updated 9/02/05

Why Do We Get Sick?

The connections between poor health and the lives we lead

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE
close
Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

A life out of balance will catch up with you eventually … and everyone is out of balance. We do generate illness (and wellness) in our lives. This is one of the tenets of medicine: that health and illness are not only things that happens to us, but also things that we do, a kind of behaviour.

Can this be? I have no doubt of it, and few health care professionals do anymore. Even doctors — often unfairly accused of being blind to it — know quite well that illness may be produced by the kinds of lives that we lead. But how does it work? How does lifestyle lead to illness?

A wee bit of science

The interaction of all human physiological systems connects the mind to the body in definite but extremely complex ways. This is new knowledge.

Twenty years ago, medical scientists actually believed that the nervous system and the immune system had nothing to do with each other — how quaint! This seems absurdly short-sighted to everyone today, even non-scientists. Of course, it was not the nervous and immune systems that weren’t communicating, but neurologists and immunologists! When they finally did start talking to each other, they discovered that their systems of study were interconnected — physically, neurologically, chemically, and electrically.

Since then, mind-body science has expanded to the point where distinguishing it from physiology is unnecessary and there is now a lot of hard evidence showing the many ways that our physical and mental experiences are intertwined. I’ll describe one example here.

Dr. Candace Pert pioneered the study of neuropeptides, molecules produced by the nervous system that turn out to affect all the cells of the body. Her work implies that all of your cells experience emotions, all together, all at once — not just your nervous system. An emotion like sadness produces a characteristic cocktail of neuropeptides that circulate throughout the body, binding to every type of cell and changing their behaviour in a characteristically “sad” way. So, when you are sad, your toe cells and nose cells, gastric glands and hair follicles are sad right along with you.1

When you are sad, your toe cells are sad right along with you.

Pert was one of the early champions of mind–body medical science, and many of her findings were initially treated with much skepticism. Today, her experimental results have been widely duplicated, and neuropeptides are now keenly researched around the world.

So, let’s take it for granted that the physiological mechanisms are there. But so what? What does the interconnectedness of our minds and our bodies mean, practically? How does lifestyle lead to illness in terms other than “neuropeptides”? How can we use the information to heal ourselves?

Getting stuck

I believe that rigidity — getting into a rut — is the common denominator in all situations where life is “out of balance.” There are many human problems, but they are all about getting stuck in one way or another. And so, when we get sick, it probably means that, whatever we’ve been doing and however we’ve been doing it, we’ve been doing for too long. This may be why illness is so often described by people as a “wake up call.”

That rigidity may be at the heart of illness is not a new idea. It can be stated in many other ways, and it has been. “Use it or lose it” may be the most familiar western expression. Eastern philosophy in general, and Taoism in particular, is bursting with more elegant imagery to this effect. Water and willow trees are often used to poetically express how vitality is derived from adaptability and flexibility.

But don’t get me wrong — when I say that rigidity may lead to illness, I’m not talking about a personality defect. Rigidity is not necessarily expressed in your personality. In fact, an “easy going” person can still be rigid, because every human being is rigid to a greater or lesser degree. Just because you’re easy going compared to other people doesn’t mean that you’ve actually transcended the human tendency to limit your behaviour to a narrow range.

The trouble is that we are an uptight species. Homo sapiens seems tragically prone to finding and sticking to a comfort zone.

First restriction, then inhibition

Starting early in life, we humans begin to restrict ourselves in response to social and emotional forces. We become inhibited. We start out yelling and pooping and crying pretty much as the spirit moves us. As we mature, we rapidly go through a civilizing process. This is desirable, of course … but there is also a price.

We start to stick to a certain way of doing things — a way of breathing, of moving, of making sounds, and so on. We make these choices not because we are greatly in tune with what we actually need and want from moment to moment, but because our great big brains give us a lot of complex ideas about what we think we need and want. The product of this process is our comfort zone — a region of behaviour and experience we are loathe to leave, more so with every passing year. If the borders of the comfort zone were more organic, more intuitive, it might serve us quite well — but it tends to be incredibly arbitrary, defined as much by pop culture as by self-awareness.

