How can we prevent illness by managing our emotions ?

Emotions are an integral part of our lives. However, they can have a great impact on our health and on the lives of others if they get out of hand and are not controlled. This is exactly what we would like to help you do through this article: regulate your emotions for better health.

Getting away from the stimulus

Poor emotional regulation inevitably leads to illness. Poor management of sadness, for example, leads to depression. Emotional deregulation is very often manifested by an exaggerated sensitivity to stimuli, a higher frequency of emotions (sadness, fear, shame…), a very slow return to normalcy… which leads to borderline personality disorder (a better known pathology due to emotional deregulation), excessive alcohol consumption, violence… Emotions therefore have a considerable impact on health if they are not well managed and one of the first things to do is to get away from the stimulus. Usually the emotion disappears when you get away from the stimulus. For example, if you get angry while chatting with someone (e.g. online) and they don’t answer you at a certain point, the best thing to do would be to walk away from the phone or turn it off and calm down by doing something else. Continuing to write to the person activates the emotional dysregulation, which makes things worse.

 Practise mentalization

Mentalization refers to imagining your own mental states or those of the person you are interacting with, i.e. their intentions, emotions, needs, in order to better understand their behaviours. For example, during your exchanges, your interlocutor suddenly becomes silent. Instead of getting angry (because that activates your emotional dysregulation), try instead to imagine his intentions or his emotions at this precise moment, perhaps he is sad or disappointed or tired and needs to rest. What about you? Why would you be angry with him? Perhaps because you want him to react at all costs. Paying attention to yourself and imagining the other person’s mental states helps you to understand yourself and the other person, which helps you to manage your emotional state better.

We hope that these tips will help you to better regulate your emotions for better health.