We are what we think

Welcome to The Resilience Brief. During the week, I share interesting ideas that can contribute to our resilience. These are designed to get us thinking a little differently and to set us up to finish the week strong. As always, these are real-world concepts that are preventative resilience tools. That way, we’re ready for when challenges come our way.

In 1962 in Japan, two researchers put together a pretty cool (but somewhat shocking) experiment to demonstrate the power of our mind and how it can play a vital role for our physical health. The researchers selected 13 boys who were highly sensitive to a Japanese lacquer tree, which is similar in nature to poison ivy.

Because the boys were sensitive to the tree, it was expected that they would have a severe reaction once they came in contact with it. But the researchers didn’t want to simply test their sensitivity, they wanted to test something else. They wanted to see whether the boys belief about the tree would impact their physical reactions. They wanted to test the boys power of expectations.

So the researchers messed with the boys a little.

At first, the researchers touched one arm of each boy with leaves from a harmless tree but told them that these leaves were poisonous. Then they touched the other arm with actual poisonous leaves but told the boys these were harmless.

What do we think happened?

With the harmless leaves (that the boys believed were poisonous), all 13 boys developed skin reactions such as redness, swelling, and itching. Remember that the leaves were totally harmless; their reactions were generated because their minds believed the leaves were poisonous.

On the other arm, the researchers tested with actual poisonous leaves (that the boys believed were harmless), 11 out of 13 boys showed absolutely no side effects. Only two of the boys showed a reaction on the arms touched with actual poisonous leaves, and they were apparently much more reduced reactions than expected (very mild swelling etc).

Wow! When I read this I thought of two things. The first is how the heck did the Japanese researchers get permission to test poisonous plants on kids who were clearly allergic to the plant?! And secondly, how amazing is the power of the mind? This experiment proves to us that simply the expectation of harm or safety can lead to real physiological changes. It’s a brilliant reminder that powerful thoughts can influence our physical health. And on top of that (perhaps even more importantly), negative thoughts can also damage our physical health.

Our perceptions and beliefs can (and do) impact our physical well-being.

Generating healthy positive thoughts

In today’s world, it can be pretty difficult to get around where it’s good. As humans, we are programmed to look for the negative because that is how our ancestors survived. If they weren’t constantly on the lookout for predators, they wouldn’t have made it. We come from a long line of people who were always looking for threats.

Fast forward to today’s modern world and we still naturally cling to that mindset of survival by avoiding dangerous threats, even though those threats are far less aggressive these

One of the ways that I train teams and businesses to shift their thinking is to simply be conscious of the type of information we are consuming. If we’re watching the TV (or more likely on our phones) and we see a politician ranting on about something we completely disagree with, we’re prone to sit there shaking our fists and getting angry. But what good does it do? What if we just closed the app or changed the channel?

After all, we should control our content diet.

Managing our content diet.

Here’s an interesting thought when you next go to log in to your social media accounts. When we select the accounts we follow, or the channels we use, we are making a choice to give our time and attention to certain things. We’re actually choosing our future thoughts. It might sound unfair, but it’s the truth. We're actually choosing (to a point) what that information stream is, so we're already locking ourselves into certain types of thinking. As an example, when we follow ESPN, we can expect that we are going to get served sports content.

And yes, we can’t really ever know for sure what anyone will actually post, but we do get a sense of what type of content they will post. And by following certain accounts, we’re deciding that we want to go down certain paths.

However, what’s even more alarming these days is that we are actually losing control of even that. The platforms are now also guiding us down certain paths by suggesting new accounts we should follow. We are served this new content before we’ve even agreed to see it.

The point is that we have to be mindful of what ideas and content we consume. We can’t just mindlessly give our attention over to certain people or platforms. Because the information that comes our way can (and does) shape our brains more than we think.

Resilient people do many things, but one of the most powerful exercises is to simply tune into what’s good. Time to reduce our negative news and recognize the power of our thoughts and expectations.

Until next time friends, stay resilient!

Carre @ Resilient Marketing Minds