Emotional healing is crucial to healing our bodies for several interconnected reasons:

1. Mind-Body Connection:

   • The mind and body are deeply interconnected. Emotional states can significantly impact physical health. Chronic stress, anxiety, and unresolved emotional trauma can manifest as physical symptoms and contribute to the development or exacerbation of diseases.

2. Stress and the Immune System:

   • Chronic emotional stress can weaken the immune system, making the body more susceptible to infections and diseases. Stress triggers the release of cortisol and other stress hormones, which, in excess, can impair immune function and increase inflammation.

3. Inflammation:

   • Unresolved emotional issues can lead to chronic inflammation, which is a common underlying factor in many chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders. Emotional healing can reduce inflammation, thereby improving overall health.

4. Behavior and Lifestyle Choices:

   • Emotional well-being influences behavior and lifestyle choices. People struggling with emotional issues may engage in unhealthy behaviors such as poor diet, lack of exercise, substance abuse, or poor sleep patterns, all of which can negatively impact physical health. Healing emotionally can lead to healthier choices and behaviors.

5. Pain Perception:

   • Emotional stress and trauma can heighten the perception of physical pain. Emotional healing can reduce the sensitivity to pain and improve pain management, leading to better physical health outcomes.

6. Recovery and Healing Process:

   • Emotional well-being can accelerate recovery from illnesses and surgeries. Positive emotional states such as hope, optimism, and happiness are associated with better recovery rates and shorter healing times.

7. Mental Health and Chronic Conditions:

   • Chronic physical conditions often come with emotional burdens such as depression and anxiety. Addressing these emotional aspects can improve the overall management and outcomes of chronic diseases, creating a positive feedback loop where improved emotional health supports better physical health and vice versa.

8. Quality of Life:

   • Emotional health significantly impacts the quality of life. When individuals heal emotionally, they often experience a greater sense of well-being, satisfaction, and purpose, which can enhance physical health through reduced stress and increased motivation to maintain healthy habits.

9. Hormonal Balance:

   • Emotions can affect hormonal balance. For example, chronic stress can lead to hormonal imbalances that affect various bodily systems, including metabolism, reproductive health, and cardiovascular health. Emotional healing can help restore hormonal balance, supporting overall physical health.

By addressing and healing emotional wounds, individuals can remove or reduce the psychological barriers that hinder physical healing, leading to a more holistic and comprehensive approach to health and well-being.

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Love and be loved

Part of our nature requires solitude, alone time, and a substantial rugged individualism. But this isn’t the whole story of our nature. We feel happier, warmer and better, live longer, and experience life as more meaningful if we love and let ourselves be loved. We must be individuals (see tips 1 and 2) but we must also relate. To do both, to both be ourselves and relate, requires that we acknowledge the reality of others, include others in our plans, not only speak but listen, and makes ourselves fit by eliminating our more egregious faults and by growing up.

4. Get a grip on your mind

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Nothing causes more emotional distress than the thoughts we think. We must do a better job than we usually do of identifying the thoughts that don’t serve us, disputing them and demanding that they go away, and substituting more useful thoughts. Thinking thoughts that do not serve you is the equivalent of serving yourself up emotional distress. Only you can get a grip on your own mind; if you won’t do that work, you will live in distress.

5. Forget the past

We are not so completely in control of our being that we can prevent past sore points from returning. They have a way of pestering us as anxious sweats, nightmares, sudden sadness, and waves of anger or defeat. But we can nevertheless try to exorcise the past by not playing along with our human tendency to wallow there. We must tell ourselves to move on and mean it. If you have a secret attachment to misery, you will feel miserable. As best you can, imperfectly but with real energy, let go of the past and forget the past.

6. Flip the anxiety switch off

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Rampant anxiety ruins our equilibrium, colors our mood, and makes all the already hard tasks of living that much harder. There are many anxiety management strategies you might want to try—breathing techniques, cognitive techniques, relaxation techniques, and so on—but what will make all the difference is if you can locate that “inner switch” that controls your anxious nature and, deciding that you prefer to live more calmly, flip it to the off position. With one gesture you announce that you will no longer over-dramatize, that you will no longer catastrophize, that you will no longer live a fearful life or create unnecessary anxiety for yourself.

7. Make meaning

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Meaning is nothing more arcane than a certain sort of subjective psychological experience. We can have much more meaning in our life if we stop looking for it, as if it were lost or as if someone else knew more about it than we did, and realize that it is in our power to influence meaning and even make it. By making daily meaning investments and by seizing daily meaning opportunities we hold meaning crises at bay and experience life as meaningful. Meaning problems produce severe emotional distress and learning the art of value-based meaning-making dramatically reduces that distress.

8. Let meaning trump mood

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You can decide that the meaning you make is more important to you than the mood you find yourself in. Rather than saying “I’m blue today” you instead say, “I have my business to build” or “I have my novel to write.” You start each day by announcing to yourself exactly how you intend to make meaning on that day, how you intend to deal with routine chores and tasks, how you intend to relax—how, in short, you mean to spend your day—and you consider all of that, the rich and the mundane alike, as the project of your life, one that you are living with grace and in good spirits. You reduce your emotional distress by checking in more on your intentions and less on your mood.

9. Upgrade your personality

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You may not be the person you would like to be. You may be angrier than you would like to be, more impulsive, more scattered, more self-sabotaging, more undisciplined, more frightened. If so, you require a personality upgrade, which of course only you can supply. You choose a feature of your personality you would like to upgrade and then you ask yourself, what thoughts align with this intention and what actions align with this intention? Then you think the appropriate thoughts and take the necessary action. In this way, you become the person capable of reducing your emotional distress.

10. Deal with circumstances

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Would you experience more distress sunning yourself at the beach or facing a long jail sentence? Circumstances matter. Our economic circumstances matter; our relationships matter; our work conditions matter; our health matters; whether our nation is at peace or occupied by invaders matters. Many circumstances are completely out of our control and many are within our control. We can change jobs or careers, we can divorce, we can reduce our calorie intake, we can stand up or keep quiet, we can do exactly as much as we can do to improve our circumstances. As a result of those improvements, we feel emotionally better. Emotional healing requires that you take real action in the real world.