I’ve recently facilitated a series of workshops on mindfulness and spirituality at a drug and alcohol rehab clinic. The most popular workshop by far was the one where I taught people how to use William Bloom’s Endorphin Effect. Endorphins, which are the hormones of pleasure, improve your mood, promote physical health and help to reduce stress. When you exercise or experience something pleasurable, endorphins are released. Endorphins are the body’s natural opiates – our ‘endogenous morphine’. The runners high, the bliss of sex and the pleasure of drinking alcohol are all due to endorphins.
But you don’t have to run a marathon, have sex or booze to get your endorphins flowing, because your body will react in a very similar way to a powerful visualization as it will to reality. Let’s suppose – for the sake of argument – that lying in a warm bath eating chocolate truffles feels really good to you. That actual experience will feel great and result in the production of endorphins, but so will vividly imagining the experience. Visualization techniques are well established in sports science, where they are used to improve performance. You can use visualization to stimulate the flow of endorphins at will. No wonder that workshop was popular!
I usually teach the Endorphin Effect as a stress management tool, but there are many more applications. Professor Karl Schmidt, a Consultant Psychiatrist, believes that the Endorphin Effect “is so self-empowering that … it should be an essential strategy in any addiction treatment unit” (Schmidt, 2010). The Endorphin Effect works well with other approaches. I’ve been using Focusing and NLP strategies to enhance the Endorphin Effect for a while and I’m now exploring how it might be tied in with more traditional meditations like Metta Bhavana (‘loving kindness’); another synergy between modern science and ancient practice.
The last word should go to Candace Pert, who pioneered the research into endorphins:
“we are physically hardwired to pay attention to, and plan for, pleasure” (Hardwired for bliss).
- Try the Endorphin Effect yourself with a five minute experiment
- William Bloom on the Endorphin Effect
- References