Molecules of Emotion

You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.  – Elizabeth Gilbert.  

Hello, Beautiful;

Deepak Chopra, world-renowned doctor, guru, and mind-body health expert said:  “The mind is not in the brain. The mind is in every cell of your body.” Your body is a thinking, feeling machine.  I mean this literally – there are cells throughout your body that “listen” and respond to your emotions. Cells that have receptors for neuropeptides; essentially “molecules of emotion” that dock to these receptors each time we experience a strong emotion, either positive or negative.  When these receptors receive that emotional information, our body responds by pumping out more chemicals and hormones that support this emotional state. Chemicals and hormones that are fed to your immune cells, to your digestive system, to your heart, liver, lungs and everywhere in between.  

This is powerful, amazing information to know about.  What is especially exciting, and a little bit frightening about this truth, however, is that it means that it is vital for our own health to take radical responsibility for our emotional states and the way we respond to the emotions of others.  If you have a fight with a family member or your spouse because they are in a bad mood, you take on their negative state in a physiological manner, depressing your immune response, liver function, and heart health. In fact, the immune system is not actually an “immune system” in the way we have thought conventionally at all.  The latest research shows that it is, in fact, a circulating nervous system. You might even say the immune system is a circulating nervous response system.

Sixty percent of your heart cells are called “neural cardiocytes”.  These cells act like brain cells. In fact, the pacemaker cells of your heart are actually neurons and can give you a far better understanding of those intuitive feelings you get about people you meet, the environment you are in and where you need to go than your brain can.  We now understand that the expression “I have a gut feeling”, commonly used since the 1970s, isn’t just a metaphor. It couldn’t be more spot-on: your gut and brain are connected by millions of nerves. The gut itself produces the same chemicals the brain does, and a healthy gut will feed your brain far more accurate information about your external situations, people and environments than your brain alone ever could.  It also works powerfully in creating a cycle within the biome of your body of either health and well-being or lack thereof.

The amount of rest you get each day, the people you spend time with, the degree to which you self-nurture and care, and the food you eat can also support this process, either feeding beneficial gut bacteria; also responsible for our emotional well being, or killing off beneficial bacteria to be replaced with an overgrowth of “bad” bacteria such as candida, E coli or staph.  Simply cutting out chemicals found in “junk” food, artificial sweeteners and eating fewer sugars and processed foods can be huge in either maintaining or restoring a healthy digestive system.  

Exercise:  How are you supporting the physical and emotional health of your body?  How do you feel on a day-to-day basis? Today, if you find yourself reacting negatively to a person or situation, can you take a moment to step back, quietly observe the reaction and allow it to pass?  If you are feeling tuned in to your own state, you might even ask where your reaction is really stemming from – for me, I found myself responding to negative emotions and realized much of the time, it was from a deep-rooted sense of abandonment, begun in earliest childhood.  Just the awareness of this fact was an incredible asset to me in learning to separate others’ emotions from my own.  

It may be difficult at first if you, like me, pick up and respond strongly to others’ moods and emotions, but with practice, you should notice that that response system becomes lessened, and sending people in a negative or even toxic state love and compassion becomes easier.  If all else fails two of my personal favorite mantras are: “Not my circus, not my monkeys” or “Let that shit go”, accompanied by the image of a baby Buddha meditating in a pair of headphones for keeping my own response system – and internal biome – healthy and happy. Play a little with what works for you, but most important is simply the awareness of what is happening in your body each and every time you allow yourself to be drawn into a negative or toxic state.  

Much love, 

• Terah