If your chill was nowhere to be found this year, you are
not alone. Public life and personal hardships provided ample fodder for
flare-ups, which, in addition to costing your cool, can also take a more
serious toll: According to scientists, prolonged and extreme anger can also
exacerbate existing health problems, as well as affect the way we react to
certain issues.
اضافة اعلان
“Throughout the day and throughout the week and throughout the
month, we’re activating these systems during times of frustration, anger or
rage that in the short run might help you in an emergency situation,” said
DrIlan Shor Wittstein, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
“But in the long run, it might be quite detrimental to how these neurohormonal
systems are activated as often as they are for those cases.”
Anger responses can cause a ripple effect throughout the body:
From the cardiovascular system to your nervous system, it’s all fair game.
These are just some of the main organ systems it can play havoc with.
The heartAccording to Wittstein, an expert in stress cardiomyopathy, one
way to think about the heart is to imagine a house: There can be issues with
the pipes, doors or the electrical system, but the house itself might seem
fine.
“Rage can have effects on the arteries that supply blood on the
heart, it can have an effect on the electrical system specifically that tells
the heart when to beat, and it can have an effect specifically on the heart
muscle itself,” he said.
If you already have conditions that affect the cardiovascular
system, moments of anger may leave you more vulnerable. When you are enraged,
Wittstein offered as an example, blood pressure can increase, blood vessels can
constrict and inflammatory cells are released. This can lead to the rupturing
of plaque inside a coronary artery. If that plaque forms a clot, blood supply
in that portion of the heart can be cut off. “And that can either cause a heart
attack that lands a person in the hospital, or a person can even drop dead of a
sudden heart attack,” he said.
The brainIn a sense, anger can have a positive physical effect in that it
can help motivate you to do something. When we are angry and aroused, our
brains are primed for fast reactions. If danger or a social threat triggers an
angry state, we are more likely to act on it: the fight-or-flight response.
One trade-off: In that agitated state, we are less likely to
make good judgments, to listen and to be attuned to other motivations that are
important, like values, said Dr Royce Lee, a professor of psychiatry and
behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago.
“You might often hear a person in an angry state say or do
something that they don’t really like,” Lee said. “And when they’re not angry
they will regret it.”
Dr Orli Etingin, an internist at New York-Presbyterian/Weill
Cornell hospital, said that anger and chronic stress also affect memory.
“Forget about the fact that you’re probably sleep-deprived too,” she said, “but
you definitely cannot pay good attention to things.”
The gutYou might have heard about the “gut-brain connection,” the
much-discussed link between emotions and our stomachs. Like other feelings,
rage can trigger discomfort, malabsorption of food and loss of appetite.
“The GI tract is made up of muscle tissue, and it’s innervated
by nerves. So if you have a very high adrenaline output, the stomach and the
intestines are going to have a hypermobility,” Etingin said. “You’re going to
have cramps, you’re going to have diarrhea, because the muscles there are being
over-activated.”
Dr William Burg, a clinical psychologist,
and professor at the Yale School of Medicine, said that small changes in your
routine can help. “Meditation, breath work, fitness and getting a full night’s
rest are all helpful ways to manage anger,” he said.
Read moreHealth
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
