Regulating Negative Emotions Is Good For Our Aging Brains

Since 2012, after reading When The Body Says No, by Gabor Mate MD, I have believed in the link between unresolved emotional repression and cognitive decline - but I hesitate to bring it up because people are so terrified by the prospect of dementia. Well, here's a study that was started in 2023 based upon that exact premise. This short article from March 2023 briefly describes the premise and the study, and it gives me hope that we might finally be approaching a time when the distress and damage of emotional repression is taken seriously instead of being treated as a dangerous radical theory. Here's an excerpt:

In a 2023 paper published in Nature Aging, researchers find that managing negative emotions could protect the brain from harm in old age.
The finding came as part of the effort to understand why negative emotions, such as persistent stress and anxiety, are seemingly risk factors for neurodegenerative conditions like dementia — and what can be done to stop this outcome.
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This also gives me the impetus to perhaps be more bold in expressing these ideas. The recent discovery (2021) that there is a strong association between Alzheimer's and inflammation bolsters the theory, since we know (and I realize I'm kind of a broken record on this topic) that stress and inflammation are not just associated - they are 100% physiologically and neurologically connected.

Anyway, when that news broke, it was reported that inflammation might be replacing plaques (and tau tangles) as the focus of Alzheimer's research - pretty much because it was determined that these things are being caused by inflammation. They spent years and years looking for a causal link between plaques and Alzheimers, and it appears that inflammation is likely the cause of plaques.

Dr. Mate can tell you what the cause is, but Big Pharma doesn't see big new profits in continuing to treat emotional repression and distress.

 

For more on inflammation, here's a great article from Vox (no paywall):
https://www.vox.com/even-better/374515/inflammation-inflammatory-foods-chronic-acute-silent-autoimmune-immune (How bad is inflammation really?)