Positive psychological wellbeing is associated with better health, and recent studies show that it even impacts mortality rates, lowering the risk of death.1 But how do we get there?
Eliminating obvious stress factors—a hectic home life, a high-pressure job, money worries, difficult relationships, divorce, self-esteem issues, constant exposure to electromagnetic fields and all the other things that contribute to our harried modern lifestyles—isn’t always possible. And even if stress is managed, that doesn’t guarantee positive psychological wellbeing.
To get to this positive state, we have to get down to the root of why we don’t manage unavoidable stresses well in the first place. And that means uncovering unhealthy, submerged emotional patterns that sabotage even our best efforts at stress management and self-improvement.
Why some people are more deeply affected by stressors than others depends on their life experiences as well as their genetics.2 Stress can be more dangerous for people with a predisposition and family history of conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and depression. And a child who has lived through a traumatic experience, for example developing abandonment issues around a parent after a divorce, is far more likely to be stressed and emotionally traumatized by her own divorce proceedings later in life than another woman who had no such earlier experience.
To compound matters, researchers in the area of epigenetics have This means an individual may have been raised in a perfectly happy home with both parents present and still be affected by or even inherit the trauma of a grandparent or great-grandparent who was abandoned as a child.
