The Role of Emotions in Health: Part 2

Iva Lloyd, ND, RPP

When it comes to health, emotions play a significant role. And how they are expressed in the physical body follows certain rules. Last month, in Part 1 of this article, I discussed the “logic” of emotions and how different systems of medicine look at them. Understanding emotions from an energetic perspective provides a road map for somatic metaphors and explains how emotions are expressed or experienced in the body. I also reviewed how to strengthen your psychological resiliency. So, what do we do with all that?

Handling of Emotions

Stuff happens. Life is filled with traumas and wonderful experiences. There is no stopping the bombardment of experiences that life has to offer. The question is whether and how you move through your life, or whether you get stuck in it. The handling of emotions can also be looked at based on the 5 Element theory (Table 1, online).¹

Emotions themselves are neither healthy nor unhealthy. It is when the processing of emotions is incomplete that we run into trouble. If you think about it, it is no different than any other aspect of the body. What determines digestive health, for example, is not so much about the food, but more about what your body can digest and its ability to absorb the nutrients that are available, and to get rid of what is unhealthy or unnecessary. The same holds true for any other system that is responsible for processing what we ingest or take in.

The handling of emotions starts with an event – something happens, or something that we anticipated happening doesn’t happen. How we process this occurrence determines the impact of the event. There are as many ways to interpret an event as there are people, each one unique, and each one being triggered slightly differently. People can get stuck in one part of the process because of their belief system, their unique constitution, their psychological resiliency, or their unwillingness or inability to complete the process.

Although there are different terms and models that are used to explore the handling of emotions, all models recognize that emotions have a physiological, cognitive, subjective, and behavioral component, and that humans have the ability to think about their emotions, regulate their response, and to adapt to social norms.²

Steps in the Emotional Process

1. Awareness

The first step in understanding the emotional process is to be aware of your life and what happens. It is about being able to recognize that you are emotionally triggered by something that did or didn’t happen. It relates to a person’s overall sense of freedom to both feel and be aware of emotions. Simply taking the time to be aware can cause emotions to shift, and starts the processing of the emotion. Awareness of being emotionally triggered often occurs because of the onset of a physical symptom – all of a sudden we get a tightness in our abdomen, our breathing changes, or there is a change in energy. Table 2 (online), also listed in Part 1, serves as a guide as to where particular emotions may be held and how they might be expressed. Being aware of the link between physical symptoms and the events that happen in our life is an important aspect of emotional awareness.

2. Reaction

Reaction is the actual way we express our emotions. It is important to truly feel your emotions and to know how to express them. This is not about getting stuck on a feeling, but to feel your emotions in a way that is healthy and productive.

How we react to emotions depends on our expectations, our anticipation (or not) of the 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 not? Is fear to be dealt with or avoided? Is the ultimate goal love and understanding?

It is important to recognize the difference between the necessity to feel your emotions and how that is done. Not all emotions need to be expressed at the moment that they arise. Part of psychological resiliency is about determining the most appropriate place and time and way to express how we feel. Just as there is etiquette for eliminating the toxins associated with digestion or urination, there is emotional etiquette.

People have a tendency toward certain emotions. Some people are naturally angry, irritable, anxious, and pessimistic, or happy and positive. The more you understand your natural tendencies, what triggers you, and whether your reaction to emotions is healthy or unhealthy, the better you can control your life (vs your emotions controlling you).

3. Understanding

Understanding why things happened or didn’t happen is not about fault or blame, but about recognizing that there is a link between your physical and emotional health and your life. Many people spend an exorbitant amount of time and money looking for ways to address their physical symptoms without ever linking them to what has happened in their lives and how they feel about that. Other people intellectualize their emotions to such a degree that they never move to the next step in the process. It is helpful to understand why things happen and how they are mirrored in the body; however, understanding is a part of the process, not the end-goal.

Our understanding 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 to base their reactions on their interpretation of their emotions. They tell themselves a story often to justify how they feel. Many people become attached to their emotions, and these emotions start influencing how they interact with their lives.

