Psychophysiological Disorders: What Emotions Do To Your Body

When you are anxious, do you get stomach pains and headaches ? Or maybe you get cramps? And what about when you’m angry? It is easy to see that your emotions are closely related to the physical pain you are feeling.

So you already understand a little bit about what psychophysiological disorders are: physical diseases that originate in (or have developed depending on) psychological factors. Learn about how important it is to control your emotions for your body!

Why do emotions affect psychophysiological disorders?

Emotions are manifested via a triple response system: cognitive, physiological and motor. The cognitive system refers to the thoughts we have when we experience different emotions.

For example, when anger builds up, our thoughts are of the type: “they are trying to annoy me”, “I can not believe they are doing this to me”, etc. But this internal debate is completely different when we are sad.

Afterwards, the motor system is activated, which is a set of behaviors that we engage according to the feelings we feel. When we are afraid, we try to protect ourselves or flee. Of course, the behavior is different if we are happy.

Finally, the physiological system consists of the emotions that arise in your body. Physiologically, there are emotions that activate us to a certain degree, just as there are others that deactivate us to a certain degree.

Anxiety, for example, is a feeling that activates you physiologically to a greater extent, increases your heart rate and makes you breathe faster.

How do anxiety and anger affect psychophysiological disorders?

There are many psychophysiological disorders. They can be:

• cardiovascular (hypertension)
• respiratory (bronchial asthma)
• endocrine (diabetes)
• gastrointestinal (gastric ulcer)
• dermatological (urticaria, hives)
• immunological
• chronic pain (rheumatoid arthritis, arthritis)

These are just a few examples. Your physiology and your emotions are very closely linked. This is especially true of anxiety and anger.

Both anxiety and anger lead to a high level of physiological activation. Muscle tension, hyperventilation and increased heart rate are a few of their physiological symptoms.

Basically, our body does this to deal with the danger it assumes caused these feelings. Therefore, it is not an inherent “bad” activation.

The problem arises when we feel these feelings very intensely, very often or over a long period of time. In this case, our body remains in a high level of tension no matter how we react to “danger”, even if it should have disappeared when we responded.

But since that does not happen,  our bodies end up overworked and they start working differently.

How do physical symptoms affect this process?

Everything we have talked about so far leads us to a conclusion: that dealing with our negative emotions depends on how we perceive and interpret different situations.

If we come up with adaptive (healthy) solutions, we will be able to prevent the body from activating these symptoms and thus reduce the risk of psychophysiological disorders.

The same thing happens when it is a physical illness in itself. There are some adaptive solutions: the patient may be convinced that it is not serious; they may know it is serious, but will resist because they are convinced that there is hope; or they may know it is serious but decide to live life as well as possible.

If you choose one of these three options, you will prevent anxiety and anger from triggering psychophysiological disorders. It may not be easy, but with the help of a good psychologist it is possible.

Photos: David Cohen, Benjamin Combs and Milada Vigerova.