#5 How emotional dysregulation lead to disease
Human beings are social creatures, which means we aren’t built to survive on our own. If you were a hunter gatherer living tens of thousands of years in the past, being exiled from your social group would be a death sentence.
Our minds don’t see social belonging just as something that feels nice; they see it as a necessity. Much of our behaviour is motivated by maintaining group cohesion: the shame we feel when we say something hurtful, the impulse to flatter and tell white lies, our natural obsession with gossiping about those close to us. All these actions serve a purpose: to keep us in the group, and therefore safe.
To our ancient brains, belonging means safety. Therefore, isolation feels like a threat to our very existence.
Here’s a quote from Gabor Maté, from his book When the Body Says No:
What do all stressors have in common? Ultimately they all represent the absence of something that the organism perceives as necessary for survival-or its threatened loss. The threatened loss of food supply is a major stressor. So is—for human beings—the threatened loss of love. "It may be said without hesitation," Hans Selye wrote, "that for man the most important stressors are emotional."
Losing your job is stressful because your brain interprets it as a threat to your access to food and shelter. Having a fight with someone close to you is stressful because your brain interprets it as a threat to your access to love, which is a threat to your belonging to a group, which is a threat to your ability to stay alive.
As we know, the modern world contains few threats to our physical safety. If you get rejected by your friends and family, it’s unlikely that you’ll actually starve or freeze to death. But your brain doesn’t know this.
If our brain interprets that our access to love is being threatened on a consistent basis, our body will continually go into a threat response.
What happens when we go into threat response mode? Here’s another quote from Maté book:
To facilitate fight or escape, blood needs to be diverted from the internal organs to the muscles, and the heart needs to pump faster. The brain needs to focus on the threat, forgetting about hunger or sexual drive. Stored energy supplies need to be mobilized, in the form of sugar molecules. The immune cells must be activated. Adrenaline, cortisol and the other stress substances fulfill those tasks.
All these functions must be kept within safe limits: too much sugar in the blood will cause coma; an overactive immune system will soon produce chemicals that are toxic. Thus, the stress response may be understood not only as the body's reaction to threat but also as its attempt to maintain homeostasis in the face of threat.
Maintaining homeostasis while in a continual stress response is hard on the body. The constant strain can then lead to disease.
So you can be a perfectly healthy individual, who is eating the right food and getting the right amount of sleep and is living a cushy, pampered life with all your physical needs met… but if your mind believes your access to love and belonging is being threatened on a constant basis, if you don’t have strong social relationships that make you feel safe… then your body will pay a price.
Emotional health isn’t separate from physical health; the two are interwoven and inextricable.