How Our Emotions and thoughts Affect Our Hearts

Sarah felt a rush of nausea as she pulled into a parking space just outside the mall.___she swallowed hard and sat in her car for a moment until it passed.

She opened the door, stood up and turned to click the lock.___standing in place she felt lighted headed and sweaty.

She wondered about what she had eaten for lunch; was it too spicy, too greasy or just too yucky? ___as she walked across the parking lot Sarah began to feel better.

“It’s nothing,” she thought.

As Sarah yanked open the large glass door, she felt extreme pressure in the middle of her chest. ___pain shot through her jaw and she bent over, feeling like she might vomit.

Right then, a woman walked up and asked if she was okay.

…”yes, I’m fine” she replied.

…”well, you don’t look fine,” the woman said, “I’m calling 911.”

…”No, really it’s just something I ate.”

…”You’re kidding yourself – it’s not something you ate – you’re having a Heart Attack!”

I know its a harsh statement BUT…If you refuse to accept that IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU then you may be one of the increasing number of women who won’t make it to the Emergency Department in time to save your life!

Learn Them – Believe Them – Act on Them…We Need You Here!

Signs to Know:

• Discomfort in Your Chest: squeezing, pressure fullness or pain (which may be severe or mild or come and go).
• Discomfort in Your Upper Body: back, neck, stomach or jaw.
• Shortness of Breath: (this may occur along with or before or after chest discomfort).
• Accompyning nausea, lightheadedness and cold sweat.

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Jill and Karen are both interesting and fun women but they respond to life’s challenges in very different ways.

Jill sees every little thing as a catastrophe (the worst thing that could happen). As a result, her face becomes flushed, she clenches her fists and the veins on her neck pop out – most of all, her blood pressure soars! It may just be that the kids have on mismatching clothes or her husband forgets something on the grocery list – regardless, Jill rages over every little thing.

Jill’s thinking looks something like this:

Problem: the paint color doesn’t match the swatch.

Her Assessment/how she sees it:

The thing is, Jill has personalized her thoughts and feels attacked. Her thiking that everything is a catastrophe makes Jill feel fearful. These constant thoughts will switch on a branch of her nervous system that increases her heart rate and blood pressure.

Karen’s thinking looks something like this:

Problem: the paint color doesn’t match the swatch.

Her Assessment/how she sees it:

• Yes, it’s frustrating (admit the obvious)
• Is it something I can change or will it be like this forever (is it a catastrophe)
• How can I make it work (seek a solution)

Karen asks herself if the current problem is truly a catastrophe; just about every day. Her answer helps to regulate her emotions and this puts less strain on her heart.

If you think that heart issues are only about diet, exercise and cholesterol, think again…

How you think about your daily challenges can have a negative effect on your heart.

 Ask yourself…is this a catastrophe?

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I had to think about “every little word” and its meaning in the first years after my electrocution. Because my heart was not functioning for a span of time, it wasn’t sending oxygen to my brain. The result for me was a situation called Visual Agnosia; which basically means loss of meaning.

In order to try and understand the meaning of words I would isolate each one and repeat it to myself, to see how it sounded. Then I’d listen to the inflection in other peoples’ voices when they said the same words; I’d also watch their facial expressions and mannerisms – I wanted to see how the words fit.

It was tedious work. But it taught me to sense the psychological connection to a word’s meaning. 

The word Disease, as in Heart Disease, has lost its power. What… you say? 

Although Disease means an interruption of an organ’s normal function – we have somehow come to think of Heart Disease as something we’ll think about later, when we’re older. Because we think we have more time to change the outcome.

Um…how do we know that we have more time - especially when we don’t know how much time we have.  

What if I called it Heart Poison? Does this bring up a different image?

Would we take more ownership of how we treat ourselves if we thought that certain choices could poision us?

The thing about Heart Disease is that we have some power over it.

Obvously, we cannot change some risks: Family History, Gender, Age, and Factors We Don’t Know Anything About.

But, others are changeable: Weight, Cigarette Smoking, Cholesterol, Inactive Lifestyle, Social Support, Diabetes, Stress, Hostile Personality, and Hypertension.

Try using the word Poison instead of Disease for a while and see if you make better choices. 

Sometimes just changing one word can cause us to change the way we think and act.

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We are naturally social creatures. We come into the world by way of a social system; a family. From that day forward we experience all kinds of social relationships, in our neighborhoods schools, jobs, churches, and in our daily communications.

So when we read that Social Support is a risk factor of heart disease, we don’t give it much attention because it seems normal and everyday.

If you think that social support is just talk…here are two studies to think about:

1. The Stockholm Female Coronary Risk Study, examined 131 women aged, 35 to 65 years, who were hospitalized for an acute coronary event. The study found that women with little or no social support were two and one half times more likely to have serious coronary artery disease than women with strong social support.

2. The Honolulu Heart Program, studied 4,653 men, asking about their social interactions with relatives and coworkers. The study found that the larger a man’s social network was, the less likely he was to experience angina, a heart attack or any type of heart disease.

Even today, with all we know about the risk factors of heart disease, we aren’t totally sure why Social Support is significant. Some research has shown that people with low social support have higher systolic blood pressure and heart rates than people with high social support.

Regardless of what the research will ever tell us, I believe that from their first beats, our hearts know what they need to stay strong and healthy…

other hearts.

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She said…“it feels like no one cares that I’m going through this anymore.” Shelia’s words remind me of how lonely a period of illness and healing can be.

