We all know that physical health depends on a good diet and exercise. But recent research suggests that it also comes from a regular dose of positive emotions.
A new study goes further, not only by showing that positive emotions improve health, but by identifying how they affect people: making people feel socially connected.
In a study published online in Psychological Sciences, researchers divided 65 people into two groups. One of them was trained in the ancient practice of meditation on compassionate love; Others were placed on a waiting list for meditation training. All participants were professors or staff members from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. No one had any experience of prior meditation.
Researchers chose altruistic attention as they write that “it teaches people how to cultivate feelings of love, compassion and goodwill for themselves and others”. Participants in the meditation group attended a one-hour class a week for six weeks. They were asked to complete it with daily practice at home.
Each day of the training period, two weeks before and one week later, participants in both groups were asked to record their attention span, the feelings they felt most strongly about that day and the quality of their reflections. Their social participation.
Researchers assessed participants’ chakra stones health before and after training. To do this, he devised a way to measure participants’ heart rate readings and breathing methods – their “vaginal tone” or the vaginal nerve activity, which regulates heart rate. Wagonal tone has been associated with heart health and researchers have considered it a good, objective measure of physical well-being.
Members of the Affordable Kindness Meditation Group showed greater increases in positive emotions such as fun, fear, and gratitude during training, compared to those on the waiting list. And those who experienced a greater increase in their positive feelings were more likely to feel more socially connected over time, suggesting that they would be “closer in tune” with those around them Used to feel more. These feelings of social connection were, in turn, related to an improvement in vaginal tone.
These results offer some of the strongest evidence to date that positive emotions can improve physical health, but they suggest that experimenting with positive emotions alone is not enough. Instead, the major factor is the influence of positive emotions on our feeling of connection with others. This study is the first to show how the social relationship between positive emotions and better health is important.
According to the authors, led by Bethany Coke and including Barbara Fredrickson, the study is also meant to show that Chakra Stones is not just a definite feature; Rather, “although the vaginal tone is largely constant,” they write, “it can also be improved by continuously improving a person’s feelings and social perceptions.” In fact, they found that even a small amount of positive emotion enhancement can alter vaginal tone and, in fact, physical health.
All these findings are important because they suggest that we can take relatively simple and practical steps to improve our own health.
And if we cannot connect with other people for this time, we can achieve a similar effect by cultivating positive emotions ourselves. Over time, we experience more and more positive emotions, whether it is focusing on love, positive memories, doing activities that we love, taking care of our bodies and our lives. Mind.
The authors describe this entire process as an “upward spiral” in which positive emotions bring us better health – and good health, according to previous research, produces more positive emotions.
“The experiences of recurring moments of positive emotion serve as nutrients for the human body,” he writes, “strengthening social-related feelings and promoting parasympathetic health, which in turn opens up. More enriching emotional and Social Experience. “