Does Your Heart Sense Your Emotions?

The research is coming out that it does ... it almost seems like one of those things where money is being spent to research something we intuitively know. That's why in every culture and every language, we say things like this:

1. She broke my heart.
2. He's going to give me a heart attack.
3. You've touched my heart.
4. My heart goes out to you.
5. I'm waiting for my heart to heal.
6. He tore out my heart, threw it on the ground and stomped on it.
7. She made my heart skip a beat.
8. He's closed his heart.

We know the vulnerability of men and heart attacks. Go over the above list, which I tried to make uni-sex, and think of whom you have heard say these things. How often have you heard a woman say, "He's going to give me a heart attack." Men might say it's because behaves a certain way, but an EQ specialist would look at the EQ skills of someone who makes such a statement.

We also know people who literally died of loneliness or a broken heart. Someone whose heart was broken by circumstances or another person who became bitter and ill-health followed, sometimes preceded by a stage of addiction to alcohol or drugs. A parent who's child died and they got cancer within a year. The Holmes and Rahe scale predicts "major illness" after the stressors add up to a certain mathematical figure.

All these are references to emotions. We know that emotions effect us physiologically. There's a good bit of medical research on anger and health, particularly regarding men and heart attacks. There are also books like "The Pleasure Prescription", by Paul Pearsall, who's got a Ph.D. in psychoneuroimmunology. We know that emotions effect the health globally, because they effect the immune system.

For more interesting reading about this connection, see my website.

For instance, another interesting body-connection is the "gut" and the vagus nerve. This is why when we take a mood regulator or anti-depressant there are side effects like diarrhea or constipation. This is why we "get a knot in our stomach," or say "He turns my stomach" or "I could tell he was lying in my gut," and "that was a gut-wrenching experience." (There's a connection here with intuition and "gut feeling.") In addition, we get diarrhea before a big tennis match or public presentation, or become constipated when we are furious, bitter, of "shut down" and why diseases like ulcerative colitis and Chrohn's disease have a psychological factor in them.

There's a classic called "Anger Kills" which explores some of these connections more fully. Duke University Medical School (where Williams, the author, works) has done a lot of studies on heart attack patients, and now put them in support groups to learn about their emotions and management. They tell them when they feel an anger trigger - we learn about these and other things in the EQ Alive! Program - to ask themselves "Is it worth having a heart attack over?" Good question, yes?

We are able to manage anger better though, than grief, sorrow and disappoinemtn. There are lots of Anger Management courses. It's relatively easy to teach - and to learn, if the person has enough motivation, which many do, when it's court-ordered. I would like to see court-ordered Emotional Intelligence courses and am working on that.

One of the most important connections is what stress (rough emotions) do to our immune system. You probably know someone who suffered a tragedy (or several small adverse events), who then got cancer, or pneumonia, or had a heart attack and/or suffered an episode of major depression or other mental illness. Our immune system is out first line of defense against bacteria (which can be treated with antibiotics), and -- importantly -- our ONLY defense against viruses, for which there is no treatment. We either fight them off on our own, or we don't.

The more you learn about emotional intelligence, the more aware you are, and the more able to manage around emotions.

It should be noted that (see the Holmes and Rahe stress scale) moving out of the modulated state is stressful -- moving out either way - extremes are stressful. This is why people die when they receive news they've won the lottery OR that their spouse has died. There was an interesting article released not long ago in a medical journal about people who showed up in the ER with no heart disease who were having heart attack like symptoms following a very bad or very good event (for one woman it was a surprise party). Doctors have given it a name, and are beginning to deal with it. (Email me for the white paper if you'd like to learn more.)

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