Every day we hear about how a nutrient or food leads to a certain disease, or how a chemical is linked to cancer. But have you ever stopped to wonder how your emotions affect your health? Each of us go through a wide range of emotions each day, week and month. Anger, hatred, worry, depression, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, fear, joy, happiness, excitement – these are just a handful of the emotions that we can experience throughout our lives. We all know that negative emotions don’t make us feel good, but what if they could also make us sick?
Interestingly, researchers have asked themselves the same question and the results might surprise you. Dr. Don Colbert quotes some of these studies in his books, which have pointed to the following facts:
- Anger and hostility – connected to high blood pressure and heart disease
- Resentment, un-forgiveness, self-hatred – connected to autoimmune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), lupus (SLE), multiple sclerosis (MS)
- Anxiety – connected to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), mitral valve prolapse, heart palpitations
- Repressed anger – tension headaches, migraines, chronic back pain, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) problems, fibromyalgia
You’d think that an emotion was just something that happened in your head, but really it can affect your entire body on both a chemical and energetic level.
A few of the more interesting studies on emotions and health have been:
- A Harvard study of 1,623 heart attack survivors found that anger that was brought on by emotional conflicts doubled the risk of subsequent heart attacks, compared to those that remained calm.
- A 10 year study found that people who could not manage their emotional stress had a 40 percent higher mortality rate than non-stressed people.
- A heart disease study conducted at the Mayo clinic found that psychological stress was the strongest predictor of future cardiac events, including heart failure, cardiac arrest and heart related death.
There are numerous accounts of emotions affecting our health. We have seen this in our practice, where quite often emotional disharmony is the underlying cause for people’s symptoms.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), emotions are an integral part of the diagnosis and treatment of a condition. It is thought that anger affects the liver, fear affects the kidneys and grief affects the lungs. We commonly observe that people’s asthma flares after the death of a loved one, and that people are more prone to urinary tract infections when they are worried or fearful. Although this might seem a little woo-woo, there are countless accounts of people that have come to us for emotional healing, only for their physical symptoms to resolve.
The first part of dealing with emotional imbalance is to observe it. We are taught to suppress our emotions, not to listen to them, as we should. Not only should we be in check with our emotional state, but also we can use our emotions as a sign post to tell us when we need some help.
Help is available in many forms: from meditation and talking to friends, to seeing a therapist that can help you uncover and deal with underlying emotions. At Brisbane Natural Health, we offer hypnotherapy, holographic kinetics, body talk and energetic healing to help people to resolve emotional wounds so that they can be the happiest version of themselves. We highly recommend a visit if you feel that emotions are affecting you on a daily basis. It is very freeing to be able to go day to day without the burden of anxiety, worry, depression or resentment. And of course we now know that it will prevent disease later on down the track.
Need an appointment? Call us on 07 3367 0337 and we’ll help you get back on track.
