When Our Emotions and Health Collide
New Book Unlocks the Hidden Impacts of Mind/Body Connection
It’s been scientifically proven that poor emotional health can have an adverse impact on your body’s immune system. This increases your susceptibility to colds and infections during periods of high stress, anxiousness, or upset. You are simply not mindful of your health in the way that you should be.
Emotions have the effect of toggling the on and off switch of your gene expression. This can directly impact your overall health and risk of disease.
In a new book entitled Hidden Within Us: A Radical New Understanding of the Mind-Body Connection Hidden Within Us, Dr. Samuel J. Mann, MD, Professor of Clinical Medicine at NewYork Presbyterian Hospital – Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, N.Y shares a pioneering look at the relationship between emotions and health, one rarely explored by physicians, patients, and research psychologists.
Counter to most mind-body research and publications which hones in on the emotional distress we consciously experience, Hidden Within Us targets the impact of emotions kept from our conscious awareness by repression. The case histories and published evidence highlighted in the book offers readers a rare look at the harm of repression as a vastly overlooked element of emotional resistance.
Dr. Mann shows how the unrecognized impact of repressed, unfelt emotions expresses itself in our health and is tied to many prevailing yet still inadequately explained and treated medical conditions. He adds:
“Our ability to repress emotions is a vital gift of evolution, but, silently, the emotions we've repressed do persist and can affect our health. This recognition can lead to new pathways to understanding, treatment, and healing.”
Dr. Mann’s book takes readers on a journey towards understanding of the link between our emotions and our physical health along with new and promising treatment solutions. The historical context of these emotions are often tied to trauma, abuse or overwhelming stress, along with many inadequately explained chronic medical conditions such as hypertension, chronic fatigue syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, migraine, autoimmune diseases, among others.
He delivers striking evidence and case examples that will empower readers to explore healing modalities and pharmacologic approaches that previously have not been considered.
Dr. Mann comments:
“My findings demonstrate the long-lasting effects on our physical health of emotions that are hidden from our awareness, and offer an explanation for many patients who are suffering from commonly encountered medical conditions whose cause has remained an enigma. I am confident that many readers will see themselves in the book and that the book will trigger insights that can either lead to rapid improvement or to more effective choices in their treatment. It will offer a fascinating read, and open the door to readers, physicians and psychologists to a radically different understanding of the mind-body connection, and its important treatment implications.”
Great Books, Great Minds recently reached out to Dr. Mann for a more in-depth look at the groundbreaking insights and discoveries covered in his book. Here’s what he had to share:
Let’s start with having you share a bit about your life and medical profession journey?
Sure. After my high school and college years, I was accepted to SUNY, Downstate Medical School in Brooklyn, NY. Upon completing residency, I joined the faculty of the first Primary Care Residency program in NYC. But it was my growing interest in hypertension that led to my doing a fellowship in that area. I subsequently joined the hypertension group at Cornell, headed by Dr. John Laragh, who at the time was one of the most renowned hypertension experts in the world.
What was the major catalyst behind your decision to write Hidden Within Us?
With the stark difference from the usual mind/body beliefs that have dominated research for decades with disappointingly little impact, along with the success of treatment based on this new understanding, I was possessed to write this book. I also knew there would be massive resistance to this understanding. After all, it had almost never been suggested even though no technology at all was needed to uncover it.
Please offer some context on the impact of emotions being kept from our conscious awareness by repression? And why the importance of bringing greater awareness to this issue?
There has been widespread belief that the emotional distress we experience could be a cause of many otherwise inadequately explained medical conditions. There is widespread agreement that the emotions we experience have temporary physiologic effects, such as transient increases in heart rate and blood pressure, tension headaches, diarrhea and many others. But decades of research failed to demonstrate that those emotions are a “mind/body” cause of chronic medical conditions.
Can you elaborate on this point a bit?
In this context, when you think about it, repressed emotions are a much more likely candidate to underlie the mind/body connection as they are much more powerful and, though hidden from our awareness, persist for years and decades. However, the greatest barrier to this understanding is that few realize that we can harbor powerful emotions even though we don’t feel them. Remarkably, this is an area of study that has been almost completely absent during decades of relatively fruitless mind/body research.
Why is the relationship between emotions and health rarely on the radar screen of physicians, patients, and research psychologists? And what are the hidden implications of this?
The main reason is that, after great fanfare, decades of studies failed to confirm the widely suspected relationship between chronic medical illness and day-to day emotional distress. Further, decades of studies looking at mind/body interventions failed to be helpful in treatment. So this time, the skepticism that exists on the part of physicians is understandable. In this context, understanding and accepting the existence and role of repressed emotions is a far greater leap for both physicians nor research psychologists
In what ways can repression become harmful to one’s broader health?
I want to emphasize that the human ability to repress emotions is a gift that evolution had to provide. However, repressed emotions, which persist for decades, chronically stimulate the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS). Unexplained increased SNS tone has been observed in many inadequately explained conditions including hypertension, chronic fatigue syndrome, an unfortunately prevalent disorder whose origin and treatment remain a mystery, migraine, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune disease, and others. Evidence also indicates that with increased SNS tone, parasympathetic tone is reciprocally reduced. The latter results in increased inflammatory mediators that contribute to disease, such as autoimmune disease. In this context recent studies show that vagal nerve stimulation ameliorates inflammation in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.
You say in your book that to a large extent, the mind-body connection does not reside in the everyday emotions we feel and that distress us. Can you elaborate on this point?
Using hypertension as an example, day to day emotional distress does raise blood pressure, in almost everyone. This is normal physiology: BP transiently increases and then subsides. This is not the cause of severe or persistent hypertension. Similarly, day to day stress can give us diarrhea, tension headaches, and other common symptoms, but research has failed to implicate it as a cause of other conditions such as those listed above.
What is your greatest hope in terms of what readers of your book walk away with?
To bring about awareness to a concept that is foreign to almost everyone: we can harbor powerful emotions without being aware of them. Further, those emotions can affect our health. And that this understanding opens the door to new pathways of treatment and healing
I also want to convey the important point that repression is not psychopathology; it is a gift that evolution had to provide to enable so many of us to survive overwhelming stress and be able to move on and function. However, over time the burden of repressed emotions can affect us medically. And with this understanding, medical illness can be ameliorated, whether through gaining awareness of those emotions, or with medication that ordinarily would not be considered. Importantly, in many, those emotions, fortunately repressed, may need to remain repressed.
In the end, when I see patients with a medical disorder and personal history that suggest this mind/body origin, I am able to suggest to patients to read the book, and tell them literally: "You are in the book." It conveys the message much better than I can in the office, and has proven to be a valuable resource in conveying this understanding to patients.
