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Mario Alonso Puig provides 5 keys to 'change the chip' and learn to manage emotions

2023-03-22T09:53:25.914Z


Advice from the renowned Spanish doctor to achieve a balance between the mental, spiritual and physical planes.


It is known: what we feel in the body has an impact on our emotions.

To give the simplest example: if something hurts us, we get sick or we are weak, we will feel our

spirits on the ground.

However, the renowned Spanish doctor Mario Alonso Puig, who is giving talks and conferences in the country, suggests that we focus precisely on another part of this interrelationship that makes up our being: as he conceives, emotions have an impact on our

physiology

.

In a video and in this interview with

Clarín

, the speaker explains that far from surrendering to the fluctuations of our emotions, often conceived as a force that is born from within and from which it is not feasible to escape;

we can learn to handle them.

And thus achieve comprehensive well-being, in a body conceived as a whole: with its

psychic, emotional, spiritual, and material dimensions.

How to learn to manage our feelings and emotions?

How does medicine respond to physical ailments that also have psychic influences?

In what sense can we

distance ourselves

to question, and also improve, our ways of reacting?

Are there ways to train this ability?

These are some of the questions that she addressed in the talk.

- Much is said about disease prevention, but not about the impact that emotions can have on health.

What tools exist so that we can learn to manage emotions?

- First, clarify that there are tools, without a doubt.

Emotions are creations, not just reactions.

For example, when seeing a dangerous animal, in that case my organism generates a fear reaction.

But most of the emotions are not due to these situations, most of the fearful situations are not generated because you are going to meet a person who wants to rob you, or a dangerous animal that wants to bite you, they are generated by the own mind.

So, if it is the mind itself that generates them, it does not come from outside, it comes from inside, therefore they are no longer reactions, they are creations.

We have to understand what are the things that are going to take us to the place we shouldn't have to go, because they worsen that affective dysfunction: the first is turning things around, which is called rumination, the ruminating mind.

It is known that this not only intensifies emotional dysfunctions, but also prolongs them over time.

And the second thing we don't have to do is try to bottle them up, which means try to deny them.

Let's suppose that a couple has an altercation in the relationship, and one of the members begins to have feelings of hatred towards the other person.

But he doesn't want to have those feelings, so he begins to say "I shouldn't have these feelings, they're not good." Although it seems that this is favorable, it is not, because he is trying to deny a reality.

It's as if I want to deny that it's afternoon now, the reality is what it is, and the reality is that I'm feeling that emotion.

It is very important what Carl Gustave Jung already described: "what is resisted, persists, and what is embraced, vanishes".

That is to say, if I say to myself "at this moment I feel enormous anger against my partner, I am not proud, but I have it", then I am not going to deny it, I have to accept that this is happening at this moment, and that is the first step, because if I deny it, I try to resist it, I get angry with myself, I start to make a

speech

about why I shouldn't feel that way or I start to think about it, and I empower it.

"Emotional freedom is a daily conquest," says Alonso Puig.

Photo Courtesy

- And what can be done once one has accepted the emotion and tries to stop ruminating?

- Once this is done, what you have to do is start taking distance, it is called "perspective distance", and it means that when emotion surrounds us there is a part of our mind that is still free, and that part of our mind is the one that will help us solve it.

So, it's about starting to observe ourselves without judging: paying attention to what is happening to your face, which is tense, and continuing in that way as if you were an explorer, what happens with your breathing, you begin to observe what is happening, like if you wanted to describe it in a diary.

Once you do that, you will notice how the perception of what is happening begins to change: your breathing, how you begin to relax, it takes a while because you have to change even a chemistry, which is altered by dysfunctional emotions.

And then, one of the things that I invite people when they are more distant is to ask themselves a question: "How else could I look at this?", then in some way you are taking yourself out of a fixed way of seeing things , we have to remember that there is a part of our mind that is not trapped by the emotional world, because otherwise we could not do this exercise, and as you do this and you start to separate you begin to see different dimensions of things.

- What new perspectives can this change offer us?

Where before you have seen an offense, now you can see an oversight.

