It’s easy to see that your emotional wellness has an impact on your behaviour; depression and anger can lead to a downward spiral of destructive behaviour, and this, in turn, further affects your wellbeing. This chain of events can damage your health, put strain on your relationships, and leave you feeling even worse than when you started – but does that spiral go both ways?
According to new research, published in the journal Psychological Science, there is an uplifting equivalent to that destructive sequence. According to the research team, ‘Positive emotion, positive social connections, and physical health influence one another in a self-sustaining, upward-spiral dynamic.’ The researchers discovered that upbeat emotions, which have been inspired by a meditative practice, helped participants to experience greater feelings of connectedness with others. This, turn, had a positive impact on ‘a biological resource that has been linked to numerous health benefits.’
This delightful dynamic helps explain the well-documented link between joy, appreciation, and good health. We humans are truly social creatures, as you can measure the effect that easy interactions have on your body. Led by psychologist Bethany Kok of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, the researchers wanted to understand why this occurs, and so undertook a nine-week experiment featuring 65 participants, who were all faculty or staff members at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Each participant’s heartbeat data was analysed in order to obtain a baseline measurement of vagal tone. This helped the researchers to discern levels of activity in the part of the nervous system that regulates your internal organs and reacts to emotional stress. For the next two months, the volunteers reported on how strongly they had been feeling 20 different emotions on a daily basis. They also rated ‘the three social interactions in which they had spent the most time that day,’ and assessed the degree to which they felt ‘in tune with’ the people they were dealing with.
Half of the participants attended six weekly sessions on loving-kindness meditation, which focuses on developing ‘feelings of love, compassion, and goodwill toward oneself and others.’ The researchers concluded, ‘Participants who reported greater increases in positive emotions over the course of the study, who were mostly the ones assigned to the loving-kindness meditation group, also exhibited greater increases in social connections, which were in turn associated with larger increases in vagal tone.’ This means that a positive emotional state led to the perception of stronger bonds with the people, which positively impacted bodily function, as measured by vagal tone.
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