How Can Attitudes Affect Your Immune System?

Jean Baptiste Molière, the greatest Italian comedian of the seventeenth century said: “The mind has great influence over the body, and maladies often have their origin there.” (Greenberg, 2013) Different from people who think that illnesses are merely physical problems and try to treat these by medical and doctor’s treatment, Jean early realized a close relationship between mindset and health. Today, after long period of time studied about this connection, scientists gave a conclusion that attitude have powerful influences on health, especially immune system of body.

Elaine Moore (2013) and Darin Ingels (n.d) defined that the immune system is a diverse system of organs and cells and chemicals working harmoniously to protect our body from foreign virus, bacteria, diseases and malignancies as well. Mindset or attitude is understood simply as a set of mind that predetermine a person's responses to and interpretations of situations. Mindset is categorized into mindful and mindless. Mindful prefers to you are able to aware of situation and have positive thinking and emotion. In contrast, mindless means cannot be aware of what is happening and have poor or negative thinking. The effects of mindset on immune system were explained by a biochemical connection that neural, hormonal and immune systems use the same peptides to communicate through their psychological and chemical process. Therefore, what our mind thinks will affect our health, especially our immune system, since everything is interconnected. (Healthish 2011)

Mindlessness and negative outlook can make us sick easily and also have serious impacts on well-being of patients suffering from diseases. The downbeat attitude, thinking and emotions go hand in hand with stress which takes a toll on body, especially decrease immunity. The stress releases cortisol and epinephrine which weaken immunity, decrease activities of white blood cells, some natural killer cells as T cells or B cells (Straus 2003), and create...