2023-06-22 11:56:26
Being red with anger, having a heavy heart or not digesting something… These expressions illustrate how much our emotions are linked to our body. Whether they are primary (joy, anger, fear, etc.) or secondary (trust, guilt, envy, etc.), we tend to restrain them, which is not without consequences for our health. Rather than defeating them, learn to make them allies.
You read us on a deck chair, toes fanned out. You feel relaxed. Then you think regarding what awaits you at the start of the school year: this authoritarian boss, this big file… And an unpleasant feeling twists your stomach. Then, seeing this couple pass by with their infant, a pleasant sensation comes to replace the first. Such is the power of emotions, those fleeting affective reactions that arise in response to a triggering event.
Impalpable emotions with palpable effects
Did you know that emotional stability is the trait most strongly associated with people’s satisfaction with their life, their social relations and their career? Or that negative emotions might promote the onset of neurodegenerative diseases and dementia1 ? This inner flow has strong repercussions on our health, and among the 10 to 20% of us who repress our emotions the most, various problems are bound to arise (see box below).
If this link between emotions and health is not easy to establish, many of us feel its power. This is evidenced by the success for thirty years of the book Tell me where you hurt, I will tell you why (ed. Albin Michel), by Michel Odoul, for whom ” body cries ” are ” soul messages “.
For Jean-Louis Pedinielli, specialist in psychosomatics [l’ensemble des effets de l’esprit sur le corps humain, NDLR]” emotional conflicts underlie all medical and psychiatric disorders “, and to take them into account in the context of health is to avoid a fragmented vision of the human being, a paradigm often criticized in medicine.
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“I understand what you feel”: validating the emotions of others to better help them
Alexithymia: When the inability to understand our emotions affects our health
Environ 10 to 20% of the population have significant difficulty identifying their emotions, find the words to describe them and distinguish the bodily sensations they cause. Those are the alexithymiques. Developing a tendency to avoidance, alexithymics have difficulty expressing themselves and lack empathy. Depression, anorexia, psychological disorders going as far as schizophrenia, psychosomatic pain… According to specialists, this inability to make connections between emotions and the ideas, thoughts and fantasies that accompany them has significant physical and psychological consequences on health. .
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Being insulted causes virulent and measurable emotional disturbances
Our emotions under the microscope
As early as 1872, Charles Darwin had already understood the impact of emotions on the body, a phenomenon which he described as “biology of emotions “Today, the empirical knowledge of many therapists, such as Michel Odoul, receives a new light from science.
In recent decades, we have even witnessed the creation of dedicated laboratories studying the impact of emotions on the body, such as the Psychobiology of Emotions Unit at the François-Rabelais University in Tours or the Cognition and Emotion Laboratory at the University of Ottawa, Canada .
Antidepressants, “anti emotions”?
Up to 60% of patients taking a very common type of antidepressant (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) feel emotionally blunt ». Scientists have found that it is most likely related to the fact that these drugs affect brain processes related to the reward circuitry. Somehow they “ take away some of the emotional pain but also some of the pleasure »…
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Sleeping pills, antidepressants, anxiolytics, tranquilizers… is your psychotropic medication ineffective or dangerous?
The six primary emotions
In most vertebrates, there are six so-called “primary” emotions:
- joy
- the surprise
- the fear
- anger
- disgust
- sadness
Identifying them makes it possible to defuse certain vicious circles of bodily and then emotional reactions (read “Put words on our ills”).
To know : From the age of 6 months, a baby recognizes and manifests these emotions. At 2 years old he can express certain basic emotions (pleasant/unpleasant), from 6 years old he can verbalize more complex emotions such as disgust or surprise.
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Diaphragm and emotions… and vice versa (II)
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Childhood emotional wounds affect adult mortality
Bibliographic references 
1 – « The Link Between Personality, Global, and Domain-Specific Satisfaction Across the Adult Lifespan », Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyAmerican Psychological association, 2023.
“Identify the 6 fundamental emotions”,The Leader Manager’s Mega Toolboxéd. Dunod, 2019.
« Exposure to negative socio-emotional events induces sustained alteration of resting-state brain networks in older adults »,Nature AgingJanuary 12, 2023.
Psychosomatics and alexithymia, ed. Phew, 1992.
“Cognition and Emotion Laboratory Publications”, Faculty of Ottawa.
“The development of primary emotions during childhood”, A. Palama, A. Theurel, E. Gentaz, SMAS Laboratory, FPSE, University of Geneva,Medicine & childhoodSeptember 2017.
“Alexithymia: between emotional deficit and adaptive process”, Céline Jouanne, inPsychotropics2006.
Under no circumstances is the information and advice offered on the Alternative Santé site likely to replace a consultation or a diagnosis formulated by a doctor or a health professional, who are the only ones able to adequately assess your state of health.
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