How Emotions Matter for Health
Author(s): Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.
How we handle our emotions can have consequences for our physical well-being. Over and above the disease process itself, emotions can sometimes make the difference between life and death. Consider these recent scientific findings:
* Among several hundred medical students at the University of North Carolina who were rated for hostility levels while in their early twenties, those with the greatest chronic anger were seven times more likely than their peers to be dead 25 years later.
* Of 100 patients preparing to go through bone marrow transplants at the University of Minnesota (an extremely high-risk procedure) 12 of the 13 most depressed were dead within a year. But of 87 who were not depressed, 34 were still alive at the end of the year.
The new science of psychoneuroimmunology is showing that there are biochemical connections between the brain — especially the emotional centers — and the immune system, offering a pathway for emotional states to affect health:
* In a Harvard study, 122 men who had their first heart attack were evaluated for optimism. Eight years later, of the 25 most pessimistic men, 21 had died; of the 25 most hopeful, just 6 had died.
Hostility. Depression. Pessimism.
Evidence is building that suggests such emotions can make the body more readily succumb to disease. These three studies linking emotional states and disease are supported by more than a hundred others. Howard Friedman, at the University of California, combined these studies into a meta-analysis showing that such afflictive emotions double a person’s susceptibility to disease of every kind. Friedman found that disturbing emotions, if prolonged and habitual, are as strong a medical risk factor as smoking.
Given the growing evidence for a link between emotions and health, an educational program in emotional literacy would be preventive mind-body medicine.
On the positive side, the intelligent management of difficult emotions seems to help the body fight disease. For example, D. David Spiegel stunned the medical community in 1991 when he reported that women with advanced breast cancer who went to once a week support groups in addition to their medical treatment had lived twice as long as other women with comparable cancer and medical care. No medical treatment at that point in the progression of the cancer could have helped as much.
The women in these groups learned how to better handle the flood tides of anger, sadness, fear and grief that typically overwhelm and exhaust people with such a deadly disease. One woman, for example, came in enraged, saying, “Men are bastards.” What she really meant, she came to realize in talking with her group, was that she wanted her husband to be more caring while she underwent chemotherapy. With that realization, she was able to ask for and get the care she really wanted. That is emotional intelligence in action.
The impact of emotions or health, for better and for worse, has long been discounted by physicians whose medical training, until recently, taught them that the brain and the immune system were completely separate organs. That medical canon is no longer true. The new science of psychoneuroimmunology is showing that there are biochemical connections between the brain — especially the emotional centers — and the immune system, offering a pathway for emotional states to affect health.
Nowhere is there yet an effort to inculcate in children the kinds of emotional skills that would help them manage their emotional life in a healthy way. Given the growing evidence for a link between emotions and health, an educational program in emotional literacy would be preventive mind-body medicine.
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About the Author
Daniel Goleman, Ph.D. is a psychologist and the internationally best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ (1995), Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Primal Leadership. Formerly, he served a reporter for behavioral sciences and health for the New York Times. Before joining the times in 1984, he was a senior editor at Psychology Today. He has been a member of the faculty at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. In recognition of his work as journalist, Dr. Goleman has received s Lifetime Achievement media award from the American Psychological Association, the Morse Award from the American Psychiatric Association, and has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Previous books include The Meditative Mind (Tarcher) and Vital Lies, Simple Truths (Simon and Schuster). With Paul Kaufaman he is co-author of The Creative Spirit (Dutton), and with Joel Gurin he is co-editor of Mind Body Medicine (Consumer Book Report.)
From : http://www.kidseq.com/
