What Is Underlying Anger, Resentment or Sadness Doing To Your Health?

Are you hurt or angry by the way a friend treated you in the past?

Are you frustrated that your relationship didn't work out as you hoped it would?

Are you resentful towards your sibling for an action that hurt you deeply?

All of these unresolved emotions are acting as stressors to your body. It's a choice whether we hang on to this all emotional baggage. 

Here are my top 5 reasons why it's important that we release unresolved emotions if we want to improve our health:

1. It has been scientifically proven that your cells hear every thought and emotion. This creates a healthy or unhealthy environment for your cells to express themselves and either build you up or break you down. Your cells renew themselves every two months, and have completely regenerated over the span of 7 years. Therefore, you are an entirely new body every 7 years. If you hold onto resentment, anger or sadness over years and years, it will take a harmful toll to your body. Not to mention, a Harvard Study proved that happy people live longer!
2. Unhappy emotions like sadness, anger, frustration and other distressing thoughts all have the exact same effect on your body. This is STRESS. Stress on the body means cortisol is surging from your adrenals into your blood stream and circulating throughout the body. Cortisol has many short term and long term side effects, although the immediate impacts are loss of energy, bad sleep pattern, low sex drive and mood swings... just to name a few.
3. Aggressive, angry or sad thoughts overstimulate an area within the amygdala (an almond sized area of the brain that is involved with controlling emotions and behaviour). When overstimulated it throws you off and gives you intense cravings to binge eat or engage in other erratic behaviour that will soothe the emotional response. 
4. Everything in your body and mind is interconnected. Nothing is separate, nothing is a coincidence and nothing is random. You are a complex bio-computer so when something becomes imbalanced, it will ripple effect into other areas of your life. If you think you can bottle up an emotional grudge and it won't do any harm, guess again. This will create an imbalance in your emotional nutrition which will lead to deficiency or overcompensation somewhere else.
5. Last but not least, unresolved emotion acts like a slow IV drip of cortisol into your body. This results in your immune system taking a beating over a long period of time. The key to a healthy life is a healthy immune system. Cortisol will also turn off your digestive system which means you are not digesting and assimilating your food properly. What's the point of buying expensive organic food if your body isn't absorbing the nutrients?

So how can we RESOLVE, RELEASE and LET GO of this excess emotional crap we are holding onto?

Meditation

It has been proven that after 10 consecutive days of meditation (even just for 10 minutes a day) improves your mood, stress levels, cognitive processing, short term memory, sustained attention and long term memory efficiency. 

In my experience, meditation is a tool to rise above some of the bullsh*t our minds trick us into believing is important and needs immediate attention or emotional response. The purpose of meditation is not to clear your mind completely... well maybe for the Zen Masters but we are a little way off that.

The purpose of sitting quietly for a sustained period of time is to gently redirect your focus back to your breath each time a thought or feeling rises up. Eventually this will train you to detach from negative thoughts or feelings. You will still have them of course (you are human) although you will no longer be swept away by them. Instead, you can be the witness, watching them come and go like the ocean waves crashing on the sand. 

Express Your Emotions

The most unhealthy thing you can do is bottle away your feelings in a "safe" place so that no one else is burdened by your emotions. Suppression only leads to some form of angry release later down the track.

It is important to let yourself feel and express your emotions whenever they come up. Talk to someone about it, or better yet, talk to whoever it is that is causing the emotion. If you are not quite ready to speak to anyone else, then write a letter to someone expressing everything you are feeling and why you feel this way.

Light a candle, tell the person that you release all anger over what happened and that you are ready to let go. Burn the letter. This is a beautiful way of releasing your emotions.

If you ever have the urge to cry, it is so important you let yourself cry! Never hold it in as this will only lead to more suppressed anger. 

If you have a lot of excess anger and don't know what to do with it, I highly recommend kickboxing. It's an awesome workout, requires no coordination whatsoever and it releases a lot of tension. You'll also be releasing some pretty crazy endorphins post-workout leaving you in a bliss state. 

Send Them Your Love & Blessings

Sending love and blessings to your ex boyfriend or ex best friend may seem a little cray cray... but trust me this is the best thing you can do to release unresolved emotions and move on with your life. It brings your into your heart centre which releases all kinds of amazing endorphins and chemicals in your body which aid healing of the body and the mind. 

Try out this little love blessing.

Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Bring the person who you need to send love and forgiveness to into your minds eye. Say this little prayer 3-10 times or until you feel complete.

May you be happy.

May you be with good health.

May you be free from suffering.

May you be with peace. 

Say this with as much sincerity as you possibly can. Really feel into what it feels like to forgive this person and how it feels to no longer carry this emotional burden with you. You should start feeling some energy moving around your heart space or perhaps throughout your whole body. It should feel really good. Once you feel this, you know you've gained all the benefits of the blessing. 

Blessings are powerful as they don't just work on the person whom you are sending the blessing to. They are powerful medicine for your own body and mind. 

Give these steps a go and leave a comment if you have any questions. See the video blog on this topic for more info.

Remember, nothing is worth sacrificing your own health and happiness.

It's time to release your old emotional patterns to make room for MUCH better things!

With love,

xXx