All our experiences and emotions occur first of all in the body, and psychological suffering is sometimes only released through physical sensations. Rosa Molina, professor, master’s degree in Neurosciences and psychiatrist at the San Carlos Clinical University Hospital (Madrid) helps us to recognize the impact of emotions and how to modulate them through the body.
–Do all illnesses have a psychological component?
Yes, we could say so, although there will be cases where this component plays 5 or 10% and others where it is practically the fundamental origin of the disease, as occurs in psychosomatic pathologies.
Let’s give concrete examples: a heart attack can be mediated because you have cardiovascular risk factors (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high sugar, obesity…). However, your personality traits and stress can precipitate this heart attack that in other conditions might not occur. That same stress will also influence the prognosis of the heart attack. There are better or worse recoveries depending on emotional management. That psychophysical component is always present.
How does stress change the brain?
–Stress maintained over time, high and intense, has been associated with a decrease in the volume of the hippocampus in the long term, which affects memory. Our brain is neuroplastic, in the positive sense and also in the negative, that is, it can create new synapses or lose them.
–How does the emotional discomfort that derives from the relationship with others affect us?
–A study by psychologist Naomi Eisenberg shows that when people feel excluded, the anterior cingulate cortex is activated, that is, the brain region involved in physical pain, and that, in addition, the level of activation is higher in those who feel more rejected. This researcher shows that mental pain shares brain networks with physical pain. The predisposition to suffer from this pain has been associated with gene mutations that make us more prone to developing depressive symptoms.
–One in seven young people has a mental health problem, according to data provided by UNICEF, and 46,000 adolescents commit suicide each year in the world. What’s going on?
–The increase refers above all to anxious-depressive pictures. That is what has come to swell the statistics. That and the increase in suicides among young people between the ages of 12 and 18. I believe that the confinement has affected, as well as all the mourning situations of many families. It may also be related to economic instability.
I have seen families in which the only income they had was through the father and when he died it has been a hard impact on the entire family nucleus, especially on the youngest. The impact of deaths, spending more time locked up and the socioeconomic situation has caused more anxiety and depression to proliferate.
–How can we help children to understand their emotions?
–I think that luckily there are more and more parents who have books on emotions in their homes, such as The Color Monster (Lumen publishing house) or The Emotionary (Palabras Aladas publishing house).
One way to help children is to keep in mind that they don’t come with emotions from the factory. The baby distinguishes between pleasure and displeasure, she cries whether she is hungry or sleepy. Then he is happy and smiles when they caress and cuddle him. But the rest of the emotions: shame, guilt, anger, rage, sadness… she learns from her parents and the most important thing is to teach her to know what emotion she is feeling and to validate it instead of denying it.
You should not say “don’t cry”, “don’t give it importance”. In this way we deny emotions. The interesting thing is that they explain to us what has happened to them, help them try to put it into words.
–Frida Kahlo said: “I tried to drown my sorrows, but they learned to swim.” We should not try to stifle emotions, but understand them in order to regulate them, but how can we do it and do it from our own body?
–One of the keys is to resort to relaxation techniques. For example, something very simple is to take deep breaths. It’s a way to regulate our emotion and lower anxiety through the body.
With these deep and very slow breaths we send misleading information to the brain making it see that we are already calm, so that it stops triggering the alarm signal. We tell him: “slow down, stop shooting norepinephrine and all the neurotransmitters that you are producing because I am already relaxed.”
-Exercise is also a help, right?
I see physical activity as a good preventative, as a good emotional regulator, as an ideal anxiolytic, but to prevent anxiety from appearing. If a patient is in the middle of an anxiety crisis, you can’t tell them to go for a run.
With physical exercise we are using the body, we are taking it to its limits and at the same time we are triggering a whole cascade of neurotransmitters and producing relaxation and well-being. The exercise can be aerobic, but yoga and Pilates are also useful, which work a lot on body awareness.
–Is the regular practice of mindfulness and other meditation techniques also resources?
–He helps connect what happens in our body with what happens in our mind. And it is also essential to maintain close contact with nature…
Very thorough research is being done on forest bathing and how the natural environment benefits our body-mind tandem. In this sense, I remember a study on how cognitive performance improved in people from a company who worked in an office full of vegetation, compared to people who carried out their activity in a study with four white walls.
–To what extent diseases such as fibromyalgia, some headaches, irritable bowel syndrome or chronic fatigue reflect unexpressed emotions?
–Although you can never make clear statements, because there are always patients who fall out of the pattern, all these diseases have an emotional component with considerable weight. They can be contained emotions, a difficulty for the verbal expression of emotions or psychological conflicts of difficulties that the person has had in the past and that this plays an important role in the development of these pictures, as well as in their evolution.
-Sustained over time, how do sadness and anger influence health, for example?
–When we maintain these intense emotions, even if we do not do it voluntarily, neuroplastic changes eventually occur. If I am depressed and I tend to turn my head to the same negative themes, which are often distortions of reality mediated by my own emotional state (that is, I cannot see the positive things because I am depressed), this is producing changes neuroplastic and it makes my brain tend to activate more easily through that circuit.
How can we change those circuits?
–It happens like when you always go the same way, that you know it by heart. The same thing happens with the brain: the brain circuits, if you get used to always being around the same negative thought, it will be easier for that to redound. On the other hand, if we make an effort to have other types of thoughts, to have more social contact to activate other types of relationships that get us out of this vicious circle, what we are going to create are other, more positive brain pathways.
How does sustained rage affect us?
–The first thing that comes to mind is what has traditionally been called the type A personality. Hostility, the response of anger and anger with aggressive behaviors, has been considered a type A behavior pattern and has been associated with myocardial infarction. . But now the relationship between hostility and heart attacks seems to have to do with more indirect psychosocial factors.
Hostility leads you into a pattern of functioning that can cause you to shun people away, possibly eat less, smoke, drink, and resort to unhealthy modes of self-regulation. All of this influences your coronary risk.