July 17th, 2011 | Posted in Emotions+Stress
Ancient and contemporary papers report that acupuncture and its variations have a considerable effect on psychological state and behaviour. Evidence from experimental and clinical studies suggests that acupuncture and its variations exert a strong influence on endogenous opioids in the brain, and that the endogenous opioid system is involved in various mental functions. It is suggested that the endogenous opioid system can play the key role in the mediation of the effects of acupuncture and its variations on mood, behaviour, learning, and memory. These findings have great implications for helping people learn to modulate emotional stress.
When it comes to handling disturbing emotions, people can learn to improve with meditation, using active imagination techniques, exercise, diet and other body-mind, energy-balancing techniques such as: acupuncture, shiatsu, massage, —for instance, to recover their calmness more quickly—without having to resort to chemical medicines.
Extract from ‘Destructive Emotions’ Scientific Explanations: The Brain’s influence on the body.
The frontal lobes, the amygdala and the hippocampus are all extensively connected with the body, in particular with the immune system, with the endocrine system, which regulates hormones and with the autonomic nervous system which regulates heart rate, blood pressure and so on. This begins to provide some clue as to how the mind can influence the body, so that we can understand the impact of emotions not just on our mental health but also on our physical health.
Evidence suggests that regions of the left frontal cortex play an important role in positive emotion, while the right frontal lobe plays that role in certain negative emotions.
With fear, we see an area of activation in the right cortex, reflecting increased metabolism in this region. Positive picture stimulation active areas all on the left side, with none on the right side—it’s a very different pattern from negative emotions. This pattern holds for all right-handed people and most, but not all, left-handed people.
We know that a very strong emotion will, in most people, affect the emotional state in the next moment. Most people don’t recover quickly from a strong emotion; it takes some period of time. Some people recover more quickly, while other people take a long time. This is a very significant difference among people.
Coming Back to a Condition of Calm After Emotional stimulation
People differ in their emotional reactions. There are profound differences among people in how they respond to the same event. This is the key to understanding why some people are prone to negative emotions and why other people may be much less vulnerable. That is, differences in the brain, but that does not mean that those differences are genetic. There is a lot of reason to believe that many of these differences in the brain are the product of people’s experience.
One of the most important differences is ‘recovery function’. This refers to how long it takes for a person to come back to a quiet baseline condition of calm after being provoked by an emotion. Certain people have a very prolonged response and others come back to baseline very quickly.
People who come back to baseline quickly are those who have less activation in the amygdala and whose activation is shorter in duration. They are people who also show more activation in the left prefrontal cortex—the area important for positive emotion. These are also people who report that their everyday experience is filled with feelings of vigour, optimism and enthusiasm.
The person who is able to recover quickly also has a lower level of cortisol, which plays a role in stress. Cortisol is a hormone released by the adrenal glands which sit over the kidneys, but are controlled by the brain. When a stressful event occurs in the environment most people will release cortisol, but the people who recover quickly have lower levels of cortisol in general, at baseline. We know that when cortisol is present at high levels over a long period of time, it may kill cells in the hippocampus—which has been documented in disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder and severe depression.
The last point is that people who recover quickly also have better function in certain measures of immunity, which implies that they may show better physical health as well. To give one example, they have higher levels of natural killer cell activity, a primary defence that the immune system uses to fight off many kinds of foreign antigens that enter our body, from cancerous tumour cells to the common cold.
