In my last blog post (Why We Get Sick) I gave an analogy to illustrate how we need to identify the various things that can negatively impact our health. I broke those causes into 3 main categories – hereditary, environmental, emotional. One thing I did not talk about are ways we can uncover those underlying causes. So let me share a story with you about a recent experience and hopefully it can help us learn about emotional causes.
The short version of the story is that I had a really bad morning yesterday. By about 10:30 I found myself in a very foul mood. On this particular day I was at the office in Oneida and found out we were having internet problems. While this alone does not prevent me from doing my job it did make a few things a little harder to accomplish, such as scheduling. It was especially frustrating because I was planning on using a break in the day to catch up on some tasks, tasks which require an internet connection. Toss on top of that a couple of other minor things and voila, grumpy me.
So here I am with a challenge, an obstacle to being productive (no internet). However, because this caused a strong emotional reaction I became even less productive. Instead of finding other tasks to do (I had plenty) I was in a funk and was getting nothing done. I let my emotional state make a bad situation worse and it changed what could have been a fairly enjoyable day into a somewhat miserable one.
What does this mean to you? Well my bad day probably does not mean much to you, but I use it to illustrate how emotions can get the best of us. Above I’m just using a snap shot of one day. But for many people our emotions dictate how we operate all the time. We live in a high stress society with lots of frustration to deal with. Most of us will let one or two small problems cascade into lots of larger problems. There is also a tendency to “pass it on” – we take our stress out on other people, especially loved ones. Sometimes we take it out on complete strangers (road rage is a great example of this). Not only do we let emotions ruin our day, but it becomes toxic and can ruin the days of those around us. I have noticed particularly on gray, rainy/snowy, and/or cold days that a lot of people will be in a bad mood. A yucky day is not the end of the world, but we tend to additionally feed off the negative emotions of those around us.
Ok, emotions ruin our day, but now what? Now we have to learn to properly deal with emotions. Much easier said than done, but possible. First and foremost I want to say that the goal is not to stop emotions. Quite the contrary, emotions can be a fantastic thing, even the bad ones. They are part of what make us human. Emotions can convey lots of information, to ourselves, and to others. A good first step is to just acknowledge the bad emotions as they occur, and then use them as a learning tool. Try to figure out why you feel a certain way, determine if the emotion really matches the cause, and maybe think about how to avoid the things that cause negative emotions. This simple exercise will often be enough to break the chain reaction that emotions can cause because you interrupt the emotional part of the brain by making use of the analytical part of the brain. Also you will probably realize that a lot of times there isn’t necessarily a reasonable cause to your negative emotion. In my case, was not having the internet really a big deal? Nope – I was still able to treat my patients (I definitely don’t need internet for that) and I still had plenty of things to do to stay productive during down time. There was really no need to be bent out of shape. The other little things that also occurred that morning that contributed to my bad mood were just that – little things. On any other day I would not have thought twice about them and they wouldn’t have put me in a bad mood. Yet on this day they contributed to the snowball effect.
Another key point is about passing on the negative emotions. Some days we can’t help but be in a bad mood. We’re human, it happens. On those days it’s a good idea to put focus on how we interact with those around us. If we’re rude or mean to those around us, particularly co-workers and family, we can cause them to have a bad day. And many times they’ll toss some of that negative emotion right back at us making our day even worse. Ideally, tomorrow is a new day, but when we involve those around us we can set up a pattern that contributes to more bad days. This creates stress and tension and after a while (sometimes only a few days) this can build up and start to contribute to a variety of physical symptoms – headaches, poor sleep, upset stomach, muscle aches/pains, high blood pressure, etc.
This brings me to my major point – recovery. When life hands us bad situations we need to learn how to recover quickly. In an ideal world the process of event, emotional reaction, and recovery would only take seconds. For most of us if we can get past the issues in a few minutes or even an hour, we’re doing pretty good. As I said above, this requires us to acknowledge the emotion, identify the cause, evaluate if our reaction matches the cause, determine if it can be avoided in the future, then move on. To get this process down to an automatic response that takes just a few minutes takes a lot of practice. It also often requires us to be able to remove ourselves from the situation which is not always an option.
I think one of the best ways to learn how to manage our emotions is through meditation. Most people think of meditation as sitting cross-legged on the floor chanting “Om”. That is just one form of meditation. There are lots of different ways to meditate, both still and moving. Still forms, usually sitting, would be things like Zen meditation or even prayer (any faith). Many yoga practices incorporate both moving and still meditation. Other moving meditation includes Tai Chi and Qi gong/Chi Kung. I’ve written about both of these elsewhere on my blog and include some posts on my facebook page (just search for East Side Acupuncture on facebook and be sure to “like” it). Simply put these are practices that combine deep breathing and simple light movement (qigong can also involve sitting or standing postures) to help focus and calm the mind.
Qigong in particular is very easy to learn and can be done in a short amount of time. I try to do qigong every morning. Curiously enough on the day I mentioned above I did not do my qigong routine in the morning. There is no definitive way to know, but I suspect my emotional reactions would have been much less intense had I not skipped the exercises that morning. Keep your eye open on the website and facebook if you’d like to learn more and I intend on putting up more resources on qigong. I will also be starting a monthly newsletter soon which will hopefully have videos and/or articles on qigong so that you can learn it to. I’ll be posting a sign up form for the newsletter in the next week or so. If you find that you have strong ups and downs in your emotions, have a short temper and/or a lot of stress then I strongly encourage you to learn and try these exercises on a daily basis. Not only will they help you deal with negative emotions and improve quality of life, but because emotions can have a negative impact on health these exercise can help you lead a healthier life.
