Blaming others can ruin your health

2013-09-03

By Elizabeth Cohen

During his sophomore year in college, he says, white students harassed him and the only other African-American living on the floor in his dorm in order to get them to move out.

The white students spat on their doors, tore their posters off the wall, and banged on their door at four in the morning. When Benton brought up the problems at a dorm meeting, the other students snickered.

“I felt like I was being bullied, being targeted,” he says now of his college experience 19 years ago. “I knew I couldn’t retaliate in any way or I’d lose my basketball scholarship.”

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, or thickening of the muscles in the heart. The disease is the leading cause of heart-related sudden death in people under 30.

So sick he couldn’t walk, Benton lay in his hospital bed bitter and resentful.

“I thought to myself, ‘I’ve never hurt anybody. I serve in the community. I work with youth. I wrestled with God — why did this happen to me?'” he remembers.

Just then, a janitor walked by and grabbed Benton’s hand, and prayed aloud to God to heal him. “As soon as she said, ‘Amen,’ I felt like someone had poured cold water on my head and made my heart shrink,” he says.

Benton forgave the students who had tormented them, 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 — the boss who fired you, the spouse who cheated on you — 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.

“Bitterness is a nasty solvent that erodes every good thing,” says Dr. Charles Raison, associate professor of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine and CNNHealth’s Mental Health expert doctor.

What bitterness does to your body

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 and an author of a chapter in the new book. 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 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.”

How to get rid of bitterness

It’s impossible to avoid all events that could turn you bitter. At some point, all of us will be the victim of a crazy boss, a cheating spouse, a spiteful co-worker, or someone else who does us wrong. Some will be even more unlucky, and suffer physical or sexual abuse.

“There are situations where you’d have to be the Dalai Lama not to feel bitterness,” says Raison, who writes regularly for CNN.com on the mind-body connection for health.

The key is how we react to these situations in the long term.

Here are five tips for how to let go of bitterness as quickly as possible for the sake of your own health.

1. Gripe for a while

“Give yourself time to vent and get it out of your system,” suggests Dr. Maryann Troiani, co-author of the book Spontaneous Optimism.

2. Watch the news

Frederic Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, tells his embittered patients to think about how many others have had bad things happen to them.

“I ask people to watch the news for a day, or read the paper, or go to work and talk to people, and they’ll see that others have suffered and this is just a part of life,” says Luskin, author of the book “Forgive for Good.”

3. Consider confronting the person who’s hurt you

Troiani says some of her patients have found solace in doing this. Other times, however, it can backfire.

“Some ex-spouses are real psychopaths, and hunting them down can be disastrous,” she says. “They’ll just connive and twist things around and blame you.”

If that’s your situation, try writing a letter to the person and reading it to a trusted friend, she suggests.

4. Realize you’re only harming yourself

Keep reminding yourself of the all the physical harm you’re doing yourself by remaining bitter.

“I tell my patients, take care of this bitterness now, or in five years it will haunt you in the form of chronic headaches, fatigue, arthritis, and backaches,” Troiani says.

5. Consider the other person’s mental state

Author Maya Angelou has every reason to feel bitter. Raped as a child, then overwhelmed with guilt when her rapist, an uncle, was murdered by another family member, she was mute for several years. Still, she says she never felt bitterness toward her attacker.

“Although he was a child molester and abused me, I never hated him, and I’m glad of that,” she says. “What I realized is that people do what they know to do — not what you think they should know.”

As an adult, she’s continued that mind-set.

“If someone hurts my feelings or hurts me in any way, I think, ‘This dummy, that’s all he knew,’ and I’m not going to carry this bitterness around with me. I will not give it a perch. I will not give it a place to live in me because I know that’s dangerous.”

Don’t be a doormat

Taking these steps and losing your bitterness does not mean you should be a doormat, Raison says.

For example, consider the classic case of the wife whose husband leaves her for a much younger woman. Instead of feeling angry, she can think about moving on with her life and finding someone new.

“What happens is that the husband who’s been doing the 20-year-old comes crawling back because now his wife looks really good, and the wife can say, ‘You’re a day late and a dollar short,'” he says.

CNN’s Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.

Honey, Your Success is Shrinking Me

2013-09-02

Women like it when their husbands are successful. Men, maybe not so much, says a new study.Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/30/honey-your-success-is-shrinking-me/#ixzz2dhzfzn9f

By Belinda Luscombe

A new study suggests that men don’t enjoy their wives’ or girlfriends’ victories.

Men’s self-esteem can take a beating if their wives do well, while women’s egos aren’t as affected by their partners’ victories. Even when the woman is successful at something her man is not really engaged in — say, hosting a party — husbands feel personally threatened, according to a  new study from the American Psychiatric Association, which also found that a woman’s success “could alter men’s perception about their romantic relationship in the future.”

The research, published in August in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sounds at first like it would fit more neatly in The Annals of Duh, (newsflash: Men Don’t Like to Lose), but the details prove to be more counterintuitive. For example, the five different experiments in the study examined not just heterosexual couples in the U.S. but also those in the Netherlands (which often serves as a model of gender equity), and revealed little difference in the way men felt about their partners’ success. Dutch men may see more successful women around them and have more females on their corporate boards and in their government, but they still feel a bit smaller when their wives or significant others do well.

