PassionFile

How Our Immune System and Hormones Are Negatively Affected

A recent article was posted on the Yahoo! network discussing Demi Moore's recent physical and mental breakdown after her very public trials and tribulations with her estranged and much younger husband Ashton Kutcher. Nobody should be surprised, when the question was posed as to whether the pending divorce could have caused her illness.

For as long as humans have been recording their history, illnesses and disease have been attributed to broken hearts, a poor "constitution" or melancholy.  Of course, our modern medical complex has been going out of it's way to label and identify conditions, both physical and mental issuing the well known diagnostic treatise called most recently DSMV IV. Both lay and professionals who study this and other assessment compendiums often find that they themselves are afflicted by multiple diseases after reading them.

Melancholy is a real disease of the mind

We now know that melancholy was often a poor substitute for depression and it's many forms. Anxiety was also included in this emotional affliction "soup", but what isn't discussed is how the immune system is affected, along with our hormones (chemical messengers between and amongst our various bodily systems) when we allow our feelings to be affected, or not (that would be suppressing our emotions).

John Montgomery, Ph.D., and Todd Ritchey specifically deal with the relationship between the brain and it's command of our bodily functions as relates to how we feel. Their research is quite clear when considering how our modern afflictions like depression and addiction, are impacted both positively and negatively by how we feel. We've known this for centuries, which is why so many historical documents use the old diseases of melancholy and a broken heart as if they were real. That is because we now know that they were, although we call them by different names now.

So when a celebrity breaks down after intense and emotional pressures, the media immediately questions how this can happen. The immune system, which in Ms. Moore's case, was firing on all cylinders to keep her healthy during the circus, was immediately depleted once the brain was told (by Ms. Moore ostensibly) that the difficulty was over, when indeed it wasn't. That is why separation and divorce are two stand-out situations that reveal our physical shortcomings. The tremendous pressures that everyone's body is under when dealing with negative and tumultuous situations essentially forces the endocrine system to work in overdrive, supported by the stress hormones as indicated by Dr. Montgomery. It is when our adrenaline overcomes feel good hormones, that we start to feel sick and succumb to the viruses and bacteria that our body is fighting everyday.

Virus and disease take over an emotionally weakened immune system

I myself suffered a similar fate almost immediately after I separated from my wife of over 12 years. My life leading up to the separation was also very charged, mostly with negative situations and trying to keep everything under control. After the physical and mental act of separation became real, I moved out and within a couple of days, I was deathly ill, sweating profusely from a serious case of pneumonia.  I was immobile for almost three weeks and lost 15 pounds. Beyond the mental torment of my situation, my body had also given out. It was the most obvious example of how our bodies can keep us focused and in-tune, up until the point that we finally accept our reality. Then, our bodies shut down. It's a physiological fact and with professionals like Dr. Montgomery, the research is catching-up with what we as a species have known for millennium.