Last update: 24 November 2017
Hypertension is a psychosomatic illness. This means that physical factors are involved, but also mental ones; in fact, the relationship between emotions and hypertension is possible.
Hypertension is characterized by an increase in the pressure exerted by the blood against the arterial walls, well beyond the limits considered normal. Millions of people around the world suffer from this problem. Although it is more common once you reach middle age, it can show up at any time.
The exact cause of hypertension is unknown. Furthermore, it is a chronic disease, meaning that it can be controlled, but not cured. It can cause serious consequences, in fact in the most extreme cases it can lead to heart failure or stroke.
All experts agree that emotional factors greatly affect the increase in blood pressure, especially following very strong impacts or stressful emotional states. Some professionals, including researcher Luis Chiozza, go further and also attribute a very important role to unconscious processes as risk factors or protective factors for hypertension.
Let's see in detail the relationship between emotions and hypertension.
"What people keep silent with their lips they usually express with gestures or attitudes, but also with the same functioning of the organs."
Emotions and hypertension
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Franz Alexander is a doctor who has studied the relationship between emotions and hypertension. Taking the cases he treated as a reference model, he came to the conclusion that there is a link between contained or inhibited anger and this pathology. In his studies he points out that hypertensive patients are often submissive and dependent people who, at the same time, have difficulty expressing a disagreement. This emotional condition ends up turning into hostility and resentment.
According to the researcher, the tension that occurs between what is desired and reality gives rise to hypertension. Physiologically, the contradiction between anger and its suppression harms blood vessels.
To put it in simpler terms, sacrificing a little precision in the name of simplicity, we can say that many times hypertension occurs because two feelings are opposed, which in turn correspond to two physiological processes. Anger, which increases the circulatory impulse, and repression, which causes vasoconstriction. This tension increases and it is then that hypertension proper arises.
Mittelman and Reiser, other scholars who agree with this approach, indicate that the emotion contained may be due to several reasons. One of these alludes to the frustrated desires of addiction. In other words, patients have long wanted someone to take care of them, but it was impossible. Other sources of contained anger are the damage inflicted on self-esteem, the feeling of threat of losing one's position, disagreement with a feared authority, etc.
Feeling of inferiority
Viktor Von Weizsaecker, a famous German physician, adds to the previous explanations that contained anger relates to hypertension through a feeling of humiliationAnd. Those suffering from this pathology feel that they have not reached their vital goals and the disease is a way to compensate for the distance between what one is and what one wants to be.
On the same line of thinking, Dr. Luis Chiozza points out that hypertension occurs when we feel that our personal dignity has been damaged. In this sense, the hypertensive person perceives that he has been treated unfairly and experiences a feeling of lack of protection from the offenses or ill-treatment received.
All of these authors speak from a psychoanalytic perspective. From this approach we intend to decipher the unconscious symptoms that very often affect the body, as happens with psychosomatic diseases. They see disease as the symbol of an unconscious reality. It must be said that all of them have been heavily criticized by the positivist currents who regard their formulations as mere speculations.
Beyond the theoretical debates, in several cases treating hypertensive patients on the basis of these hypotheses improves their conditions. Similarly, many clinical cases show a clear relationship between emotions and hypertension, specifically between aggression and hypertensive crisis. For this reason, sufferers of this disease should perhaps ask themselves how fulfilled and respected they feel. Perhaps the answer to this question is the key to improving one's health.
