Last year I visited the Body Worlds Exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre.
"Body Worlds (German title: Körperwelten) is a traveling exhibition of preserved human bodies and body parts that are prepared using a technique called plastination to reveal inner anatomical structures. The exhibition's developer and promoter is German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented the plastination technique in the late 1970s at the University of Heidelberg."
Body Worlds is shrouded in controversy but nonetheless I visited it and was moved, disgusted and intrigued. Even learned a few things.
Body Worlds 3 was focused on the heart, a part of us that is so much more than a collection of muscle fibres, valves and tissue. Our hearts explode, ache, skip beats and even seem to stop in certain situations despite our ability to keep breathing.
Gunther von Hagens spread his own wonder with the human heart and presented recent research regarding the impact of heart break and depression on the heart's life span and overall health.
Given I've worked with clients with a particular set of medical conditions or illnesses, I've always wondered if there is a correlation between personality types, propensity towards anxiety and depression and physical illness including heart disease. I've also wondered what those gut wrenching, heart breaking moments in life have had on my heart muscle. What's the physical impact on the heart during times of suffering?
For years cardiologists and mental health experts have known that depression raises risk for heart attack by 50 percent or more.
But what hasn’t been clear is why depressed people have more heart problems. Does depression cause some biological change that increases risk? Does the inflammatory process that leads to heart disease also trigger depression?
The answer may be far simpler. A study done in 2008 suggests that people who are depressed are simply less likely to exercise, a finding that explains their dramatically higher risk for heart problems.
Researchers, led by doctors from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco, recruited 1,017 participants with heart disease to track their health and lifestyle habits. As they expected, those patients who had symptoms of depression fared worse. About 10 percent of depressed heart patients had additional heart problems, during the study, compared with 6.7 percent of the other patients. After controlling for other illnesses and the severity of heart disease, the finding translates to a 31 percent higher risk of heart problems among the depressed people, according to the study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Taken from NYTimes.com
So maybe it's not such a big mystery at all. When we feel like crapola or down in the dumps, we are less likely to take care of ourselves. This is the time we need to try really hard to pull ourselves up and take action. If we let the domino effect of a rough patch in life get the best of our get up and go, we might just end up leaving this wonderful life prematurely.
But I don't think the impact of emotional and spiritual pain on our hearts can be fully understood in such a simplistic way. If you have ever fallen in love, you can literally feel the centre of your chest opening, softening, aching and expanding. And when love fades or is taken away during a break up or death, there is a pain so incredibly real and tangible in the centre of our chest that just can't be measured.
Sure. doing the good things we don't feel like doing can be a true test of our character and resilience. Wallowing for too long is just not good. But how we choose to let pain impact us in the long run is up to us and clearly acts of self love like taking good care of ourselves is what will truly heal our hearts physically and spiritually.
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