HEALTHY AGING AND BELIEFS

As strange as it may sound, what you believe plays a tremendously determine role in how you age. In this, there are healing beliefs that you can adopt and there are toxic beliefs—beliefs which you will want to discover and replace. Now when it comes to beliefs, there are many kinds of beliefs—identity beliefs (about who you are), causation beliefs (what causes what), equivalence beliefs (what is equal to and equivalent to what), contributory beliefs (what contributes to something), assumptive beliefs (what you assume without question), etc.

Identity beliefs: “I am a diabetic.” “I am an alcoholic.” Causation beliefs: “Things going wrong makes me depressed.” “When you lose a loved one, you have to grieve for two or more years.” “If there is heart attacks in your family, you will probably have a heart attack.” Equivalence beliefs: “A diagnosis of cancer is a death sentence.” Contributory beliefs: “I smoked for years before I quit, I will probably get lung cancer.” Assumptive beliefs: “My grandfather smoked heavily everyday of his life and he lived into his 90s.”

What we know in Neuro-Semantics is that unlike a thought which sends signals to your body and which can influence how your body responds, a belief is a command to your nervous systems. That’s why a belief sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy and begins to make happen what we fear will happen. That’s what makes a belief so much more powerful than a mere thought. You can think all kinds of things without doing any semantic damage to yourself. But if you believe something that is limiting, toxic, dysfunction, or dangerous, that belief will activate all of your many nervous systems to try to make it real. It is this actualization process that is the problem.

Let’s peek into this actualization process for just a moment to understand it. The reason a mere thought will not do semantic damage is that you can try on a thought without believing it. It’s just a thought. So it does not activate any commitment to the thought. A belief is different. Having confirmed a thought that it is real, actual, or factual, the belief informs all of neurology that reality is such and such. In response your autonomic nervous system, your immune system, your sympathetic nervous system, and on and on all go into action to help you adjust to reality (well, to your perception of reality). That’s why the-confirmed-thought (a belief) can get your body to create ulcers, headaches, backaches, strokes, heart-attacks, and on and on.

The bottom line? Be very careful what you believe! What you believe can have drastic effects in your mind-body-emotion system. One of the most effective solutions to this is the critical thinking model in NLP, The Meta-Model of Language. As a thinking tool, the Meta-Model empowers you to think critically about the things you think and believe and to quality control your thoughts so that they are more accurate and precise. Another effective tool are the belief

change patterns. These are processes by which you can transform a limiting belief into an empowering belief.

Anne Harrington wrote about a story from a 1957 psychiatric journal that radiates questions and puzzles. It is in her book, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine.

Mr. Wright was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma, cancer of the lymph nodes. “Tumors, some the size of oranges, infested his neck, groin, and armpits.” He ceased to respond to conventional therapies. Then he learned of a new experimental drug, Krebiozen, and was “persuaded that it would be his miracle cure.” On Friday he begged his doctor for an injection. On Monday, the doctor was greeted by Mr. Wright “walking around the ward, chatting happily.” The tumors had “melted like snow balls on a hot stove.” Mr Wright continued his stunning recovery until he read conflicting stories about Krebiozen’s effectiveness in the newspaper. His confidence undermined, he relapsed. His doctor then convinced him that the original injection had been defective and administered another one—actually distilled water. He recovered even more dramatically than the first injection and sent home, “a picture of health.” Later when Mr Wright read that the American Medical Association had denounced Krebiozen as a worthless drug, he relapsed once again. He was admitted to the hospital and died two days later.

Whatever happened there, obviously his mind played a significant role in both his recovery and his relapses. What he believed somehow activated his mind-body system both to his benefit and then to his detriment.