Everyone wants to be happy, but did you know that happiness is related to your physical health?
Negative emotions also affect your health. You may have some personal experience with this concept. You had a stressful experience at work or at home and when it was over you came down with a cold.
The relationship between emotions and health is now more than something that seems true. Researchers have validated what many of us have suspected for years.
Keep reading to find out more about this important link.
What researchers are telling us
All of the studies mentioned in this post are from Real Cause, Real Cure by Jacob Teitelbaum, MD and Bill Gottlieb, CHC. The authors describe nine real causes of ill health. The one that I am focusing on here is described as a “happiness deficiency.”
For many years researchers have known that stress and negative emotions such as depression, anger, and anxiety are linked to ill health and death.
Researchers began to explore the relationship between positive emotions and health. Dutch researchers found that happy people live 10 to 40 percent longer. Other studies found that happy people had less pain, fewer hospitalizations, fewer injuries and even fewer colds.
Exactly how does happiness improve health?
Teitelbaum and Gottlieb point out four ways that happiness can have a positive effect on our bodies.
Feeling happy can:
- Enhance your immune system so that you can fight off everything from viruses to cancer
- Prevent the over production of stress hormones, that have been shown to cause cell damage
- Improve heart health – people who are depressed, hostile, or anxious have more heart disease
- Protect your brain – depression increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease
Happy people feel all their emotions
One common trait of happy people: they feel all of their emotions and know how to express them – even negative emotions – in healthy ways. Unhappy people often suppress their emotions.
What happens when you suppress your emotions
Suppressing emotions can lead to a number of health issues. Emotions are felt in the body. See my post: How Your Emotional System Works. Briefly, emotions are chemical messengers produced by your brain. These chemical messengers are like keys that fit into receptor sites on your cells throughout your body.
When you feel happy your whole body benefits from the happy feeling. When you stuff or suppress an emotion such as anger or grief, you do not fully experience the emotion. The chemical messengers attach to the cells and never let go.
Your cells continue to act like you are still feeling the anger or the grief even if you have tried to forget the emotion. As we learned earlier, negative emotions, even those you repressed, affect your health.
What can you do to feel happier?
If you have repressed emotions from your past, you can release them using the poetry of emotion process. You do not need to remember all of those unpleasant memories from the past. The poetry of emotion process works with your unconscious to release repressed emotions at the cellular level.
Do you have repressed emotions? Do you want more happiness?
To read more…
(Image: makelessnoise @ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/makelessnoise/317412761/)
