How often have you heard the advice to not to keep any anger in for the sake your health? There’s a common notion that suppressing your anger must be bad for your body, or at least give you a stomach ulcer. From time to time you read reports showing that it could be bad for your heart. But when you look across the evidence that has built up over the years, what does it reveal about managing anger?
In terms of ulcers, whether you storm around the room raging or simmer in silence, you can still get them. While stress was thought to be a major contributing factor, there’s no clear evidence that it depends on whether or not you express your anger, as it’s now known that most ulcers are caused either by the bacteria Heliobacter pylori or by prolonged use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.
When it comes to the heart, the evidence is more mixed. In a study carried out at the University of North Carolina in 2000, 13,000 patients were given questionnaires in which they rated their own tendency to get angry, and were followed up a few years later. Although their blood pressure was apparently normal, those who had said they frequently lose their temper were three times more likely to have had heart attacks in the intervening years than the others, even when factors like smoking, diabetes and weight had been taken into account. Likewise, Mark McDermott from the University of East London found that people who expressed their anger suffered more from heart disease than those who held back from shouting.
Express yourself
This all seems plausible, especially as there are known physiological mechanisms through which expressing anger could be problematic. When you lose your temper your face reddens, your jaw clenches and your heart starts racing in preparation for fight or flight. The body gets ready by taking fat from smooth muscle in case you need extra energy. If those fatty acids aren’t used they have to go somewhere and can end up clinging to the artery walls, and these deposits can contribute to heart disease.
Each time your blood pressure shoots up you can be left with scar tissue left by the tiny injuries inflicted on the coronary artery walls, which in turn can also contribute to heart disease. The occasional scar is no problem, but theoretically if this is repeated day after day the harm could start to build up. A healthy heart can deal with this, but if someone already has coronary heart disease then on rare occasions the sudden rise in blood pressure can cause fatty deposits inside the wall of the arteries to break off and block the artery. If this means blood can’t reach the heart, the result is a heart attack; if it can’t reach the brain then you have a stroke.
But other studies have shown no link between anger and heart disease, or that people with high blood pressure seem to be more likely to suppress their anger. The problem is that studies measure both heart disease and the expression of anger in so many different ways that they’re hard to compare.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery Giora Keinan from Israel looked not only at how frequently people get angry, but at the intensity of that anger. He found that in terms of health, the best thing to do is to get very angry, making your case “clearly and firmly”, but to do so only rarely. He suggests that the people who do this are likely to be the same people who are good at finding other ways of dealing with difficult situations. This reduces the amount of stress they experience, and in turn improves immune function, leading to better health.
thanks for article: source
0 comments:
Post a Comment