Emotions and Physical Health/Success

Brown provides ample evidence that the mind and body are intimately connected. In other words, emotional states have a profound effect on physical health and individual achievement.

Brown’s description of negative emotions such as feeling stress, disappointment, nostalgia, anguish, loneliness, belonging uncertainty, defensiveness, and perfectionism have a negative impact on a person’s health, as well as their individual achievement. For example, stress causes “more rapid aging, decreased immune function, greater inflammatory processes, less sleep, and poorer health behaviors” (6), while perfectionism causes “depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis” (146). Likewise, a person who does not regulate his or her anger becomes “exhausted and sick” (224), and someone feeling chronic disappointment encounters difficulties in his or her relationships. Furthermore, a study involving patients feeling nostalgia (homesickness) revealed that they experienced symptoms such as “loss of appetite, fainting, heightened suicide risk and [sometimes] hallucinations” (77). Whereas being humiliated...