In spite of this overall trend, many people remain highly experimental for some time. The young at heart may remain experimental for life. But even these people have a relatively limited repertoire of behaviour compared to what we are actually capable of. In fact, it’s quite incredible how narrow the range of “normal” is when you realize that we are biologically capable of virtually any kind of behaviour. Even within human nature, behaviour can be as wildly different as that of Carl Sagan, Osama bin Laden, the Queen of England, and a South Pacific cannibal.

We are sabotaged by our great big brains. We live lives with a fraction of the variety that is actually possible. This rigidity eventually manifests as illness.

Illness and blame

What good is this idea? It sounds dangerous. Many people feel defensive about it, in fact. If rigidity leads to illness, then doesn’t that mean that it’s our fault? Shouldn’t we be able to fix it? And why can’t we fix it? If rigidity leads to illness, how come a little whimsy and carpe diem won’t make it go away?

It is important to understand that we are not to blame for our illnesses. Just as our personalities are defined by both genetics and environment, our illnesses are defined by both inside forces and outside forces.We are involved in the generation of our illnesses, but we don’t do it deliberately; the process is insidious, complex and indirect. There is no straightforward connection between “pent up anger at my father” and “tumour in my prostate.” The connection is almost certainly there, but it is not simple.

There is no plain connection between “pent up anger at my father” and “tumour in my prostate.”

Nor does it happen overnight. Illness is probably among the last signs of an enduring pattern in life. By the time you get sick, it’s probably because you’ve already been entrenched in a way of being for years or decades. So it does not logically follow that we can put our house back in order when we get sick just with “mind over matter.” Yet this is the frequent assumption of holistic medicine: that merely being aware of a mind-body connection somehow gives us power over illness. I don’t believe it’s that easy. My observation and experience is that healing is an extremely challenging process.

It’s also crucial to understand that our habits and rigidity are usually functional, not dysfunctional, and many if not most of them are worth the risk. We cannot avoid rigidity at the expense of being sociopathically “free” with our behaviour. Most of how behave is well-chosen to serve us in the short term, and often in the long term as well. Even emotional patterns that ultimately prove to be dysfunctional usually have their roots in a creative and necessary response to a real threat, such as an abusive parent. Yesterday’s creative survival strategies often turn out, thirty years later, to have a downside: can you be “blamed” for this? Of course not. You do what you gotta do.

It may be too late

I would never discourage anyone from trying to restore balance to life. At the same time, I think that anyone trying to heal should understand that doing so may be difficult or impossible, and may not have an effect on an established illness. Spontaneous remissions from serious diseases are not called “miracles” for nothing!

We are all students of life — but the skills required to reverse a disease process, once it is started, are probably several grades beyond us, if they exist at all. In fact, when we are sick, it is usually an indication that it’s too late for us, and we do not have the emotional and spiritual equipment to undo the damage. If we did, it’s quite likely that we wouldn’t have gotten sick that way in the first place.

That said, miracles do happen. The passionate individual, determined to overcome, will take those discouraging words as a challenge to excel, to learn enough about the self to heal, or to (quite literally) die trying. I did the very same thing myself once, and set out to change personal habits that were literally destroying me. Somehow, I succeeded. And I have met dozens of other people over the years who have achieved something similar.

If rigidity leads to a life out of balance and then to illness, then it suggests a way of preventing illness and extending life, more than a healing method. We must step outside of our comfort zone, and choose to leave behind the many small fears and preconceptions that defined it so long ago. We must stretch ourselves.

There are probably as many ways to do this as there are people. For some, it might be a climbing of mountains. For others, eye contact, new furniture, or reconciliation. But for almost everyone, above all, it means really deep breathing and fresh movement, components of every interesting spiritual discipline that ever was. We must strive to become permanent dancers, freely embodying every impulse, wriggling happily through our days, impulsive, exploratory, and uninhibited.

Even if it is too little, or too late, it will still be worth it.

Notes

Pert. Molecules of Emotion. 1999. Classic account of Candace Pert’s discovery of neuropeptides — as much a story of a woman in science as it is about neuropeptides. Regrettably, Pert’s ideas and book have been significantly co-opted by New Age flakiness in recent years. Return to text.