I’m thinking about people with health anxiety mostly. When they think they have a certain illness or disease and then their body will develop symptoms from that illness. For example, reading something about carpel tunnel, and then all of a sudden your wrist starts hurting and you think you have it. or when you are nervous about having lice and all of a sudden your head gets itchy. Yesterday I read about a scary disease where one of the common symptoms is dry eyes, and i’ve had very dry eyes ever since reading that.
I understand that this is anxiety related, but how does your body develop actual physical symptoms based on what you’re thinking in your mind?
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Setting aside /u/GroundPoint8’s explanation for a sec, your brain absolutely can cause physical symptoms. Think about something scary or arousing and your heart rate will go up. Think about something that angers you and your muscles will tense.
Or, more easily, you can will your arm to move.
Your mind isn’t some ethereal thing separate from the physical structures in which it exists. Your thoughts “are”, in a physical sense, your experience of the electrical impulses and chemical states of the neurons in your brain. And those neurons are connected to neurons in others areas of your body that control things like the release of certain hormones or the contraction of muscles.
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