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This dual-research summary suggests
that intense anger or depression can damage your heart and your health.
Chronic and/or intense emotions like these may be caused by psychological wounds
from childhood neglect.
Lesson 1
in this nonprofit Web site is about detecting and reducing such wounds. The
whole Web site is about preventing them.
See my comments after the
article. The links and hilights below
are mine.
We all know that emotions originate in
the brain. But we usually talk about our emotions coming from our
hearts. If someone you know doesn't give up easily, you might say, "He's
got a lot of heart." Not every culture would agree - for instance, when
Italians want to say someone has heart, they say instead, "Ha fegato":
"He has liver."
But what about bad emotions? When you feel so sad or so angry that your
heart "aches," could it actually be true? Two new studies add support to
the theory that, yes, what goes on in your mind can, literally, break
your heart. (Read "Giving the Finger: This Hurts Me More Than You.")
In the first study, just published in the Journal of the American
College of Cardiology (J.A.C.C.) a team of eight researchers looking at
more than 63,000 women who were par-ticipants in the ongoing Nurses'
Health Study, found that those
who reported basic symp-toms of depression (like feeling down and
incapable of happiness) had a
higher-than-nor-mal risk of coronary heart disease.
And
women who were clinically
depressed were more than twice as likely as other women to suffer sudden
cardiac death. None of the participants had heart problems at the
study's outset, but nearly 8% had symptoms of depression.
The researchers theorize that
depression might have some direct physiological impact on the heart -
like causing it to work harder in the face of stress. The study
also found that the more depressed women were, the more likely they were
to smoke cigarettes or have high blood pressure and diabetes - not
exactly heart-healthy conditions.
Or it may be that the anti-depressants
prescribed to treat those with mood problems were associated with heart
ailments; in the study, sudden
cardiac death was linked more strongly with antidepressant use than with
women's symptoms of depression.
The antidepressant theory is just that - a theory. It could be that the
antidepressant ta-kers in the study were simply the most depressed. But
if the theory is substantiated by further research, it would add to a
growing body of evidence suggesting that anti-depres-sants carry a high
risk (particularly for teen-agers) when weighed against the drugs' still
uncertain benefits. Scientists have already shown that antidepressants
are a bad idea for those about to undergo coronary artery bypass
surgery.
No one is sure exactly how depression hurts the heart, and one plausible
explanation is that the train runs in the opposite direction - a damaged
heart and its consequent stress on the body might activate, somehow,
genes or other physiological changes that contri-bute to depression.
But another new paper, also
published in the J.A.C.C., lends credence to the idea that it is our moods that work on our
hearts and not the other way around. In this paper, resear-chers
from University College London reviewed the findings of 39 previously
published arti-cles and found that
men who are angry and hostile
are significantly more likely to have a cardiac event than those who
aren't.
That may sound unsurprising - we all
know that anger can stress your heart. But it's im-portant to note the
difference between aggression and just being aggressive. Previous
studies (here's one) have found that so-called type A's - those who are
driven, competi-tive and obsessed with deadlines - are not more likely
to experience heart disease.
In other words, your type A co-workers
who are annoyingly ambitious and dutiful are no more likely to have a
heart attack than you are. Rather, it's the seething, angry types with
underlying hostility who are the ticking time bombs.
Anger, it turns out, is
physiologically toxic.
The authors of the second paper offer the standard theories about how an
angry emotion translates to a physical heart attack:
angry people have a harder time
sleeping; they take prescribed drugs less often; they eat worse,
exercise less, smoke more and are fatter.
These things add up: compared with the
good-humored, those who were angry and hostile - but had no signs of
heart problems at the outset - ended up with a 19% higher risk of
developing coronary heart disease, according to the University College
London paper.
The two studies reify gender stereotypes: women get their hearts broken
through sad-ness; men "break" their hearts (via heart attack) through
anger. But both studies suggest that men and women have a common
interest in understanding that some causes of car-diac disease - poor
diet or lack of exercise or bad sleep habits - may have a precipitating
cause themselves. Whether male
or female, letting yourself get overwhelmed by emotion can damage not
only your mind but also that crucial organ, the heart.
Comments
This
article is instructive for several reasons. One is the author's dubbing
emotions like anger and depression "bad." This superficial opinion blocks
readers' awareness that all
emotions are healthy pointers to
unfilled
needs.
The researchers and author also routinely use the term "depression" without
noting that the same symptoms may indicate normal or blocked grief.
The second research team and the author also fail to note the similarity
between anger and frustration. Both feel the same and may
evoke similar behavior - but they have different causes. These illustrate
popular media's promoting public
unawareness on key topics.
Note that significant anger is also a sign of normal grief. Our
pleasure-oriented society generally minimizes healthy mourning, and ignores
mourning basics. To see if this describes you, try this
quiz. Then study
Lesson 3
on behalf of any youngsters in your life
Regardless, these two studies suggest that
"significant" depression in women
and angry hostility in men can cause risk of cardiac disease and sudden
death. Like many such studies, these two apparently make no attempt
to learn thecauses of depression or angry hostility - which are the
primary problems.
My clinical experience since 1979
suggests that chronic or excessive emotions are often symp-toms of
significant childhood neglect - i.e. being raised in a
low-nurturance environment by
wounded, un-aware caregivers.
Other symptoms are "a poor diet or lack of
exercise or bad sleep habits" (self neglect).
That comes from our society's not alerting
courting couples to potentially unwise mate-commitments and unqualified
child conception. That comes from public unawareness of the lethal [wounds + unawareness)
cycle. This Web site exists to promote
awareness of the cycle and it's effects,
and motivate people like you to break the cycle!.
+ + +
Pause,
breathe, and reflect - why did you read this article? Did you get what you
needed? If not, what do you need? Who's
answering these questions - your
true Self, or
someone else?
The Web address of this article is
http://sfhelp.org/gwc/news/cardiac.htm
Comments