What Is Epigenetics: Your Mind’s Influence Over Your Health
Disclaimer: Although your mindset is powerful, not all health conditions are caused by your mindset. Sunwarrior is not suggesting that all health conditions are caused by your mindset. Rather, epigenetics is an emerging and relatively new field of study that suggests your DNA isn’t only influenced by external factors like previously believed. DNA chromosome is also influenced by your thoughts and beliefs. This article explores this topic further to give you a better understanding of how your mindset may impact your health.
With epigenetics, you will unlock the significance of mental health to your overall well-being. Understand why environmental factors are not the be all, end all when it comes to disease.
What Is Epigenetics and Its Role in Human Development and Mental Health?
Your Disease Is More Than Environmental Patterns
Not many people understand the role and mechanisms of epigenetics in human health, so let’s begin with a question. What if I told you that you had the power to change your body with your mind?
Would you believe me if I said cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, and depression, just to name a few, were all linked to the same source?
It may sound surprising that an overwhelming amount of conditions could all be manifestations of just one single thing.
Physical and mental health issues are growing problems in society. Both create a strain on governments, families, and communities.
This is where epigenetics comes in. By understanding what’s driving so many of these conditions, you can look to significantly decrease mental and physical health issues and benefit your overall well-being.
Definition of Epigenetics
Epigenetics is a field of science that has unlocked the door in allowing you to explore the real reason for ongoing struggles and difficulties.
Put simply, epigenetics helps you to understand how a cell functions. In turn, it offers an insight into how physical and mental health problems occur.
Metabolic issues, cancer, immunological diseases, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and other diseases are affecting more and more of the population. And this isn’t just small percentages of people either.
It’s not simply 1% to 2% In fact, a large percent of the population deals with some sort of health issue, and it’s not only because of environmental influences.
The very heart of what is driving these conditions that so many people struggle from is a manifestation of the information stored at a cellular level. This fact is especially true for what you may believe about yourself, which becomes stored as organized matter in your cells.
Epigenetics essentially shifted the focus of researchers and scientists on external causes for health conditions to looking at how self-perception becomes encoded in our DNA. Your body stores what it learns from the environment on a cellular level.
Then these self-perceptions eventually begin to have a profound influence over how your cells function. These can include:
- Regulation of genome expression
- Transcription or the copying of genetic information from DNA to mRNA (messenger RNA)
- Methylation, methylated DNA is one that has changed in activity but not its sequence
- Cell division, mutations, and apoptosis, the lack of which can lead to the development and spread of cancer cells
- Production, inhibition, and regulation of protein enzymes
- Regulation of chromosome, especially in female mammals
Epigenetics recognizes that you are an extension of your environment. Also, the true reason for certain problems comes from what is stored inside of you at a cellular level.
Your body is made up of around 100 trillion cells. They are designed to do one specific thing, which is to absorb your experience and environment.
The Influence of Living on Your DNA
Your cells are constantly absorbing, learning, and storing new information from your perception of your environment and experiences.
On top of that, these cells in your body each have a cellular memory, which stores information. This cellular stored learning is constantly sending signals that influence how you view yourself.
How you see yourself becomes your memorized self. The memorized self then has a massive impact on how your cells function.
If your cells have absorbed and stored the wrong information from an unhealthy mindset, you can experience negative emotions that later may influence your health.
Here are just a few:
- Social anxiety
- Depression
- Agitation or explosive anger
- Sense of hopelessness
These emotions or negative thoughts you tell yourself release chemicals that are the precursor to the inflammatory process.
Epigenetics proves that your own mindset has an incredible amount of power over your body, right down to the genetic level, in healing and even preventing mental and physical conditions.
What Epigenetics Research Says
Understanding the latest epigenetic research is essential to getting to the heart of many health problems. According to experts in the field, ongoing struggles are actually a manifestation of what’s been stored at a cellular level, especially when it comes to self-perception.
Research suggests that how you see yourself tends to be your destiny and how you see yourself can affect every aspect of your life with serious ramifications.
There is nothing more important than understanding how your self-perception shapes your ongoing experiences and traits. The rapidly growing field of epigenetics demonstrates that you are an extension of your environment.
