Ive been looking at things on how the consciousness mind can affect the physical body, purely on patterns ive observed from my own experience. It seems to me, consciousness can actually be a strain upon the body.
Healing.
How many times have you gone to bed feeling ill, and woken up feeling fine...but the symptoms return over the course of a few hours of waking up?. This could be either via physical activity making you feel ill again, but from my own experience and some study's done across the world physical activity actually makes you feel better, and increase's the body's metabolic rate, thus producing key items to fight off illness. Thus is leads me to think, it's your mind - the focus on which you will concentrate upon something giving you pain, which can often increase the pain being experienced? If it's true that segments of our mind float off during sleep, then this could explain why the body heals faster during sleep then it does while being awake, theres less burden upon the body...less signals have to be produced to rationalise the illness..while at the same time, your body may have to fight for resources between your conscious and subconscious while awake - but while your asleep your subsconscious has free reign.
Meditation often, helps many people overcome illness. This would also add stock, because meditation is about clear thought - maybe detaching a little,thus letting the subscious deal with the illness and the consciousness to take a back seat.
If you through terminally ill patients into the works though, you can also see how it could be possible the conscious mind can be an asset in healing.
Says, theres 2 terminally ill cancer paitents. they both have exactly the same condition - the doctors say to both of them they have 1 week to live. often the case is the one who sits there crying, and in dispear will be dead the next day - while the one who totally disagree's with the doctor and keeps fighting - can live 6 months +, even sometimes force the cancer into remission.
Stress
My old man, works at a nut house. He has 26 service users, aka clients. All who have severe brain damage through accidents etc. You will be suprised to know though, he has some which are aged 65+ and not 1 has any grey hair. Thus leading me to think, there actions are often based alot on instinct - meaning the subconscious has more free reign upon the body, then it would over a regular person thus leading to no greys?
Stress can take it's form's physically for alot of us- aka rash's, headaches. Our consciousness is actually producing physical reactions - negative ones. While the subsonscious is trying to heal the physical and wounds being produced.
Stress can stop people wanting to eat etc, our conscious mind is actually overiding the subconscious's signals. Ultimately making us feel worse.
Actions.
How many actions, which lead to negative affects upon the body, are caused purely by the conscious mind? the answer is probley most of them. Taking drugs/smoking etc Are the conscious minds way of getting our body to produce happy chemicals, but the cost of this is damage to our body. The sub conscious often alerts us to danger by producing feelings of fear/anxiety. Yet most of the time the conscious overides these feelings and it's considered heroic, self sacrifice etc.
It seems to me, the conscious mind is constantly battling with the sub conscious, and the aim is to find balance?....if you dont show your sub conscious respect and dont abuse it's attributes over eccessively, maybe there would be less illness/stress and wrong actions in the world?