Emotions and Health: Part 1

Emotions are a major determining factor in how we think and feel, overriding much of our logic thought process. There is a wide range of emotional experiences such as anger, happiness, sadness, joy, depression, and excitement, along with many more. Emotions have a wide variety of effects on personal well being due to how integrated they are in thought processes, playing a role in both mental and physical health. Due to the way they affect health, emotions can be placed under the categories of negative or positive.

All emotions are needed in one form or another depending on different situations in our lives. Some emotions though, when uncontrolled, place more harm on bodies than good. Emotions that cause harm to our own health are classified as negative emotions. These poor emotional states or negative states include emotions such as anger, sadness, depression, stress, jealousy, and others that have similar feelings. These emotions cause the body to enter in a state that prevents it from functioning properly as they place the body under constant pressure, eventually leading to chronic stress. Many of these negative emotions cause the flight or fight reaction in the body. While this reaction is beneficial in certain situations as it gives us the needed energy to run or fight a threat, it is not needed in the majority of society activities today and does more harm than good. Constant stress turns off the body’s growth and repair system and prevents it from healing. It stops the functioning of the immune system, causes high blood pressure, damages the arteries and blood vessels, prevents us from focusing, impairs memory and accuracy, makes us more easily tired, causes depression, increases cholesterol level, and reduces our reproduction system. The negative effects lead to many health conditions such as cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and stroke.

Anger, even with its ability of increasing strength and giving the ability to be more “forceful”, has benefits when confronting threats but this emotion causes harm to our health. Studies have shown that angry outbursts, even if they last only a few minutes, will cause a massive release of adrenaline, placing the body under stress conditions and increasing blood pressure and heart rate. The stress from anger increases the risk of heart disease by 19% and the risk of heart attacks and stroke by five times. It is not only anger outbursts that cause harm, but repressing or trapping our anger is known to cause health problems. A study showed that women who suppressed their anger during confrontations have twice the risk of dying from heart attacks, stroke, and cancer. This shows that anger outbursts during confrontations poses the same risk as trapping our anger inside.

Arguments themselves are known to have adverse effects on health. Research has shown that a half hour argument with a lover will slow the body’s ability to heal by at least a day, with frequent arguments causing the impaired healing time to double. The negative effects of arguments cause harm not only during the moment of the argument but also in the recollection of arguments, both causing stress levels to significantly increase. It is more than just large outbursts or trapping of anger that cause harm. Subtle forms like impatience, irritability, and grouchiness damage our health and are associated with the conditions of anxiety, low mood, and suppressed immune system.

Jealousy is a complex emotion in how it affects us and the harm it causes to our health. It is considered a complex emotion due to it being a mixture of anger, stress, and fear. This combination of emotions results in an intense flight or fight reaction and leads to many complications. It harms us by increasing blood pressure, heart rate, and adrenalin levels; weakening the immune system; and causing anxiety and insomnia. Jealousy can be a very powerful and painful emotion that is difficult to control,with a variety of causes. It is an emotion that requires special observation and needs to be avoided to prevent us from harming ourselves with it.

A variety of emotions are linked with feeling down such as depression, pessimism, and apathy. These emotions lower the levels of the feel good neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine present in the brain. Low amounts of these neurotransmitters affect how a person perceives pain since serotonin is used to regulate pain perception. It is believed that due to its function in pain regulation that low levels of this neurotransmitter is why people who suffer with depression experience increased aches and pains. Serotonin has a role with the feelings of desire and low amounts of this neurotransmitter is linked with low levels of brain chemicals, altering the way the brain functions. This altering of brain function links the emotion of feeling down with poor sleep, fatigue, and sexual dysfunction.

During moments of negative stress and frustration a person might cry. While some might view it as a sign of weakness, crying actually provides us with benefits in reducing stress levels and the harmful effects it provides. A comparison study was conducted on the difference between emotional tears and tears produced when chopping onions. The study showed that emotional tears contained high levels of stress hormones and neurotransmitters, allowing the body to remove them from the system. Along with removal of stress hormones and neurotransmitters, emotional tears are shown to reduce heart pressure and heart rate, and are able to increase synchronised brain-wave patterns. Suppressing tears prevents the release of these stress components, and leaves the body in a constant state of tension. This constant state of tension makes the body susceptible to the negative effects of stress such as anxiety, weak immune system, impaired memory, and poor digestion, along with many of its other negative effects.

Negative emotions can play a big role in our mental and physical health. It hampers our body and mind from progressing forward in live and can even set us backwards. They can hunt us, give us poor sleep, prevent proper digestion of food, weaken our immune system, place our minds in such a negative state that we can lash out at people causing relationship damage with family and friends, and can cause us mentally destroy ourselves along with a host of other problems in our lives.

In the next blog post, we will look into positive emotions and how they affect our health, push us forward in life, and help overcome negative emotions.