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Radiant Well-Being:
Researching the Mind-Body Connection
An interview with Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.
by Raz Ingrasci, President
 Dr.
Joan Borysenko is the Chairperson of the Hoffman Institute Advisory Council. A cancer cell biologist, licensed psychologist, and yoga and
meditation instructor, Dr. Borysenko is the co-founder and former
Director of the Mind-Body Clinic at New England Deaconness Hospital.
She is President of Mind/Body Health Sciences, Inc. and an international
authority on mind/body medicine. She is an outstanding lecturer, workshop
leader, and frequent guest on national TV and radio shows.
Dr. Borysenko is the author of several best-selling books, including
"Minding the Body, Mending the Mind," "Fire in the
Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism," "Inner Peace
for Busy People," "The Power of the Mind to Heal,"
and, most recently, "7 Paths to God: The Ways of the Mystic."
Raz Ingrasci: You’ve seen the University of California,
Davis research results. In general, what does mind/body medicine tell
us about the correlation between mental states and physical health?
Dr. Joan Borysenko: It tells us that there is a very strong
connection between mind and body. We used to call it psychosomatic
medicine and we knew in many instances everything from back pain to
migraines to allergic reactions seemed to be at least in part mediated
by what was going on emotionally. People in the medical sciences,
in general, weren’t so interested in psychosomatic medicine.
That was the purview of psychiatry. But, in the last 20 years or so
we’ve learned so much more about genetics, immunology, and endocrinology
that we now understand the pathways through which emotions affect
the body.
For example, Candace Pert, who is the author of a really wonderful
book on emotions and health, Molecules and Emotion: The Science Behind
Mind-Body Medicine, says that emotions are really the bridge between
the mind and the body. There is a way that thoughts get turned into
do-able events within the body. Another friend of mine in this area
is Carolyn Myss and she always says, "Your biography becomes
your biology."
What the research shows about the Hoffman Process is that, in fact,
there is a substantial and lasting decrease in depression and other
negative emotions, and a concomitant increase in positive emotions.
That is quite remarkable. It is the research in molecular biology,
immunology, and psychology that’s taking things out of the purview
of psychosomatic medicine and putting it now into a larger framework,
which compels us to look at the effects of emotions on health.
RI: What kinds of illnesses would we expect from
negative emotions? What health issues are likely to be affected by
decreases in negative emotions, like decreases in depression, and
concomitant increases in emotional intelligence and forgiveness?
JB: Depending on which research you look at, somewhere
between 50 and 90 percent of reasons why people visit their family
practice physicians are for stress-related illnesses, and virtually
any illness can be either caused by/made worse by stress. For example,
if you have asthma and you’re stressed, it is going to be worse
and you’re more likely to have an attack than if you’re
not stressed.
RI: When you say stressed, do you mean emotionally
stressed?
JB: Yes, emotional stress. Although physical stress
follows the same final common pathways, emotional stress tends to
be more chronic for people, and what the research is trying to look
at are the effects of chronic stress.
For example, with Vietnam War vets or people who were abused as children
who have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, there’s been a great
deal of research that looks at the way that their cortisol levels,
which is the primary hormone associated with chronic stress, are affected
over time. When they (the levels) are very high, they affect every
system of the body. When they’re chronically high, they really
can erode health – everything from actually killing off cells
in the hippocampus of the brain and reducing memory, to making it
harder for those cells to function.
So everything, from memory to immunity – actually to heart disease
– is affected by negative emotions. Take "hostility,"
one of the negative emotions that was reduced in the Hoffman Process
according to the research of Michael Levenson and Carolyn Aldwin.
We know that hostility is actually related directly to heart disease.
So there’s something other than stress that is important: hostility
and the heart disease connection are very specific.
Then you look at depression and virtually every illness that you can
think of is made worse by depression, and there’s quite a bit
of literature looking at depression and the incidence of cancer. They
haven’t looked at the incidence of all cancers but certainly
the general incidence of cancer seems to be increased in people who
are chronically depressed, probably because depression is immunosuppressive
and the immune surveillance system that normally is there to remove
cells that have become cancerous may not work so well when you’re
depressed.
