Can Your Body Tell Tales? How Emotions Affect Your Health
"Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds." Zacharty Bercovitz has the right idea, even though it is a scary thought. Our mental health affects our physical health more than most people imagine. Our emotions have intimate connections to our physical bodies.
Human beings are creatures of emotion. Emotions can be extremely powerful and often rule our day. When someone says she is having a "bad hair day," she does not necessarily mean that her hair would not sit properly, but that she is experiencing negative emotions. She may be feeling anxious, depressed, stressed, or unappreciated.
When you think about it, you know you have physical reactions to emotions. Have you ever felt nervous at a job interview? Experts suggest that taking a sip of water before answering a question will help you to feel calm and be able to answer the question. Why does it work? When you are nervous or anxious, your body responds to the emotion.
Unfortunately, the signals for nervousness are the same as danger. When you are in physical danger, the survival instinct takes over. Your mouth will become dry, so you don't have to worry about choking on your saliva when you try to run away from the danger. You may find that adrenalin kicks in and your heart races faster. You can experience sweating as your body reacts to an impending run from danger and starts to prepare for the body to deal with excessive heat. Sweat also releases toxins from your body, so that your organs can function efficiently and you can survive the danger.
Even though you are not in physical danger in a job interview situation, you can feel the same physical reactions. Emotions are often short-lived, so you will not have ongoing physical reactions to the majority of emotions. Living with long-term stress will certainly have an impact on your physical health though.
More troubling are the repressed emotions. Repressed emotions are those you do not deal with at the time you actually feel the emotion. If you repress anger, you may end up feeling physical pain in many areas of your body. Often people who experience constipation or bowel problems have repressed negative emotions, such as anger. Some have discovered physical healing occurs after participating in emotional counseling, such as attending sessions with a psychologist. In old English language, the bowels were the synonym for where the centre of the emotion is in the body. It's why we have "gut feelings" about things.
Negative emotions are extremely powerful and we need to deal with those emotions or risk getting ill. Repressed emotions often lead to other problems, such as dependence on drugs or alcohol, gambling, or other self-destructive behaviors. If you continue to repress your emotions, you may become physically ill as your body continually runs in a state of stress in trying to deal with the overwhelming manifestations of your emotions.
Stress is big killer in Western society. Heart diseases, such as heart attacks or strokes, are often symptoms of stress. If you feel stress, you react in a physical way as if your body is in danger. However, you can feel stress over a longer period, so your body has no way of discharging the adrenalin. If you continually live in a state of stress, you tend to ignore the symptoms. If you commonly get migraines, for example, it could be a sign that your body needs a break from stress. You may want to get more exercise, learn relaxation techniques, and make changes to your lifestyle to reduce your level of stress.
Your body is an incredibly complex machine with interwoven connections that biologists are just beginning to fathom. Emotions are not just something you feel in your mind, as emotions impact on your physical and biological body as well. When you learn how to deal with your emotions appropriately, you will find better physical health is easier to maintain. If you want a healthy body, you need to have a healthy mind and learn to deal with your emotions appropriately.