[Exploring Life] The word psychosomatic describes a kind of influence or effect that the mind can have on the body, or the body can have on the mind. For example, psychosomatic medicine focuses on diseases or physical disorders that are thought to originate 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.
