Saybrook University offers an online Mind-Body Medicine graduate degree program that comprehensively explores evidence-backed mind-body practices as an integrative and complementary approach to health care. There’s a lot to know about the psychophysiology connection between heart and mind and how mental and emotional states can impact cardiovascular health. Learn how stress, a major factor in heart health, can be managed through mindful practices.
What Is the Mind-Body Connection?
The mind-body connection is the relationship between thoughts, feelings, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes and how they can positively or negatively affect physical health and biological function. In other words, scientists and medical practitioners study how our minds and mental health can influence our physical health.
Medical practitioners who have studied mind-body medicine at Saybrook University learn to analyze and diagnose patients by evaluating their whole-person, lifestyle, and physical and mental health. This allows medical professionals to determine if a mental condition is the source or side effect of a physical condition and vice versa. Targeting health and patient care from the mind-body medicine approach provides sustainable and complementary wellness solutions that can restore mind, body, and spirit wellness beyond just symptom relief.
Heart and Mind Connection: Practices To Improve Heart Health
The worldwide leading cause of death is cardiovascular disorders. Despite scientific discoveries and innovations, there are extreme cost barriers that make treatment for such disorders challenging to provide or receive. This increases the need for alternative, cost-effective therapies, including mind-body practices.
Given the mind-body connection, mental stress is considered to be either a direct or indirect risk factor for cardiovascular disorders. Thus, stress-relieving therapies as an alternative or complementary treatment method to achieve stress regulation can reduce cardiovascular disorder risks or triggers. In fact, the benefits of mind-body exercises include stress relief, blood pressure management, improved sleep quality, and improved heart rate variability.
As part of the Mind-Body Medicine online program at Saybrook, including the master’s degree and Ph.D. program, Psychophysiology of the Human Stress Response is a required class. This course introduces the basic principles of psychophysiology related to several body systems. Graduates learn to review the science behind the human stress response and its impact on the nervous, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and immune systems, as well as learn to examine various research strategies used to investigate the complex mind and body connection through psychophysiological monitoring, neuro-imaging, and biological markers.
We also offer an elective mind-body science course called Principles and Theories of Stress Management. This course provides students with basic information on the principles and theories of stress management techniques in various settings. It emphasizes the historical perspective on developing stress management techniques and methods for identifying triggers. This stress management course includes supporting evidence behind stress-reducing practices such as meditation, autogenic exercises, humor, progress muscle relaxation, and instructions on performing such mindful techniques.
Mindfulness and meditation, emotional regulation, and possible lifestyle changes are some mind-body practices that can address chronic stress and improve heart health.
Mindfulness and Meditation
Mindfulness can help regulate and manage emotions such as stress, anxiety, and depression, and help cope with pain, improve sleep hindered by rabid emotions and hypertension. Meditation is the act that trains the mind to concentrate and redirect thoughts to achieve a calm and clear mental state. Movement Modalities for Wellness, an online course part of the Mind-Body Medicine master’s degree, reviews the importance of physical activity in developing self-awareness and maintaining and restoring health. This includes yoga, tai chi/qigong, and meditation, among other movement modalities.
For more information, watch “What Happens When You Meditate? Meditation & Subconscious Mind” with Donald Moss, Ph.D., dean of the College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences at Saybrook.
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is your ability to control your emotional state, such as rethinking difficult situations to minimize anger or anxiety, hiding fear or signs of sadness, and focusing on happy or calm thoughts. Practicing mindful exercises such as meditation can help you accept emotions and adjust your mindset to focus on positive emotions.
You can improve your emotional regulation through therapy, acts of reflection, meditation, and other mentally focused practices through which you can safely access and address your thoughts and emotions. These practices can help whether you react an event, interaction, or a response to stimuli such as a person, place, or thing. This level of control can help you reduce stress and negative responses to triggering events, placing less strain on the heart and mind connection.
Lifestyle Changes
Your lifestyle can positively or negatively impact your mind-body connection. A poor diet, low to no activity, and limited mental care can disrupt mental and physical wellness. The Nutritional Foundations of Mental Health is an online course available in the Mind-Body Medicine program at Saybrook University. This course provides an overview of practical and scientific approaches to food’s impact on mental health, including the quality and variety of food available and the extent of its impact on the brain.
The Contemporary Neuroscience-Psychology and the Brain elective course investigated the nervous system, emphasizing clinical examples and mind-body interactions. Students explored contemporary neuroscience of eating, sleeping, hormones, and memory. This course allowed students to learn in-depth about the connection between the mind and body and how lifestyle can impact a person's mental and physical health.
Discover More About MBM and Heart Health
The Mind-Body Medicine program from Saybrook University includes master's and doctoral degree programs, each with options to choose a specialization, focusing on integrative and functional nutrition and integrative wellness coaching. The MBM Ph.D. program includes additional specializations such as applied psychophysiology and integrative mental health that would benefit those pursuing a degree that focuses on the mind-body connection, including how a person's mental status can impact cardiovascular health. With courses addressing stress management, a common trigger for cardiovascular conditions, graduates can learn in-depth information about mindful exercises that improve your mental health and emotional regulation and provide recommendations for positive lifestyle adjustments.
