Books to Change Your Life: When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté
You've seen it recommended everywhere for a reason!
I finally read this book earlier this year after seeing it recommended everywhere — I’m sure you saw it, too. I’m not one to jump on mainstream anything if I can help it (for better or worse), but I also won’t dismiss something popular if it seems genuinely worth investigating. So here we are.
When the Body Says No is an exploration of psychoneuroimmunology, which is to say the impact of thoughts on the body. Maté is a medical doctor turned author, sharing his reflections and findings on the reality of the disease cycle in the body. Something that people aren’t always ready to hear is how deeply their own thoughts and thought patterns have an impact on their own health. In other words, how does stress impact the body.
The stress > disease pipeline is basically 100%. And I don’t just mean perceived stress, I mean physiological stress, which can take many forms.
As a cancer survivor, I find a lot of encouragement and agency in the fact that my own thoughts have an impact on my body. In a disease where Western medicine says, “we don’t know why this happens,” it brings me much comfort to think that I played a part in my own cancer forming. People think I’m crazy to think that, but it’s true. Knowing that my lifestyle and behavior contributed to my unwellness means that my lifestyle and behavior can contribute to my continued wellness. I don’t have to a passive, helpless bystander in my own body.
Something that our “we’ll fix you right up!” medical system has inadvertently taught us is how to be passive in the face of our own bodies. We live our modern lives until something breaks down and then go to a specialist, or three, to whip us back into shape. But just like taping together a piece of paper that’s ripped, we don’t always come back to exactly the state we were before. But what if we didn’t wait until we ripped apart to change our circumstances? (accidents notwithstanding)
What if we realized that every thought we have has an impact on our body? This book provides science as well as stories of patients to illustrate this point. At this point in time, we’ve been told some diseases are inevitability or “just part of getting old,” when in actuality, many of those diseases are the culmination of unfelt feelings, unseen emotions, and unhelpful lifestyle habits. Mitochondrial health is at the core of aging (you can understand that if your cells are healthy, you are healthy), and science is exploring the impact of emotions and thoughts on mitochondria.
If you’re feeling disheartened by the limitations of Western medicine, overwhelmed with the ten thousand self-care regimen recommendations, and curious to understand the interconnected link of stress and illness, this book is for you!