Ignoring Your Emotions Is Bad for Your Health. Here ’s What to Do About It

Modern life is full of emotional challenges. The pressure to succeed, need to “keep up,” fear of missing out and desire for good relationships and work satisfaction can all evoke volatile combinations of emotions. However, what we learn in our society is not how to work with our emotions, but how to block and avoid them. We do it quite well: Between alcohol use, prescription drug use and screen time, there are a multitude of ways to avoid our feelings. When we do acknowledge them, we swat them away with mantras learned since childhood. (“Mind over matter,” “get a grip” and “suck it up” are familiar ones.) Thwarting emotions is not good for mental or physical health. It’s like pressing on the gas and brakes of your car at the same time, creating an internal pressure cooker. Emotions have energy that pushes up for expression, and to tamp them down, our minds and bodies use creative tactics—including muscular constriction and holding our breath. Symptoms like anxiety and depression, which are on the rise in the U.S., can stem from the way we deal with these underlying, automatic, hard-wired survival emotions, which are biological forces that should not be ignored. When the mind thwarts the flow of emotions because they are too overwhelming or too conflicting, it puts stress on the mind and the body, creating psychological distress and symptoms. Emotional stress, like that from blocked emotions, has not only been link...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime Mental Health/Psychology Source Type: news