Blaming others can ruin your health
By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent
August 18, 2011 - Updated 1837 GMT (0237 HKT)
(CNN) - Kevin Benton had every reason to feel bitter. During his sophomore year in college, he says, white students harassed him in order to get him to move out. “I felt like I was being bullied, being targeted,” he says now of his college experience 19 years ago.
This was the first time in his life Benton had encountered racism and it hit him hard. He had trouble sleeping, and then over the next several months he suffered panic attacks. Admitted to the hospital, he was found to have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The disease is the leading cause of heart-related sudden death in people under 30.
After some time, Benton could forgive the students who had tormented him, and three days later, he walked out of the hospital. “If I hadn’t forgiven them, I’d be dead,” says Benton, now healthy and a social worker for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.
Feeling persistently resentful toward other people can indeed affect your physical health, according to a new book, “Embitterment: Societal,psychological, and clinical perspectives.” In fact, the negative power of feeling bitter is so strong that the authors call for the creation of a new diagnosis called PTED, or post-traumatic embitterment disorder, to describe people who can’t forgive others’transgressions against them.
Feeling bitter interferes with the body’s hormonal and immune systems, according to Carsten Wrosch, an associate professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal. Studies have shown that bitter, angry people have higher blood pressure and heart rate and are more likely to die of heart disease and other illnesses.
Physiologically, when we feel negatively towards someone, our bodies instinctively prepare to fight that person, which leads to changes such as an increase in blood pressure. “We run hot as our inflammatory system responds to dangers and threats,” says Dr. Raison, clinical director of the Mind-Body Program at Emory. Feeling this way in the short term might not be dangerous - it might even be helpful to fight off an enemy - but the problem with bitterness is that it goes on and on. When our bodies are constantly primed to fight someone, the increase in blood pressure and in chemicals such as C-reactive protein eventually take a toll on the heart and other parts of the body.
“The data that negative mental states cause heart problems is just stupendous,” Raison says. “The data is just as established as smoking, and the size of the effect is the same.”
CNN’s Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.
Condensed from: CNN International
Available at:
<http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/08/17/bitter.resentful.ep/index.html?hpt=hp_c2>.
Access: August 18th, 2011.
According to the sentence “Studies have shown that bitter, angry people have higher blood pressure and heart rate and are more likely to die of heart disease and other illnesses”, it is CORRECT to say that
a) some studies demonstrated that people who have diseases like bitterness and blood pressure are afraid of dying of heart problems.
b) some studies have demonstrated that all angry people will have problems related to blood pressure, heart diseases and other illnesses.
c) studies which were developed show that people who are persistently angry are more likely to suffer from bitterness and heart diseases.
d) studies indicate that people who are angry and bitter have more chance of having heart diseases and other illnesses than other people.
