Two psychotherapeutic approaches. At the first, my client tells how much she was worried about something. Her husband, trying to calm her down, said: “Do not let all this go through you! Stop worrying, you will be nervous and angry all the time – you will earn oncology. On the same day, another client relayed to me the words of her gastroenterologist: “You don’t express emotions very well. We must express! Don’t keep your anger inside. This will lead to cancer!” And both of my clients wanted to know if that was true.
Some believe that giving vent to negative emotions is dangerous for health, and cite scientific studies. Others believe that the suppression of emotions is more dangerous, and also cite research. The main problem is that most of these studies are either misinterpreted or not credible.
To compare our ways of responding to stress, cognitive therapists David Barlow and Stefan Hoffman conducted an interesting experiment. Its participants, patients with anxiety disorders, watched an emotionally charged scene from the movie The Deer Hunter, in which Robert De Niro’s character, having been captured, is forced to play Russian roulette over and over again. Half of the participants were instructed to contain their emotions as much as possible, the rest were allowed to express them freely.
The problem arises when we constantly respond to stress in only one way.
Viewers from the second group calmed down faster and better, which was quite expected. This was reflected not only in subjective experiences, but also, for example, in the heart rate. But the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the activity of internal organs, reacted in approximately the same way in both cases. This means that a single suppression or expression of emotions does not have significant consequences for our body.
Any researcher in today’s popular field called “psycho-oncology” will tell you that the link between stress and cancer is much more complex than just letting off steam or not letting off steam. There’s a lot we don’t know yet about the connection between emotions and health.
The problem arises when we constantly react in only one way – we suppress our emotions all the time or, conversely, we are in a state of eternal irritation to the whole wide world. But even in this case, it cannot be said that you will get cancer.