Emotions are deeply connected to sickness and health, how vulnerable a patient is to disease, or how fast a patient recovers -- and yet medicine and medical care often lack any trace of emotional intelligence.
Emotional interventions should be routine practice in medical care.
There’s a subtle difference between disease and illness: disease is the thing a doctor can cure, but illness is the thing a patient suffers. Emotional wellness might not seem to have a correlation to how well a disease is cured -- but it has a great impact on how little or how much or just how a patient suffers through their illness.
This is not to say that emotional well-being can, on its own, cure a disease--there are a lot of current trends that suggest people can cure themselves by thinking positively, which is dangerous, not only because it disregards the necessity of medicine in curing illnesses but also because it can make people feel like they’re to blame if they get sick, that it must be in their minds or because they’re not strong enough to “will” themselves to be well.
Our immune system is the brain of our body, deciding what belongs in our body and what doesn’t, and rejecting the latter. When it recognizes cells, it leaves them alone; when it doesn’t recognize them, it attacks. When it works correctly, our body fights off bacteria, viruses, even cancer -- but if it judges incorrectly, it can end up attacking necessary cells and leading to autoimmune diseases like lupus or allergies.
The nervous system is innately connected to our immune system, and, like the brain, our immune system can learn.
The chemical messengers with the most extensive operation in the brain and the immune system are most densely found in the neural areas responsible for regulating emotion. So the nervous system not only communicates with the immune system, it is necessary for the immune system to function properly.
Stress can negatively affect immune resistance, though it is temporary -- presumably directing energy away from the immune system to deal with the stressor. Of course, if the stress itself is continuous and intense, the resulting suppression of the immune system also continues.
Studies have shown that toxic emotions (stress, negativity, etc.) diminish the effectiveness of some immune cells, though it is not conclusive whether the effect is great enough to make a difference. But it is an accepted practice among surgeons to cancel a surgery if a patient is too scared -- scared patients in surgery bleed more, get more infections or sustain more complications, and have a more difficult road to recovery.
There are three main negative emotions that impact health: anger, anxiety, and depression. We’ll now go into a little more detail on each.
Anger has a major impact on heart health: when we’re angry, the pumping efficiency of our heart drops, sometimes by a small amount, but in some cases by 7% or greater, a state which cardiologists classify as a sign of myocardial ischemia, when blood flow to the heart drops at a dangerous rate.
Higher levels are anger are also connected to dying younger. One study performed on physicians themselves found that physicians with the highest scores on a hostility test were 7 times more likely to die by the age of 50 than physicians with lower scores.
Of course, anger by itself does not cause heart problems -- but it is one extremely important factor that affects heart performance. And high levels of anger can be lethal to people who already have heart disease.
None of this is to say that suppressing your anger will lead to a healthier heart; on the contrary, suppressing anger can intensify the physical agitation and raise blood pressure even more. The determining quality that makes anger harmful to your health is whether it’s chronic or not. Everyone gets angry from time to time -- it’s when you find yourself constantly angry, jumping to anger immediately as a first emotional resort, or in prolonged periods of intense anger, that anger becomes chronic.
But anger and hostility, like all other emotional reactions, can be learned about and controlled. For helpful ways to deal with anger, refer back to previous sections, particularly Managing Emotions.
The most deadly emotion for men is anger, which puts them at greater risk of heart disease. The most deadly emotion for women is anxiety, which puts them at greater risk of developing infections and disease.
Chronic anxiety can:
The more stressed we are, the worse our immune system functions. This is why we get sick during stressful periods of time, or right after. Again, it is not clear if the range of impact is of clinical significance.
Unlike anger and anxiety which can lead to the onset of diseases, depression plays a part in worsening many other existing medical conditions.
Depression often gets overlooked when it accompanies more serious physical illnesses because the symptoms of depression overlap with those illnesses. For instance, loss of appetite, fatigue, or emotional outbursts in a cancer patient might not give a doctor pause -- but they could be signs of accompanying depression, which, untreated, might make the patient’s recovery longer, harder, and less successful.
Depression can negatively affect a patient’s recovery because it reduces their will to take care of themselves, their energy to do so, and numbs them to the possible consequences of doing so.
Though it might cost more money up front to treat depression alongside other medical conditions, arguably it would save more money in the long run to do so.
Society often looks at drug addicts or alcoholics as people who just can’t control their impulses, and this is true in the sense that impulses are generally emotional needs. One theory suggests that addicts have a chemical imbalance in their brain -- but instead of being treated with medication, they’ve found an addictive drug to treat themselves with.
Most addicts suffer from chronic depression, anxiety, or anger. When they find a substance that counteracts what they’re suffering from, they turn again and again to that drug to stabilize them. Many addicts reported finally feeling “normal” when they use their particular drug. What drug they eventually develop a long-term habit with depends on which of these they’re suffering from.
Emotional intelligence education could go a long way in aiding recovering addicts. While some rehabilitation centers and support groups such as AA attempt to do this, making emotional intelligence a routine part of any addict’s medical care would most likely increase positive results.
Hope can be beneficial, though not a cure-all, for patients facing illness or disease. Patients with greater hope are generally more positive, more willing to try things to recover, and generally take better care of themselves.
Strong relationships are another benefit of emotional intelligence that have positive medical benefits. Feeling like you have no close contact with anyone and no one to share your feelings with -- feeling socially isolated, in other words -- doubles your chance of sickness or death.
In fact, isolation is as big a health risk if not bigger than lack of exercise, obesity, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and smoking. Where smoking increases your risk of mortality by a factor of 1.6, isolation increases it by 2.0. Social isolation is more deadly than smoking.
Social isolation takes a greater toll on men than on women. Isolated women are 1.5 times more likely to die than social women; for men, the risk is 2-3 times.
Isolation isn’t the same as solitude. It doesn’t matter how few friends you have or how infrequently you see them. Isolation implies feeling like you’re cut off from people without it being your choice.
Goleman says medicine must take to heart 2 findings from this research:
To improve the emotional intelligence of both patients and doctors, medicine can:
There are 3 target groups that, if they received instruction in basic emotional intelligence, could lead to broad public-health benefits:
Medicine has become more of a business and less of a public health service. But again, though it might cost more up front, addressing the impact that emotions have on physical wellness would ultimately save the medical industry more money down the line by preventing disease and illness before they occur or offsetting some of the additional damage done by toxic emotions. And since, more and more, patients get to choose their doctors and health plans, medical practitioners and hospitals that have more satisfied patients will be more likely to retain those patients and gain others through member loyalty.