Good Thoughts Could Improve Physical Health, Study Says

New research suggests taking the time to think about good thoughts about yourself and your loved ones.

Participating in self-compbadion exercises alleviates heart rate and disables the body's response to threats, which researchers say could reduce the risk of disease.

In the study conducted by academics from Exeter and Oxford Universities, 135 Exeter students in good health were divided into five groups and played an instructional game. different audio.

The team took physical measurements of heart rate and sweating and asked participants to report their feelings.

The questions were about their degree of security, their likelihood of being kind to themselves and their connection to others.

The two groups whose instructions encouraged them to be kind to themselves, not only said they felt more compbadion for themselves and connections with others, but also showed a body reaction consistent with feelings of relaxation and security. .

Their heart rate has dropped with the variation in the duration between their heartbeats – a healthy sign of a heart able to respond flexibly to changing situations. They also showed a lower response to sweating.

Meanwhile, the instructions that induced a critical inner voice resulted in increased heart rate and increased sweating, which corresponded to a sense of threat and distress.

Dr. Anke Karl, Principal Investigator at the University of Exeter, said, "Previous research has shown that self-compbadion is linked to higher levels of well-being and better mental health, but did not know why.

"Our study helps us understand the mechanism by which being nice to oneself in case of problems could be beneficial for psychological treatments.

"By turning off our response to threats, we are strengthening our immune system and giving ourselves the best chance of recovery.

"We hope that future research will be able to use our method to study this in people with mental health problems such as recurrent depression."

The recordings that encouraged self-compbadion were a "compbadionate body badysis" in which people were guided to deal with bodily sensations with an attitude of interest and calmness; and a "self-centered loving exercise" in which they directed goodness and soothing thoughts to a loved one and to themselves.

The other three groups listened to recordings designed to induce a critical inner voice, to place them in a "positive, but competitive, self-enriching mode," or in an emotionally neutral shopping scenario.

While members of both self-supporting and positive but competitive groups reported greater compbadion and less self-criticism, only the compbadion groups showed a positive bodily response.

– The study, titled Calming Your Heart and Feeling Connected: A New Experimental Paradigm for Studying the Benefits of Compbadion, is published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.