I'm feeling pretty sick today.

My overall health has been a major concern for me over the past couple of months. I'm certain that the stress that I have been under is the primary culprit of me being constantly sick. Being sick compounds the stress in my life since I've had to call in sick to work many times with sinus infections and other types of infections that are still a mystery to me to this day. I recall last year, towards the end of the summer, I got a really bad fever in the middle of the night. I woke up sweating with the chills and just completely out of it. I guess I'm like most men and I tend to whine a lot when I'm sick but my wife took good care of me for about 3 hours that night. I finally managed to get myself to sleep and when I woke up I was completely fine. 

Today I woke up feeling pretty lousy with body aches and great stomach discomfort and I stayed in bed for most of the morning and early in the afternoon. Feeling sick today put me in a lousy mood and I did dwell on it for most of the day. I was able to avoid thinking the absolute worse but it was pretty troublesome. I was able to the body scan today and the fact that I was able to finish it without fallinf asleep or being too distracted put in a better mood. I have been better since then and I just need to be patient with my body and have faith that as long as I keep doing the work I will get better.

Here is a passage from Full Catastrophe Living by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn where he mentions the stunning results of a series of experiments carried out in the mid 1970s about how the mind and the immune system are connected somehow:

A remarkable series of experiments conducted by Drs. Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen at Rochester University Medical School, starting in the mid 1970s, contributed profoundly to the explosion of research and interest in PNI. They uncovered a dramatic relationship between the brain and the immune system. They showed that immunosuppression (a lowering of the immune response) in rats could actually be conditioned by pairing treatment of the animals with a drug having the property of reducing immune system functions (called an immunosuppressant) with exposure to a sweet tasting chemical (saccharin) in their drinking water. After receiving this combination of an immunosuppressant injection and saccharin in their water, when saccharin alone was readministered in their drinking water at a later time, the animals once again showed immunosuppression, this time without the immunosuppressing drug. It appeared that their bodies had somehow learned to suppress immune functioning in response to tasting saccharin when it had been given with the immunosuppressant drug. Control animals did not show this conditioned response. This suggested that in the conditioned animals, their immune functioning was affected by a kind of psychological learning, which could only have come through the nervous system.

This reinforces my belief that my body and my mind have been conditioned to react in destructive ways, conciously and subconciously, as a result of not confronting my panic attacks and stress over the last 9 years. This is why I believe that the panic attacks and anxiety come on very strongly even when I know that the fear is not real. It feels almost as though my physical sensations make the panic worse because my thoughts revolve around resisting what my body is telling me and I become completely detached from the situation itself. This realization is helping me deal with the panic attacks better and I tell myself, "Since I learned to react this way over the past 9 years then overtime I can learn to react differently." I'll let you know how my immune system is improving as my mental health improves.