> Emotional and Mental Health

A traditional Chinese approach - one that sees ultimate health as a consideration of the mind and body as a balanced whole - can help us determine the physical costs of poor emotional health.

Many times our lives lack balance because we’re chemically depressed, anxious, pessimistic, irritated, or critical, write Joel and Michelle Levey in Living in Balance (Conari Press, 1998). These emotions make us vulnerable to major disease by creating toxic conditions in the body.

Connecting Illness to Emotions

Dr. Christiane Northrup coined the term “toxic emotion”. In Women's Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (Bantam, 1994), she writes, “A thought held long enough and repeated often enough becomes a belief.” That belief then becomes a biology in which emotional stress causes our adrenal glands to produce corticosteroids - hormones that weaken our immune systems.

Suppressed anger is probably the most toxic emotion of all. The physiology of suppressed anger leads to poor behaviour choices and poor health. We need both mental and physical action to remedy the physiology of toxic, endogenous neurochemicals that build up in the brain when anger is suppressed.

Other poor behaviour choices that can lead to toxic emotions include addictions to food, alcohol, drugs, and psychologically stimulating substitutes such as sex, shopping, and gambling. These behaviours, says Elnora Van Winkle of New York University, remain until the toxicosis is gone.

Working Toward Solutions

What actions and attitudes can improve emotional health? Some of the solutions outlined in Peter J. Frost’s Toxic Emotions at Work (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) are neither new nor surprising:

• Keep fit to dissipate stress.
• Look on the bright side of life.
• Don’t take things personally.
• Refocus your mind through meditation or breathing exercises.
• Create personal space

While Frost is looking at emotional health in workplaces, we can also look to our exercise and nutrition at home.

You (and your mind) Are What You Eat

Food can be part of the problem - and part of the solution. Food provides nutrients that give us energy and protect our health. But the food-to-energy conversion also produces free radicals that can damage cells and initiate disease. We need protector nutrients to prevent or delay damage. Protector nutrients include vitamins E, C, and beta-carotene plus minerals. Ask for them at your favourite health food store.

Jeffrey Bland, nutrition expert and author of The 20-Day Rejuvenation Diet Program (McGraw Hill,1999) cites “overconsumptive undernutrition” as a problem for emotional health. Bland points out that two-thirds of the standard American diet is over-processed and refined foods that deplete our resistance to disease and promote premature aging. What can we do?

We need to eat lots of natural, preferably organic, foods. We need to eat more raw fruits and vegetables. We need to eat meats and dairy foods with vitamins and minerals intact. We all need required daily allowances, at least, of vitamins A, B-complex, C, E, and essential minerals of calcium, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese, and iron. We can get lots more of these if we choose fresh, natural foods.

The last word: stay positive. Think, and do, good things for the sake of our health - both physical and emotional.

Rhonda Schuller is a professional writer and ultra trail-runner who lives in Vancouver, BC. In 2002 she placed second in the women 50-plus category in the BC Montrail Ultra Trailrunning Series.

Source: alive #255, January 2004