The function of Emotions in Health: Part 2
When you are looking at health, emotions play a substantial role. And just how they're expressed in the physical body follows certain rules. Recently, partly 1 want to know ,, I discussed the “logic” of emotions and how different systems of drugs take a look at them. Understanding emotions from a dynamic perspective supplies a guide for somatic metaphors and explains how emotions are expressed or familiar with your body. I additionally reviewed how to strengthen your psychological resiliency. So, exactly what do we all do with all that?
Handling of Emotions
Stuff happens. Life is full of traumas and wonderful experiences. There isn't any stopping the bombardment of experiences that life provides. Now you ask , whether and how you progress using your life, or whether you receive stuck inside it. The handling of emotions can also be checked out in line with the 5 Element theory .1
Emotions themselves are neither healthy nor unhealthy. It's when the processing of emotions is incomplete that people run into trouble. If you think about it, it's no different than every other part of the body. What determines digestive health, for instance, is not so much concerning the food, but much more about what the body can digest and its ability to absorb the nutrients that are available, and also to eliminate what's unhealthy or unnecessary. The same holds true for any other system that's responsible for processing what we should ingest or take in.
The handling of emotions starts with a celebration – something happens, or something that we anticipated happening doesn't happen. The way we process this occurrence determines the outcome from the event. There are as numerous methods to interpret a celebration because there are people, each one unique, and every one being triggered slightly differently. People could possibly get stuck in a single part of the process due to their belief system, their own constitution, their psychological resiliency, or their unwillingness or wherewithal to complete the procedure.
Although you will find different terms and models that are used to explore the handling of emotions, all models notice that emotions have a physiological, cognitive, subjective, and behavioral component, which humans have the ability to consider their emotions, regulate their response, and also to adjust to social norms.2
Steps within the Emotional Process
- Awareness
The initial step to understand the emotional process will be aware of your life and what happens. It's about being able to recognize that you are emotionally triggered by something which did or didn't happen. It requires an individual's overall sense of freedom to both feel and become aware of emotions. Simply taking the time to keep yourself informed may cause emotions to shift, and starts the processing from the emotion. Understanding of being emotionally triggered often occurs because of the start of an actual symptom – all of a sudden we obtain a tightness in our abdomen, our breathing changes, or there is a alternation in energy. Table 2 , also listed in Part 1, serves as a guide regarding where particular emotions might be held and just how they could be expressed. Being aware of the hyperlink between physical symptoms and the events which happen in our life is an important aspect of emotional awareness.
- Reaction
Reaction may be the actual approach we take to express our emotions. You should fully feel your emotions and also to understand how to express them. This isn't about getting stuck on the feeling, but to feel your feelings in a way that is good and productive.
How we react to emotions depends upon our expectations, our anticipation of the big event, our surroundings, how others around us react to the same event, our life experiences, our psychological resiliency, and our current state of health. Every society has judgment around expressing emotions: Is expressing anger helpful or otherwise? Is fear to become handled or avoided? May be the ultimate goal love and understanding?
It is important to acknowledge the main difference between your necessity to feel your feelings and how that's done. Not all emotions need to be expressed right now that they arise. A part of psychological resiliency is about determining the best place and time and method to express how we feel. Just like there is etiquette for eliminating toxins associated with digestion or urination, there is emotional etiquette.
People are likely toward certain emotions. Many people are naturally angry, irritable, anxious, and pessimistic, or happy and positive. The greater you understand your natural tendencies, what triggers you, and whether your response to emotions is healthy or unhealthy, the better you can control your life .
- Understanding
Understanding why things happened or didn't happen isn't about fault or blame, but about recognizing that there's a outcomes of your emotional and physical health insurance and your life. Lots of people spend an exorbitant period of time and money looking for ways to address their physical symptoms without ever linking these to what has happened in their lives and just how they feel about this. Other people intellectualize their emotions so much they never proceed to the next step in the process. It is useful to realise why unexpected things happen and how they're mirrored in your body; however, understanding is part of the procedure, not the end-goal.
