Can Changing The Way You Deal With Emotions- Affect Your Health?

Emotions have a direct and profound influence on physical health. I have yet to see a disease that doesn't have an emotional aspect to it. Learning how to deal with emotions in a resourceful way is vital for anyone wishing to establish long term health and well-being.

The body records all feeling in the emotional realm which is also where we experience and express emotions. This includes a wide spectrum of emotions from the most primitive to sublime: Love, Hate, Sorrow, Happiness, Anxiety, Serenity, Anger, Compassion, etc.

Individuals experience emotions in different ways which make them one hundred percent subjective. Emotions give life its color and flavor. Involvement, commitment and motivation are all emotionally related but so are conflict and war.

The emotional body exists within the physical body. Emotions are created in the limbic area of the brain. Different emotions initiate the secretion of different bio-chemicals. Depending upon the emotion, specific bio-chemicals are secreted. Emotions cause the secretion of bio-chemicals, a specific chemical for each emotion. Neurological and biochemical activities are translated into various types of physical arousal (sensations) that facilitate experiences.Significance is associated to the emotion in the cortex, using the information processing mechanism.

Unfortunately, social norms for the most part, encourage people to be more in their minds than with their feelings. Healthy ways of handling emotions are not taught in most educational systems therefore children resort to modeling the existing models which are usually far from being healthy. In many cases all they have are the models they see on TV or the internet and those in their immediate family. Somewhat like the blind leading the deaf.
Emotional health is crucial for physical health- but how is emotional health defined?

Most people regard emotions either positive or negative. Agreeable and pleasant emotions are considered positive. these emotions are embraced Disagreeable emotions that create uncomfortable situations are considered negative and are condemned.and are devalued. Along this line of thought, emotional health is determined by the amount of positive verses negative emotions one has. The more positivity, the healthier the individual is considered.

By sorting emotions into positive and negative social norms perpetuate emotional restraint because they indirectly instruct us to promote certain emotions and manipulate themselves into avoiding others. The practical implication is that we become conditioned to allow those emotions that are regarded positive and consistently repress those that are considered negative. We constantly judge what we feel, Evaluating what we feel as either good or bad. We get caught in a dead end game of feeling bad and then feeling bad for the unpleasant feelings we have.

Unfortunately, emotions don't go away when we repress them. The organism diverts our attention away from our feelings one of these being various degrees of neurological shut down. The nervous system shuts down as a means to dull the sensations associated with what we feel. Emotions are monitored by the degree of openness of shut down of the nervous system. This way we under the impression that we have only positive emotions when actually, underneath we can feel considerable pain.

This could have been a good solution if it weren't for the very high price it involves. The nervous system is crucial for healthy physiological functions. Shutting down the nervous system mean considerably jeopardizing both emotional and physical health.

A common symptom of the tendency to neurological shut down is the inability to identify what one feels. More and more people are less and less capable of identifying what they feel because they have totally shut down their feeling mechanisms. In some cases the emotional vocabulary is so limited, the only differentiation people can make is if a feeling is pleasant or not.

Many dysfunctional behaviors such as addictions, eating disorders, violence, and others are an outcome of unhealthy emotional patterns. Dysfunctional behaviors divert people's attention else where, unfortunately to destructive avenues.
For example: substance addictions are often triggered by a need to blur or deal with unpleasant emotions. An estimated 95% of the heroin addicts I have worked with testified that the need for a "fix" is highest when they feel emotional pain.

Eating disorders are another common distraction mechanism. Over eating blurs feelings by exchanging emotional hunger for physical hunger. Over time, the ability to distinguish between the two different types of hunger is disrupted in which case all cases of emotional hunger are interpreted as physical hunger.

Holistic approaches discuss a new modality for dealing with emotions and creating emotional health. This approach legitimizes all emotions. The Emphasis is on experiencing emotions rather than on expressing emotions. This model does not perpetuate any type of emotional expression and definitely does not legitimize violence and assault. This model legitimizes the feeling, meaning the emotional experience.