It is important to know the difference between how you feel and who you are. A parent, teacher, boss, spouse, sibling, or even a friend can often influence how you feel about yourself. Not everybody knows how to filter what they hear or see. We fill in the blanks when we are hurt or triggered. Every person has certain triggers, emotions that they have a tendency to feel, or situations that can easily trigger them. Understanding emotions starts with understanding yourself. It is about recognizing your resiliency, your ability to filter, and your triggers and susceptibilities. It involves becoming aware of how you feed your emotions and the degree to which you downplay stressful events or you take a small situation and blow it out of proportion to the event.

4. Processing

The actual processing of emotions is about moving through the emotions and releasing what is not needed 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 associated with cancer,³ how a person perceives pain directly influences the amount of pain they feel,⁴ and anger and how a person expresses it impacts cardiovascular risk factors and GI symptoms.⁵

My experience suggests there are 5 ways of processing emotions: distraction, dissipating, decision-making, suppression, and reflection.

Distraction involves diverting your attention to something else, often something that is more pleasant. Many people view distraction as a positive response to an emotional situation, and it can be when used appropriately. Yet, it is important to recognize that when distraction serves to delay the processing of emotions, it is not, in and of itself, a way of processing. Common forms of distraction involve watching television, surfing the web, exercising, reading a book, listening to music, or focusing on work or another task.

Distraction can be helpful when it is not appropriate to express openly when something happens. If you know that you are tired, overwhelmed, that your psychological resiliency is currently weakened, or you tend to overreact to emotional triggers, distraction can provide a time-out, giving you time and space to let the impact of the event lessen in intensity and to understand what happened and why.

Dissipating emotions is the one aspect of the process that I often find is missing. It relates to a person knowing how to release the intensity of an emotion. Emotions can be released using the mind or the body. Some forms of counseling and simply talking to the person involved, or a friend or family member, can assist in dissipating emotions. Other ways of dissipating emotions include:

Short bursts of activity. In order for exercise to help dissipate emotions, versus simply being a distraction, it needs to be a short 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 using exercise as a way of dissipating emotions, it is important to link the activity to the situation or emotion that you are releasing.

Breathing. Slowing down your breathing can effectively dissipate the intensity of an emotion such as anger, anxiety, panic, and fear. Learning to connect with your breath helps you to manage emotions more effectively.

Yell at someone/something without them knowing. You don’t always need to deal directly with the person you are upset with, or have a situation resolved, in order to process an emotion and release the intensity or hold that it has on you. Dissipating emotions is not dependent on another person listening or hearing what you have to say. It is dependent on you being able to express how you feel without worrying about how you say something and what someone else thinks. Therefore, when you are upset or triggered, it is helpful to have an honest conversation with that person without them being present. This is a great thing to do in the car, when home alone, or when out for a walk alone in nature.

Free-form writing. Some people like to verbalize how they feel; others prefer to 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 a few seconds or minutes, or it can involve writing for a couple of hours without stopping, as a form of dumping years of pent-up emotions onto the paper. Both are effective. The important thing is to write and shred. It is not about writing someone a letter. It is a dump of emotions. It is a way of getting rid of the outer layer of whatever you are feeling so that you can work more effectively with the underlying concern or situation.

Allow for time and perspective. Some emotions dissipate on their own. Any of us can overreact to a situation when we are over-tired, stressed, unwell, or simply distracted by another life event. Some people know that they are being overly sensitive and easily triggered. Allowing some time to pass is sometimes all that is needed for an emotion to dissipate. If the emotion is still with you in a couple of days, then you probably need to look at it more closely and decide what other actions should be taken. Do you need to more actively dissipate the emotions, or do you need to make a decision that you don’t want to make?

Decision-making: First you become aware of an emotion as you feel it; then you react to it, you understand why it happened, you decrease the intensity of it, and then you have to deal with it. Processing emotions involve determining what needs to change. It is about making a decision about the event and your reaction to it. Do you feel that you over-reacted to a normal life event? Is there someone in your life that brings out the worst in you? Do you need to reconsider whether your job is right for you? Do you need to stand up for yourself differently? Is your reaction normal based on the situation, and you just need to ride it out?

Think of your emotional response like your reaction to food: If you eat something that causes symptoms, you have to decide whether it is a 1-time occurrence that will resolve on its own, whether you need to strengthen your digestive tract, avoid the food, take a supplement to help you digest more effectively, or whether there is a deeper, underlying problem. Emotions are the same. They are not necessarily good or bad; they are a message. Your job is to interpret the message and make a decision about what, if anything, needs to change so that you have more of the emotions you want and less of those that you don’t.

