All We Need Is Love

Nothing heals better emotionally, biochemically, physically and mentally than love. Love is a positive high frequency (528 Hz) emotion which can heal and help us overcome many obstacles and appear to heal. By studying the heart’s rhythms, researchers there have discovered that when we feel love, or any positive emotion such as compassion, caring, or gratitude, the heart sends messages to the brain and secretes hormones that positively affect our health.  Yale – Love Study: Dean Ornish, M.D., helped conduct a study at Yale that involved 119 men and 40 women undergoing coronary angiography. Those who felt the most loved and supported had substantially less blockages in their heart arteries than the other subjects. In a related study, researchers looked at almost 10 thousand married men with no prior history of angina. These men had high levels of risk factors, such as elevated cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, and electrocardiogram abnormalities. Those who felt their wives did not show them love experienced almost twice as much angina as the first group, who felt their wives did show them love. While feeling loved appears to benefit our heart’s health, giving love seems to do the same for our aging process. The results of a study of more than 700 elderly adults showed that the effects of aging were influenced more by what the participants contributed to their social support network than what they received from it. In other words, the best love for healing – is balanced love with compassion, acceptance, and understanding, the more they benefited. Social Relationships – Love Study: Social ties with friends, family, workers, and community that involve love and intimacy of any type also may help protect against infectious diseases. In a study of 276 healthy volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 55, all participants received nasal drops containing rhinovirus, which causes the common cold. Researchers assessed subjects on 12 types of relationships, including relationship with spouse, parents, parents-in-law, children and other close family members, neighbors, friends, co-workers schoolmates, and member of various groups. They scored a point for each type of relationship if they spoke to a person in that category at least once every two weeks. While almost all of the people exposed to the cold virus were infected, not everyone developed the signs and symptoms of a cold. The participants who reported only one to three types of relationships had more than four times the risk of developing a cold than those reporting six or more types of relationships. “When you feel loved, nurtured, cared for, supported, and intimate, you are much more likely to be happier and healthier. You have a much lower risk of getting sick and, if you do, a much greater chance of surviving,” Ornish concludes in his book.   Reap the Benefits of LOVE: However, to reap the benefits of love you need not have a lover or spouse. The love you feel can be for a co-worker, a parent, a child, or a sibling. In fact, it can even be for your dog, cat, fish, or plants. “Somebody could be flooded with love for their pet or their God and get just as much of a boost…as someone who just started going out with someone new,” comments Candace Pert, Ph.D., research professor at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington. There are numerous studies illustrating the fact that people live healthier lives and heal better after a major illness or surgery if they own a pet. Conscious – Love Study: A few years ago researchers at the Institute of HeartMath used their tools to teach 30 people how to feel love in a conscious manner. One month later, they measured the study subjects’ levels of both cortisol and DHEA, known as the anti-aging hormone. They found that the cortisol levels for the whole group had decreased 23 percent while the group’s DHEA levels increased 100 percent across the board. If they are out of balance, such as high cortisol, low DHEA, that basically is rapid aging. Learning to love or to love more consciously, more of the time, brings those hormones into balance. This is a very direct pathway to see how love affects health Endorphins – Love Research: Candace Pert, Ph.D., research professor at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and author of Molecules of Emotion, Why You Feel the Way You Do (Scribner, 1997), reports that endorphins, which are associated with the feeling of bliss, help us “bond” with other people. Endorphins are “natural endogenous morphine-like substances that we produce in our brain, sex organs, gut, immune system, and heart,” says Pert. Endorphins are known not only to create a positive, bliss-like feeling — which we definitely associate with love — but also to stimulate the special immune system cells, called Natural Killer cells, which fight cancer. How Does a Broken Heart Physically Affect the Heart Rhythm? HeartMath�s research shows that when we experience heart-felt emotions like love, care, appreciation and compassion, the heart produces a very different rhythm. In this case it is a smooth pattern that looks like gently rolling hills. Harmonious heart rhythms, which reflect positive emotions, are considered to be indicators of cardiovascular efficiency and nervous system balance. This lets the brain know that the heart feels good and often creates a gentle warm feeling in the area of the heart. Learning to shift out of stressful emotional reactions to these heartfelt emotions can have profound positive effects on the cardiovascular system and on our overall health. It is easy to see how our heart and emotions are linked and how we can shift our heart into a more efficient state by monitoring its rhythms. When a relationship ends, the stress hormone cortisol runs high, weakening the immune system and bringing fatigue and sickness. The circuits in the brain that are involved in love and loss are really a motivational system. A person who has been dumped is experiencing the same irrational and involuntary brain state as a person deprived of food, water or a drug.   