The Mind and Body Connection
We’re most used to thinking of our physical selves when it comes to the topic of taking care of our health. Doing regular exercise, eating healthy, and getting enough sleep are just some of the basic ways to take care of ourselves and be in tip-top shape.
However, when it comes to overall health, there’s much more than just physical health. Good health encompasses the psychological factors too, such as mental health and emotional wellbeing. We may not think of emotional health when caring for ourselves and our bodies right away, but mind and body health is very closely linked to one another.
It’s amazing how closely connected the body is to our emotions and how emotions impact our physical health. Taking good care of our physical wellbeing, in turn, benefits emotional health greatly.
Therefore, good physical health habits lead to better emotional health, and caring for our emotional wellbeing can help boost our physical health in more ways than one.
How Does Emotional Wellbeing Affect Physical Health?
Do you realize how our emotions trigger some physical reactions? For example, we feel a jolt of excitement at the advent of happy news. Alternatively, we can feel physical pain if we experience heartache. Some physical sensations can be a direct response to our feelings and emotions.
We tend to understand very little about them until we try to connect physical manifestations of any strong feelings that we may experience at a precise moment. When we look closely and start to really become conscious of them, it’s easy to see a connection.
Emotional wellbeing strongly boosts physical health. Also, some adverse physical manifestations of the body are triggered by a particular emotional state.
- Feeling sad or unhappy can sometimes result in the development of high blood pressure or stomach ulcers.
- Feelings of worry can cause constipation or the inability to sleep at night (insomnia).
- Feeling nervous can cause nausea.
- Feeling stressed at work can make you prone to viral infections.
These are just a few of the direct physical effects of particular emotional feelings and conditions.
Poor emotional health can negatively impact a person’s body and further affect the immune system, while emotional wellbeing can promote better physical health.
When a person is in love, he or she often becomes more attractive and relaxed. This is usually due to their improved happiness. Some studies have shown that being in love can even boost the growth of new brain cells resulting in improved memory.
Feelings of gratitude are also widely known to be beneficial to our wellbeing. The attitude and practice of gratitude has been a constant theme in health and famous for its many benefits, such as how it helps to lower blood pressure, boost the immune system, and reduce stress by increasing levels of oxytocin.
How Taking Care of Your Body Boosts Emotional Wellbeing
Here are some good health practices to ensure emotional wellbeing.
- Nurture your body with healthy and nutritious food. In that way, you have more energy to conduct daily activities and be more productive.
- Regular exercise carries great psychological benefits that helps keep you in shape mentally.
- ‘Laughter is the best medicine.’ Laughter is known to reduce stress levels, lower blood pressure, and improve cardiac health. Overall, it promotes a great sense of wellbeing as it helps the body release endorphins – the happy hormones.
- Smoking can bring very negative effects to the body. Nicotine in cigarettes can disrupt the way chemicals in the brain work. Along with excess consumption of alcohol, smoking is one the worst things you can do for your body and can contribute to your health’s decline.
Simply put, taking good care of your body and building good habits that promote wellbeing not only benefits you in the long run, but it’s a true marker of your sense of self-love and respect which constitutes a great part of emotional wellbeing.
Your ability to make good choices and take care of your physical health signifies good emotional health.