We know emotions have an impact on our body. Just ask a search engine – ‘How do emotions influence our body?” and thousands of results pop up. They’ll tell us emotions like anger and anxiety influence our body in bad ways whilst ‘good’ emotions – happiness and satisfaction – have a good influence.
Influence though is a word with many meanings – power, manipulate, effect, affect… So what exactly does ‘influence our body’ mean? Come to that, do emotions influence our body or does our body influence our emotions? Or could it be a bit of both?
On that thought, let’s take a deeper look at our emotions – how they’re triggered, why they’re triggered, and how they ‘power, manipulate, effect, or affect’ our body. And how they might do this…
Wikipedia tell us emotions are “physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion]
If ‘neurophysiological changes’ bring on emotions, how do they do it? How are emotions triggered?
Emotions are ‘produced’ by a section of our brain called the amygdala. It’s part of our fight or flight (stress response) system, although it plays a role in many other emotional responses as well.
Primarily though it’s activated by sensory signals that are interpreted as dangerous or threatening, like a car suddenly cutting in front of us in traffic.
The amygdala also stores emotional memories. When it receives sensory signals, it quickly assesses what they mean based on previous similar experiences. Sometimes it draws on emotional memories and experiences stored in other parts of your brain to help with this process.
It then uses all this information to figure out an emotional response to the situation at hand. Cue a surge of anger at the offending driver of the other car.
Playing into the mix are cortisol and adrenaline, both of which can heighten their response (a primitive survival mechanism – getting angry adds more ‘oomph’ to our reaction).
This response is important for reacting quickly to potential threats. However, unchecked, the amygdala can also cause emotional overreaction, which is why we probably got angrier than the car situation strictly warranted…
So, most emotional journeys usually start like this – with a stimulus. Something we see, hear, touch, feel, and think about ends up making us angry…sad…happy. Sounds simple in theory, doesn’t it?
The reality though is that the journey to feeling an emotion is a complex mix of sensory signals, memories, experiences, and chemical reactions. The culmination of this process is our emotional response – anger, anxiety, joy, pleasure…
For example, a surge of anger and frustration because someone has cut us off in traffic, a feeling of calm when listening to soothing music, or anxiousness when confronted with a stressful situation.
Now we might think we got angry because the other driver cut us off, but that’s not the whole truth. We actually got angry because our brain interpreted the event as threatening, and invoked our sympathetic, or fight and flight, response.
This set off a cascade of physical responses designed to deal with the ‘threat’, and put us into a sympathetic state.
When that car cut us off, our eyes saw it do this, and sent the information to our brain, which interpreted the event as a threat and triggered our fight or flight response.
Our hypothalamus swung into action. It instructed our pituitary gland to release chemicals that triggered the release of other chemicals, including the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol.
These 2 hormones, along with various other stress response hormones, then trigger a series of physical responses in our body.
As part of this overall response, our amygdala, spurred on by the release of adrenaline and cortisol, generated a feeling of anger. Overreaction? Perhaps. But ultimately, the anger was designed to hype up our defensive reaction.
The problem is that the dangers we face today are quite different to the ones our ancestors faced. They may have needed anger to deal with looming predators. Looming deadlines, and rude drivers, require a different approach.
And therein lies the problem with emotions like anger and anxiety, and why they can affect our physical health so much.
We’re stuck in traffic so we can’t let our anger play out as nature intended – as motivation to fight off a looming predator or run for the hills. Instead, we let it stew away inside us. The longer it bubbles away, the more it fuels an interactive loop within our sympathetic nervous system, and our stress hormones.
As a result, by the time we reach our destination, we are super angry with the other driver, full of stress hormones, and high on anxiety! Pumped and primed, and ready to take survival action!
Because here’s what our sympathetic nervous system and our stress hormones did…
Adrenaline prepped our body for immediate action – it increased our heart rate and breathing for an instant response. That helped us quickly take our foot off the accelerator, hit the brakes, or swing the steering wheel.
Long-term stress hormones like adrenaline keep our heart pumping blood at ‘flight or fight’ levels, and our blood vessels are constantly receptive to the (damaging) actions of other stress hormones. This is a recipe for high blood pressure.
Cortisol (primary stress hormone) took a more prolonged approach.
Again, if this is an ongoing situation, we can wind up with:
3. It contributed to the production of emotions (anger and frustration) to help fuel our defensive response. These can make us feel anxious (a response to stress), which again is not a healthy state to be in for very long.
4. Finally, cortisol can increase inflammation and oxidative stress in our cardiovascular system, which again predisposes us to problems like atherosclerosis (hardening and narrowing of the arteries) and plaque build-up which increases our risk of heart disease.
On the other hand…
Maybe we were listening to soothing music and practising our awareness of breathing when the car cut in front of us. We calmly took our foot off the accelerator to let them in, chalked up the experience to just another day in M25 peak hour traffic, and deliberately let it go. We even smiled at the other driver!
We arrive at our destination cool, calm and collected. Even though we had almost been running off the road less than half an hour before…
That’s the power of awareness of self and our breathing, choosing to react or not. Instead of getting angry, we decided we were not going to let it worry us. Noticing our reaction and choosing to activate a parasympathetic state of being instead.
Emotions are more than just feelings. They are part of complex neurophysiological changes activated by our sympathetic and parasympathetic systems i.e. fight-or-flight, and rest and digest, responses. These changes lead to a cascade of physical effects that affect our bodies in various ways.
However, understanding the connection between these changes and emotions can provide us with ways to manage them better, and ensure we spend more time in a parasympathetic or relaxed state of being.
Ewell Chiropractic
9A Cheam Road, Ewell, Epsom KT17 1SP
Our practice is next to the central car park in the Ewell village if you travel by car. And just a 10-minute wander from both train stations in Ewell.
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