You probably know that stress is responsible for many modern aliments, from migraines to diarrhea. But did you know that creative thinking can help alleviate many stress-related disorders? When you activate your creative system, you affect the way your body works. Creative imaging has helped many people overcome insomnia, lose weight, stop smoking, and among other benefits, become enthusiastic about life.
Your creative system
While the sympathetic nervous system's arousal subdivision releases adrenalin to increase heart, brain, and muscle action, which cools the skin, the parasympathetic nervous system's creative system releases choline to slow everything down, which gently warms one up. The two systems balance each other.
The choline response occurs when you consciously relax your muscles, or dream, eat, meditate, pray, or take deep breaths. Choline is also released when you feel secure, satisfied, proud, loved, or accepted.
Choline levels increase when you are engaged in intuitive fun. Researchers discovered high levels of choline response in four to eight-year-old children during imagination games.
In 1987, in a study for a major toothpaste manufacturer, researchers from the Image Feedback Lab (IFL), based in Columbia, Maryland, asked shoppers to imagine "whiteness" and "brightness." During the exercise, participants' blood pressure fell, their pulses slowed down, and their muscles relaxed. Their skin temperatures rose comfortably, and their pupils opened to allow in more light. Ninety-six percent of the subjects experienced a 36 percent increase of the choline response and reported a sense of well-being.
Aston and Jones identified the biological center of the creative reflex as the locus coeruleus (located in the brain stem). Biochemically, it is in this region and other areas of the body that choline carries out a calming action that generates a sense of well-being.
Medical researchers at the Paine Center in Hartford, Connecticut, have discovered that certain imagination exercises have many benefits. Virtually every known medical disorder can be improved by the use of creative images and activity. The creative reflex can improve tolerance to physical pain and discomfort.
Locking on creativity
The human creative system usually operates automatically, but one can choose to go on manual. Mind and body can be controlled by controlling images. In imagining a delicious meal in front of you, the image causes an electrochemical change throughout your body, resulting in a slower heart rate and less salivation.
Imagining oneself in the path of speeding car has the opposite effect. The heart speeds up and the mouth becomes dry.
The more details one adds to the image, the greater the physical effect. The more vivid the imagery, the less distinction there is between image and reality.
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