Remember, take care of your body because it is yours to cherish. If you don't, life will be hard to manage, and every little incident, small or large, that happens will become a huge risk towards a sound, healthy life.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Your Emotional Intelligence, intelligent management of your emotions, influences your immune system. As researcher Candace Pert says, our emotions are in every cell. One of EQ competencies, Personal Power is particularly important. It means opposite of feeling hopeless and helpless.

According to Society for Neuroscience, “one important determinant of immune system’s resistance or susceptibility to disease may be a person’s sense of control as opposed to a feeling of helplessness.” Further, they think it’s PERCEPTION of control or helplessness that influences these physiological responses which in turn affect immune system.

And what jobs do they mention as being particularly stressful in this way? Telephone operators, waiters and waitresses, and cashiers, “jobs that carry high demands and low control.”

Individuals who can regulate pace and style of their work have lower rates of heart disease. Going back to “executive monkey” experiments of a decade ago, monkey who could control shocks handled stress better than one who couldn’t.

Note that it’s PERCEPTION. In other words, if you could change your perception, you could do a lot for your wellness. One way to change your perception is to learn and understand emotions better, so that eventually you can tamp them down when necessary. Then your perception of event will be that you can handle it, and that makes a difference.

The goal is not to become numb. We need information and vitality we get from our emotions. Also, short-lived and immediate response to stress. It helps us in long-term, giving us extra strength we need to cope with threat. We’ve all read in news about people performing incredible acts in order to save people they love. In addition, immediate physiological responses protect us and help re-re-establish homeostasis.

Those of us in public speaking understand this phenomenon. You learn to allow adrenalin to pump up just enough to get you “up’ sufficiently for presentation, but not so much that anxiety takes over, or that you’re exhausted afterwards. You also learn to put it out of your mind until needed; otherwise you’d be up all night before! It becomes a matter of management, which is what Emotional Intelligence is all about.

Learn more about intelligent management and use of emotions. It can affect your wellness.

Resource: “Brain Facts,” www.sfn.org