About MindBodyConnection.org

I'm Andreas Dovland

I'm dedicated to explore and document how thoughts and emotions influence physical health, performance and well-being.

The goal is to create systems and a body of knowledge to combat psychosomatic lifestyle disease.

This mission is very close to my heart. You can read my story below.

I founded MindBodyConnection.org exactly 4 months after my mother died from cancer at 55 years old.

That chapter of her story started in 2008.

One day she rushed home and said “something is very wrong”.

It was probably a severe panic attack, but she never quite recovered from it physically.

That day was followed by years of chronic fatigue and other health issues.

Health conditions like that tend to put people on a journey of personal growth, and that’s exactly what happened for her.

Over time, as she gained awareness, she would tell me about her life and experiences she had gone through.

She told me about her relationship to herself, and about her relationships to others.

She’d tell me about how her mind had kept her from slowing down, resulting in chronic stress and overworking.

She once told me about the weeks leading up to her panic attack.

While already running a household with two dogs, two foster kids, two kids of her own and a full-time job - she had applied for a job cleaning airplanes at night.

She wasn’t sleeping anymore, so she figured that she might as well do something productive…

After that her body just stopped working.

But how can something like this happen?

Humans have this tendency to avoid dealing with their inner experience.

Challenging and painful emotions tend to get repressed.

Unresolved issues and traumas stay in the shadows.

And we have plenty of tools to help us do this.

Food, drugs, alcohol, work, sex, social media. Pick your poison.

The problem with repressed emotion is that the pressure increases over time.

While you're doing your best to push them down, your emotions are fighting to get back up to the surface.

This takes a huge toll on our bodies while also requiring us to do more of the things we do to repress, fueling negative feedback loops and addictive behaviors.

Most people aren’t aware that stress also is one of the most common tools for repression.

It is very effective and can work for a long time. It is also easy to find.

You can just create it in your mind if you want to.

But when you get addicted to stress, bad things happen.

Your body spends less and less time in parasympathetic activation.

This is where the body rests, heals and recovers.

Instead, your body is constantly running on overdrive, fueled by adrenaline and cortisol.

This is survival mode, and the body thinks it's in constant danger.

In survival mode, the body doesn’t dare to prioritize long-term health, because it tries to survive right now.

When the body does this for long periods of time, disease is inevitable.

This is exactly what happened to my mother.

And it's happening every single day to people all over the world.

It's happening to someone you know.

Maybe you have experienced something like this yourself?

This is what MindBodyConnection.org is about.

We’re looking to gain an understanding of how the mind and body work together to produce health - and disease.

We're tired of seeing symptoms being treated instead of core problems.

Our mission is to research, educate and spread awareness about how the mind-body connection affects your life, and how you can use it to take control of your health, performance and well-being.

If this mission resonates with you, the best way to support it is to join the newsletter and share any content you find valuable with your friends and family.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end, and thank you for being a part of the mission.

I’ll leave you with a life lesson my mother always used to repeat:

Live true to yourself - or suffer the consequences.