Is it true that a person's mental state affects his health?

1. Historical medical statistics claim that the same wounds heal three times faster in winners than in losers.

2. Food eaten in good company and in a good mood is digested better than food eaten in bad company and in bad condition.

3. During the Second World War, people in the USSR practically did not get sick, but after the victory, many fell ill and died.

Of course, it is true, there are so-called psychosomatic diseases, the appearance of which is precisely the cause of mental health problems. Strong stress, constant tension of the nervous system, and everything else "hits" all systems of the body. Everything is regulated at the level of hormones by our brain .. so the nerves really should be protected.

Apparently true. In general terms, the whole point is that the brain is an organ necessary not only to think, but also to control all physiological processes in the body, from the synthesis of hormones to the functioning of the immune system. We can say that these are two sides of the same coin, and that sometimes the brain makes an amendment to the control of the body for the state of the psyche (the opposite is also true - the mental state is influenced by completely physiological processes, as any person who becomes irritable from hunger knows about).

But it is important to understand that these processes have been studied very fragmentarily, and research results are often contradictory. For example, there is a lot of evidence that the regular release of stress hormones increases the likelihood of problems with the immune system. But at the same time, the specific manifestations of these problems can be very different, from allergies (in which some parts of the immune system work more actively than they should) to oncological diseases (which occur when the immune system, on the contrary, has not crushed malignant cells in the embryo, as she does in most cases). Another well-known example is the placebo effect, an improvement in the patient's condition as a result of taking a pill that does not contain any active ingredients. It is well studied in the case of pain relief, and there it is clear what the matter is: the brain releases its own endogenous opiates. As for the beneficial effects of placebos on other physiological processes, the story is darker. Perhaps the influence itself is exaggerated. Research shows that placebo is excellent at treating any disease when measured in terms of patient complaints, but its effectiveness often drops to the brink of invisibility when it comes to objective laboratory parameters.