How to Boost Your Immune System — Part 5

We’ve all heard that challenges and various forms of excitement are good for our health. But too much can easily lower the effectiveness of your immune system.

An expert on immunity, Dr Alex Concorde, offers the simple advice of heading off stress from the outset.

The trick is not to focus on demands on your time, but to concentrate on what your actions can realistically achieve. This may involve creating a suitable home environment, or being successful in your job.

The main object, though, is to keep it light and full of fun. Laughter is known to help the immune system, as is plenty of optimism.

So, share a joke and always Think Positive.

Psychologists are finding that there is one thing that improves as we age - our outlook. Sutdies show that as we age, we are more balanced in the way we process emotional information.

Research at the University of Colorado was conducted that studied the way people of different ages reacted to emotionally charged images. The images were viewed for a few seconds only while brain reaction was monitored. Participants clicked a mouse to register which category these images fell into.

The results showed that younger adults pay more attention to emotionally negative images than positive ones. The 55+ age group had different results.

“But the new finding from our study was that the older adults, ages 55 plus, didn’t show this so-called ‘negative bias.’ Instead they tended to show a better balance between paying attention to both negative and positive images.”

The article, Looking at the Sunny Side of Life: Age-Related Change in a Event-Related Potential Measure of the Negativity Bias, is published in the journal Psychological Science.

Getting older provides positive outlook

It’s often said that laughter is the best medicine. Norwegian researcher Sven Sveback says he’s got the data to prove it.

Sveback, of the medical school at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has released a study of 54,000 individuals whom he tracked for seven years after they filled out a questionnaire on how much humor they found in life. He found a direct correlation between having a sense of humor and longevity.

According to Sveback’s research, humor cut the chances of death for cancer patients by 70%.

“Humor works like a shock absorber in a car,” he says. “You appreciate a good shock absorber when you go over bumps, and cancer is a big bump in life.”

A Laugh A Day May Help Keep Death Further Away

Happy people are healthy people. According to a study by Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Professor, Sheldon Cohen, positive emotions play a larger role in health than previously thought.

The study indicated that people who are happy, lively, calm or exhibited other positive emotions were less likely to catch a cold and if they did, were less likely to report symptoms. Professor Cohen’s original study was in 2004. In the more recent study he allowed for other variables in personality and the results were the same. Happy people seem to have a higher resistance to infectious diseases such as rhinovirus and influenza.

The people who report positive emotions are less likely to catch colds and also less likely to report symptoms when they do get sick. This held true regardless of their levels of optimism, extraversion, purpose and self-esteem, and of their age, race, gender, education, body mass or prestudy immunity to the virus.

“We need to take more seriously the possibility that positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk,” said Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon.

The paper will be available online at Psychosomatic Medicine

The article about the research appeared online at Carnegie Mellon University