The power of your thoughts for a healthy life
[Music]
when
sarah came to my clinic a couple of
years ago
with her eight-year-old son tim
and she had a problem because her son
was bedwetting
and that’s not a good problem if your
child is eight years old because
he wants to go and sleep over they want
to take school trips so we had to take
that issue seriously but what surprised
me more than that
was that sarah was in my clinic again a
couple of days later
and this time she was there with her
daughter emma who was 10.
so i was surprised i said sarah you were
here
now you’re here with emma what’s going
on
and sarah was really devastated she said
look doctor israel
emma is losing her hair and i said what
do you mean she’s losing her hair
she goes well when i comb her hair just
comes off and the whole brush is full of
hair and
she showed me the head and
this was what we could see you see sarah
had a
kind of a hole in her head we call it
alopecia areata
and i was surprised i said what is going
on in your family because we know that
uh when you lose hair it could be some
kind of form of stress that causes
autoimmune
disease and there was
no bacteria involved nothing else than
what we were thinking actually and i
said to sarah what is going on
in your home and she started to cry and
to sob
she was completely devastating said dr
eastworn something’s terrible has
happened you know my husband
philip has been diagnosed with a brain
tumor
and it’s been going on for three months
and and his surgery
is for scheduled for
two weeks and which is all terribly
devastated
and our family’s not doing well so
think about this you have two kids at
this age
and you have a father who has a
diagnosis a tumor diagnosis and
a mom who’s breaking apart what can be
scarier for them
than to actually think of losing their
parents
and it’s sad to say that yes
thoughts can make us sick
and in this case it was not a virus or a
germ it was the thoughts it was the
stress that was causing this problem
well what can you do about it why do
this why does this happen
how are we formed and why is this going
on
so that’s going to be the topic of our
talk today and that’s what i’m going to
talk about
and i am a medical doctor with my
clinic in cologne germany and i’ve been
working for over 20 years in medicine
and we have we got a lot of progress
in the medical field we have wonderful
vaccinations that
prevent disease we have medicine that we
can prescribe
and we have surgery diagnostics and
and a lot of different forms of therapy
and
but there is still so much that we don’t
know about the body
and so much that we don’t know about the
healing system and there is so much that
you
can actually do to influence your health
so thinking about this i thought well
if thoughts are formed in the head it
would be interesting to describe how
your head is formed
so i said to sarah sarah come sit down
let me explain to you my method i call
the beneficial thinking method
and let me show you the house that you
have on your head
that he calls the beneficial thinking
house
so imagine you have a house that you
carry on your head
and this house has three floors and five
tenants so there’s a basement and you
can see a crocodile in the basement
and there’s a mid floor and in the mid
floor you have a lady with her
back turned to us that’s lady amy and
she has a friend that’s a seahorse
and there’s a fairy and on the top floor
there is a scientist so what do they all
do we’re going to start off with the
most
important part that i think should be
discussed first and that’s
the ground floor in this house
and you have three tenants there and the
most important tenant that you have to
remember
is this lady amy with a yellow hat she
is
she represents the amygdala that we have
in our brain the two pieces that look
like
like almonds and her job
is to detect danger so you have a
personal bodyguard in your body
that is responsible to recognize danger
and to save you from danger so how does
amy know what danger is
well she has her detectives and those
are your sensory organs
so your eyes and your ears and your nose
and your skin they were not made to
enjoy perfume
or caviar or ice cream they were
originally made to remind
amy if there is any danger going on and
what we have discovered also is that
what you think
actually affects amy too so if you think
that there’s some danger going on
and if you think someone’s coming up
this might hurt you
well amy is going to be aware of that
and is going to react so what does she
do
well she does something that’s quite
simple she presses a button
right and this button goes sends an
elevator to your cellar where you have
that crocodile so this
crocodile the cellar represents your
brain stem
and what happens actually that she sends
with this elevator that goes down
substances like adrenaline cortisol that
form some sort of energy and are like
fuel for your crocodile
who senses that the strength and then
starts fighting or make gives you energy
to run away
so it’s very important to understand
that this is what we call the
fight-or-flight response in our body
and this was has been with us for
millions of years and this is what
protects us
at the end of the day from danger we
sort of abuse it though
and um we kind of think about all kinds
of different things
that are dangerous that are actually not
even dangerous at all like let’s say
you have a fight with your spouse
because the spaghetti was overcooked
right and that’s amy doesn’t really know
that that’s
danger or not she just understands that
you feel that way
and she just sends down that elevator
with
all those unnecessary hormones and what
you have to understand though
and this is the point that i have to
make is these adrenaline cortisol all
this fuel
that you use for your energy that you
use for your crocodile
unfortunately makes you sick right
they they’re the main course cause of
modern
stress-induced illnesses in our society
so
you can get heart disease from that your
immune system suffers and that’s what
happened to
to emma who lost her hair and um
you can have your immune system your
metabolism you can become obese or you
have
problems with sugar uh metabolism you
you can really get ill from these
substances so if you are stressed a lot
you become sick
and it’s interesting to understand that
there is something you can do about it
and there is this thing you know before
amy presses that button you have this
little space
that nature has given you to stop her
you can really tap her on the hand say
amy stop
and how would you do that so you know
when you get excited and your heart
beats and
and you know that you maybe you’re upset
or angry or you have to run and get the
