Is Your Own Story Damaging Your Health?

Every night I would sit with the kids on the couch and read a couple of stories. It was a sacred ritual and I loved them snuggled up on either side of me as we looked at the pictures and figured out the words and meanings.  I understood those children's stories at a whole different level as an adult.

Metaphor is a wonderful way to get a message across and we have probably all had a time when somebody explained a concept that was challenging to us, starting with ‘It’s like….’ which made the difference between confusion and understanding.

So would you be surprised to hear that we make up metaphors to represent notions and concepts to ourselves regarding our own state of health.

Little do we know, but those metaphors have consequences.

You see our brains actually have a bit of trouble figuring out if something is real or not. Remember reading a book that scared the life out of you? What the brain was reading resulted in an increased heart rate and sharper hearing, a real fear in the gut - to something that is not real! Reading The Shining, I was on high alert for the whole time I had that book, even not sleeping well!

And the same is for the metaphor we have in our heads that represents to us how we think of health. 

In their book ‘NLP and Health’ authors Ian McDermott and Joseph O’Connor write of the ‘Metaphors of Health’. ‘The prevailing medical metaphor is not balance, but war.’ They say that health means being the defence against constant attack from the outside, and that the vocabulary of warfare is so natural that we no longer think about it. 

When I was working in my pharmacy I was very good at using that attacking type language when I was advising patients about antibiotics, cancer and fungal medicines etc, yet I never stopped (regrettably) to think about the power of those words.

War within our bodies means that we are under constant attack. To me I have a picture of troops with guns in a WWII scene, shooting the invaders and germs. But a war type metaphor will promote a constant physical vigilance to fight the disease, battle the illness, being under attack from a virus, a hostile takeover of our bodies. We even have an ‘arsenal’ of drugs in the medical armoury to fight pain. And then in recovery we are getting over the ‘ravages of illness’. We fight heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Our own immune system is an army, on patrol, our very own security guards looking for breaches in our bodily security.  With this in mind, if our brains are being told a tale of fight, it responds effectively with vigilance – using the expertise of the vagal nerve we are put into a state of sympathetic activation leading to the fight or flight response. And our attention is on the disease rather than health. 

How can a battle be won when you are fighting for both sides at once?

So is health a battle you should be fighting? Because while we are thinking of fighting, we are not exactly in the healing mode that requires rest and repose (the parasympathetic response of the vagal nerve).

What if you changed that metaphor? 

What if you created a more gentle and encouraging attitude to health. 

Take for example, cancer. A tumour that our white bloods cells are working on. Would it be useful to have the army metaphor? Or maybe your white cells are the sheep that are nibbling away at the tumour which is like a clump of grass that has gotten longer than the rest of the grass. Can you feel the difference in your body in picturing either of those descriptions?  It is a lot more gentle yet achieving the same result. I have also heard of a chap who used the Pacman visualisation to plod around his body and create his wellness.

Having a cold or flu could be celebrated an immunity upgrade! I know that sounds weird but that is how I see those types of infections when I get them.  

Our bodies are wonderful things and have enormous capabilities that we seem to not give them credit for. Our outer layer of skin replaces itself every month, our stomach lining regenerates every ten days, the liver every couple of months. Bones heal and hair grows. We have incredible capacity to build immune cells if the balance of our bodies health is upset. And we also have the capacity to have balanced health.

Think of the metaphor you may have for health and consider whether it is focused on health or a problem. Could there be a more healing or encouraging story you could have that you run to promote your own health?