Our knowledge of our emotions and how we think about them greatly influences the impact that they have on us. People have a tendency to trust their emotions and also to base their reactions on their own interpretation of their emotions. They tell themselves a story often to justify the way they feel. Lots of people become mounted on their emotions, which emotions start influencing the way they interact with their lives.
It is important to know the difference between your feelings and who you are. A parent, teacher, boss, spouse, sibling, or even a friend can often influence how you feel about yourself. Few people understands how to filter what they hear or see. We complete the blanks when we are hurt or triggered. We all have certain triggers, emotions they have a propensity to feel, or situations that can easily bring them on. Understanding emotions starts with understanding yourself. It's about recognizing your resiliency, your ability to filter, as well as your triggers and susceptibilities. It calls for becoming conscious of how you feed your emotions and the degree to which you downplay stressful events or else you have a small situation and blow it out of proportion towards the event.
- Processing
The actual processing of emotions is all about moving through the emotions and releasing what's unnecessary or unhealthy. Processing of emotions is important, as research does link certain emotions with specific health outcomes. For example, hopelessness is one of the strongest emotions related to cancer,3 how a person perceives pain directly influences the quantity of pain they feel,4 and anger and how an individual expresses it impacts cardiovascular risk factors and GI symptoms.5
My experience suggests you will find 5 ways of processing emotions: distraction, dissipating, decision-making, suppression, and reflection.
Distraction involves diverting your focus on something else, often something which is much more pleasant. Lots of people view distraction like a positive response to a psychological situation, and it can be when used appropriately. Yet, it is important to notice that when distraction serves to delay the processing of emotions, it is not, in and of itself, a way of processing. Common types of distraction involve watching tv, surfing the web, exercising, reading a magazine, hearing music, or concentrating on work or another task.
Distraction can be helpful when it's not appropriate to express openly when tips over. If you know that you're tired, overwhelmed, that your psychological resiliency happens to be weakened, or you tend to overreact to emotional triggers, distraction can provide a time-out, providing you with time and space to let the outcome from the event lessen in intensity and also to know very well what happened and why.
Dissipating emotions may be the taking care of from the process that I often find is missing. It relates to an individual understanding how to produce the intensity of an emotion. Emotions could be released while using mind or the body. Some forms of counseling and just talking to the individual involved, or perhaps a friend or family member, can help in dissipating emotions. Different ways of dissipating emotions include:
Short bursts of activity. To ensure that exercise to help dissipate emotions, versus truly being a distraction, it must be a brief burst of activity where the focus is on pushing outward, ie, releasing. Examples include: hitting a tennis ball against a wall, kick-boxing, hitting a bunching bag, sprinting. When utilizing exercise as a way of dissipating emotions, it is important to link the game to the situation or emotion that you're releasing.
Breathing. Slowing down your breathing can effectively dissipate the intensity of a feeling for example anger, anxiety, panic, and fear. Learning to connect with your breath allows you to manage emotions better.
Yell at someone/something without one knowing. You do not always have to deal directly with the person you're upset with, and have a situation resolved, to be able to process a feeling and release the intensity or hold it is wearing you. Dissipating emotions isn't dependent on another person listening or hearing what you are saying. It's dependent on you being able to express how you feel without having to worry about how you say something and just what someone else thinks. Therefore, when you're upset or triggered, it's helpful to have an honest conversation with this person without them being present. This can be a best part to do in a car, when home alone, or when out for any walk alone in nature.
Free-form writing. Many people like to verbalize the way they feel; others would rather write. Both are effective means of dissipating emotions as long as the expression is not guarded and can flow freely. Writing as a way of dissipating emotions can involve yelling at someone on paper for some seconds or minutes, or it may involve writing for a couple of hours without stopping, like a type of dumping years of pent-up emotions onto the paper. Both are effective. The main thing is to write and shred. It's not about writing someone instructions. It is a dump of emotions. It is a way to get rid of the surface of whatever you feel to be able to work better using the underlying concern or situation.
