The Biological Impacts of Emotions

Our minds and bodies are intricately linked. According to Gabor Maté, Western medicine treats our minds separately from our bodies while traditional healing practices world-wide understand and work with the unity between mind and body.
Nevertheless, we instinctively know and often speculate on that connection when we wonder which stress caused our ulcer and which anxiety is behind our headache.
The biological impacts of emotions are now finally being acknowledged in Western medicine. In The Myth of Normal, Maté describes how a 1982 German study found certain personality traits to have a strong association with breast cancer, neurologists in the 1990’s linked ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) with the personality trait of “excessive niceness”, other studies have linked prostate cancer with anger suppression, overwhelming grief with blood, bone, skin and lung cancer and a Danish study has found that grief doubles the risk of contracting multiple sclerosis (MS).
Maté is then quick to point out that he believes that deep grief doesn’t pose a high risk of illness in itself, rather it is how people are able to process their grief and loss that determines how their body will respond.
The link between our minds and our bodies, our emotions and our illnesses, is one that Maté often explores. Comment below.