Chapter 21

Five Keys to Mental Mastery

“Today, [people] of all stripes are using mental conditioning not just as a means to a better golf swing but also to make them better corporate competitors, more creative artists and, some argue, better human beings.”

Jay Tolson
U.S. News and World Report
July 3, 2000.

You’re reading a book about managing change – and that also includes how you manage it in your own life. You can’t always (or even sometimes) make people and events conform to your needs and wishes. But you can control how you respond when life doesn’t go your way. Psychologists studying people who successfully cope with change have found a variety of mental skills that set change winners apart from change losers.

While none of these experts on human behavior compiled the same list of characteristics, the mental attributes that they identified are similar. Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, concentrates on optimism with its positive self-talk. Then you’ve got Dr. Suzanne Kobas, who as a professor at the City University of New York, developed her three psychological characteristics of stress hardiness: control, commitment, and challenge. Dr. Daryl Connor, psychologist and President of ODR, Inc., has five characteristics of resiliency: positive, focused, flexible, organized and proactive. And the most familiar of all the experts is Dr. Stephen Covey with his seven habits of highly effective people: personal vision, personal leadership, personal management, interpersonal leadership, empathic communication, creative cooperation, and balanced self-renewal.

If there are so many great lists floating around out there, why do we need to create a new one just for this book? Why not take one that already exists and be done with it? That’s because experts, like Covey or Connor, didn’t have the benefit of the newest mind-body research coming out of the medical centers. Over the last decade, the field of psychoneuroimmunology (psycho-neuro-immunology) or PNI has gained significant respectability (and momentum) in the scientific community. The research at medical schools such as Harvard University, University of California at Los Angles (UCLA), Rochester University, Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of Massachusetts (to name a few) have all shown the interconnection between emotions, the brain and the immune system. (You may have even read about PNI research in your local newspaper or a national magazine.) Therefore, any “list” of what constitutes successful personal change management should now build upon the latest PNI research. (For examples of some of that research, please refer to the accompanying sidebar.)

Research to ponder

The following are just a small sampling of the tens-of-thousands of studies in psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) research.

Psychologist Sheldon Cohn at Carnegie-Mellon University and scientists at a specialized cold research unit in Sheffield, England conducted a rigorous study that proved that stress weakens the immune system. They evaluated almost 400 healthy subjects for how much stress they were experiencing in their lives and then systematically exposed each individual to a cold virus. Cohn found that people with the higher stress levels were the most likely to “catch” a cold. For those subjects with minimal stress, only 27 percent caught colds. However, of those with high stress levels, 47 percent became sick.

In the American Psychologist journal (42, 1987), Howard Friedman and S. Boothby-Krewley reported their findings from combining 101 smaller health studies into a single larger one. Applying a special statistical analysis to several thousand people, they confirmed that negative emotion adversely impacts peoples’ health. Individuals with long-term problems such as anxiety, depression, stress, and hostility had double the risk of illnesses that included asthma, headaches, arthritis, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Dr. Reford Williams of Duke University Medical School and his collaborators found that the higher the feelings of hostility (as measured on a psychological test) among their subjects the greater the chance of death from heart disease. In fact, male doctors, who as medical students were in the high-hostility group, had a death rate twenty-five years later six and half times higher than those doctors who were in the low-hostility group during medical school.

Cardiac researchers at Yale School of Medicine found results similar to the study at Duke University Medical School. Studying over 1,000 men with a history of one previous heart attack, researchers noted that those men who scored high on tests of anger and aggression suffered more second heart attacks and were three times more likely to die of heart attacks than those men who had lower scores.

Peggy Huddleston, Project Director at the Center for Psychology and Social Change, an affiliate of the Department of Psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, put the mind-body research to practical use with pre-surgery guided imagery to reduce pain and speed healing of post-operative patients. The following three women all followed Huddleston’s program described in her book, Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster. June K. needed only Tylenol to control her post-operative pain following a mastectomy and reconstruction surgery. After hip replacement surgery Patricia F. left the hospital a week early because she used Huddleston’s approach. Maureen K.’s doctor warned her about excruciating pain following her plastic surgery, but instead, as she told The Boston Globe (10/29/1996) “I didn’t have any pain at all.” These women, and thousands of other surgery patients, have learned how mental mastery helps to protect and heal their bodies. (Should you or a friend have surgery on the horizon, then you might want to visit their Web site [ www.healfaster.com].)

We’ve based the five keys to mental mastery on the work of those who have come before us, the most recent PNI research, and the program conducted by the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The five keys to mental mastery – successfully managing changes in your life – are:

• Flexibility
• Mindfulness
• Positive thinking
• Patience
• Compassion.

One powerful, but basic rule that links together all five keys is that you have control over what you put into your mind and how you act. You aren’t a puppet. Nobody is telling you what to think and feel. Sometimes you may not like the choices life dishes out, but you can always choose how you respond to any given person or situation. You, and only you, are responsible for the thoughts you hold, which in turn shape the life you live and impact your health.

The five keys discussed in this chapter help you to become less vulnerable to your external world by keeping your internal world strong and healthy. You’re less dependent on what other people say and do. You don’t need others to change in order for you to have less stress and a happier life. Mental mastery gives you control when everyone around you is losing theirs.

Mind over body

To directly experience how quickly your mind impacts your body, try these two simple experiments.

Think of a big juicy lemon. Do you see that lemon in your mind? Now take a knife and cut that lemon into quarters. Holding one quarter in your hand, take a big juicy bite out of it. What’s happening to your mouth, and even your body? You probably feel your mouth puckering slightly and a little extra saliva forming. Your body might even be pulling back, in rejection of the sour taste.

For those of you who like eating lemons, here’s another visualization. Think of a chalk board - you know, those big old fashion blackboards that you find in school classrooms. Now imagine scraping your finger nails down that board. What do you feel? A few shivers? Did you want to pull back your hand?

What you put into your mind has a direct and immediate effect on your body. The same thing happens when you practice the five keys of mental mastery. By using your mind, you can cause stress to relaxe it’s deadly grip and disease-fighting anti-bodies come to the rescue. But when you dwell with bitterness, judgmentalness, and anger your body remains a prisoner to stress and becomes flooded with immune-destructive chemicals.

Back to excerpts

Buy the book now!