What I like so much about the Hoffman Process is that it’s not
psychotherapy, it’s not treatment. It’s simply a way of
becoming more fully human, developing the potential that’s there,
coming into your life with much better awareness. It’s being
in the present moment and not controlled by reactivity based on past
patterns.
The fact is that just about every human being has old patterns that
came from the way that we were parented because no parent is perfect,
and just asking how can I become more conscious and more awake, which
is what the Hoffman Process does, will help.
RI: Research also shows not only that the psychological
profiles of Hoffman participants shift, but a year later they have
more physical energy and vitality. Would it be fair to say, in general,
that the process actually makes people, to a significant degree, more
stress hearty and resilient physically?
JB: I think that’s an absolutely true thing
to say. It’s very clear in looking at your research that the
combination of enhanced emotional literacy, the ability to forgive,
and the ability to empathize are really critical to emotional health.
RI: One of the interesting things for me in this
data is the observation that, although the Process is educational
rather than psycho-therapuetic, it has a strong therapeutic benefit.
So it seems to me that we can say, for instance, depression, whatever
the cause may be, to a significant degree you can learn your way out
of it.
JB: That is the promise of cognitive therapy. I was
extremely impressed with the Hoffman data on depression, that right
after the program, you didn’t have a depressed person left,
which is quite remarkable. But the most important thing from the research
point of view is that those numbers hold over time and they actually
hold very well.
I believe, when I reviewed the literature, that the rate of mild to
moderate depression was only 17 percent in the sample who had taken
the Hoffman Process at the end of a year and that is extremely low.
When you look, you say, "Wow." The relapse rates for anti-depression
therapy is higher; the lowest possible is 18 percent and I think the
highest was about 82 percent. It’s remarkable, and its outcome
is better than a drug therapy.
The authors of the research findings that are in the appendix of Tim
Laurence’s book, The Hoffman Process, looked at relapse rates
from traditional cognitive therapies, which were 12 to 46 percent.
My sense is that the Hoffman Process does more than what a cognitive
therapy alone could do because it has a spiritual component and the
spiritual component, the meaning component, is so important to people.
When one recognizes, "I have a mind but I’m not in my mind,
I’m something larger than that," it gives an enhanced layer
of perspective to the cognitive therapy that can only be helpful.
RI: I have noticed that after having done Hoffman,
when people speak about their healing, they always relate a spiritual
dimension to it. The spiritual dimension is inherent in wholeness
for people, at least in the Hoffman Process. So, I agree that it is
a tremendous accelerator or augmenting factor in there. The other
thing is that the research shows that spirituality goes up –
every day experiences of spirituality – and stays up and I think
that, too, is related to forgiveness.
I think another interesting feature of the research is that, to our
knowledge, there has not been any other research model that has looked
at both decreases in negative effect – which everyone wants
to reduce – and simultaneous increases in positive effect. I
don’t think that those necessarily go hand in hand. In other
words just because someone’s depression goes down doesn’t
mean that they’re going to become more spiritual or more emotionally
intelligent. So it’s my view that it is precisely the increase
in emotional intelligence, spirituality, and forgiveness that engenders
the competency that goes forward, the increased skill that keeps people
in that state where they’re less likely to slip back. Maybe
you can comment on that.
JB: There is a difference between just not experiencing
a negative emotion versus experiencing something positive, like spirituality,
like compassion, like empathy.
I do think that it’s really important to distinguish between
the effects of negative emotions and the effects of positive emotions,
which is different from just a non-stressed, neutral state.
RI: Another fascinating thing to me is that over
time there is a trailing off effect that we generally expect. One
of the really interesting things in the Hoffman work was that emotional
intelligence went way up after the Process; a year later it was higher
still. In other words, it kept going up after a year.
