There is a growing body of evidence that illnesses in the body are trapped emotions that are affecting us in tangible, physical ways. We can heal our bodies and minds by releasing suppressed, repressed, and trapped negative emotions. In this article, we will look at how emotions affect your body. Here’s How Your Emotions Affect Your Health
You can, of course, feel emotions in your body as physiological changes. For example, embarrassment causes the face to redden with the rush of blood to your cheeks. In this way, you know how some emotions can be felt physically in the body. Similarly, fear might make you feel tightness in your stomach and muscle tension.
There is a mental component to how we process our feelings and interpret the event. For instance, if your car breaks down on your way to work, you can feel frustrated about it. On the other hand, you can feel that you have received a message that you need to slow down this morning and take care of your valuable possessions.
You decide how to feel about a physiological emotion. That’s because your body is the mental component of the mind-body connection that determines how emotions affect your body.
How negative emotions affect your health
A University of Michigan study examined whether we can cultivate positive emotions to affect our bodies and optimize health. They found that ‘Negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and sadness) narrow an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire toward specific actions that served the ancestral function of promoting survival.’
In other words, our fight or flight response kicks in when we have a negative emotion. So we feel aggressive or need to hide from the feelings.
Researchers at the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, say ‘psychological factors might influence immunity and immune system’mediated disease.’ Also, the study found ‘substantial evidence that factors such as stress, negative affect [emotions], clinical depression, social support, and repression/denial can influence both cellular and humoral [lymphatic fluid] indicators of immune status and function.’
Negative feelings have a major impact on the immune system of the body.
“At least in the case of the less serious infectious diseases (colds, influenza, herpes), [there are] consistent and convincing evidence of links between stress and negative affect [emotions] and disease onset and progression.”
In other words, if you are in a bad mood, feeling sad, angry, or stressed, you are more likely to get sick from even something like the flu.
How positive emotions affect your health
Your body responds when you feel joy, happiness, excitement, hope, appreciation, respect, or love. As a result of the pleasure, it releases endorphins and oxytocin, often called ‘the cuddle hormone.’ We feel good when we have these emotions and want even more promising, positive emotions, like a drug craving.
Unlike negative emotions that can stay trapped in the body, positive emotions help remove the effect of negative emotions in the body. Positive emotions don’t get trapped in our bodies. But some believe that they trigger cellular changes that improve the body’s normal functioning.
The University of Michigan scientists say that positive emotions (e.g., joy, interest, and contentment) broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire, which in turn can build that individual’s enduring personal resources, resources that also serve the ancestral function of promoting survival.
One implication of the broaden-and-build model is that positive emotions have an undoing effect on negative feelings. So, broaden the momentary thought-action repertoire. Thus, positive emotions loosen the hold that negative thoughts gain on an individual’s mind and body by undoing the narrowed psychological and physiological preparation for specific action. Indeed, empirical studies show that contentment and joy speed recovery from the cardiovascular aftereffects of negative emotions.
How you can use this information to affect your health in positive ways
Learn to identify negative vibes in your body. Practicing self-awareness and mastery is the key. For example, where do you notice the changes in your body when frustrated? You can better identify the emotion once you feel these stress changes in your muscles and internal organs. Thus, you will better cope with both your internal processing of feelings. Furthermore, you can relax your muscles to change how you feel.
Change your processing of the feeling by reframing the thought from this is so frustrating to this is just a minor setback. Everything will be ok. Then work on relaxing the muscles of your shoulders and upper back by lifting and releasing your shoulders. Many of us carry tension here. Thus, the shoulders are a good place to start when you are re-learning how emotions affect your body.
