INTRODUCTION:

A famous food blogger developed stomach cancer after a failed marriage. A gratitude affirmation treated a migraine permanently for a healthcare worker. An ill person recovery fastens after meeting with family members and friends. Everyday we hear numerous incidents when people manifest illness after developing negative emotions over a long period of time. But what we do about it, nothing. There are hospitals to treat medical illnesses, they are just curative centres offering pills, injections and surgeries but people hardly realize the value of positive and negative feeling states as an etiology or cure of illness chronic or acute. Sometimes toxic family members and office culture causes so much emotional instability that people fall sick.

Emotions play a crucial role in human survival. Having emotional responses to illness is natural and the emotions we express can offer insights into how we cope with health related situations. Through current understanding of emotions, applying emotion theory as a framework to examine how humans respond to illness should be feasible.¹ Emotions serve as forms of communication both within the brain and among individuals, enabling cooperation, competition, and disengagement. Fundamental emotions influence social interactions, decision-making, and contribute to psychological disorders such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.²

Negative emotions can heighten numerous health risks. A comprehensive body of research connects negative emotions to a variety of diseases, where the immune system may influence their emergence and progression; inflammation has been associated with multiple age-related conditions, including heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, specific cancers, Alzheimer's disease, frailty and loss of function, as well as gum disease. The production of proinflammatory cytokines, which affect these and other conditions, can be directly triggered by negative emotions and stressful situations. Moreover, negative emotions also play a role in prolonged infections and slower wound healing, which promote ongoing production of such substances in the body. Therefore, immune dysregulation related to distress may be a fundamental mechanism underlying a wide array of health risks linked to negative emotions. Supportive personal relationships that reduce negative feelings promote health partly by being conducive to immune and endocrine functions.³

Relationships can be broadly understood as the actual or perceived aspects of our social environment that hold emotional significance, characterized by their positive e.g. encouragement or negative e.g. subversion or mixed i.e. both positive and negative qualities. Emotions, conversely, can be described as having cognitive, behavioural, subjective, and physiological elements. They demonstrate interactions between individuals and their environments, including those linked to relational dynamics. Grasping the nature of relationships and emotions is essential due to their evolutionary importance and their impact on health and overall well-being. Research that compiles data from multiple studies indicates that aspects of relationships, like social support, serve as some of the most significant indicators of health, comparable to well-known risk factors such as smoking and exercise. Additionally, emotions play a critical role in health, with indicators of negative emotions like anger, depression, and anxiety being linked to increased disease rates and mortality. Furthermore, new studies are starting to emphasize the protective role of positive emotions, such as happiness, on health, as demonstrated by findings from databases like PsychInfo, Medline, and the Social and Behavioural Sciences Collection. Social connections and emotions significantly impact physical well-being. Key mechanisms involve how social interactions and emotional regulation affect health behaviours and biological functions throughout life. These mechanisms are mutually influential, with persistent health issues also affecting social and emotional dynamics. Strong evidence exists that associates relationships and emotions with physical health results. This comprehensive model considers the two-way connections between relationships, emotions, health behaviours, biological mechanisms, and overall health.⁴

There will always be psychological distress throughout life. Negative emotions can cause biological deterioration on the body and raise the risk of illness and death if they are not well controlled. The impact of negative emotions and their role in increased inflammation are highlighted by a bio-behavioural model of negative emotionality. The model advances our knowledge of how emotional factors change inflammation, accelerate biological ageing, and increase the risk of disease.⁵

Emotions such as anger, grief, and shame have been linked to specific health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal disease, which may be quantified with self-report surveys, according to research on stress and disease. In vivo studies of emotions are possible under carefully monitored circumstances that enable the measurement of behavioural, physiological, and subjective reactions, such as for instance, reacting to emotional cues, communicating with romantic partners etc.^6. In order to determine the relationship between illness-related negative emotions and patients' subjective health, 135 cardiac patients' emotion regulation and illness-focused coping mechanisms were investigated. The relationship between emotions and physical functioning was found to be mediated by illness-focused coping methods, while the relationship between emotions and psychological well-being was mediated by emotion management strategies. The results indicated that the association between illness-related negative emotions and health includes both emotion regulation and illness-focused coping mechanisms.⁷. In a study, people aged 19 to 63 were asked to rate relative strength of their affective states and personality trait neuroticism in predicting common physical symptoms. Results suggested that physical symptoms were unrelated to neuroticism but associated with unpleasant emotional state.⁸ According to a researcher who focusses on the results of cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality and investigates the potential contributions of negative emotions and thoughts to the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and physical health, low-SES environments are stressful and lower people's reserve capacity to handle stress, making them more susceptible to negative emotions and thoughts.⁹

