Emotions and Our Heath
Did you know that up to 80% of illnesses and accidents can be linked to our emotions?
Do you know that more people have heart attacks on a Monday morning than on any other day in the week and that newborn babies who don’t receive any love (or in medical terms kinaesthetic tactile stimulation) will die within a few days even if they are well nourished and healthy? Deepak Chopra mentions these facts in his audio Perfect Health.
The mind/body/emotional connection within disease, in particular the role the immune system plays is recognised within many health care systems.
Psychoneuroimmunology is the medical term for this connection between the mind, the immune system and the nervous system.
In her best seller “You Can Heal Your Life” by the acclaimed therapist and author Louise Hay, Louise states that all illness is caused by an imbalance of mind, body or soul.
There is a percentage of disease caused in the body due to outside influences such as our diet, our environment we live in, chemicals we ingest in our area, food and toiletries and all these have an affect in the body. Importantly though so do our emotions. There is more and more evidence linking emotions to health. Stress being the most talked about and advertised example.
So if our emotions and emotional health is a huge contributing factor for good health. Doesn’t it make sense that we look after emotional health in order to live an all round healthy life?
My friend and mentor Paul Blackburn, who is the co founder of Beyond Success tells a story of a client of his who had terminal cancer. She came to Paul as her last hope.
During their time together Paul tried to discover the feelings around this client being overweight. She seemed reluctant to talk about it and said she’d been overweight for years, had tried everything and nothing worked. However, as being overweight is usually a sign of trying to protect ourselves, Paul felt there were probably emotions not dealt with here that were linked to the terminal illness. Eventually the client confessed she had been raped at age 13, hadn’t dealt with it and had been overweight since…
Paul guided his client through the healing process and helped her to deal with the anger and various intense emotions around this incident. Months later she was disease free, was still alive at the time of writing his book (Beyond Success) and was finally at a healthy weight. In fact she was on a new diet, she called the ‘eat whatever you like’ diet.. because she ate what she liked and still stayed slim.
The emotions were felt and faced, her disease disappeared as did her weight problems.
There are more and more cases like this being documented and its becoming undeniable that its an area we need to address in order to have both emotional and physical health.
“The immune system, like the central nervous system, has a memory and the capacity to learn. Thus, it could be said that intelligence is located in literally every cell of the body, and that the traditional separation of mind and body no longer applies.” http://www.alternativemedicine.com/A…rapyDetail.xsl.
Not convinced? Neither was I initially, however if we analyse it in the following way we can come to the same conclusion.
Person A:
Emotionally healthy, would tend to look after themselves and have a lifestyle that leaned towards good health. For example would be less likely to have any addictions or habits like smoking/drinking/over-working that would impact their health. Would be more likely to eat, exercise and sleep well.
Person B:
Emotionally unhealthy. Would tend to look after themselves less. Would be more prone to addictions, irregular sleep, unhealthy eating, little exercise. All of these factors continuously impacting the body will most likely manifest a disease.
Conclusion:
There are many things that contribute to our health; emotions being a huge factor.
Whether you believe that illnesses can manifest from the mind and our emotions or even if you don’t believe that.. its undeniable that a person in a good state of emotional health will eat better, exercise, sleep better and do the things necessary to ensure they are healthy.
The solution for us all is to look after ourselves physically as well as emotionally.
There are many things we can do to improve our emotional health- self development, coaching, meditation, exercise and yoga are a few tools that can help improve your emotional health.
What steps can you take today?
Louise Hay lists conditions and the emotions around these diseases in You Can Heal Your Life. Louise’s research states that these links are found in 80% of cases. You can find the list here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/359921/Louise-L-Hay-Heal-Your-Body
Resources:
The Psychology of Winning. Dr Dennis Waitley.
Perfect Health. Audio. Dr Deepak Chopra.
You Can Heal Your Life. Louise Hay
Beyond Success. Paul Blackburn