The Legacy of Negative Emotions.

As we keep making stress hormones, we create a host of highly addictive negative emotions, including anger, hostility, aggression, competition, hatred, frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, guilt, shame, sadness, depression, hopelessness, and powerlessness, just to name a few.

When we focus on thoughts about bitter memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis.

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In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone.

If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease be it a cold or cancer as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect until, we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny.

For example, if we can anticipate a possible known future scenario and then focus on that thought to the exclusion of everything else even for just one moment, the body will physiologically begin to change to prepare itself for that future event.

The body is now living in that known future in the present moment.

As a consequence of this phenomenon, the conditioning process begins to activate the autonomic nervous system, and it creates the corresponding stress chemicals automatically.

This is how the mind-body connection can work against us.

If we can associate a person, thing, or experience at a particular time and place in our outer reality with that rush of chemistry within us, we’ll begin to condition the body to turn on the response just by thinking about that stimulus.

In time, we’ll be able to simply condition the body to be put in mind of that emotionally aroused state by thought alone the thought of a potential experience with someone and something at some time and someplace.

If we can expect the future outcome based on past experience, then the expectation of the event, when we emotionally embrace it, will change the body’s physiology.

Also Read: How to support someone in distress or emotional pain.

And if we assign meaning to the behaviours and experiences, we’re putting our conscious intention behind the outcome so that our bodies will change or not change equal to what we think we know about our reality and ourselves.

But whether or not you believe that the stress in your life is justified or valid, the effect of that stress on the body is never advantageous or health-enhancing.

Your body believes that it is being chased by a lion, is standing perched on a perilous cliff, or is fighting off a pack of angry cannibals.

Here are a few examples from scientific studies demonstrating the effects of stress on the body.

Researchers at the Ohio State University College of Medicine confirmed that stressful emotions trigger hormonal and genetic responses, by measuring how stress affects the speed of healing minor skin wounds a significant marker of gene activation.

A group of 42 married couples were given small suction blisters, and then their level of three proteins commonly expressed in wound healing was monitored for a total of three weeks.

The couples were asked to have a neutral discussion for half an hour as a baseline and then, later, to talk about a previous marital argument.

The researchers found that after the couples discussed a previous disagreement, their level of healing-linked proteins was mildly suppressed (showing that the genes were downregulated).

The suppression rose to an even greater degree about 40 percent in couples whose discussion ballooned into a significant conflict, peppered with sarcastic comments, criticism, and put-downs.

Research also supports the reverse effect that reducing stress with positive emotions triggers epigenetic changes that improve health.

Two key studies by researchers at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston looked at the effects of meditation, which is known for eliciting peaceful and even blissful states, on gene expression.

In the first study,

It was conducted in 2008 and 20 volunteers received eight weeks of training in various mind-body practices (including several types of meditation, yoga, and repetitive prayer) known to induce the relaxation response, a physiological state of deep rest.

The researchers also followed 19 long-term daily practitioners of the same techniques.

At the end of the study period, the novices showed a change in 1,561 genes (874 upregulated for health and 687 downregulated for stress), as well as reduced blood pressure and reduced heart and respiration rates, while the experienced practitioners expressed 2,209 new genes.

Most of the genetic changes involved improving the body’s response to chronic psychological stress.

Also Read: How to recognize signs of distress in children and Common reactions to stress in children.

The second study,

It was conducted in 2013 and found that eliciting the relaxation response produces changes in gene expression after just one session of meditation among both novices and experienced practitioners alike (with the long-term practitioners, not surprisingly, deriving more benefit).

Genes that were upregulated included those involved in immune function, energy metabolism, and insulin secretion, while genes that were downregulated included those linked to inflammation and stress.

Studies like this underscore just how quickly it’s possible to change your genes.

When we’re living in survival mode, with our stress response turned on all the time, we can focus on only three things:

our physical bodies (Am I okay?),
the environment (Where is it safe?),
and time (How long will this threat be hanging over me?).

Constantly focusing on these three things makes us;

less spiritual,
less aware,
and less mindful,

Because it trains us to become more self-absorbed and more focused on our bodies, as well as on other material things (such as what we own, where we live, how much money we have, and so on), in addition to all of the problems we experience in our external world.

This focus also trains us to obsess about time to constantly brace ourselves for the worst-case future scenarios based on our traumatic past experiences because there’s never enough time and everything always takes too much time.

So, we could say that just as stress hormones cause the cells of the body to become selfish to ensure that we survive, they endorse our ego to become more selfish, too and we become materialists defining reality with our senses.

We end up feeling separate from any new possibilities, because when we never leave that state of chronic emergency, that me-first mentality that pervades all our thinking strengthens and endures, leading us to become self-indulgent, self-serving, and self-important.

Ultimately, the self becomes defined as a body living in the environment and in time.

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