How Emotions Influence Your Health

Are you surprised that your thoughts and emotions can affect your health? I was also shocked when I learnt that the kind of things I think about and my emotions can affect my health and well-being.

 

Emotions and thoughts that are freely experienced and/or expressed without judgment or attachment tend to flow fluidly without impacting our health. On the other hand, repressed emotions (especially fearful or negative ones) can zap mental energy, negatively affect the body, and lead to health problems.

It's important to take note or study our thoughts and emotions and be conscious of how they affect our bodies, behaviour, and relationships.

Negative Thoughts and Emotions

Negative attitudes and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can create chronic stress, which upsets the body's hormone balance, depletes the brain chemicals required for happiness, and damages the immune system. Chronic stress can actually reduce our lifespan. Science has proven that stress shortens our telomeres, the end caps of our DNA strands, which causes us to age more quickly than normal.

Poorly managed, continuous or repressed anger is also related to some serious health conditions, such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, digestive disorders, and a series of infections.

Positive Thoughts and Emotions

On the other hand, positive emotions help the body recover from the ill effects of persistent negative emotions. Therefore cultivating the act of positivities in all our deeds or activities over time can help us become more resilient in the face of crisis, stress and even stress.

Emotional resilience is like an elastic band - no matter how far a resilient person is stretched or pulled by negative emotions and thoughts, he or she has the ability to bounce back to his or her original state as though they have not been moved or attacked.

Resilient people are able to experience tough emotions like pain, sorrow, frustration, disappointment, heartbreak, and grief without falling apart. Resilient people do not deny the pain or suffering they are experiencing; rather, they retain a sense of positivity that helps them overcome the negative effects their situations have on them. In fact, some people are able to look at challenging times with optimism and hope, knowing that their hardships will lead to personal growth and an expanded outlook on life.

Positive thoughts and emotions broaden our perspective of the world, thereby bringing about more experience, creativity, idea, wonder, and options. When you inculcate the habit of thinking positively, over time, you create room for lasting emotional resilience and flourishing in your life.   

Positive attitudes, such as love, awe, interest, serenity, playfulness, gratitude, happiness, forgiveness et cetera that have direct impact on our overall health and well-being does not just manifest overnight, but we can also develop them ourselves with frequent practice.

How to Overcome Our Negativity Bias

Because we are wired to defend against threat, insecurities and loss in life, we tend to prioritize bad over good. While this is a survival mechanism for someone who needs to stay hyper vigilant in a dangerous environment, the truth is that for most of us, this "negativity bias" is counter-productive.

Our "negativity bias" means that we spend too much time ruminating over the minor frustrations we experience in life and ignore the many chances we have to experience pleasantness, awe, loving and gratitude throughout the day.

 

In order to offset this negativity bias and experience a harmonious emotional state everyday of our lives Fredrickson proposes that we need to think of how to counter every negative thought and emotion with more than one positive thoughts and emotions. For example, when disappointment happens, we can counter it with optimism and faith. These positive emotions literally reverse the physical effects of negativity and build up psychological resources that contribute to a flourishing life.

In addition to the above, learn to smile always. Smiling has been proven to nourish the mind and make one look younger.