Allow for time and perspective. Some emotions dissipate by themselves. Any of us can overreact to a situation when we are over-tired, stressed, unwell, or simply depressed by another life event. Some people know that they're being overly sensitive and easily triggered. Allowing serious amounts of pass is sometimes all that is needed for an emotion to dissipate. When the emotion continues to be with you in a couple of days, then you probably need to look in internet marketing more closely and decide the other actions ought to be taken. Do you need to more actively dissipate the emotions, or must you make a decision that you don't need to make?
Decision-making: First you become aware of a feeling while you feel it; then you definitely respond to it, you realize why it happened, you reduce the intensity of it, and then you have to deal with it. Processing emotions involve determining what must change. It's about making the decision concerning the event and your response to it. Do you feel that you simply over-reacted to some normal life event? Is there someone in your life which brings out the worst in your soul? Must you reconsider whether your job fits your needs? Must you stand up for yourself differently? Is your reaction normal in line with the situation, and you simply need to ride it?
Think of the emotional response much like your response to food: If you eat something that causes symptoms, you have to decide whether it is a 1-time occurrence which will resolve on its own, whether you need to strengthen your digestive system, steer clear of the food, take a supplement to help you digest better, or whether there is a deeper, inherent problem. Emotions are the same. They are not necessarily good or bad; they are a note. Your work would be to interpret the message and make a decision by what, contrary, needs to change allowing you to have more of the emotions you would like and fewer of people who you do not.
Keep in your mind, emotional health happens when the subconscious equals the conscious, which equals the spoken and which equals action. Many people simply want to change 1 part of the equation. That doesn't work. For example, you cannot choose that you want to forget about the anger you are feeling toward a spouse for something which happened, although not let go of the situation. I call it the icing-on-the-cake phenomenon. Many people and books promote being positive, happy, and loving. That's good advice, as long as there's not a lot of suppressed emotions and negative feelings underneath you have not released.
There is really a distinction between choosing to be healthy and choosing to become happy. If you have a life that you don't like, projecting happiness is unhealthy. Emotional health is about honesty. If you're happy, great. If you're unhappy, it is important to determine first what needs to change, not how you can feel different in the same life. Emotions generally follow and mirror your lifetime; they don't lead.
“Fake it until you make it” might be good advice. But, you should know the main difference between faking it and suppressing your feelings. On the surface they can look the same, however their effect on health is extremely different.
Suppression: Naturopathic medicine focuses a great deal around the negative impact of suppressing emotions, urges, toxins, etc. Suppressing emotions is all about avoidance, denial, and becoming stuck while distraction or intellectualizing your emotions, versus actually dealing with a psychological situation and processing the outcome of emotions in your health.
Research is starting to recognize the outcome of suppression on health. For example, suppression of anger is assigned to increasing the sensation, perception, and concentration of pain.6,7
Many naturopathic and energetic practitioners believe that suppressed emotions provide the seed for disease.
Reflection: The last step from the emotional process is all about reflection and releasing expectations, of irrational or unworkable beliefs, and the degree that emotions drive your lifetime. It is about resolving old conflicts and recognizing your personal patterns and triggers. It's about choosing new patterns along with a lifestyle your lifetime. It is not about convincing yourself that your every day life is great or that everything is and was okay. It's about deciding to truly let go of that which you cannot change, changing what you can, and learning from your experiences.
Closing Comments
Emotions allow us the chance to experience the good and the bad of life. It is emotions that provide life color – that allow us to feel love and gratitude, and to contrast by using anger and fear. Emotions really are a tremendous tool. I encourage you to embrace your emotions and learn to use them like a personal guide that can assist you in living a fuller life.