Emotional well-being and alopecia part 1

I am currently reading the book Emotional Intelligence and learning how the author, Daniel Goleman, defines the meaning of intelligence. He explains that people with a modest IQ can outperform those with a high IQ if they are more self-aware, have more self-discipline, and have more empathy. This month I will be talking about the importance of becoming aware of our emotions and how this applies to autoimmune health and alopecia specifically.

self awareness

Self-awareness means being aware of our state of mind and the thoughts we have related to that state of mind. So, for example, if we are angry because someone insulted us, acknowledging the anger and accepting it means that we accept it. We can then put the emotion into perspective by assigning a value to it as it relates to our personal experience. We may be angry about the name we were called because it evokes the same feeling we had when we were called names in high school. This is our attachment to emotion. Once we can rationalize why this is triggering us, we can deal with it without necessarily having to react. Self-aware people tend to be sure of their limits and often have a more positive outlook on life. When they are in a bad mood, your attention helps them control their feelings and therefore they can go ahead and get out of that mood sooner than people who are not self-aware.

People who are not self-aware fall into one of two categories; one is people who feel overwhelmed and unable to escape their emotions. These people tend to feel overwhelmed or controlled by their emotions and are unable to put them into perspective. The other category is people who accept their feelings but don’t try to change them. They may or may not be generally happy people, but if they become melancholic, they are more likely to become depressed due to their laissez-faire attitude.

The physiology of emotions

We now accept that psychological activity and biological activity are interdependent; they depend on each other and are in constant communication. Psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology (PNIE) is the name of the discipline that studies the interrelationship between organs and hormones that regulate our behavior and physiology through the brain, nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system (hormones). The PNIE system is like a giant switchboard, always on with coordinated messages that come in from all directions and go out to all directions at the same time. It also follows that any short-term or chronic stimulus that acts on any part of the PNIE system has the potential to affect other parts as well. one

When a person who is not self-aware gets ‘stuck’ in a negative emotion or continually tries to repress a negative emotion, the limbic portion of the brain (emotional center) will send messages that the body is under threat to the pituitary, which they then secrete ACTH, which will then cause the adrenal gland to secrete cortisol and the adrenal medulla to secrete adrenaline, which will then stimulate the nervous system.

If the nervous system is over stimulated for a period of time (the period of time will vary from person to person), it will begin to attack tissue or cells in the area of ​​the body that is inherently weak. For people with autoimmune disorders, this is the immune system. Autoimmune disease occurs when a patient’s immune system mistakes part of their own tissue for an invading foreign organism, attacks, and attempts to destroy that part of the tissue. For those of us with alopecia, it’s our hair follicles that are under attack.

So when emotions such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, lack of information, fear, anger, and sadness become chronic and/or stressful, they manifest as diseases in our bodies. Being aware of how these emotions feel in our bodies and where we feel them is part of the self-awareness process. It means learning to detect how our bodies interpret warnings that may have missed our intellect or are being suppressed. Some of these warning messages come to us in the form of anxiety, tension, headaches, backaches, fatigue, sweating, or insomnia. The ability to see these signs and symptoms as they occur alerts us to the fact that we need to pay attention to what is bothering us and address it before it progresses.

This retraining of the emotional circuitry is imperative for our general well-being. Health is balance in the body, mind/emotions and soul, so to ignore any area is to cause illness and disease.

References

1. Gabor Mate MD, When the Body Says No 2. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence