title: Health Realization/Innate Health: can a quiet mind and a positive feeling state be accessible over the lifespan without stress-relief techniques?
abstract: Health Realization/Innate Health (HR/IH) questions long-held assumptions about chronic stress, and challenges current definitions of both stress and resiliency. HR/IH sets forth principles that explain why the experience of psychological stress is not an effect of causal factors beyond people's control, but is an artifact of the energetic potential of the mind. HR/IH describes the "cognitive factor" in stress not as the content of people's thinking in response to stressors, but rather as a quality of the way people hold and use their thinking, referred to as state of mind. HR/IH hypothesizes that understanding principles that explain the nature and origin of thinking and experience offers a means to access innate protective processes that are healing and antibiosenescent reliably and consistently, without techniques. HR/IH suggests that the primary effort of mental health care could be to initiate life-long prevention of the state of chronic stress. In addition, HR/IH suggests that addressing mental well-being would have a broad impact on the incidence and course of the many physical illnesses that are known to be stress-related. The brief therapeutic interactions of HR/IH draw upon people's innate wisdom and recognition of the healthy perspective available to everyone. Anecdotal results suggest that people who gain insight into the principles that explain the nature of thought and experience and who realize how to re-access a natural, positive state of mind can and do experience sustained day-to-day peace of mind, wisdom and well-being, regardless of circumstances. HR/IH deserves rigorous scientific evaluation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Community Medicine, West Virginia Initiative for Innate Health, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA. jsedgeman@hsc.wvu.edu
authors.forename: Judith A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Sedgeman
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D006240:Happiness; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D008603:Mental Health; D008960:Models, Psychological; D013312:Stress, Physiological / Q000517:prevention & control*