bus
or whatever it is that you need energy
for your
body calms down again after a couple of
days and or a couple of hours and
minutes
it’s because you have a system in your
body that excites you
but you also have a system and it’s
exciting it’s called
sympathetic nervous system but you have
a system also that cools you down
right you have to understand that and
this system that cools you down
has a nerve and we call it the
parasympathetic nervous system but this
this special nerve is responsible also
for your breathing so that is why
when amy starts pressing the button you
feel
oh my god i don’t feel good and in this
case it was sarah who was so upset with
everything then sarah can just take a
deep breath
and this deep breath will help her come
out of the cellar
because when you breathe your whole body
calms down
and what happens you can just touch your
pulse and
i’m breathing now because of course my
aim is working too because i’m doing
this talk
and i just understand i can just feel
the tension getting lower
and i can feel my muscles relaxing
and i can just feel my voice calming
down so it’s worth understanding
and a very intelligent neurologist put
it this way
between stimulus and response there is a
space
his name is by the way viktor frankl and
he went on and said in that space is our
power
to choose our response and our response
lies our growth
and our freedom so it’s
a scientific thing that you can do in
this moment
where you notice that you’re going to
scream at someone or you notice that
your thoughts are taking you in a very
non-beneficial direction that you can
tap amy on the fingers and say stop take
a deep breath
and think and then act this will support
you
and help you from getting ill but there
are other things too that you can do so
i said to
sarah you know what let me show you
other parts of the brain
and i showed her that the mid part of
the brain
you know we have amy and by the way that
little seahorse in there is responsible
for all the
memory and it’s represent the
hippocampus i said you know what
remember happy things you can you can
actually activate your memory center to
ask them do happy
memories that you have that will make
you feel good
and this fairy this little fairy is
something i really love she’s my
best tenant in the whole building
because she makes us feel good
and people think feeling good is a
luxury but it isn’t
it’s a responsibility you are
responsible for your happiness and you
can induce it you can talk to your fairy
and say you know what i want to be happy
and she does
work and she likes to do so one thing
that
helps the fairy to to understand that
you’re doing okay
is gratitude so when you say i’m
grateful for something
then she kind of starts making
your dopamine and your exorcism flow or
if you hug someone and you give this
person a warm feeling what happens
actually that she produces some oxytocin
and that flows in your brain and you
feel comfortable
so these things are quite interesting
and what’s even more
is that if you’re happy fairy you know i
said to sarah go home
and take a look at a nice movie
sit down with your kids and watch a
movie
a funny movie though and what happens is
that she produces more that
funny stuff that makes you happy called
dopamine
so the happy fairy has a responsibility
she calms down amy
and what she does above all is when
you’re feeling good the elevator goes a
bit higher
to your top floor and that’s where you
have your power that’s where your
scientist sits
and watches and helps you and if you ask
yourself how did we
humans manage to go all the way up to
the moon and back
it’s because we have the scientists it’s
the result of evolution
it’s the result of all the years of
knowledge that we have
and unfortunately unfortunately a lot of
us
just don’t know that it’s there and use
the scientists so seldom
so how can you activate your scientists
you just tell them what you need to say
i’m in trouble
i need to find my way out help me
and it kind of organizes the algorithm
in your brain
and all your sensory organs kind of form
themselves together and
look out for the help that you’re
looking for so it’s worth thinking of
so if we get back to the beginning of
everything when you were born
and like this little boy called henry or
twozie came to my clinic after four days
and i look at these kids and i say to
myself
they’re so friendly they’re so happy
they’re so healthy
and they’re so without fear
what happens to you and you looked like
that each of you
looked just as cute just as friendly
just as smart as henry so what happens
is when you grow up
you learn what fear is you you collect
fear
and this value of the thought that makes
it fearful thought or a dangerous
thought is what you
learn by growing up and
i was lucky as a child i took when i had
to survive ethiopia with an ethiopian
mom who used to drag me to the ethiopian
church on sundays and i listened to
these singing enchanting
and then i’d go home and my indian
father could curry
and the household of korean you tell me
stories about my
chinese great grandmother who was i
never met
but i had so many cultures in my life
that made me
free of all this fear which helped me
actually because the war broke out and i
had to
leave the country and go to hungary a
completely different nation with
completely different culture
and a completely different language that
i had to learn by the way and then i
started to
eat hungarian goulash and admire that
and enjoy that
and i ended up in in germany and um
now i speak german and i do have my
trouble with that word der
and the d and the das and i enjoy worst
but
still life has been good to me because i
have been exposed to so many different
things and i’m so
less of fear so
there’s one important thing that i would
like to make
you aware of
when i see all of this and my life and i
i think of
now that i there’s one thing i have to
ask you because
my little friends and that i call the
little children of this world
would like to grow up and in a happy
healthy and friendly environment and to
do this they need you grown-ups to
change the way you think
and to be aware of the thoughts that you
have and to understand that your
thoughts
have an effect on the world they grow up
in so i ask you
in the name of my little friends and the
name of the children of the world
to consider your thoughts to be aware of
them
to understand what amy does to stop her
pressing the button please train her
you can do that tame make her tame her
crocodile
understand your fairy make your fairy
dance and most of all
please keep your scientists on the top
floor
busy thank you so much
[Music]
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