Saturday, March 27, 2010

Anger and Your Heart

There have been a number of studies over the years describing the relationship between emotions and physical illness. Simply put, it is impossible to separate our emotional and physical selves; this relationship is the so-called "mind-body connection."
Therefore it is not surprising that one of our more powerful emotions, anger, has been associated with physical disease. For the most part, it has come to be understood that both stifled anger and high levels of anger are risk factors for coronary heart disease, or heart attack.
In a study published earlier this year in the American Heart Journal, authors Davidson and Mostofsky looked not only at anger, but at various types of anger. Specifically, they found that different kinds of anger impart different levels of CHD risk. In other words, it's not so much that one is angry, it's how that anger is expressed that seems to matter.

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