As your cells absorb environmental signals, all these signals have the ability to change your gene activity. Your life experiences don’t actually alter the genes you were born with.
Rather, they make changes to the genetic activity. Changes occur to proteins, enzymes, and other chemicals that regulate cells.
You can always support your body with supplements such as Enzorb Digestive Enzymes to improve the function of your body. Realize, though, that you can do so much more.
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An Example of Epigenetics
Depending on what information is being absorbed, genes can actually be switched on and off. You may have felt at one time or another that you were destined to get a certain disease because family members have that disease.
But research shows that your mind has a greater influence over your health than your hereditary factors.
To let you know how powerful your thoughts are as environmental signals, research indicates that a significant number of health (mental and physical) issues are related to the negative thoughts we say to ourselves.
All those negative thoughts that pop into your head can heavily influence your health. This is because the majority of health issues are often directly affected by stress and emotions.
It’s been shown time and time again that just thinking about something causes your brain to release neurotransmitters. These are chemical messengers that allow your cells and nervous system to communicate.
Neurotransmitters control virtually all of your body’s functions from hormone regulation to digestion.
Our cells bathe in these neurochemicals released in relation to our thoughts. The cells are heavily influenced by the neurochemicals connected to your thoughts.
The thoughts we introduce to our cells truly impact and shape real physiological and cognitive outcomes. If those thoughts are positive and provide correct information, then those outcomes are positive.
However, if the information is incorrect, then those outcomes can be negative and lead to health problems.
The Mind-Body Connection
Epigenetics research is showing that lifestyle choices can be directly traced to the genetic level, proving that the mind-body connection is undeniable.
We all have a choice in deciding what information our cells receive, whether it’s positive or negative.
There are different ways you can approach life. It’s either from a place of fear and doubt or one of love and acceptance. Whichever you decide can have a big impact on your body.
Unsurprisingly, fear and doubt can make room for anxiety, depression, and anger to take over our lives.
From a place of love and faith, we grow positively. Positive emotions like love, affection, joy, and confidence help us to improve and find out who we really are.
Your mindset is recognized and understood by your body, right down to a genetic level. Your thoughts really have an astonishing power to influence your physiology.
Your thoughts program your cells. A thought is a neurochemical event that signals a number of chemical and electrical particles in the form of neuro or polypeptides.
These polypeptides then look for receptor sites on cells. Each cell contains thousands and thousands of receptor sites, and these sites are there to receive information.
If we’re flooding stem cells with incorrect information, then daughter cells formed through mitosis will structurally change. These structural changes can lead to several physical and mental difficulties.
What is mitosis? It is a cell division type wherein a cell splits apart. The new cells or daughter cells are exact duplicates of each other.
As technology advances, science reveals that we are only just beginning to understand the complex mind-body connection. Put simply, the more you improve your mental habits and encourage positive, truthful thinking, the more benefits your body will see.
Shifting Negative Beliefs and Encouraging Positive Thinking
Taking part in positive mental self-care practices is absolutely vital for maintaining optimum physical and mental health. Shifting negativity into positivity encourages the most beneficial changes within the body.
You can’t control the majority of external events that happen in life, but you can control your perception of these events. Your perception of both yourself and these events that take place is key.
Your mindset plays a role in shaping neurological wiring. This involves how your cells become programmed in the first place and how DNA expresses itself.
By providing your cells with the right information and positive, accurate perceptions, you can change your brain, cells, and genes. This helps to eliminate, or at the very least significantly decrease, mental and physical health issues.
Learn why genetics is not an excuse to live healthy in this video from Sunwarrior:
Your cells are intelligent. They know who they are and what they need in order to function well.
However, this doesn’t mean they question what information they receive. They work with what they are given, whether it’s negative or positive.
Each of us is made of approximately 100 trillion cells. That’s why understanding epigenetics and how your thoughts affect your cells is essential to your health.
An accurate and positive view of yourself, expressed in the right thoughts, even in a tough situation, is the key to living a happy, confident, and optimistic life.
What do you think about epigenetics? Share your thoughts about it in the comments section below.
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- Explicit Versus Implicit Memories
Author: Dr. Lawrence Bradley
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