When subjects of the experiment felt angry for one five-minute period, their cortisol levels increased. Cortisol, known as the stress hormone, suppresses the immune system. Thus, these subjects experienced suppressed secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA), an antibody, for up to six hours after feeling angry for only five minutes. Secretory IgA serves as the human body’s first line of defense against disease. Thus, lower than normal levels of IgA, leave us more susceptible to colds, flu and respiratory disease. When the subjects of this study felt love and appreciation for just one five-minute period, their secretory Iga rose significantly. While the rise in IgA spikes after feeling love for five minutes and then drops off, it then begins a slow rise that continues for many hours afterward. The Risk of Developing Heart Disease Many studies have found that the risk of developing heart disease is significantly increased for people who often experience stressful emotions such as irritation, anger or frustration. These emotions create a chain reaction in the body � stress hormone levels increase, blood vessels constrict, blood pressure rises, and the immune system is weakened. If we consistently experience these emotions, it can put a strain on the heart and other organs, and eventually lead to serious health problems. PEMF Research – Reducing Daily Stress  Close to 70-80% of the problems seen by doctors are most likely caused by stress.  Many approaches are used to reduce the effects of stress, including relaxation, meditation, yoga and stress avoidance. A new, simple, easily useable approach to reducing the physical response to the effects of daily stress is whole body, pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) application. According to Dr. William Pawluk, MD, long-term use of weak PEMFs may be able to help the body remodel tissues that tend to be hyper- reactive to chronic or acute stress so that over time they will become less and less reactive. Research has shown that PEMFs produce a number of anti-stress changes in the body, both to ward off stress, that is, create stress resistance, and to decrease the hormonal, immune, neurologic, soft tissue, cardiac, vascular, low pH and low-oxygen damage caused by stress.   Heart rate variability Exposure to PEMF for 20 minutes resulted in more rapid recovery of heart rate variability, especially in the very low frequency range after physical strain. The study also showed the moderating influence of the subjects�constitutional VLF power on their response to PEMF treatment. These findings have since been replicated in a clinical study and should be taken into consideration when PEMF treatment is chosen. � European Journal of Applied Physiology. Emotional Stress: In rabbits, emotional stress increases risk of sudden death. PEMFs increase resistance of the rabbits to stress. Death risk is lowered almost two-fold.De-Stressing the whole body �physically, mentally and emotionally by learning to build a buffer against stress by accessing a high performance state called “coherence.” Coherence is a mental and emotional state that people experience when they are “in-sync” or in the “zone” – when the heart, brain and nervous system are working in harmony. Influence of Sound and light on Heart Rate: AUDIO-VISUAL ENTRAINMENT (AVE) is used to positively affect the heart rate. By stimulating nerves within the ear, the parasympathetic system can be relaxed, causing a slowing of the heart rate and breathing.  Binaural beats are probably the most well-known stimulus used for synchronizing the user’s brainwave activity to the recorded patterns thus helping you relax more, sleep better, and deal with the problems of living more effectively. When it changes your mind, it will also change your life long-term. DID YOU KNOW: Masters of meditation and yoga, great artists, inventors and highly accomplished people in many walks of life share a common pattern of brainwaves.   Music on Heart Rate: In a study out of Oxford University, Dr. P. Sleight and his investigators found that listening to music initially effects change of heart rate that is directly proportional to the tempo of the music and possibly to the complexity of the rhythm. They also found that the style of the music or the music preference of a subject appears less important than the tempo of the music, and that music with a slower rhythm and some short pauses or breaks in the music induces calm in the listener.   Researchers found that compared with baseline, the subjects’ mean flow-mediated dilation:               �                Decreased 6% after listening to enjoyable music (P = .0002). �                Increased 26% after listening to anxiety-provoking music (P = .005). �                Increased 19% after watching a humorous video (P = .08). �                Decreased 11% after listening to a relaxation tape (NS).   In your Heart, there is a sensor that receives pulses that dictate how fast the heart beats. Heavy and loud music, especially with a strong beat, can interfere with that sensor, causing the heart to beat in time to the music. The faster tempo and louder will generally make a person’s heart rate and blood pressure spike, probably because it releases adrenaline, similar to a stressful situation.