Emotions and Your Health

EMOTIONS AND YOUR HEALTH

When most people want to get healthier they usually either start to exercise or change their eating habits. Unfortunately, most do not realize the significant effect that the nervous system and the emotions, present and past, have on their health.

Ask yourself a simple question: How do you know when you're healthy? If you are like 95% of the people I've asked, your answer will focus on how you feel. The fact of the matter is that most serious disease processes develop for many years before you have a pain or other symptom that you can feel. We've all heard of someone who was "fit as can be" and soon after dropped dead of a heart attack.

So, what is health? According to Webster's, health is "A condition of wholeness in which all of the organs of the body function 100% all of the time." Feeling good is fine but is not a good criteria as to whether you are healthy or not. Depok Chopra, M.D. states that "Health is our natural state and all disease results from the disruption of the flow of intelligence." This same belief has been the foundation of chiropractic philosophy for the past 100 years.

Interferences to this flow can be classified in three catagories: Structural as in trauma, spinal misalignments, postural imbalance, etc.; Biochemical as in nutrition, chemical toxicities, air and water polution, etc.; and the Emotional, Mental, Spiritual effects. Most people focus our their energy in the structural and biochemical realms when trying to get healthy being unaware of the significant importance of the nonphysical systems, particularly the emotions.

Recent advances by researchers such as Candace Pert, Ph. D., Dept. of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown Univ. Medical Ctr., are showing that emotions aren't just psychological feelings existing in our heads. They are physiologically based, as circulating neuropeptide molecules that carry the information of emotions from centers in the brain and spinal cord linking all tissues, organs, and systems. They allow all the systems to talk to each other forming a bodymind link and are now seen to have no less validity than physical substances.

Most of the emotions we experience are processed and do not cause any problems. Ones that occur at times of charged events or during times of decreased resistence, can become "locked" in the body as what we call Neuroemotional Complexes (NEC). These can then remain over the years to restimulte reoccurring patterns of behavior negatively effecting physiological processes and, therefore, your ability to maintain a healthy state. According to Dan Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence, "When some feature of an event seems similar to an emotionally charged memory from the past, the emotional mind responds by triggering the feelings that went with the emotional event. The emotional mind reacts to the present as though it were in the past." Therefore, some emotionally related responses are outdated due to the dynamics of change over time. We are now not the same person we were then and the body's ability to maintain healthy balance is effected.

Effects of reoccurring emotional patterns on immune system functions, which control bacteria, viruses, and cancer, can have a significant influence on the body's ability to maintain health. Other examples of studies show how anger effects the heart and cardiac function, anxiety and fear effect immune response and cardiac function and depression worsens medical conditions and decreases recovery time. 

These emotional responses have an irritating effect on the organs (viscera) resulting in viscero-somatic reactions from those organs back into the spinal cord. A resultant series of nerve and structural reactions cause further tension, pressure or other stress on the nervous system interfering with it's ability to regulate body functions creating a cycle of complicating factors to your health. 

Traditional "talk-it-out" therapies primarily work through the conscious mind with it's potential for filtering and blocking of conscious access to past negative experiences. Therefore, to get to core issues may take months to years. Or, issues may be worked out on a conscious level but not unlock the emotional memory in the body leaving a substrate for reestablishing of old patterns. Fortunately, new technologies have the potential to establish the presence of these NEC's and drastically reduce the core issue assessment time to literally one session.

One of these is the Neuroemotional Technique (NET). This is a chiropractic proceedure to trace past emotional responses back through the physiology to assess spinal subluxation pattens to adjust. In addition, psychiatrists and psychotherapists are utilizing the assessment process of the proceedure to access core issues to more efficiently apply their theraputic process. NET doesn't "fix" your problem, but releases the stored memory of the emotion so that you have a clean slate from which to more effectively work on your presesnt state and create new, healthier ways of being through personal coaching or other therapy processes.

It's interesting to note, even with all the data that is coming out about the effects of emotions on health, how resistent many medical physicians are to these concepts. They still question the clinical significance of emotions on health.

Unfortunately, we are one of the few cultures that doesn't acnowledge the interrelationship of energy systems and our health. This is due to our strict adherence to the scientific model requiring quantification to be "real" and the problems with trying to quantify non-physical energy systems.

Where has our overreliance on the scientific method gotten us? Many of our health statistics rank us far below other industralized nations. Medicine is now classified as the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. The Journal of the American Medical Assoc. states that medication reactions kill an estimated 106,000 people a year and hospitalize an additional two million. That's equal to one jumbo jet liner crash in which everyone is killed every day!

Isn't it time we look beyond the classical Western medical model for answers to our deteriorating health system's problems? According to "Intuition Magazine", Candace Pert has also delved into alternative therapies and the biomedical advances that have validated practices such as chiropractic, biofeedback, and meditation. We need to come to grips with the fact that the energetic systems are as important, if not more so, than the physical. 

Self healing is a natural, innate capability that we are born with and should be viewed as the norm rather than the miraculous. The key is to realize that your body is a dynamic system of systems with a phenomenal capacity and potential for change. Your state of health is dependent on the decisions and actions you accumulate over a lifetime. It will continue to fluctuate in the future dependent on your attention to removing the interferences, whether structural, biochemical, or emotional, to it's innate healing capabilities, creating an internal environment within which, as Webster states, "...all organs function 100% all of the time."