Keep in mind, emotional health is when the subconscious equals the conscious, which equals the spoken and which equals action. Many people only want to change 1 part of the equation. That doesn’t work. For example, you can’t decide that you want to let go of the anger you feel toward a spouse for something that happened, but not let go of the situation. I call it the icing-on-the-cake phenomenon. A lot of people and books promote being positive, happy, and loving. That’s good advice, as long as there aren’t a lot of suppressed emotions and negative feelings underneath that you have not released.

There is a difference between choosing to be healthy and choosing to be happy. If you have a life that you don’t like, projecting happiness is unhealthy. Emotional health is about honesty. If you are happy, great. If you are unhappy, it is important to figure out first what needs to change, not how to feel different in the same life. Emotions generally follow and mirror your life; they don’t lead.

“Fake it till you make it” may be good advice. But, you need to know the difference between faking it and suppressing your emotions. On the surface they can look the same, but their impact on health is very different.

Suppression: Naturopathic medicine focuses a lot on the negative impact of suppressing emotions, urges, toxins, etc. Suppressing emotions is about avoidance, denial, and getting stuck in the process of distraction or intellectualizing your emotions, versus actually working through an emotional situation and processing the impact of emotions on your health.

Research is starting to recognize the impact of suppression on health. For example, suppression of anger is associated with increasing the sensation, perception, and intensity of pain.^6,7

Many naturopathic and energetic practitioners believe that suppressed emotions provide the seed for disease.

Reflection: The last step of the emotional process is about reflection and letting go of expectations, of irrational or unworkable beliefs, and the degree to which emotions drive your life. It is about resolving old conflicts and recognizing your own patterns and triggers. It is about choosing new patterns and a way of living your life. It is not about convincing yourself that your life is great or that everything is and was okay. It is about choosing to truly let go of what you cannot change, changing what you can, and learning from your experiences.

Closing Comments

Emotions allow us the opportunity to experience the ups and downs of life. It is emotions that give life color – that allow us to feel love and gratitude, and to contrast that with anger and fear. Emotions are a tremendous tool. I encourage you to embrace your emotions and learn to work with them as a personal guide that can assist you in living a fuller life.

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Iva Lloyd, ND, RPP, is a naturopathic doctor, registered polarity practitioner, and educator and Reiki master. In 2002 she founded Naturopathic Foundations, a clinic with 5 naturopathic doctors. In 2011 she established www.ndhealthfacts.org – a website that focuses on identifying the causes of diseases and natural treatment options. Dr Lloyd is the author of 4 books. She also teaches part-time at CCNM, writes for various journals and magazines, and gives seminars on naturopathic assessment, the psychological aspects of health and disease, and the energetics of health. She is editor of the Vital Link – the journal for the CAND – and sits on the editorial boards for the Natural Medicine Journal and the International Journal of Naturopathic Medicine. She is Past-Chair of CAND and current Interim President of the World Naturopathic Federation.

References

1. Lloyd I. Energetics of Health: A Naturopathic Assessment. London, England: Churchill Livingstone; 2009.
2. Gilam G, Hendler T. Deconstructing Anger in the Human Brain. Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2015 Dec 23. [Epub ahead of print]
3. Rosenfeld B, Pessin H, Lewis C, et al. Assessing hopelessness in terminally ill cancer patients: development of the Hopelessness Assessment in Illness Questionnaire. Psychol Assess. 2011;23(2):325-336.
4. Egloff N, Cámara RJ, von Känel R, et al. Hypersensitivity and hyperalgesia in somatoform pain disorders. Gen Hosp Psychiatry. 2014;36(3):284-290.
5. Fava GA, Fabbri S, Sirri L, Wise TN. Psychological factors affecting medical conditions: a new proposal fro DSM-V. Psychosomatics. 2007;48(2):103-111.
6. Quartana PJ, Burns JW. Painful consequences of anger suppression. Emotion. 2007;7(2):400-414.
7. Burns JW, Quartana PJ, Bruehl S. Anger inhibition and pain: conceptualizations, evidence and new directions. J Behav Med. 2008;31(3):259