Happiness and it's link with physical health

[rousseau]

As time has gone by I've become more naturalistic in world-view. And with that I've realized more and more how closely tied my level of contentment is to my physical health. In fact, at this point I'd be comfortable making the claim that any time in my life where I've been happy and content has coincided with physical balance

I start this thread now because yesterday I saw this happen to me pretty acutely, and it made me think. Yesterday morning I was feeling pretty bad and at the time I associated my life with nothing but negativity. Then I realized that I was in real need of exercise, and so I walked to the college and took a run on a treadmill. Then like that the negativity disappeared.

What's interesting about this is when you look at my mind-set before and after the workout. Before the workout it felt like my life was awful, after the workout it felt like my life was great. With that in mind it can't really be said that either perspective about my life is actually correct, and instead what you can say is something like: "when you feel good you feel good, when you feel bad you feel bad".

Going further, when I was feeling negative I was trying to think my way out of my depression, which had absolutely no effect, but moving closer to physical balance had the exact effect I was looking for. So with that in mind you could say that positive mental health stems from positive physical health, and may only have a loose coupling to thought in terms of affect.

The take home message is that as we move closer and closer to an atheistic / materialist society we gradually accept that our sense of self isn't a static thing, and most of the time it's instead tightly coupled to how how we've treated our body.

 

[ryan]

Yeah, exercise is good for so many reasons.

 

[ronburgundy]

Your thoughts are partly supported by recent neuroscience coupled 'ol fashioned behavioral science methods that have been making a strong case that emotion is a conscious experience of bodily states, and that is the case whether it is a bodily state caused by general health, acute pain, or triggered by learned responses to immediate stimuli.
Nervous system reactions from heartbeat and sweat to muscle contractions in the body and face (which we usually think are caused by an experienced emotional state) are actually unconscious learned bodily responses arising prior to and giving rise to subjectively experienced emotion.
Although, once an emotion is experienced as a subjective feeling it serves as a kind of feedback loop that heightens the bodily response in part by triggering thoughts and memories that serve as additional stimuli to which our body reacts, intensifying the emotion, and so on. Thus, conscious control over using one's focus of attention can help avoid or get out of such feedback loops, putting the body in a more relaxed state, where immune function is more effective.

Some of the more interesting evidence comes from acute cases where people have damage to brain areas needed for experiencing emotion. Subjectively they report completely flat affect to strongly positive or negative stimuli, yet the person still has bodily responses associated with strong emotional reactions, such as nervous system responses and muscular contractions including the face muscles show what we mistakenly call "emotional expression". Both physio measures and human observers can use the persons bodily reactions accurately determine whether the stimuli the person is seeing is positive or negative, showing that the objectively observable bodily responses are largely unchanged, despite no actually experienced emotion. This suggests that bodily responses are a response to the stimuli itself and precede emotional experience rather than merely follow from it.

Note I said "partly supported" because although bodily states seem to be the basis of subjective emotion, there is evidence that one can "think their way out of" emotional states both by exerting conscious control over body-feeling-thought-body feedback loop, and by directly controlling bodily states, such as slowing one's breathing, and unconstricting muscles. A given emotional state can vary in how much of it is being caused by health issues, immediate stimuli, or the feeling-thought feedback loop. So, the degree that one can "think their way out" of an emotional state will depend upon how much of role thought is playing in the creating that state.