Bottled Up Emotions

Suppressing intense feelings can carry a heavy emotional toll. When letting it all out just isn’t a good option, here’s a healthier way to cope.

It’s Thanksgiving dinner and your crazy uncle has you cornered, describing his rigid political views and offering incendiary commentary on the week’s news. Part of you is tempted to let loose with a tirade of your own, but you don’t want to ruin the holiday or upset your entire family. So you decide to keep the peace by biting your tongue — perhaps the right thing to do for holiday harmony, but potentially stressful for you.

Suppressing emotions is not a good long-term strategy, of course. Among other things,      it has marked negative effects on your emotional and physical health.   But in certain situations — at a party with in-laws, dealing with an irate customer at work, interacting with a difficult coworker — it may not always be advisable or in your best interest to “express yourself” fully.

You don’t have to choose between social graces and your sanity. While you need to    “make a distinction between feeling your feelings and expressing them,” says psychologist Gay Hendricks, PhD, cofounder of the Hendricks Institute and author of many bestselling books, including The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level (HarperOne, 2010), there are ways to go about it that don’t make you feel inauthentic or send your stress response skyrocketing.

Challenges to Overcome

  • Uncertainty. If you’re taken off guard by an unpleasant encounter in a social setting, you may have no idea how to respond — or you may be unsure if the situation calls for you to express yourself or hold back.
  • Feeling phony. You may feel you’re lacking integrity or inauthentic if you don’t  speak your truth. Or you may feel a moral obligation to express your feelings.
  • The “ready to blow” effect. Any emotion, if held down long enough, tends to become more concentrated, sometimes turning into a simmering rage you may feel frightened of or uncertain how to handle.

How to Cope

  • Be honest — with yourself. “Is it a good idea to express your feelings all the time? No,” says Hendricks. “But in all situations, you can tell yourself the truth.” If you must temper your reaction for someone else, acknowledge internally that’s what you are doing, he advises. “When you hide your emotional responses from yourself, it throws off your integrity.”
  • Name your emotions. Sounds easy, but, says Hendricks, “a lot of the time we don’t know what we’re feeling.” For example, we’ll often react with anger when, really, “we didn’t know how to say to the other person, ‘I’m afraid’ or ‘I’m sad.’” When you have a strong emotional reaction, try to identify your true feelings and reflect on what’s prompting them, instead of unleashing on the other person.
  •  Talk it out in advance. If you know you’re headed into an emotionally charged situation, talk about what you expect will happen with someone else in advance. Describe all the emotions you think might get triggered, says Hendricks. That preemptive conversation will help you stay calm in the moment.
  • Be a neutral observer. When faced with an intractable difference of opinion, look  at the situation as an opportunity to learn more about the other person,   Hendricks suggests. Pretend you’re a sociologist trying, very neutrally and calmly, to understand another species. “If you do something inarguable — if you just listen and ask questions — the other person can’t really argue with you,” says Hendricks. If asking questions feels like a stretch when you really disagree with someone, try neutral, observing phrases, like: “Wow, you have strong feelings about that.”
  • Shift gears. If you’re really stuck, “take three deep breaths and change your body position,” says Hendricks. Changing your body position keeps you from getting frozen in fight-or-flight mode. Likewise, rhythmic breathing quiets the body’s stress response. Try to make each breath four to five seconds long on the inhale and four to five seconds long on the exhale. And then just keep on breathing.

Jon Spayde is a regular contributor to Experience Life.

Any serious scientist will be familiar with the assertion that stress causes immuno-compromise. A recent study by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health has finally put this long-held knowledge into perspective, deciphering that those who bottle up their feelings have a cardiovascular disease risk of 140 per cent and a risk of cancer of 170 per cent when compared to individuals who share how they feel.
 Overall, the risk of premature death for those who keep their negative feelings to themselves is around 135 per cent that of individuals unafraid to speak their minds. When framed in this way, the dangers of suppressing emotions are hard to ignore, but how exactly does bottling up your emotions lead to real and tangible damage to the body? The article below will explore the molecular and physiological mechanisms behind this startling array of statistics, and provide some helpful tips to managing your rage, and keeping your body healthy!
Although the concrete mechanism linking bottled-up emotions and premature death has yet to be established, several sound scientific principles may be applied in order to elucidate some facts about the forces at work.
 Firstly, it is conceivable that those who feel that they must hide their emotions from others are more susceptible to seeking comfort in substance abuse such as alcohol addiction, cigarette smoking, or the use of other harmful drugs in order to relieve their stress. The use of these substances has several obvious and detrimental effects to health, and so needs no explanation here.
 The second suspected mechanism is slightly less direct in nature.
When the body is coping with a stress response, such as un-vented anger or pent-up rage, a hormone known as Cortisol is released. Cortisol is a hormone of critical importance to humans, but it also has some unwanted effects in individuals experiencing high levels of stress. Cortisol is a steroid hormone, specifically a glucocorticoid, meaning that it is capable of suppressing the immune system’s response to damage or invading pathogens.
  This unfortunate effect means that individuals who have a higher than normal stress level, and thus a raised Cortisol level, will have under-effective immune systems, not only opening the floodgates to any nasty bugs that may wish to make your body their home, but also preventing a complete response from being carried out towards invaders from within – cancer cells. Every day, the immune system destroys a cell that would otherwise have become cancerous, so it’s easy to see how quickly things can go wrong when this response is working below optimum levels. All is not lost, though.
  Studies have shown that releasing anger actually increases blood flow to those parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and reward, thus making taking out your frustration a ‘feel good’ experience. However, there are those of us for whom releasing anger at every turn can very quickly end both friendships and careers. Perhaps a change in outlook is the answer?
  Conditioning your brain to be more optimistic about everyday situations and into overlooking the minor foibles of others can quite literally be a lifesaver. The statistics speak for themselves, and lend credence to the thought that optimistic people really do live longer than their pessimistic, stressed out counterparts.
Speaking of which, we are about to launch www.tantrumfitness.net – a whole new approach to releasing your anger whilst becoming healthier. So, why not try to LET RIP whilst GETTING FIT?

Till next time

Lots of hugs

http://www.nakeddivorce.com/about-us/about-adele/

Preview  Neuropeptides and their effect on the human body.

Neuropeptides and their effect on the human body.

Why bottling up emotions may be bad for you

Let’s begin by rephrasing that sentence. Bottling up emotions       IS bad for you.

Sowmiya Bhas   | Updated: May 22, 2014 5:31 pm
 
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