Psychosomatics: The Heart of Anger

[Explor­ing Life] Psy­cho­so­matic med­i­cine focuses on dis­eases or phys­i­cal dis­or­ders that may have their ori­gin within our thoughts and emo­tions. An emo­tion that becomes habit­ual will man­i­fest as a phys­i­o­log­i­cal real­ity within the body. Pos­i­tive emo­tions can be defined as those emo­tions hav­ing a ben­e­fi­cial effect on our phys­i­ol­ogy, while neg­a­tive motions are degen­er­a­tive and lead to dis­or­ders and dis­ease. In How Anger Hurts Your Heart the effects of habit­ual anger reveals itself phys­i­o­log­i­cally in the degen­er­a­tion of the heart.

So how exactly does anger con­tribute to heart dis­ease? Sci­en­tists don’t know for sure, but anger might pro­duce direct phys­i­o­log­i­cal effects on the heart and arter­ies. Emo­tions such as anger and hos­til­ity quickly acti­vate the “fight or flight response,” in which stress hor­mones, includ­ing adren­a­line and cor­ti­sol, speed up your heart rate and breath­ing and give you a burst of energy. Blood pres­sure also rises as your blood ves­sels constrict.

While this stress response mobi­lizes you for emer­gen­cies, it might cause harm if acti­vated repeatedly.

Emo­tional Addic­tion: Any emo­tion chron­i­cally repeated in response to our expe­ri­ences can form an addic­tion. The men­tal real­ity of the emo­tion and it affects on our thoughts even­tu­ally becomes a phys­i­cal real­ity through the con­stant pro­duc­tion of hor­mones that sup­port the emo­tion. In other words, it is impor­tant to learn that the mere pres­ence of an emo­tion, whether pleas­ant or unpleas­ant, is not the source of the prob­lem. The source of the prob­lem lies in chronic reac­tions involv­ing intense emo­tions that phys­i­cally mobi­lize the body for an emer­gency sit­u­a­tion. If, through habit­u­a­tion, we con­stantly react to our expe­ri­ences as if they were emer­gen­cies (e.g. — con­stantly get­ting angry) then our body is placed in a state of con­stant emer­gency, which in turn has degen­er­a­tive effects on the heart (and other inter­nal organs as well). The addic­tion is that the body is con­di­tioned to believe that a state of emer­gency is nor­mal and expects the hor­mones for that con­di­tion to be con­stantly provided.

And anger might not be the only cul­prit. In Kubzansky’s own research, she found that high lev­els of anx­i­ety and depres­sion may con­tribute to heart dis­ease risk, too. “They tend to co-occur,” she says. “Peo­ple who are angry a lot tend to have other chronic neg­a­tive emo­tions as well.”

No Emo­tion Is Neg­a­tive: Emo­tions are a nat­ural and nor­mal part of the phe­nom­e­non we call liv­ing. All emo­tions, even anger, have some­thing to reveal to us about our­selves. Believ­ing in the false notion that some emo­tions are neg­a­tive can lead to fear and repres­sion of the emo­tion. The phrase “chronic neg­a­tive emo­tions” makes the assump­tion that an emo­tion can be neg­a­tive and if habit­u­ally repeated can have neg­a­tive effects on the heart. Anger is in itself not neg­a­tive; chron­i­cally and inap­pro­pri­ately react­ing with anger is neg­a­tive in its effects on the body. The aspect that is neg­a­tive is not the emo­tion, but our rela­tion­ship to it. Learn­ing to have a more inti­mate and mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship with all of our emo­tions while evolv­ing them toward higher ground is essential.

“We’re really good at treat­ing heart attacks, but we’re not that good at pre­vent­ing them,” says Holly S. Ander­sen, MD, car­di­ol­o­gist and direc­tor of edu­ca­tion and out­reach at the Ronald O. Perel­man Heart Insti­tute at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cor­nell Med­ical Cen­ter. “Stress is not as easy to mea­sure as your cho­les­terol level or your blood pres­sure, which are clearly objec­tive. But it’s really impor­tant that physi­cians start tak­ing care of the whole per­son — includ­ing their moods and their lives — because it mat­ters.” The bot­tom line: “A change of mind can lead to a change of heart,” Kif­fer says.

A change of mind can lead to a change of heart: Learn­ing to dis­ci­pline and evolve our emo­tional lives toward bal­ance and equa­nim­ity is a uni­ver­sal chal­lenge. Read­ing health arti­cles can in fact cre­ate an imme­di­ate sense of fear. For exam­ple, read­ing How Anger Hurts Your Heart may result in a fear of anger itself since anger is framed in a neg­a­tive light. Again, it is not anger that is neg­a­tive, it is our rela­tion­ship to it that can become neg­a­tive. There is no need to fear anger, but there is a need to inves­ti­gate and explore it on a per­sonal level.

This kind of inward jour­ney into our emo­tions is an essen­tial yet fre­quently neglected aspect of learn­ing. All too often we asso­ciate learn­ing with the acqui­si­tion of stuff from out­side our­selves. An emo­tion is inside of us and has a very direct influ­ence on how we inter­pret our lives. Chronic emo­tions will skew the mind toward cer­tain thought clus­ters and the body toward cer­tain phys­i­o­log­i­cal responses. This cre­ates an imbal­ance within and clouds our per­cep­tion of the world around us.

As much as a change in mind can lead to a change in heart, the reverse is true as well. A change of heart can lead to a change in mind. The rela­tion­ship of body to mind is one of inte­gra­tion rather than one way flow of influ­ence. Emo­tions reveal the simul­tane­ity that is body and mind.