EMOTIONS IN MIND

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert

Our health is not merely about having a physical life free from disease, it is also about our emotions and our interactions with the world around us. Prolonged emotional stress is being considered a key risk factor to many chronic conditions and psychosomatic problems. For this reason, our emotional life and well-being is recognised as one of the more important states for good health.

In and of themselves emotions are important and can be healthy states. This statement might sound obvious for positive emotions but some find difficulty considering negative emotions as being useful for our health. Emotions are important messengers to give personal meaning to our experiences.

For example, if you discover that a friend has not said the truth to you it is understandable that you feel disappointed and somewhat angry. It is what you decide to do with the disappointment and anger that becomes important. Suppressing it and let it build up inside to the point that it is expressed much later with the same person in an exaggerated manner as a reaction to something trivial is not very adaptive.  Even worse, it sometimes gets directed to others.  Both these expressions to anger would certainly be negative and unhealthy.

Expressing your disappointment directly with your friend and letting that friend know how you feel is a healthy first step of acknowledging your disappointment and anger. The second step is to ask why your friend behaved in that way and to then consider a resolution. This might help the relationship go further or it might be the start of a new awareness about your friendship. This is considered healthy management of emotional stress in our life, particularly in personal relationships which are so important for our health.

Through CBT and yoga (particularly relaxation and breathing techniques) an individual learns to modify the emotional reaction to make it more realistic to a situation and to direct the emotional energy to a more solution-focused state which promotes emotional wellbeing. The goal is to achieve balance between being too reactive or too suppressive. Emotional wellness is increasingly becoming an adjunct to medical care and is being provided in various well-established hospitals.