Where before you have seen an intent to attack, now you can see an intent to correct.

And this is little by little, what we cannot go from being emotionally illiterate to being great emotional experts in a moment.

This happens because the emotional world is so powerful, that it is connected with the body, if it were a simple thought, it is a matter of changing the thought and that's it, but the body has already gotten used to reacting in a certain way, and I have to unlearn that way of reacting to be able to respond.

A French philosopher said this very well: "Freedom is what you do with what they have done to you."

Well, of course, if I don't take that distance, if I don't take that new perspective, I'm going to be totally involved.

Now, emotional freedom is a daily conquest.

We don't have to think that it's a simple thing, it takes your job, sometimes you do it better, sometimes you do it worse, but little by little you learn.

When he said this, the philosopher was defining very well what it is about: a person who knows how to manage his emotions is free to return something different from what he receives.

- You are critical of the separation that we tend to exercise between physiological, mental and emotional processes, and present them as interrelated. Do you think that we tend to underestimate the connection between them, or is it instead a lack of knowledge?

- Both things, first there is an incredible lack of knowledge, I have even spoken with great medical professionals, I have explained this to them and they did not know it.

And I'm talking about great professionals, that is, there is a surprising lack of knowledge about the research that exists between the connection that exists between physical and physiological processes, mental processes, and mental processes.

But not only is there ignorance, but there are people who deny it.

They are people who consider that everything that the human dimension represents can be understood exclusively through matter, therefore they consider that the mind is a pure emanation of the brain, that without a brain there is no mind, that without a brain there is no consciousness, they consider that love for a person, for a loved one, can be explained exclusively by a movement of molecules and activation of brain nuclei.

For me it is a tremendously limited and deeply distorted vision.

So, don't talk to these people about the mind as something that clearly needs the brain to function, but it isn't born from the brain.

And don't talk to them about the spiritual dimension of existence, because they will think that this is a utopia and that it doesn't make any sense.

All of us who have worked and researched in this field know perfectly well that the material dimension exists, that the mental dimension exists, and that the spiritual dimension also exists.

And that when all three are harmonized, the person has a truly extraordinary level of fulfillment and vital experience.

But when the person believes that it is only matter, that there is no more in him or her, he is a person who lives in a different way, because then the only thing that interests him is maintaining his body, his physiological integrity, then everything has to to be for herself. And fundamentally it goes with this idea of ​​"what can I get for myself", instead of "what can I also offer for others".

The Spanish doctor wrote more than 10 books.

Photo courtesy MAP/Ernesto Agudo Cruz.

- Do you think that greater interdisciplinarity is necessary from the level of care?

- For example, I am a doctor and I have a lot of training in psychology and neuroscience, but if someone comes to my office with ulcerative colitis, which is an inflammatory disease of the colon and that can be very serious, since it presents large haemorrhages, I can recommend that they complement the treatment.

In fact, I am thinking of a real situation that has happened to me in my time as a surgeon: of a very young woman, with some very serious hemorrhages, which endangered her life.

Immediately, what is recommended to this person besides medical treatment?

A psychotherapeutic approach, maybe I can't give it to her, but someone else can give it to her, what I have to know is that the help of another professional is essential, since the only thing that matters is that this woman gets good.

Or, for example, a patient I had asked me if doing yoga would hurt her, and I told her no, on the contrary, it would help her physiologically.

Today it has been shown that yoga has the ability to improve brain function, it produces expansion of certain areas of the brain and this is physically demonstrated.

So, our problem is not that we do not know everything, it is that we are not open to a comprehensive vision of things, because I cannot know everything about medicine, everything about psychology and, above all, ancestral practices, but I can work in collaboration so that that person from different approaches has the best options to heal.

Anxiety is a factor that is negatively contributing to around 80% of physical illnesses, if I don't treat that because I'm just a medical doctor, I'm not helping that person enough.

If there is someone who might know more about anxiety, why not include him in the team to give that patient better treatment?

What I think is that there is a lack of a comprehensive approach to things.

***

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Source: clarin

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