Why Your Mood Can Boost or Weaken Your Immune System

Jan 06, 2024 - 04:15

Updated: 2 years ago

Why Your Mood Can Boost or Weaken Your Immune System

Thoughts and feelings can boost wellness or chip away at health.

We often think of medicine passively these days. You get the treatment—pills, shots, procedures—and it fixes you up. No personal investment needed. Like a car wash, you simply show up and ride the conveyor belt, emerging shiny and clean.

However, a growing body of research indicates your mind plays a profound yet overlooked role—that thoughts and feelings can boost wellness or chip away at health even with the best treatments modern medicine can offer.

Even Occasional Positivity Uplifts Immunity

Your mood may affect how often you get sick, or how well treatments work if you do fall ill.

With flu season underway, many contemplate getting the flu shot. However, a jab alone may not fully protect you from the sniffles. Flu shots are only 48 percent effective, according to a recent study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. So what accounts for the remaining 52 percent?

Beyond medical treatments, there are many factors that contribute to immunity, including age, genetics, sleep, diet, exercise, social interaction, and mood. This last factor is underappreciated as we hustle through demanding days.

Yet studies show that frowns hamper the immune system while smiles provide a boost—which impacts both natural defense and how likely a flu shot is to help. This mind-body dynamic has heightened urgency given surging depression rates in the U.S.

Research shows happier individuals tend to enjoy these advantages:

Stronger immune response
Less disease
Decreased pain
Better prognoses
Lower mortality rates

Now, perhaps you may be thinking, “But, I haven’t been feeling very positive lately.” The good news? It is never too late to turn your outlook and consequently, your health prospects around.

Even brief bumps in happiness—for example, from watching a comedy, positive journaling, or a yoga session—still contribute to boosting health markers. These include better central nervous system parasympathetic activity (“rest and digest, versus “fight or flight”), lower cortisol (the “stress hormone”) levels, greater natural killer (immune cell) counts, lower inflammation, and less mucus, to name a few.

How a Happy Mood Suppresses Immunity Threats

Mood affects the immune response at the surface—through lifestyle habits—but also by “turning on” or “off” a number of key biochemical reactions, according to a body of research.

Every time you smile, your brain is at work, not just in expressing your happiness, but also in promoting your well-being. It activates what is known as the endogenous opioid system—our body’s intrinsic mechanism for creating and regulating feelings of pleasure and pain relief. Unlike synthetic opioids, which can be addictive and dangerous, these natural compounds promote health.

Cultivating positive moods helps return the body to a regenerative state that counters corrosive stress responses. Feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin generate relaxation by engaging the vagus nerve, part of the parasympathetic nervous system. Relaxation allows the body to repair itself while chronic “fight-or-flight” stimulation causes wear and tear. Importantly, relaxing also benefits cardiovascular health, which touches most diseases.

The enemy of your enemy (stress) is also your friend. Feeling good curbs stress-related hormones like cortisol and catecholamines. At high loads, these compounds both increase inflammation and blunt the production of immune cells and antibodies.

5 Ways to Use Positivity to Strengthen Immunity

While you could take a pack of prescriptions to fight infection, a positive mood could be the most natural starting place, with little downside!

Here are a few ways to boost your immune system with a good mood:

Make time for comedy

The adage goes “laughter is the best medicine.” Time dedicated for comedy and humor may surprise you in reversing a difficult day while simultaneously bolstering immunity.

When you’re feeling down, if can be hard to pull out of it because it feels incongruent. Stand-up specials, funny movies or learning some jokes inject absurdist joy. Look for the funny side to things (even very frustrating situations can be hilarious when viewed from the right angle).

Pause to savor joy

Taking time to intentionally appreciate positive moments has the benefit of increasing their value. By savoring, people can enhance positive emotions and prolong the emotional benefits derived from positive experiences.

From relishing the taste of a favorite meal to appreciating a beautiful sunset, savoring offers a simple yet powerful tool for cultivating a more positive and resilient mindset.

Be present through mindfulness

Mindfulness complements savoring, training nonjudgmental attention on the current moment rather than getting tangled in regrets, worries, or other negative tunnels of thought.

Mindfulness encourages a non-reactive and accepting stance toward thoughts and feelings, fostering a more balanced perspective. Engaging in mindfulness practices, such as meditation or yoga, has been associated with reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression, increased feelings of calm, clarity, and contentment, as well as enhanced immunity.

Try journaling

As humans, a sense of integrity is important. Journaling brings clarity by funneling thoughts onto paper.

Not only is journaling about gratitude a great way to boost awareness of the positive, but we could also focus on what we’re doing well in life. By reflecting on how we are living up to our values, it increases our determination to do more. The sense of self-congruence we can obtain from journaling has been found to be great for health. The alignment of behavior with personal goals has significant physiological implications, especially for immune function.

Embrace conscientiousness

Decades of research has shown that lowering overly-negative moods is most effective when paired with cultivating conscientiousness—the tendency toward diligence, organization, and detail-orientation. In fact, many of us may mistake negative stress reactions for “taking things seriously,” when in fact it can be mute in comparison with simply getting things done.

Several tools could help to encourage conscientiousness living. For one, it pays to take time to plan our activities and reflect on how well we achieved our goals. Aids like checklists, post-its, or time-tracking apps like Toggl may help us to get more organized. Planning ahead by time-blocking—using an app like Google Calendar or a planner to map out how we will spend the hours of days to come—also facilitates better awareness of time. You could even schedule time each week to reflect and make your next schedule!

Sometimes life gets messy. When that happens, you can make use of what clinical psychology calls “coping cards” which include if-then statements (“If X happens, then I will do Y”). In this way, we plan in advance for how to best handle challenges if you aren’t very tactful in the moment.

In the intricate dance between mind and body, positivity is a step we can all master. So, make a move and watch your health follow your lead.