In ancient Greece, when a person got sick, they’d get three doctors visit them together: the "knife“ doctor, the "herb“ doctor and the "word“ doctor.

Even the ancient Greeks knew that our emotions and our thoughts affect our body and today it’s been thoroughly researched and proven: positive thinking and positive expectations are, with no shred of doubt, associated with better health (even the scientists were shocked by the consistency in the data of more than 160 studies on the mind-body connection!)

So what can you do to improve your health, with no doctors involved?

It’s pretty simple: pay more attention to your body and in a good way.

Bad emotions, bad health?

The sad thing is, there are so many things that can disrupt your emotional health and lead to strong, overwhelming feelings of stress, anxiety or sadness: getting divorced, just like getting married, can put you off balance; being laid off from your job or getting a job promotion; experiencing money problems; dealing with the death of a loved one...

You react to the situation you’re in and so does your body. It responds to the way you think about something, to the way you feel about it, to the way you act. Back pain, chest pain, constipation or diarrhea, headaches, sexual problems, weight gain or loss, insomnia... these are only some of the conditions that can develop as a consequence of unbalanced emotional health.

And this is probably something you have already experienced: when you’re sad or upset, you probably aren’t that interested in taking care of your health as well as you should. You don’t feel like exercising. You don’t feel like eating nutritious foods or taking medicine prescribed by your doctor.

Your body reacts to all.

Some of it is related to your conscious mind, but a lot of it you "do“ unconsciously – I mean, who in their right mind would consciously work on getting ill?

So how can you use your mind to improve your health?

Fortunately, the same mechanism that can make you sick can also be used to make you well: your thoughts, emotions, your lifestyle, the way you respond to the environment, you can use them in a positive manner to create healing responses.

When you adopt a positive and constructive outlook on your health and on your well-being, when you’re paying more attention to your body, you’re allowing your mind and your body to share information more effectively.

If you want to use the mind-body connection for healing, the first step is to look at some of the books and magazine articles to learn more about how it works and about the different methods you can use. And when you do, you’ll probably discover that you’ve used many of these methods all of your life – and now, you’ll just know how to use them more efficiently!

When you use methods such as subliminals for boosting your immune system , you’re better equipped to access and communicate with your mind-body connection and to produce a healing response. As you become more aware of it, you’re able to unlearn the negative patterns of dealing with stress and to re-learn the positive ones, the comfortable patterns of activity within the body.

Now don’t get me wrong, illness is very real. Accidents happen. Medicine can really help.

But our mind has a vital role in our state of health and we can play a greater role in our own wellbeing by understanding this subtle relationship, so why not do it?