Expressing your emotions effectively is very good for your health.
People who bottle up their feelings are at least a third more likely to die young than those who regularly express what they’re feeling and thinking.
The good news is that you can be proactive and not only reverse the trend but also completely rewire yourself towards affirmative behaviour and long term positive health outcomes.
When researchers looked at specific causes of death they discovered that the risks increased by 70 per cent for cancer and 47 per cent for heart disease.
This is been well known in Holistic Health circles and now a study by experts at the School of Public Health, Harvard and the University of Rochester showed the risk of premature death from all causes increases by about 35 per cent among those who fail to express how they feel.
Findings, published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, suggested that the consequences of bottling up emotions are more serious than previously thought.
Recent scientific research shows the waters of our body, which comprise 70%-90% of our cellular composition, can bottle up emotional signatures or memories, just as water stores or dilutes chemicals such as salts or sugars. This can have both a positive and negative effect, depending on our emotional intelligence.
Repeated suppression of feelings builds up and aggregates like a chemical would inside our cells which can disturb the subtle balances of our hormones and cellular functions.
London-based business psychologist Voula Grand said: “It has long been thought that cancers are partly the result of suppressed emotions. Although people learn to hide their feelings at a very early age, they can still be taught to express them later in life. It takes a lot of energy and effort but it can be done.”
However recently developed Mind Body systems like BodyTalk, EFT and Holographic Kinetics are very effective therapies in this field. Clients can often be helped to quickly realign their emotional response patterns, as they do with the other approaches we use at Global Health like bach flowers, homeopathy, motivational counselling, NLP and hypnotherapy.
Photo credit: Anthony Crider