A study investigating the relationship between chronic physical illness and unpleasant feelings states revealed that older persons with scarce resources tend to have more negative feelings and critical illnesses compared to middle-aged people. Zung depression scale was used to measure negative feelings, and physician assessment was used to operationalise the severity of chronic illness.¹⁰ Positive emotions promote happiness and good health, while negative emotions cause illness if they persist in our mental systems. Dark energy from negative emotions becomes entangled in the subconscious and energy body, eventually manifesting as illnesses. Depression is considered to be one of the causes of cancer. A particular organic disease's onset, progression, and chronicity may be influenced by psychosocial factors. These elements are not "all powerful" in the sense that addressing them will result in the healing of illness. However, these are elements that the astute practitioner will incorporate into his therapeutic toolbox. The doctor will be better equipped to practise scientific medicine and provide his patients with better care if they are recognised and controlled.¹¹Healthy perspectives, ideas, and physical well-being itself may be supported by positive emotional states. Today's researchers are looking for direct benefits of happy affect on immunity, health-relevant behaviours, and social support, as the Greek physician Hippocrates predicted happy emotions and healthy outcomes may be related through numerous pathways.¹²Anxiety, sadness, aggression, and health issues linked to stress are among the issues that positive emotions are best suited to preventing and treating. In addition to counteracting unpleasant emotions, nurtured happy feelings help people think more broadly and develop their own coping mechanisms. This program is based on the broaden-and-build model of pleasant emotions developed by B. L. Fredrickson in 1998. This concept states that good and negative emotions have different but complementary forms and functions. An individual's fleeting thought-action repertoire is limited by negative emotions to particular behaviours that fulfilled the ancestral purpose of fostering survival. Positive emotions, on the other hand, increase a person's repertoire of short-term thoughts and actions, which can help them develop long-term personal resources. The broaden-and-build concept implies, among other things, that positive emotions have the power to reverse negative emotions. A variety of coping and intervention techniques are examined. To the extent that these tactics foster good feelings, they maximise health and well-being.¹³

CONCLUSION:

We are living in an era where man is planning to live on moon. It is high time we realize that we are not only physical beings but are highly sensitive to the energy fields around us which simply is created by feelings and emotions. People must realize the importance of words and everyday vibrational energy they build up across the road rage, at office and in toxic relationships. Stress counselling will only give a temporary relief for the evergrowing negativity of life. The idea has to be known to conventional treatment and medical field where an emotional angle of illness is never asked, considered or treated. It is time we consider an emotional therapy as a healthcare option to treat the patient where a hospital bed, injections, medical diet and surgeries are provisions in the name of health restoration. Negative emotions get entangled in the subconsious and energy body as dark energy and later present themselves as full blown illnesses. It is a well-known fact that one cause for cancer is depression but hardly we see any emotional care centre for public or a hospital treating via positive energy. People today are considering affirmations and meditation into their daily schedules taking responsibility of ventilating emotions and imbibing good ones and everyone has to take care of it on their own.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST:

The author declres no conflict of interest.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

My deepest thanks to Ms Amali Mery Mam, Professor Mental Health Department, Ms Arti Associate Professor OBG Department, Shri Swami Bhumanand College of Nursing, Haridwar for peer review of this short article.

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Received on 28.08.2025 Revised on 13.10.2025

Accepted on 25.11.2025 Published on 21.02.2026

Available online from February 23, 2026

Asian J. Nursing Education and Research. 2026;16(1):66-68.

DOI: 10.52711/2349-2996.2026.00014

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