prevent mental health and heart

Prevent Mental Health and Heart

Happy Heart - Positive thoughts and feelings may help your ticker thrive

Depression, social isolation, anxiety, hostility, emotional stress. When it comes to heart disease, the negative aspects of psychological functioning have gotten most of the attention. They have been shown to increase the chances of developing various sorts of cardiovascular disease, and they can make existing conditions worse. What about the flip side? Can happiness or an upbeat approach to life protect the heart and blood vessels?

 

Folk wisdom says yes. But there’s precious little hard data to back up this notion. A small number of studies have demonstrated that positive thoughts or an optimistic outlook confer some protection. The latest contribution in this area looks at positive thoughts, feelings.

 

Psychologists Laura Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health and Rebecca Thurston of the University of Pittsburgh school of Medicine studied the impact of emotional vitality. This gauges a person’s feelings of energy, sense of well being, and ability to regulate his or her emotions.

 

The researchers crunched information collected between 1971 and 1975 from more than 6000 initially healthy men and women talking part in America’s first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Based on answers to six questions classified each participant they classified each participant as having low, moderate, or high emotional vitality.

 

During the 15-year period following the health survey, far fewer people in the high emotional vitality group had a heart attack, developed angina or another form of coronary artery disease, or died of heart disease, compared with individuals in the low vitality group. The difference amounted to as much as three percent, which could translate into thousands of fewer cases of heart disease or deaths each year.

 

Greater emotional vitality wasn’t just a stand in for less depression – its benefits remained after the researchers took depression into account. Instead, it seemed to exert its own special effect.

 

How could feeling energetic, having a sense of well-being, or being on an even emotional keel guard the heart? By counteracting stress, emotional vitality could calm the stress-induced arousal of the nervous system that boosts heart rate, elevates blood pressure, and activates inflammation and other heart disease-promoting processes.

Mental Health - Possitive Thoughts

Positive thoughts and emotions might contribute to an individual’s sense of control over his or her destiny, which has been associated with protection against heart disease. It might make it easier to make or use social connections. Then again, it could be that people with high emotional vitality are less likely to develop heart disease because they have healthier behaviors, like smoking less, exercising more, or controlling their weight.

Mental Health - Social Environment

Your genes, early learning, and family and social environments set the stage for whether your outlook on life is essentially positive or negative. If yours is a bit on the negative side, don’t despair. It isn’t set in stone (or the legion of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health counselors would be searching for work!) and working to improve it is actually one of the hottest trends in mental health.
This goes beyond the “power of positive thinking” It involves several different approaches. Here are a few.

• Deliberately focus on events (e.g a holiday in swiss) or activities (a cool swim on a hot Saturday afternoon) that give you pleasure and take a mental snapshot to recall later.
• Maintain a “gratitude journal” where you can jot down the things that you enjoyed doing, so you can relive those events/activities every time you read it, or share the experiences with others.
• Engage in activities that call you on your inherent strengths, either at work, home, or play. For instance, if you have a talent for managing people, and you’re stuck in accounts ask for a transfer to HRD.
• Apply your strengths to something outside yourself that helps you create meaning in your life. It could be religion, nature, art volunteering, or something else.
• Legendary songwriters Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer had it right 60 years ago when they wrote:”you’ve got to accentuate think positive, eliminate the negative think, latch on the affirmative.”