Free Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence by Sondra Barrett Page B

memory in your mind and notice whether there are any physical changes from the earlier now: Are you breathing faster? Have your shoulders tensed? Let that memory go and imagine a restful scene or a peaceful moment to bring your cells back into balance.

    Your thoughts and your cells have just had a conversation about danger and safety. Appreciate the miracle this represents—the sacredness of the interplay of mind and molecules. Be aware that it is not simply physical events that trigger our “stress cocktails”; our minds play an important role in our chemistry.
    Body clues can make you aware of your inner emotional state, and they are with you always—you can pay attention to them anywhere and at any time. For example, next time you’re in a meeting and find that your hands are freezing, note that your cells may be saying, “Danger.” Now that you have received their message, what action do you want to take?
    Cells Speak Their Truth
    In the late 1880s, a patient complained to her physician of electric tingling in her hands and feet whenever she caught a whiff of certain unpleasant odors. Her French physician was later to discover that electrical properties of the skin changed with fluctuations in emotion. Ultimately, from this discovery modern psychophysiology was born. Electrical activity of the skin became known as the galvanic skin response (GSR), and machines were developed that could measure it, such as the lie detector mentioned earlier. GSR, a measurement of sweat gland activity, is an index of events in the brain that are carried to the surface of the skin. Carl Jung, one of the first students of the skin’s electrical response, viewed this as a physiologic window to the unconscious.
    Imagine the excitement in those early days. You’re sitting in a musty old lab, your fingers attached to an elaborate set of wires connected to a huge machine. Every time you imagine a friend’s face, the needle on the machine moves. You realize that the friend doesn’t have to be there for you to react emotionally and physically: she is present only in your imagination, yet she is changing you physically.
    Fast-forward to the late 1980s when psychologist James Pennebaker was invited to teach the psychophysiology of stress to technicians who administered polygraph tests. They wanted to know what was occurring in the body and mind when a person was being questioned about a crime. Typically during the test, a person telling a lie reacts with a measurable stress response. In addition to the GSR and skin electrical conductance, modern polygraph measurements can include heart rate, muscle tension, voice changes, and other links to emotional discomfort. Pennebaker could explain the physiologic mechanism underlying each of these changes—yet he was to learn something that would transform his life’s work and our knowledge about our cellular selves.
    The revelation came when those experts administering the lie detector tests asked Pennebaker to explain this surprising observation: when a person actually confessed to a crime, they exhibited relaxation responses, not stress. As a result of their admission, they now faced a future of upheaval and turmoil, possibly even incarceration. How could they possibly respond by relaxing?
    Pennebaker had no answer at the time, but he would later make a startling discovery that now informs what we know of personal well-being and telling the truth. Following up at the University of Texas with his psychology students, he began exploring confession itself. He asked his students to “confess,” in writing, to a secret or a trauma they’d never told anyone. He discovered that following this disclosure, his students’ immune health improved and their levels of stress hormones decreased.
    He explained the phenomenon this way: When people hold back a painful or fearful story (a crime committed, an abuse suffered orinflicted on another, a secret fear), the very experience of holding back is stressful,