How Emotions Affect Your Organs

What goes on in your mind has a profound effect on your body. Thoughts and emotions affect all organs, including the immune, nervous, hormonal, circulatory, and reproductive systems. Emotional wellness is a vital part of your health & total wellness. When our emotions become excessive or repressed for a long time, they negatively impact the energy flow through our meridians.

Your Heart and Your Emotions

The heart pumps blood to nourish the cells but can get weakened due to anxiety and stress. Anxiety can affect the heart’s normal functioning, raising your blood pressure and white blood cell count and increasing blood sugar through the action of adrenalin. Stress affects circulation, the heart, and the nervous system. In early Western medicine, doctors already believed emotions caused diseases. A powerful mind-body connection through which emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and behavioral factors can directly affect our health. Living with fear often leads to depression and negatively impacts health. Learning to unwind before bed and nourishing a grateful heart with optimistic thinking by writing in a gratitude journal is good for your health.

Connecting Emotions and Wellness

The connection between emotions and the human body has been a core topic throughout the history of science. Research indicates there are close relationships between emotions and bodily reactions during the formation of mental experiences. Physiological responses, such as cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, skeletomuscular, and autonomic nervous systems, trigger emotional experiences. Now, we understand that direct and instantaneous interactions within the body allow an emotion to be a mental recognition and a feeling within the body.

The mind and body are within a unified framework. Different functions and components of the bodily system are related to corresponding categorical emotions.

A 2017 research on “Understanding Mind-Body Interaction from the Perspective of East Asian Medicine” analyzed relationships between the visceral system and emotions according to the principles of East Asian medicine.

The research concluded the following:
-anger was related to the liver,
-happiness to the heart,
-thoughtfulness to the heart and spleen,
-sadness to the heart and lungs,
-fear to the kidneys, heart, liver, and gallbladder,
-surprise to the heart and gallbladder, and
-anxiety to the heart and the lungs.

The research also demonstrated that specific patterns existed between the visceral system and corresponding emotions, which suggests that each emotion is primarily associated with a connected body system and corresponds to the principles of East Asian medicine. For example, the DongUiBoGam, the Korean book compiled by the royal physician Heo Jun and was first published in 1613, states the following: “The liver is in charge of anger, the heart is in charge of happiness, the spleen is in charge of thoughtfulness, the lungs are in charge of sadness, and the kidneys are in charge of fear.”

Imbalances in emotions can lead to illnesses in their corresponding organs, such as
-anger damages the liver,
-happiness damages the heart,
-thoughts damages the spleen,
-anxiety damages the lungs,
-fear damages the kidneys, and
-surprise damages the gallbladder.

The relationship between the mind and the body is horizontal, meaning the heart is significantly prevalent in most emotions. Experts consider the heart as common visceral system that influences emotions. The Korean book states the heart stores the mind, and feelings of sadness, thoughtfulness, and worries all damage the heart, signifying the heart’