How emotions can damage your heart may sound simplistic compared to damage from diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity or high blood pressure. But the fact remains that emotions like bitterness and anger are bad for your heart’s health. Also, loneliness and depression affect your heart, too. Read more on how emotions can damage your heart, particularly bitterness, anger, social isolation, loneliness, and depression, along with tips to help you regulate your emotions and in turn help your heart.
4 Heart-Damaging Emotions
Studies have shown that people who feel lonely, depressed, and isolated are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely, not only of heart disease but from virtually all causes, than those who have a sense of connection, love and community.
Bitterness
Chronic bitterness and resentment can weaken your body’s ability to fight infections and illnesses. This is because the persistent release of stress hormones suppresses the immune system’s functioning
Anger
The long-term physical effects of uncontrolled anger include increased anxiety, high blood pressure and headache. Anger can be a positive and useful emotion if it’s expressed appropriately.
Social isolation and Loneliness
Both social isolation and loneliness increased the risk of hospitalization or death from heart failure by 15% to 20%. However, they also found that social isolation was only a risk factor when loneliness was absent.
Depression
If you suffer from depression, you may have uncommonly sticky platelets, the tiny cells that cause blood to clot. In patients with heart disease, this can accelerate the hardening of the arteries and increase the chance of heart attack. Some studies show that treating depression makes platelets less sticky again.
Stop Your Mind Drifting Into Depression
Tips To Help Regulate Your Emotions
You can’t control your emotions with an on/off switch. But assuming you can, you probably wouldn’t want to leave your emotions running high all the time. Also, you wouldn’t have to switch them off completely either.
Find a Healthy Balance
Realistically when you control emotions, you’re preventing yourself from experiencing and expressing feelings. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. And any can contribute to mental and physical health symptoms, including anxiety, depression, insomnia, muscle tension, pain, and stress.
Therefore, when learning to control emotions, ensure you aren’t just sweeping them under the rug. This is because healthy emotional expression is finding a balance between devastating emotions and no emotions.
Talk About Your Emotions
For the most part, according to studies, depression is a risk factor for the development of heart disease. If you already suffered a heart attack that requires surgery to unclog blocked arteries, depression is also linked to poor outcomes, such as an earlier death or subsequent heart attack. But while cardiologists know what to do about cholesterol and blood pressure, they often don’t know how to handle depression and stress, or even how to get patients to reveal how they feel.
People would rather discuss their blood sugar and cholesterol than their emotional state. People do not like being depressed but, in our society, there is a certain stigma about things like depression. And if patients are not as forthcoming about these issues, it makes it much harder for doctors to identify and treat them.
Symptoms of depression predate heart attack
For instance, in a patient who has suffered a heart attack, very often doctors discover that the symptoms of depression predate the heart attack. The depression after a heart attack is called an adjustment problem or adjustment disorder, which normally should dissipate within a matter of weeks. However, if the symptoms persist, then the depression is independent of the heart disease. These depressive emotions, if prolonged, are worth paying attention to, because of the potential effect they will have on the cardiovascular system.
Depression prevalent in women
In cases of depression, women outnumber men 2 to 1. Many women, adopting the “tend and befriend” attitude, internalise their anger and disappointment instead of expressing these emotions, and become nicer and more nurturing. You can be that quiet person who holds everything in but has increased stress reactions.
Broken heart syndrome
Researchers also found that sudden emotional stress could result in severe weakness in the heart muscle, making it seem as though the person was having a heart attack. This “broken heart syndrome,” was more common in women. Women tend to put themselves last on the list and feel no time to exercise or for themselves.
Open Up to Your Doctor
Even though doctor-patient time is often shortened, understanding patients’ fears and anxieties is still important. Sometimes, careful observation does the trick, such as noting whether anxiety is provoking patients to sit very forward in a chair, or whether they look as though they are not taking care of themselves or putting on weight.
Psychological counselling
For the very stressed, doctors may refer patients to behavioural psychologists to help alter their response to certain triggers or refer them for psychological counselling. If medications become necessary, a psychopharmacologist may be the referral. Sometimes, antidepressants are prescribed. For clinical psychologists, it’s about working with patients in a therapeutic situation to help them work through persistent reactions. It’s also about helping patients think of new ways to deal with their life situations and put them in perspective.
Bottom Line
The truth is that patients appreciate when they sense their doctor cares about them by talking about these emotional challenges. Besides, eliminating negative emotions connected with heart disease is best addressed through a true doctor-patient relationship. How emotions can damage your heart is not about your doctor providing information and expecting you to change. It’s about working at a deeper level with you. For instance, if your problem is uncontrollable anger, your doctor will advise you to manage it through regular exercise, relaxation techniques and counselling.
https://news.yale.edu/2020/08/11/stress-and-anger-may-exacerbate-heart-failure
Photo Credit: Creative Commons