A long illness can bring up unexpected and complicated emotions in the people around you. Usually, neither patient nor friend is aware of this subtle shift – but it often sounds a lot like Shelia’s words.

The shift represents a change between Internal and External thinking.

• Helping others as they heal is normal. We have empathy for their situation and we do what we can to help make their situation better (External Thinking).

• But when their illness lingers, it often brings up fears about our own health. We begin to wonder how we might cope if we were in their shoes (Internal Thinking).

If you’ve ever felt what Shelia’s felt, here’s a way to express your emotions:

Say, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me while I’ve been ill. I can only imagine what feelings my illness has brought up in you. I want you to know that if you are ever in my place, I’m going to be there for you.”

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We usually don’t care for anything unless we see its worth to us.

Think about the basics of worth; what’s a car worth if we can’t drive it? Nothing…so we change the oil and make sure it has gas. Then it brings us value.

But what about our worth to ourselves?

I’ve seen people’s self-worth grow when they recognize a personal characteristic or a strength that they didn’t know they had.

I remember a study in graduate school where three guys in a psychology class decided to take turns complementing an unattractive woman in their class – they wanted to see if their complements made a difference. It wasn’t the kindest study, but they learned that the more they complemented the woman on her hair, her choice of clothes and smile, the more she began caring her herself.

She washed her hair more often, wore more flattering clothes and started smiling. At the end of the semester, she had become so self-confident and attractive that each had asked her out on a date. She felt it was worth it to care for herself.

The story fits a theory; we care for what we value and deem worthy.

The thing is…I believe when you see how important your heart is…when you appreciate how much it does for you, then you will care for it better than you ever have.

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I was eight years old when I was electrocuted. And, like most children who develop empathy for teddy bears and imaginary friends, I developed tremendous empathy for my heart.

I feet sorry for my heart. I believed that my poor little heart must have felt all the pain that I, thankfully couldn’t remember.

Years later while I was in my doctoral program, I began thinking back over those years. I came across several pictures I’d drawn in 1973 and showed them to my therapist. She said, “Lisa, you were really working hard to figure this out weren’t you?”

She was right.

Now, as I work with people who are trying to heal their emotionally broken as well as physically broken hearts, I wonder why it is that we only seem to think about our hearts in relation to DISEASE or LOVE.

1. Physical (an organ) that we’ll think about sometime in the future; Heart Attack or Heart Disease.

2. Symbolic (of love) or lost love; Heartbroken or Heart Ache.

Seems we’ve taken the out-of-sight and out-of-mind attitude when it comes to caring for our hearts.

I think the question we should ask ourselves is this…

Why do we think that our heart will remain committed to us 24-hours a day regardless of how we treat it?

We don’t even expect this out of our relationships!

Develop empathy for your heart.

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Liz is angry at her husband’s doctor.

Henry, her husband of twenty-one years died six months ago of heart related issues and Liz has been spitting mad ever since.

When her friends ask if she’s talked about her feelings with the doctor, Liz screams… NO! ARE YOU KIDDING…I wouldn’t give him the time of day!

So, Liz’s well-meaning and loving friends have learned NOT to ask any more questions. And, because they don’t ask, she has gotten angrier!

Now Liz talks about her anger to strangers in the grocery store, to retail sales clerks and even to the new postal carrier. She continues to focus on her anger and refuses to think about anything else.

Liz is ruminating.

Rumination can be a mask for grief especially after the death of a loved one. By ruminating about her anger Liz can avoid thinking about her sadness.

In psychology rumination describes a vicious cycle. It is the repetitive dwelling on a problem, with a focus on how bad you feel and how awful things are – without taking action to make things better.

Research on undisclosed trauma tells us that rumination tends to extend the time that people are sad or anxious and if it continues without attention it can make a sad situation even worse.  

What we know is this…regardless of why a person dies, the more the surviving spouse is able to talk about the death with a friend, therapist or trusted person, the more able they are to grieve the loss and move beyond bereavement.

Some of Liz’s rumination is understandable. It may have helped her stay connected to her feelings as she slowly accepted the reality of Henry’s death.

But chronic rumination can hurt us more than help us…

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Most of us can tolerate some physical pain, some emotional pain, some anxiety and some chaos BUT we usually don’t seek medical care or therapy until we hit our threshold and the pain has become unbearable.

We avoid thinking that it’s time to act because if we don’t act, then maybe we can fool ourselves into thinking that the problems aren’t really happening.

I recently read an article that questioned why, with all the education about the symptoms of a heart attack, were some people still hesitant about getting to hospital ASAP!

I think this hesitation is also about pain – about the way we think about and define pain. For some reason we still think that it’s not a heart attack unless we are in physical pain.

Not all symptoms are physically painful, especially with women; some symptoms are “out of the ordinary and unusual.”

Yes you may have PHYSICAL PAIN – but if you don’t, ask yourself this…Do I have UNUSUAL PAIN or UNUSUAL DISCOMFORT?

For example,

• Do you sense that You Don’t Feel Quite Right?
• Are you Dizzy, when you’re usually not?
• Are you Anxious, when you’re usually not?
• Are you Weak, when you’re usually not?
• Are you Fatigued, when you’re usually not?
• Do you have Shortness of Breath, when you usually don’t?

Many women still say…”if I go to the hospital and it’s not a heart attack they might think I’m overreacting or I’m a hypochondriac.”

Trust yourself and stay in touch with “what feels right” and with “what does not feel right” for your body.

If your symptoms are out of the ordinary for you – Err on the side of caution and GO… ASAP!

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