody loved her and she wanted to die. Within three weeks, in ordinary shoes, this woman tramped nine miles up Mount Wilson and the next day tramped down again. Her attitude had changed from that of irritable fretfulness to one of buoyant joy, and with the moral change had come new strength in the muscles. The death of her husband has since made it necessary for her to support the family, and she is now on her feet from eight to fourteen hours a day, a constant source of inspiration to all about her, and no more weary than the average person.
Flabbiness in the muscles often causes this trouble with the feet. "The arches of the foot are maintained by ligaments between the bones, supported by muscle tendons which prevent undue stretching of the ligaments and are a protection against flat-foot."[31] Muscle tissue has an abundant blood supply, while ligaments have very little and soon lose their resiliency if unsupported. Any lack of tone in the calf-muscles throws the weight on the less resistant ligaments and on the cartilages placed as cushions between the bony structures of the arch. This is what causes the pain.[32]
[Footnote 31: Grey's Anatomy--"The Articulations."]
[Footnote 32: Actual loss of the arch by downward displacement of the bones cannot be overcome by restoring muscle-tone. The majority of so-called cases of flatfoot are, however, in the stage amenable to psychic measures.]
Flat-footedness is only one result of weak muscles. Eye-strain is another; ptosis, or falling of the organs, is another. In a majority of cases the best treatment for any of these troubles is an understanding attempt to go to the root of the matter by bracing up the whole mental tone. The most scientific oculists do not try to correct eye trouble due to muscular insufficiency by any special prisms or glasses. They know that the eyes will right themselves when the general health and the general spirits improve. I have found by repeated experience with nervous patients that it takes only a short time for people who have been unable to read for months or years to regain their old faculty. So remarkable is the power of mind.
SUMMARY
We have found that the gap between the body and the mind is not so wide as it seems, and that it is bridged by the subconscious mind, which is at once the master of the body and the servant of consciousness. In recording the physical effects of suggestion and emotion, we have not taken time to describe the galvanometers, the weighing-machines and all the other apparatus used in the various laboratory tests; but enough has been said to show that when doctors and psychologists speak of the effect of mind on body, they are dealing with definite facts and with laws capable of scientific proof.
We have emphasized the fact that downcast and fearful moods have an immediate effect on the body; but after all, most people know this already. What they do not know is the real cause of the mood. When a nervous person finds out why he worries, he is well on the way toward recovery. An understanding of the cause is among the most vital discoveries of modern science.
The discussion, so far, has merely prepared us to plunge into the heart of the question: What is it that in the last analysis makes a person nervous, and how may he find his way out? This question the next two chapters will try to answer.