How to Lower your Health Risk With Positive Thinking
QHHL 
Jun 14 2018
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0 QHHL
In health and personal development circles, positive thinking is often a hot topic. To most people, it seems obvious that your thinking can have an important impact on your overall health. However, the extent of the link between health and thought is sometimes unclear. Until recently, there was little scientific evidence to support the idea that thinking positively can actually lower your health risk, let alone how. And these are all questions that medical research needs to address to prove the effectiveness of this strategy.
There is a clear link between negative thinking and increased health risk. For example, a recent study investigated the connection between Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) and depression. This study was designed to determine if these dual diagnoses actually increased a patient’s risk of death. The results were astounding. Patients who were diagnosed with depression after their CAD diagnosis were two times more likely to die prematurely. And this statistic held even in patients who had never suffered from depression before their CAD diagnosis.
The researchers also followed the patients over time. In some cases, patients were diagnosed with depression within a year of their CAD diagnosis. However, more than 37 percent were diagnosed with depression more than 5 years after the initial diagnosis. And astonishingly, the increased risk of early death still held for this final group.
The reason for this strong connection isn’t clear. One theory is that patients with depression are less likely to make lifestyle changes that improve their CAD. Depression tends to make people less compliant with medication and with making changes to their diet and exercise routines. And all of these changes are essential in decreasing health risk after a CAD diagnosis.
Another potential cause of this increased health risk is the physiological changes that occur with depression. There are a lot of physical symptoms that can accompany depression, indicating the strong link between physical and psychological health. Thus it’s entirely possible that depression could cause symptoms that worsen CAD.
There is evidence to support both of these potential causes, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other factors at play. What is clear is that delaying treatment for depression when you have CAD is a very serious health threat.
A recent study also found that a positive outlook may have an observable effect on patient outcome. In a study conducted by the Duke University Medical Center, patients with angina who were optimistic about their future suffered fewer negative symptoms. They were also less likely to need surgery for their condition. Unfortunately, this study is inconclusive. There are a number of reasons why optimistic people might enjoy better outcomes. For starters, people who believe that they’ll be fine are probably more likely to make lifestyle changes that decrease their health risk. They might also be more optimistic because they have fewer health risks to start with. Further research is needed to understand the link between optimism and outcome, but the present results are promising.
Thinking positively seems like a fairly straightforward idea. You just need to avoid negative thoughts. But in reality, there are a number of factors that can affect your mental health and wellbeing. A recent study has found that regular exercise might be more effectively at treating depression than previously thought. When your muscles are activated during a workout, they produce an enzyme that breaks down kynurenine. This compound is present in higher levels in people with depression and other mental health disorders. But during exercise, it’s converted into a form that can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, which effectively protects the brain from its negative effects.
This new discovery indicates that you can support your positive thinking by adopting strategies that work to improve your brain health at the same time.
No matter how healthy your lifestyle you will have positive and negative risk factors for certain diseases. These risk factors may be genetic, environmental or caused by lifestyle choices. Eliminating every risk factor is nearly impossible. Instead, what you should try to do is create a good balance between your negative and positive risk factors. This means eliminating or reducing the negative risk factors and increasing the positive ones. There are a number of factors that increase your health risk that you can control with the following strategies:
If you want to monitor your health risk, try using HomeLab to keep track of your health state and to measure any preventative measures you take. And if you see signs of a significant problem, you should check with your doctor as soon as possible.
Tags: Health assessment, health risk