JB: That’s a remarkable thing, when you teach
someone a skill that by its very nature leads to greater and greater
awareness. That, I think, is probably the crux of the whole thing:
unless people learn the skills of awareness and the skills of choice,
the positive effects are likely to diminish over time. But if this
gets in at the level of, "Yes, this is how I need to be looking
at life, these are skills for me that have really become skills ready
at hand, they’re second nature, they’ve become unconscious
like driving a car." So they’re not going to go away, they’ve
become, in a way, part of the ground of your being.
RI: It’s like learning to ride a bike, once
you get it, you get it for life.
JB: That’s right!
RI: Being able to shift emotional intelligence so
that it continues to expand is wonderful and I think that was a wonderful
research finding.
JB: It’s a tremendous finding and emotional
intelligence is what we hope we had learned from our parents, but
we don’t generally. It is remarkable to find out that we can
learn it later in life in a way that becomes a good habit in the same
way that we learned good habits from our parents.
RI: One of the great findings of recent brain science
is that our emotional brain, the limbic brain, can grow as adults.
Until recently, we believed that the adult brain stopped growing.
But when people become more emotionally intelligent and they grow
in love – the very kinds of things that are being measured in
this study – our brains literally do change and grow. Isn’t
it true, then, that if these changes are as lasting as they are, the
brain has to have grown?
JB: Yes, it is and that’s what’s exciting.
The brain is really plastic in that way and can grow, and it’s
remarkable to me that an eight-day process can create changes like
that. It’s like a positive feedback loop, where changes are
self-reinforcing.
RI: Over the years, if I look at Process enrollment,
about 60 percent of the people taking the process are women. Do you
agree that women are, in a sense, leading the movement of personal/emotional/spiritual
growth? What are your observations of that?
JB: Well, I think it’s true. It’s funny
you should ask because this morning I was just reading the work of
Stephanie Allen, President of the Women’s Vision Foundation.
One of the things she was looking at is gender differences in men
and women. One difference is that men are more fearful of vulnerability
and women are more fearful of isolation. Because the relational nature
of women is that we need to connect with each other, it’s scary
if we don’t. For men, it’s scarier to connect because
vulnerability is scary.
Again, you hate to make generalizations because there’s a spectrum
of masculine and feminine traits in any person. Something like the
Hoffman Process is likely to be more threatening for men and more
attractive to women. That goes for all emotional growth programs.
In fact, the Hoffman Process has enrolled more men than most any other
personal growth process that I’ve witnessed or been part of.
I think it’s quite remarkable that the Process appeals to men
as much as it does.
RI: Do you have any other comments or things you’d
like to say?
JB: Yes. I got connected with the Hoffman Process
because of what I saw in front of my very own eyes, which was a very
positive affect on my spouse, and I thought to myself, "This
is amazing, this is a huge difference." I have never seen such
a big difference in a human being in such a short period of time,
especially a human being I’m close to that makes a difference
in my life. It made me interested. So I then took the Process and
our son Justin took the Process and I experienced a tremendous change.
I look at it now and I think how amazing that a Process can bring
you to the place of absolute presence, absolute being; when all of
the scales fall from your eyes and the armor falls away from your
heart and you find yourself just present. Of course, that made me
a very active proponent of the Hoffman Process. But that was from
a personal standpoint.
I’m also a scientist, so to see now the scientific data corroborating
what I witnessed with my own eyes and what I felt within my own life
is just remarkable. What I’d like people to know is that this
reasearch is very good data. These studies were very well done –
controlled studies, long-time follow-up, and very good measurement
instruments done by people who had no vested interest in the Hoffman
Process. That makes me, as Chair of the Hoffman Institute Advisory Council, really delighted. One thing I’m going to do now that
the research data is out is to make some slides for public talks.
That means that it’ll be easier for me to talk about the Hoffman
Process because I see it as powerful, and more powerful than any other
mental health intervention that’s out there. That’s saying
a lot as a scientist and as a psychologist and I’m really delighted
because as a person it has made such a difference to me.
RI: You’ve given us lots of encouragement and
support over the years. We appreciate it so much and we’re also
glad the data turned out so well.
JB: I bet you are! ø |
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