And interestingly, the men subconsciously felt worse about themselves whenever their romantic partners scored a win, no matter if  they were competing in that area or not. That is, a man doesn’t  just feel worse about himself when he’s shooting for the same goal, he feels worse whenever his woman succeeds. And this is a woman he likes.

“It makes sense that a man might feel threatened if his girlfriend outperforms him in something they’re doing together, such as trying to lose weight,” said the study’s lead author, Kate Ratliff, PhD, of the University of Florida. “But this research found evidence that men automatically interpret a partner’s success as their own failure, even when they’re not in direct competition.”

One of the ways the researchers tested this theory included giving couples what they called a “test of problem solving and social intelligence.” They told participants that their partners had either scored in the top or bottom 12% of all people who took the test. This news did not affect the way the participants said they felt. However, in a subsequent test of “implicit self esteem,” which measured how they actually felt,  a different story emerged.

Men who believed their partner aced the test exhibited significantly lower subconscious self-esteem than men who believed their partner had flunked. This was true even though the men had no idea how they had done in the test.

(Incidentally, the test for subconscious self esteem, which can be found here, measures what words people associate with the word “me.” If they associate it more with positive words, such as “good” or “great,” their subconscious self esteem is deemed high; if they associate “me” more quickly with pejorative words, it’s low. If you’re curious about how you are affected by your mate’s victories, you might like to try it after you’ve celebrated one with them.)

After repeating the experiments in the Netherlands and getting the same results, the researchers did two more tests, this time online, among people who were not Dutch or college students.  More than 650 U.S. participants, 284 of whom were men, were asked to think about a time when their partner had succeeded or failed. It was scientific deja vu: the men felt bad when their wives beat them at something, but they also subconsciously lost confidence when their wives got any wins. Women’s self esteem was not affected either

Why this difference between men and women? The researchers offered several theories: men are more competitive than women generally — which makes sense, except that in many of these areas, they weren’t actually competing. So men may just be really competitive. Another is that men may feel they have to be more successful to hold on to their partners — and women may be guilty of feeding into this, at least partially, according to the researchers:  “Women do indeed feel more satisfied with their relationship when they think about a partner’s success compared to when they think about a partner’s failure.” Or, it may be that cultural pressures still run deep, and they’re subconsciously conforming to old-school partnership models of the male provider and devoted dependent woman he has rescued/ is supporting.

Another explanation could have to do with the fact that women tend to be more communal, so they look for reasons to connect with other people, while men look for differences. “One possibility to test in future research is that men are more likely than women to focus on dissimilarity and women are more likely than men to focus on similarity,” says the study.  “This would be consistent with previous findings that women are more concerned with communal behavior and with smoothing social interactions than men are.”

Regardless of what is driving their low-self-esteem, men’s bruised egos can have lasting effects on relationships. Subconscious feelings of low self-worth affect behavior, and may make the men feel less optimistic about the relationship. (Previous studies have shown that men whose wives earn more than they do are more likely to cheat, for example.) On the other hand, the authors also say that while men subconsciously felt smaller by their partners’ success, they usually have the cognitive wherewithal to get over it. That’s why they don’t report feeling any worse when their partners do well.

Plus, having a wife who is successful has its advantages. As economists have noted,  the people who have benefited most from the increasing earning power of women are the men who married them.

This Is Your Brain on Facebook

By Maia Szalavitz

That little zing you get when someone “likes” your picture or sings your praises on Facebook? That’s the reward center in your brain getting a boost.

And that response can predict how much time and energy you put into the social media site, according to new research.

In one of the first studies to explore the effects of social media on the brain, scientists led by Dar Meshi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin, imaged the brains of 31 Facebook users while they viewed pictures of either themselves or others that were accompanied by positive captions. The research was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“We found that we could predict the intensity of people’s Facebook use outside the scanner by looking at their brain’s response to positive social feedback inside the scanner,” says Meshi. Specifically, a region called the nucleus accumbens, which processes rewarding feelings about food, sex, money and social acceptance became more active in response to praise for oneself compared to praise of others. And that activation was associated with more time on the social media site.

Social affirmation tends to be one of life’s great joys, whether it occurs online or off, so it’s not surprising that it would light up this area. Few people are immune to the lures of flattery, after all. But do these results suggest that the “likes” on Facebook can become addictive? While all addictive experiences activate the region, such activation alone isn’t sufficient to establish an addiction.

It does, however, raise the interesting possibility that these affirmations might be the first step toward an addiction for some people, since Facebook use also shares another property common to addictive behaviors. On the social media site, the pleasure deriving from attention, kind words, likes, and LOLs from others occurs only sporadically. Such a pattern for rewards is far more addictive than receiving a prize every time, in part because the brain likes to predict rewards, and if it can’t find a pattern, it will fuel a behavior until it finds one. So if the rewards are random, the quest may continue compulsively. “Our research is a nice first step in making the neurobiological link between social media addiction and reward activity in the brain,” says Meshi.

Facebook may draw people in by making them feel connected— but it keeps them coming back because so many of us take pleasure in knowing that we’re liked.