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Harvard Heart Letter | May 2008
It’s time to accentuate the positive
Positive thoughts and feelings may help your heart thrive.
Depression,
social isolation, anxiety, hostility, emotional stress. When it comes
to heart disease, the negative aspects of psychological functioning
have gotten most of the attention. They have been shown to increase the
chances of developing various sorts of cardiovascular disease, and they
can make existing diseases worse. What about the flip side? Can
happiness or an upbeat approach to life protect the heart and blood vessels?
Folk
wisdom says yes. But there’s precious little hard data to back up this
notion. A small number of studies have demonstrated that positive
thoughts or an optimistic outlook confer some protection. The latest
contribution in this area looks at positive feelings.
Psychologists
Laura Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health and Rebecca
Thurston of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the
impact of emotional vitality. This gauges a person’s feelings of
energy, sense of well-being, and ability to regulate his or her
emotions.
The researchers crunched information collected
between 1971 and 1975 from more than 6,000 initially healthy men and
women taking part in the first National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey. Based on answers to six questions (see “Rating
emotional vitality”), they classified each participant as having low,
moderate, or high emotional vitality.
During the 15-year
period following the health survey, 16.4% of people in the high
emotional vitality group had a heart attack, developed angina or
another form of coronary artery disease, or died of heart disease,
compared with 19.5% in the low vitality group. Although that may not
seem like a large difference, applied to the United States as a whole
it could translate into thousands of fewer cases of heart disease or
deaths each year.Greater emotional vitality wasn’t just a
stand-in for less depression — its benefits remained after the
researchers took depression into account. Instead, it seemed to exert
its own special effect.
How could feeling energetic, having
a sense of well-being, or being on an even emotional keel guard the
heart? By counteracting stress, emotional vitality could calm the
stress-induced arousal of the nervous system that boosts heart rate,
elevates blood pressure, and activates inflammation and other heart
disease–promoting processes. Positive emotions might contribute to an
individual’s sense of control over his or her destiny, which has been
associated with protection against heart disease. It might make it
easier to make or use social connections. Then again, it could be that
people with high emotional vitality are less likely to develop heart
disease because they have healthier behaviors, like smoking less,
exercising more, or controlling their weight.
Rating emotional vitality
Want
to calculate your own emotional vitality score? These questions can
help. Circle the number below each question that best represents how
you feel.
Have you been waking up fresh and rested?
0=None of the time;
1=Rarely;
2=Less than half of the time;
3=Fairly often;
4=Most every day;
5=Every day
How much energy, pep, vitality have you felt on a scale of 0–10?
From 0=No energy at all, listless to 10=Very energetic, dynamic
How happy, satisfied, or pleased have you been with your personal life?
0=Very dissatisfied;
1=Somewhat dissatisfied;
2=Satisfied, pleased;
3=Fairly happy;
4=Very happy;
5=Extremely happy — could not be more pleased
Has your daily life been full of things that are interesting to you?
0=None of the time;
1=A little of the time;
2=Some of the time;
3=A good bit of the time;
4=Most of the time;
5=All of the time
Have you been in firm control of behavior, thoughts, emotions, feelings?
0=No, and I am very disturbed;
1=No, and I am somewhat disturbed;
2=Not too well;
3=Generally so;
4=Yes, for the most part;
5=Yes, definitely so
Have you been feeling stable and sure of yourself?
0=None of the time;
1=A little of the time;
2=Some of the time;
3=A good bit of the time;
4=Most of the time;
5=All of the time
Add up your points. A score of 0 to 22 indicates low emotional vitality; 23–27 is medium emotional vitality; and 28–35 is high emotional vitality.
Source: NHANES questionnaire, 1971–197
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Focus on the good, not the bad
Your
genes, early learning, and family and social environments set the stage
for whether your outlook on life is essentially positive or negative.
If yours is a bit on the negative side, don’t despair. It isn’t set in
stone (or the legion of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental
health counselors would be searching for work!) and working to improve
it is actually one of the hottest trends in mental health.
This
goes beyond the “power of positive thinking.” It involves several
different approaches. One is deliberately focusing on events or
activities that give you pleasure and taking a mental snapshot to
recall later and maybe jot down in a “gratitude journal” or share with
others. Another is engaging in activities that call on your inherent
strengths, either at work, home, or play. A third route entails
applying your strengths to something outside yourself that helps you
create meaning in your life. It could be religion, nature, art,
volunteering, or something else.
Legendary songwriters
Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer had it right in the 1940s when they
wrote: “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,
latch on to the affirmative.”
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