Modern life is full of emotional challenges. The pressure to succeed, the need to “keep up,” the fear of missing out, and the desire for fulfilling relationships and job satisfaction can generate highly intense and unstable combinations of emotions.
However, what society teaches us is not how to work with our emotions, but rather how to block and avoid them. And we do this quite well: between alcohol consumption, the use of prescription drugs, and screen time, there are countless ways to avoid what we feel. When we do recognize our feelings, we tend to push them away using phrases we learned in childhood (“mind over matter,” “pull yourself together,” “tough it out”).
Repressing emotions is detrimental to both mental and physical health. It’s like pressing the gas pedal and the brake at the same time: it creates a sort of internal pressure cooker. Emotions carry an energy that pushes to be expressed, and to stifle them, the mind and body deploy creative strategies, including muscle tension and holding our breath. Symptoms like anxiety and depression can stem precisely from the way we manage these deep, automatic, and innate emotions, which are biological forces that shouldn’t be ignored. When the mind blocks the flow of emotions because they are too intense or conflicting, it generates both mental and physical stress, leading to psychological distress and physical symptoms. Emotional stress, such as that caused by repressed emotions, has been linked not only to mental health disorders but also to physical issues like heart disease, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, insomnia, and autoimmune diseases. Most people are driven by their emotions without even realizing it. But once you understand their power, simply acknowledging them can be a tremendous help.
Consider Laura, a patient of mine, who was deeply troubled by a recurring and severe form of psoriasis. The plaques on her skin caused her not only physical discomfort but also intense emotional distress, embarrassment, and anxiety about being judged by others. Beneath this dermatological issue lay a hidden web of anxiety, stress, and unexpressed emotions. Laura was experiencing a mix of sadness, anger, shame, and anxiety, which she tended to repress without realizing it. She also had clear physical symptoms, and while she suspected her psoriasis might be aggravated by stress, she wasn’t aware of just how much her emotions impacted her skin flare-ups. Because she hadn’t paid attention to her emotional inner world, she lacked the tools to feel better.
Current neuroscience suggests that the more a person experiences emotions and inner conflicts, the more their anxiety increases. This is partly due to the vagus nerve, one of the body’s primary emotional centers, which responds to emotions triggered in the midbrain by sending signals to the heart, lungs, and gut. These signals prepare the body for immediate action to ensure survival. The body is ready to react to a perceived threat before the person is even consciously aware of the triggered emotion.
This is why emotions are not under our conscious control. In Laura’s case, for instance, situations involving pressure or judgment rapidly triggered anxiety, shame, and tension. Her body reacted almost immediately, and her skin became one of the main outlets for this distress, causing her psoriasis to worsen.
Laura’s symptoms persisted until, through therapy, she learned to listen to her body, recognize and distinguish each emotion, name them, and tend to them one by one.
The role of emotions in both creating physical suffering and facilitating healing is becoming an increasingly central topic. However, this growing field is not yet part of standard medical care. Yet, simply teaching people that emotions are not under conscious control would be enormously helpful. Basic biology and anatomy explain that we cannot stop emotions from triggering, as they originate in a part of the brain that operates outside our conscious awareness.
However, when people receive emotional education and learn skills to manage their feelings, they can begin to heal. Laura began to improve physically as well once she allowed herself to connect with her sadness and the frustration surrounding her condition. She recognized and validated her anger, understanding that it was entirely natural. She learned specific strategies to express that anger in a healthy way, without harming herself or others. She practiced self-compassion when facing the shame and discomfort associated with her psoriasis, and eventually, those emotions began to fade.
As she fully experienced her emotions, they began to flow and subside, as core emotions do when they are truly felt in the body. By working through her feelings, she also altered her body’s stress response, helping to reduce the intensity and frequency of her skin flare-ups.
My patients tend to avoid emotions, just as most of us do, because that is what we have been taught. But to heal the mind, we must move through the emotions tied to our experiences, which reside in the body. When we understand the automatic nature of emotions and learn to identify and work with the core feelings underlying our anxiety, we feel better, and we perform better.
