We all know that stress can affect our health. Stress can make almost any illness worse and is even thought to be the cause of some illnesses.
Did you know that stressful or painful emotions can also affect your health? These emotions include fear, anger, rage, guilt, and hatred.
Are your emotions affecting your health?
Two kinds of emotions
There are two kinds of emotions. One kind helps and protects you. The other kind can create stress in your life. Healthy emotions are from the present moment. They give you valuable information about what is going on in your life right now.
Stressful emotions are from the past. They were created when you experienced a painful or traumatic event and you were not able to experience the emotion and release it. We release emotions by taking action or learning from them.
An example may help. Your significant other is ignoring you and you worry that you may be breaking up. If this is a healthy fear, you will be able to talk to your significant other and you can discover if your fear is valid and take action. Whether the result is relief or anger or hurt, you are having an honest emotion.
If this fear is from the past, you may worry when there is no reason. You may actually create problems in the relationship when you let fears from the past take over your life.
How we store emotions form the past
Candace Pert, author of Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d (2006), tells us, “we found that these molecules of emotion aren’t just in the limbic system, but throughout the body, linked to form a comprehensive system of communication including the endocrine, digestive, and reproductive systems – literally, every system in the organism”
Emotions are chemical molecules created by your brain and can be found at the cellular level throughout your body. Emotions from the past are stored in the body not just the brain.
Many of these emotions have been with you since early childhood. Once these emotions become attached to your cells they tend to increase causing even more stress. If you felt unloved as a child, you will be on the look out for situations where you feel unloved as an adult.
Since this is all happening at an unconscious level, you may not be aware that any of your painful emotions are from the past. You only know that you feel bad.
How emotional stress causes illness
According to Karol Truman, who wrote Feelings Buried Alive Never Die… (2001), “DISEASE in any form is the natural consequence of unresolved negative feelings that have seemingly been forgotten, ignored, or buried.” She goes on to say, “symptoms of an illness may be removed, but to achieve a complete resolution of that illness an “inner” healing and changing of belief systems must take place before dis-ease is eradicated.”
When the receptor sites on your cells are full of stressful emotions, your cells are in a constant state of stress. If you are holding on to a lot of fear, you cells are in a constant state of fear.
Stressful emotions prevent your immune system from working at its optimal level.
Positive emotions, such as gratitude and appreciation, can enhance your immune system. You may have heard that consciously choosing these emotions can improve your life and that is true. But if you have a large backlog of painful emotions, no matter how much gratitude you feel, you cannot overcome a painful past. Eventually the toxic emotions overwhelm your system and the result is disease.
According to Karol Truman, “Everything we are today is the sum total of all of the feelings we have had up to that moment.”
What can you do?
One of the most direct and efficient ways to decrease the emotional stress level in your body is to release the past. The poetry of emotion process can help.
(Image: Kelly Long @ Flickr)
