How may love impact anxiety, depression, and illnesses?
The importance of love in people's overall well-being is unquestionable. This blog will explore love in many contexts and its positive and negative outcomes. It will also provide tips on how to foster love in your life.
What is love about?
Love is directly related to a fundamental need to establish a sense of intimacy or connection with someone. Love is one of the first states that individuals mention when asked to generate names of emotions. Love is a word complicated to be defined in the scientific field. Yet, Love is one of the most potent factors in health and illness.
Love can be explored through numerous frameworks, such as a relationship, an attitude, an experience, and an emotion. Attachment is the most commonly used word in the medical field for love; however, many others may refer to love: nurture, connection, affection, tenderness, bond, commitment, intimacy, and fondness are some of them.
When does the first trauma begin?
The importance of a loving and nurturing environment for an infant to grow healthy is undeniable. Love is the first profound experience with the mother, and numerous traumas that happen in childhood may come from a lack of love. Deprived love experiences with parents may fail to acquire a true sense of self, promoting countless mental and physical issues in later life. This traumatic experience can be epigenetically passed on throughout generations, replicating negative connection patterns.
What may the lack of love cause?
Healthy bonding can make miracles! How we relate to others and ourselves is a powerful determinant of health and illness – even life and death. And much research has been pointing to the impact of lack of love on mental and physical health.
It is widespread for people to go to doctors with somatic complaints, which might be caused by emotional unbalances due to loss of love and intimacy. And there is strong evidence that developing a sense of love and intimacy within relationships seems to minimize or cure numerous diseases.
Familial and social ties help individuals to avoid an increased risk of dying from several illnesses, including coronary disease, cancer, anxiety, depression, and all other causes of death.
What does the research say?
The simple touching of someone is a powerful way to begin healing and reduce loneliness and isolation.
A significant reduction in irregular heartbeats occurs when the nurse or doctor touches the patients to take their pulse
Individuals who live in hostile and toxic relationships and environments are more prone to develop coronary diseases.
Individuals with lung cancer tend to have more troubled interpersonal relationships and difficulty expressing emotions.
Individuals who feel isolated tend to experience an elevated risk of dying of cancer.
Higher suicide rates are related to lower social integration.
Individuals with close social ties tend to live longer than those with poor social connections.
Couples with unhealthy relationships may have more significant increases in blood pressure that remain elevated longer.
Married people live longer than single, separated, widowed, or divorced people.
Unmarried individuals are more likely to commit suicide than those married.
How can individuals subside anxiety, depression, and chronic illness from deprived love?
Awareness. It is the first step toward change. Reflecting on the quality of your relationships may help you understand your needs.
Normalizing experience. You are not alone. Individuals are thirsty for love and connections of all different kinds.
Journaling. Writing may help you to understand. It is one of the best ways to make sense of people's feelings and behavior. Fostering the writing habit helps individuals untangle their emotions and create a better understanding of experience to facilitate change.
Self-challenge. People can change; they are not trees! Experience a favorable modification every week. It is not because individuals had a challenging experience that they cannot change. Individuals can heal themselves! In the end, they will see that it was worth it!
Therapy. There are effective and short-term therapies that can help individuals to heal in a brief period.
Communication. Improving communication is the best way to foster healthy relationships. It is not what we say but how we say it!
Empathy. Treating others the way we like to be treated is the key to attracting and maintaining good connections!
Kindness. It is important to nurture good feelings and self-appreciation. The more individuals practice self-love, the more they can connect and develop healthy relationships with others.
Social groups. Challenge yourself: put yourself out there! Join groups with like-minded people. The Internet is a great resource for finding affinity groups depending on individuals’ preferences.
It seems that the real epidemic in our culture is not physical heart disease but an emotional one. Emotional heart issues foster profound feelings of loneliness, isolation, alienation, anxiety, and depression, which may be the root cause of our society's illness, cynicism, and violence. There is a biological basis for our need to form loving human relationships in our hearts. If we fail to fulfill that need, our health is in peril.
About the Author
Dr. Noelia Leite is an integrative psychotherapist and holds a doctoral degree in mind-body medicine. She practices as a licensed marriage and family therapist and holds advanced certifications as a clinical hypnotherapist and yoga therapist.
She has lived, studied, and worked worldwide, being a speaker at conferences and collaborating in multiple peer review articles and magazines. Her eclectic and holistic clinical approach blends innovative scientific interventions, healing practices, and spiritual and philosophical traditions.
Her private practice is located in Miami, FL, and she also sees clients online. Her ultimate goal is to help individuals, couples, and professionals break free from any negative ties that may stop them from living their lives to the fullest.
