Comments on: ‘How Your Mood Affects Your Health’

By: lower back pain medicine

lower back pain medicine — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:47:09 +0000

I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article. I am desiring the same best work from you in the future as well. In fact your fanciful writing abilities has prompted me to start my own blog now. Actually the blogging is distributing its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine instance of it.

By: ashleycunningham

ashleycunningham — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:17:54 +0000

While reading “How Your Mood Affects Your Health” and seeing connections between how one’s feelings are a driver to the state of his/her health, thoughts of finals last semester rushed through my head. I tend to overreact when it comes to studying, classes, and grades and when finals come around, my nerves take over my entire being. I find myself constantly worrying about what little fact I need to study, am extremely irritable, and feel like finding time to do normal everyday tasks like eat, sleep, and relax just isn’t possible. Because of all of this abnormal stress, I found myself with the worst cold possible. No matter how much my parents and friends tell me to “calm down” I simply can’t. In my opinion, the verbal encouragement doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me. In connection with the idea of humor helping out breast cancer patients, it is evident that some other form of encouragement must be able to decrease stress, especially for the typical nervous exam taker like me. I have heard of dogs being brought into hospitals to bring happiness to ill patients. Also, while growing up, it was not uncommon for people to take stuffed animals to hospitals to cheer up sick children or elderly people. Even though stressed out students do not have serious illnesses looming over them, the moods and feelings that are created before, during, and after exam time can be detrimental to one’s health. With all of this said, colleges and universities can attempt to enhance students’ performance and mood during exam time by offering some type of mood changers. It’s probably too extreme to recommend pets being brought in to play with to decrease stress levels but short social gatherings that provide food and beverages, even some dancing or other sporting activities may allow those that get stressed to relax their emotions just for a moment and help their health in the end.

By: jzabel

jzabel — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:30:36 +0000

Continuing a thought brought up in the previous post, humor, especially in medical situations, can be used to relieve stress which barriers between the doctor and patient, as well as between sick and well persons, create. As mentioned in the initial post, this adjusts the bodies hormones and brings them into a more healthy balance. In a chapter of the book “The Body in Medical Culture” which is in the process of being published, this aspect of laughter is addressed as a means to give common grounds for two different groups to approach death and human sufferring. Without it, stress and emotions would run too high for any productive work to be accomplished. It gives the doctors and the patients a tiny bit of power in what often appears to be a powerless situation, such as terminal cancer. That tiny bit of power can make a world of difference in how someone views their health and, consequently, the speed of their recovery.

By: Loneliness and Health: Experience, Stress, and Genetics « Neuroanthropology

Loneliness and Health: Experience, Stress, and Genetics « Neuroanthropology — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:12:21 +0000

[...] Be sure to check on Greg’s post on “How Your Mood Affects Your Health” for more on this topic at: http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/how-your-mood-affects-your-health/ [...]

By: dlende

dlende — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:37:40 +0000

I just wanted to leave a brief comment about humor, which I will surely write on in the future. Some students and I have done research on the role of humor in recovery from breast cancer. In looking at humor, one student is definitely lined up with the research mentioned above–say, laughing as a form of “psychneuroimmunology” (yes, there’s even an academic journal called that). Another student takes the cultural side, seeing how humor plays a role in renegotiating relationships and identity as the person first becomes a cancer patient and then, hopefully, moves through to recovery, all the time dealing with the threat of death, being treated in a certain way by the medical system, and looking for social support, but not always finding it, among family and friends. In the middle, humor has been too often reduced to either a form of “coping” or to simply laughing (showing funny movies to see the phsyiological effects). But humor is also a thing in itself, an experience that ties together embodied effects that range from the biology covered above to concretizing a new identity because suddenly it’s all right to laugh about having lost all your hair due to chemotherapy.