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Your Emotional Impact Your feelings impact on your health. Yes, that’s true; every condition has an emotional connection that affects some part of your body. Negative emotions, such as unresolved anger, fear, or even loneliness are some of the fundamental causes of disease. A recent study describes how physical wounds can take much longer to heal when you find yourself in a situation plagued by hostility and conflict. There are a number of ways to address the effects of stress, but eating isn’t one of them. In fact, eating when you are stressed interferes with your body’s ability to digest and ultimately absorb the nutrients. This can leave you in a situation where you are overweight – and malnourished at the same time. A short walk before eating your lunch will help clear your mind of the morning’s challenges and speed-up your metabolism so that what you do eat gets converted to energy instead of fat. (Of course, making healthy choices for that lunch goes a long way to provide you with the energy you need for the rest of the day.) Another way is to make sure that you allow yourself to use the allotted lunch break to nourish yourself. Eating on the run, making calls on your cell phone, or checking that column of figures while eating puts stress on you. The anxiety that activates your “sympathetic” mode (also known as “fight or flight”) turns off your digestive process and prepares you to deal with danger. Even if there is no imminent danger, (and there rarely is the type of danger that would cause you to either fight or flee) your body doesn’t know that you are just angry – and your digestive system is put on hold until the stressful situation has passed. Staying in this stressful situation, or being there routinely at meal time, robs you of the nutrients your body needs to keep you healthy. |
