Nervous System Foundations 08 How Emotions Affect The Body

So,

How do our negative emotions affect us physically?

I say negative emotions in quotation marks because it is my belief that no emotion is better or worse than any other emotion.

All emotions are valid and every single emotion has a purpose and that purpose is generally communication.

Fear typically triggers the knowing that we are not necessarily safe or secure.

Anger,

For example,

Might mean that we need to change a behavior or change something in a relationship and so every single emotion as we go through them has different purposes and the purposes for me might be different than you.

But ultimately nothing is a negative emotion because it has a purpose and that purpose again,

Like I said,

Is communication.

And at the end of the day,

When we talk about emotional regulation,

It's not about trying to control what we feel or change what we feel.

It's about learning to respond to what we feel and learning to actually address what we're feeling and being in communication with these feelings and these emotions.

It is important to understand that some emotions actually do feel worse than others in the body and for that reason,

We still use the word negative because sometimes they can have negative health outcomes.

If we're stuck in these cycles of emotional loops that are in these more negative states and they can actually have negative health consequences if they fester for too long.

So the big thing that we want to address is that it's important to be in communication with these emotions and to learn from them and adapt from them and to not bottle them up or stifle them or to bypass them.

And there is a slight difference between bottling them up or bypassing them and I want to address that.

So bottling up an emotion is letting it fester inside of us without actually addressing it or communicating what we're feeling,

Expressing what we're feeling.

It means it kind of just lives beneath the surface and bubbles and festers and snowballs until maybe we have a complete big inappropriate outburst or something at some point.

Bypassing,

Or you may have heard the word spiritual bypassing,

Is when we just pretend everything is totally fine and totally ignore what we're feeling.

So just looking at the bright side or good vibes only,

These things are actually really harmful because it completely invalidates what we're feeling and if we pretend everything is totally fine and we're in this peace and love and rainbows state,

We're not actually addressing what's happening and these emotions can still affect us negatively because they're still in there and not addressing them and pretending they're not there can be extremely harmful.

We never want to bypass emotions.

We want to listen to them and be in communication with them and then have tools to work through them.

Working with a practitioner who's well-versed in all this is really,

Really important,

Especially someone who is trauma-informed if trauma is there.

So what does it mean?

When we are stuck in a negative thought loop or a negative emotional pattern and we're not able to break it,

They can then set off a sympathetic reaction in the autonomic nervous system which can shift our body into a fight,

Flight,

Or even freeze mode.

What this means is when we're in a sympathetic state,

Our body has shifted into a state where it is much more concerned with survival in the short term because if we have an immediate threat that we need to deal with,

We're not concerned with thriving in the long term.

We're concerned with neutralizing this threat.

So if we're in a perpetual state of a specific emotional loop and that threat's not going anywhere,

Then we're going to get stuck in this sympathetic or freeze mode.

Then what happens is we need to do something about that threat in order for our body to shift back into long-term survival and even thriving.

So when we're stuck in sympathetic,

Then what happens is all of our resources are going towards systems that are going to help us neutralize this threat,

So whether that's fighting or running or even beyond that,

Freezing and just playing dead for survival.

When that happens,

Our cardiovascular system increases in activation.

So our blood pressure goes up,

Our heart rate goes up,

Breathing goes up.

We're stressing that cardiovascular system.

We also see our immune system get less attention.

Our digestive tract gets less blood flow.

Our reproductive function goes down.

As a result,

As those systems have begun to shift,

This can really stress the body.

Something else that happens when we're in sympathetic is our muscle tension increases and our sensitivity to pain actually increases.

So as we're stuck in these feedback loops,

We're stuck in a more autonomic sympathetic state.

We're more prone to pain and muscle tension and high blood pressure and decreased digestion.

We're going to have issues in the gut,

Low libido,

And our immune function might go down.

Long term,

You can see how these can be really serious on the body and they can really affect our health.

Ultimately,

They create what we would call nervous system dysregulation.

Tons and tons of taxing on the body's systems.

Ultimately,

Many of the illnesses and chronic diseases that we're seeing now are diseases of stress and of dysregulation.

So if we zoom back out,

It's really,

Really important to address these negative emotional experiences that we're having.

Like we said,

There's lots and lots of ways to address these emotional loops.

Working with a therapist,

Good stress management,

Getting good sleep and rest,

And all these things that are really,

Really important for stress management.

But yeah,

Getting help where appropriate.

So with all that,

I hope that this has been helpful for you to understand how our more negative emotions can affect us physically.

Thanks a lot for listening.