Psychoneuroimmunology: Mind-Body Science for 21st Century Healthcare

Think about the last time flu properly flattened you. You could not concentrate. You would have loved to read a book and could not hold a page. You were irritable, you had no energy, and a shower was enough to require a lie-down afterwards. None of that was a failure of will. Particular immune molecules were sending messages that changed your thinking, your mood and your behaviour, for the sensible reason that you needed to rest.

That is psychoneuroimmunology in one experience everyone has had. Judy Lovas teaches it as the study of how three systems talk to each other: the nervous system, which handles thought and memory and analysis; the endocrine system, which is heavily involved in emotional state; and the immune system, which keeps you well. In plain terms, how your thoughts and your feelings and your health influence each other, continuously and in every direction, rather than one causing the others.

Two hours. She takes it from the founding study in the mid-1970s, where a conditioned response was shown to suppress immune function and the field got its name, through the decades of stress research that followed and found the same thing across every kind of stress. She covers what psychological factors do to the onset, progression and treatment of illness, and what immunity does back to cognition, emotion and behaviour. It is the evidence base underneath integrative practice, and it is what lets you use the word holistic without apologising for it.

You’ll walk away with

• A definition of psychoneuroimmunology you can give a client in a sentence, and a longer one for a colleague who wants the mechanism
• Sickness behaviour explained properly, so you can tell a client why their thinking and mood change when they are unwell and why that is the body working rather than failing
• The bidirectional relationship stated carefully: what psychological factors do to immune function, and what immune activity does to cognition, emotion and behaviour
• How psychological factors bear on the onset, incidence, progression and treatment response of physical conditions
• The founding study that created the field, and why a conditioned response producing an immune effect was such a significant result
• What decades of stress research established about the immunosuppressive effect of stress, and why the type of stress turns out to matter less than expected
• An Australian study published in a leading medical journal that examined immune function in recently bereaved people, from someone who knew the researcher
• Why this science supports a genuinely multidisciplinary approach, and the range of fields now drawing on it beyond mental health
• A defensible basis for integrative practice, so mind-body work rests on evidence rather than on assertion
• Language for explaining all of this to clients and to sceptical colleagues without overclaiming

Watch the course trailer