The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

The science of stress reveals that our emotions do not directly cause illness, but the biological systems controlling our emotional and stress responses share pathways with our immune and cardiovascular networks, influencing our vulnerability to burnout and disease.

In the 1950s that Austrian Canadian physician and physiologist Hans Selye pioneered the notion of stress as we now know it today, drawing the scientific community’s attention to the effects of stress on physical health and popularizing the concept around the world.

Since ancient times humans have felt intuitively that emotions and health are linked, and there had always been speculation about this notion. But without compelling evidence, it had been impossible to say for sure that such a connection really exists and especially how it works. Dr. Esther Sternberg in her groundbreaking work was pivotal in helping to solve this mystery. Through experiments it revealed the physical mechanisms; nerves, cells, and hormones, used by the brain and immune system to communicate with each other. She described how stress can make us more susceptible to all types of illnesses, and how the immune system can alter our moods.

Sternberg explains how our understanding of these connections in scientific terms is helping to answer such crucial questions as “Does stress make you sick?” “Is a positive outlook the key to better health?” and “How do our personal relationships, work, and other aspects of our lives affect our health?”

In the immeasurably revelatory The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (public library), published in 2001, Sternberg examines the interplay of our emotions and our physical health, mediated by that seemingly nebulous yet, it turns out, remarkably concrete experience called stress.

“The same parts of the brain that control the stress response … play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. And since it is these parts of the brain that also play a role in depression, we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives… Rather than seeing the psyche as the source of such illnesses, we are discovering that while feelings don’t directly cause or cure disease, the biological mechanisms underlying them may cause or contribute to disease.”

“Members of certain professions are more prone to burnout than others — nurses and teachers, for example, are among those at highest risk. These professionals are faced daily with caregiving situations in their work lives, often with inadequate pay, inadequate help in their jobs, and with too many patients or students in their charge. Some studies are beginning to show that burnt-out patients may have not only psychological burnout, but also physiological burnout: a flattened cortisol response and inability to respond to any stress with even a slight burst of cortisol. In other words, chronic unrelenting stress can change the stress response itself. And it can change other hormone systems in the body as well.”

Esther Sternberg

The Biology of the Stress Response

• Hormone release: Stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, releasing cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine into the bloodstream.
• Physical changes: Heart rate and blood pressure increase to supply energy to muscles for a fight-or-flight reaction.
• Brain impact: Chronic activation shrinks the prefrontal cortex and overworks the amygdala, reducing our capacity to regulate future stress.

Emotions, Burnout, and Disease Susceptibility

• Immune suppression: Long-term negative emotions and unmanaged stress keep cortisol high, which suppresses immune cell function and raises infection risks.
• Inflammatory links: “The same parts of the brain that control the stress response … play an important role in susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory diseases,” as noted by The Marginalian.
• Cardiovascular strain: Persistent adrenaline and cortisol damage blood vessel linings, increasing the likelihood of high blood pressure and heart attacks.

A wealth of evidence supports that “emotions and health are one.” Sternberg reminds us that our brains have maps of our relationships. Loss, loneliness, rejection, isolation, disappointment, fears, anxiety and stress all affect our molecules and nerve pathways to cause disease and pain. To achieve this balance, Sternberg identifies healthy food, clean water, exercise, rest; however, she adds love, acceptance, belief and spirituality. A fine menu of nourishment!

Our perception of stress, and therefore our response to it, is an ever-changing thing that depends a great deal on the circumstances and settings in which we find ourselves. It depends on previous experience and knowledge, as well as on the actual event that has occurred. And it depends on memory, too.

Esther Sternberg