Emotions and our health

Jefferson Breland

(8/2024) For June’s Complementary Corner, I wrote a column entitled, "Your Body Delivers the Mail." In it, I described how your body sends you messages about the state of your being on the body, mind, and spirit levels via symptoms. 

I also wrote, what you do with those messages is your business. You can ignore them, and, more than likely, watch your body send you more interesting messages over time that increase in the intensity of their message. By this, I mean, you will experience more severe symptoms unless you address the root cause, not just the symptoms.

For instance, if you are experiencing pain and you take a medication to reduce or eliminate the pain, the pain may still be there. The medication may just mask the symptom, but the root cause of the pain will still be there.

According to Chinese medicine (CM), the root cause of any condition begins as an energetic imbalance. We can call this an imbalance of the "energy body." For the record, our bodies do produce measurable electromagnetic fields in addition to the more common electrical measurements of the brain, heart, and nervous system.

We can think of this imbalance simply like a light switch.

Something in our body (a gland, DNA, an organ) is affected by an energetic imbalance, and a switch gets turned on or turned off. If the switch is not turned back on or turned off, we are on our way to a greater energetic imbalance which can mean we experience more severe symptoms.

How does this switch get turned on or off?

Well, according to CM, an emotional imbalances are the root cause of 90-95 percent of all disease. This includes diseases that are labeled as genetic by Western medicine.

How can this be?

When we experience an emotion, whether strong or barely noticeable, it creates a shift in our body’s energy which is called Qi (pronounced "chee") according to CM.

An example of of a strong emotion effecting the body’s energy is what is called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). PTSD is believed to be caused by someone experiencing a traumatic event which triggers a person’s instinctive survival mechanism, the fight, flight, or freeze reaction associated with the sympathetic nervous system.

How this reaction becomes a diagnosis of PTSD is when the body doesn’t reset or regulate itself back to "regular" function through the function of the parasympathetic nervous system.

The traumatic event switches on the sympathetic nervous system for protection. The parasympathetic nervous system is designed to return us to "normal" emotional function.

If a person experiences a more subtly elevated emotional state, one in which a person may not even be aware of the emotion, the prolonged experience of the emotional energy imbalance will gradually have a profound effect on the person.

An example of this sort of emotional energy imbalance is Helen, my mother, and her 200 gallstones.

My mother, bless her heart, had many emotional challenges in her life: the death of her mother when Helen was two-years old, the death of my sister, Kathleen, at age 14, and a lifetime of frustration of being a very intelligent woman and not expressing her full potential in the world.

Very likely, she was also frustrated by my father, Bruce, who had some fundamentally different ideas about how to live. Just sayin’.

According to CM, frustration and anger initially effect the function of the Liver and Gallbladder meridians (energy pathways in our body) and over time will effect the organs themselves,

Now, my mother knew she was frustrated. I know because she shared her frustration with everyone in the family. What I don’t think she knew is that she was constantly frustrated on a very subtle level. We can think of this subtle level of emotion as some sort of state of emotional background noise, it is so constant we forget it is even there.

I believe my mother just thought she was frustrated only when she expressed her frustration as anger. The longterm effect of the background emotional state is that our brains continue to produce neurotransmitters associated with that state and our body becomes accustomed to them.

According to CM, everything in the body is connected. Sound familiar, right? So, this background emotional energy of frustration also affected her digestion (hence the jar of antacids in the cabinet above our stove), the function of her esophagus, her knees, and her skin.

It would take more space than I have here to explain all of the relationships I just mentioned.

If you have questions, call me. I am more than glad to talk about this stuff anytime.

The effect of my mother’s lifetime of frustration doesn’t end there. The culminating event of my mother’s emotional energy imbalance was emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder wherein the doctors discovered approximately 200 gallstones.

According to CM, this is an example of the Qi of the emotional imbalance becoming denser and denser to the point where it takes physical form. This is also an example of Albert Einstein’s famous formula E = MC² in which energy and matter are interchangeable.

The emotional energy transforms in to physical matter, in this case, gallstones. This is also true of kidney stones, tumors both benign and malignant, bone spurs, body fat, atherosclerosis, polyps, among many other bodily accretions.

So what to do with this information? It is only useful, well, if we can use it.

Once we are aware of the power effect our emotions have on our bodies, if we want to improve our health or our future health, I suggest the next step is to become aware of how our bodies exhibit the earliest signs of the presence of these emotions.

This is such an obvious place to start and you may calling me various names at present for making such a statement. To which I reply, many people are unaware of their emotions and how they manifest in their body, especially in the earliest moments of feeling an emotion.

The moment an emotion, any emotion, arises there is a change in brain chemistry which affects the entire body. Heart rate, breathing, digestion, hormonal activity, muscle function, our senses, our immune systems, blood vessels, everything in our body is affected.

In order to help ourselves become aware of how emotions affect us, we need to use the body’s messages as early as we are able.

Not everyone experiences emotions in the same way. So I suggest you do a self-inventory.

Where do you store tension in your body? Are your shoulders tight? Is your neck stiff? Do you grind your teeth or tighten your jaw? Do you experience heartburn or acid reflux?

Many common symptoms such as back pain, indigestion, hip or knee pain, nervousness, and difficulty sleeping are the result of subtle, persistent emotional states we are unaware of.

These subtle emotional states are often the light switch of our body’s imbalances. Daily events in our life and our practiced ways of reacting to them create an ongoing message to our body which we normalize with phrases like: "That’s just the way life is." "Life is hard."

"Marriage takes work." "Anxiety runs in my family."

Many people move through life reacting to the world around them or their family unaware they have a choice of how to respond.

It is how we choose to respond that will flick the light switch in a healthy or less healthy direction. The power is in your hands.

Stay tune for next month’s column in which I will offer some practical tools for making healthier choices.

Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturists licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland with offices in Gettysburg and Towson, respectively.
He can be reached at 410-336-5876.

Read past editions of Complementy Corner