Do Feelings Influence Physical Health?

Do you value the emotional experiences of your life? That may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer, but take a moment to consider it.

A large part of life’s worth comes from the cascade of fleeting, often subtle emotions that can be enjoyed daily—some predictably and others less so.

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Think of the spark of joy you might feel upon seeing the coy smile of a loved one who has just made an unexpectedly hilarious joke at your expense. Imagine the pleasant surprise that might wash over you during an overcast week in November if the long-absent sun were to break through the clouds and suddenly warm your face.

Even the so-called “negative” emotions can have their own charms—or at least they can make life more interesting. Imagine the sweet sadness you might feel when noticing that your aged, beloved, and once-sprightly dog is slowly trying and failing to jump up onto the couch. Think about how angry you might feel if a recklessly rude driver were to deliberately steal your parking spot just as you were steering into it. For better or worse, emotions make up the experiential fabric of our lives.

Do you also value your physical health? You may be thinking: “Yes! Who doesn’t?” Indeed, we are generally highly motivated to avoid illness, maintain our physical mobility, and promote the health of all the important functions of our bodies that keep us alive, pain-free, and independently functional for as long as possible. We are hard-wired to care about our physical well-being.

Now, here’s another question: Do you appreciate how your emotions might affect your health? If so, have you ever tried to change how you were feeling to improve your mental health and physical health? Despite strongly valuing our psychological and physical well-being, many of us do not recognize just how closely interrelated these important facets of life truly are.

Emotions may seem too ephemeral, too abstract, or too localized “just in our heads” to have any real effect on serious health outcomes as concrete and consequential as whether we develop hypertension, whether we experience atrial fibrillation, or whether we recover poorly after a heart attack. Nevertheless, in both small and large ways, our emotions continually shape our physical well-being (Consedine, 2008). Our emotions manifest somatically (i.e., in our bodies) just as much as cognitively (i.e., in our minds) (Thagard & Aubie, 2008).

Emotions’ effects on health run the gamut, ranging from beneficial to harmful and from transient to long-lasting. In the short term, for instance, if we endure a period of high perceived stress, then we may be more likely to contract a common cold (Cohen, Tyrrell, & Smith, 1991). In the longer term, people who tend to experience more frequent positive emotions live longer than those who experience less (Diener & Chan, 2011). Similarly, highly optimistic people have at least 50% greater odds of living to the age of 85 compared to people with low optimism (Lee et al., 2019).

I am an affective scientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. I study the emotions and health outcomes of cardiac patients who have recently experienced frightening life-threatening medical events. There are many points of intersection to explore due to the wide variety of emotion-related factors (e.g., positive affect, purpose in life, depression, anxiety) and the complexities of how those factors may affect our bodies over time.

Here’s a blunt truth. Ready? Many of us will contend with one or more chronic diseases at some point in our lives. Some of you reading this now have been managing such diseases for years. As you may know well from personal experience or that of a loved one, the onset of chronic disease is associated with an increased risk of subsequently experiencing clinical depression.

Similarly, after an acute medical event, such as a sudden heart attack or stroke, people have an increased risk of developing potentially debilitating levels of psychological distress, which in turn may increase the risk of secondary cardiovascular events (Edmondson & von Känel, 2017). An important topic to be covered is whether these kinds of mental health symptoms after medical events may be significantly reduced or even prevented, and if so, how.

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There is good news amid all this talk of impending disease, disability, and mortality. (Are you still with me?) By fully recognizing the influences among our moods, emotions, and physical health, we may be able to identify modifiable psychological factors that could be instrumental in allowing us to steer toward better patterns of thinking and behaving that may substantially improve our lives. For example, research shows that optimism and positive affect are associated with better health (Chida & Steptoe, 2008) and are modifiable (Heekerens & Eid, 2021). The goal of increasing positive psychological factors and reducing negative ones may not be as impossible as, at first, it may seem. Doing so could foster both our mental and physical well-being over the course of a long life.