Is Anger Eating Your Heart Out?

You’ve heard many expression that equate your emotions with parts of your body. Recent research supports what we “knew in our hearts”:  there is a measurable effect of your emotions on your health. Emotional management therefore, is a necessity if you want to improve or maintain physical health!

What emotion is most damaging to your health? Anger, Fear, Depression, and any other negative feelings you have towards others, OR towards yourself! The fact is, it’s hard  to control your own strong emotions, but it can be learned and improved by practice. But changing someone else is next to impossible. People only change, with great difficulty, when they WANT to change.

And even with motivation, changing your re-sponses (you see the word “response” even tells you it is something you do habitually) can be a long term process. Emotions like anger and fear come from the “old” part of your brain, which existed in the time of very early humans. It takes a lot of self-mastery to control that emotion; but it CAN be done.

One of the most effective ways to calm anger is with compassion.

“Instead of putting someone in their place,put yourself in theirs”

If you’re like my Facebook readers, this quote hit home. While reading the quote, you begin with a feeling of annoyance or anger thinking about someone who “misbehaved”, treated you in a way that you didn’t appreciate, or perhaps they said something rude. But then the magic begins when you turn the tables. “Put yourself in their place”. You can feel an immediate shift to a mindset of compassion, understanding, forgiveness. Doesn’t that feel better?

How much of your life is spent judging other people’s errant behavior, and feeling that “something must be done” to stop them!  This mindset is focused on negativity, and your body will probably respond with tension, your facial expression will reflect your emotions and thoughts as well. (that’s the way you get frowning wrinkles!)

If you spend a lot of your time judging those around you, angry at the political problems, the state of the country and the world, your body will be affected. Anger, frustration, fear, worry, and negative feelings play a part in creating a stress level in your body.

If you experience these feelings on occasion for a short duration, and then you are able to let them go, that’s healthy. But if a negative mindset is the filter through which you see the world, you can expect your body to similarly experience dis-ease. Chronic negativity is a stressor that changes your body’s chemistry and results in the release of the stress hormone cortisol. All systems in your brain and body respond to stress. In the short term, this response was normal protective to enable you to fight or escape (research has finally found that women have additional excellent coping mechanisms). However, maintaining this stressful reaction then causes damage to all of the same systems.

It’s been estimated that over 90% of doctors visits are the result of stress.

The bottom line: It’s not easy to stop negative emotions and judgments; but it is NECESSARY for your health.

If you want to live a long, healthy, happy life, learning to manage your emotions must be your #1 priority. The absolute BEST way to deal with stress is to prevent it. If you are practicing stress relief, that mean’s you’re already experiencing a stressful feeling.

My programs are designed to help you develop resiliency and turn down the volume so the things that used to bother you no longer come up on your radar. You will be amazed at how much better you feel: that neck tension is so much better (people aren’t a pain the neck anymore), you sleep better at night (and feel more energy and restored in the morning); perhaps you even have less “heartburn” (from an angry heart); blood pressure lowers and puts less pressure on all of your internal organs.

Your body starts with small warnings and signals; perhaps tension, a headache, more frequent colds. But if you don’t pay attention, the signs will get worse and more persistent. Don’t wait until you’ve gotten a bad diagnosis or end up in the hospital from stress. Put yourself on your priority list, and let’s reverse that negative mindset.

You can do it! And I can help you-