Health Leader, Love - The Dance Between Two Hearts

STORY BY

Drs. Blair & Rita Justice

You may think Valentine's Day is for the birds,
but, actually, it is from the birds. Popular customs associated with St. Valentine's Day had their origin in the conventional belief in England and France during the Middle Ages that on February 14, birds began to pair. So the day was looked upon as especially consecrated to lovers and as a proper occasion for writing love letters and sending lovers' tokens.

Despite the commercialization of nature's start of another cycle of life, expressing love and feeling love are powerful healing influences on the body.

Love and Lactic Acid

At the Menninger Clinic, tests showed that persons who are romantically in love

suffer fewer colds and have white blood cells that more actively fight infections
have lower levels of lactic acid in their blood, therefore, less fatigue
higher levels of endorphins, which may contribute to a sense of euphoria and reduce pain.

Having the ability to love and care about others seems to result in lower levels of the stress hormone norepinephrine and a higher ratio of helper/suppressor T-cells. People with high scores on emotional intimacy have higher levels of IgA antibodies and report less serious illness. (From Blair Justice's Who Gets Sick, p. 284).

But Dr. Zhivago Died at the End...

There is a caveat that underscores conventional wisdom that it's foolish to give your love to someone who can't give it back. Research shows that in terms of romantic love, the ability to love is not enough. Unrequited love resulted in depression and a lack of relaxation. ( WGS, p.376)

On Golden Pond

It's not only romantic love that heals and helps our bodies. Old love, like ours which has thrived over three decades, increases longevity. The evidence is clear that the more attached we are to others, the longer we will live. Whether we have heart disease or cancer, our survival will be significantly increased if we have friends, good family relations, and a loving marriage.

A Man and a Woman
Sit Near Each Other

A man and a woman
sit near each other,
and they do not
long at this moment
to be older, or younger,
nor born in any other nation,
or time, or place.
They are content to be
where they are,
talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together
feed someone
who we do not know.
The man sees the way
his fingers move;
he sees her hands close
around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body
that they share in common.
They have made a promise
to love that body.
Age may come,
parting may come,
death will come.
A man and a woman
sit near each other;
as they breathe
they feed someone
we do not know,
someone we know of,
whom we have never seen.

("A Man and a Woman Sit near Each
Other" from Loving a Woman in Two
Worlds by Robert Bly.

When we are ill, lasting, intimate bonding with at least one other person in our life plus committed connections with groups gives us the strength to persevere.

Animal Attraction

If our Valentine is four-legged, winged, or scaled, our love for them can also benefit our health. Because pets can provide a source of support, love, and companionship, research has shown that when people are hospitalized with heart attacks, their survival rates increase if they have an animal waiting for them at home. (From Blair Justice's A Different Kind of Health, pp. 204-205, 206)

Beating as One. Literally

There's a theory of love based on limbic synchrony and prosodia, a neural mechanism that endows heart-to-heart communication with emotional meaning. Even without words, when deep feelings are transmitted, they are experienced in the limbic brain, the center of our emotional life. The limbic loops of the sender and receiver synchronize without a word spoken.

Prosodic communication uses all the nuances of facial and eye expression, voice tone and body language. The amygdala, a principal player in limbic-to-limbic language, reads the silent love exchanged between two people in synchrony.

Email, which makes all of us aprosodic despite devising scores of "emoticons," can never convey the feeling tones that synchronize two hearts. On the other hand, dogs communicate almost exclusively by emotional meaning and can read our hearts the minute they see our faces and hear our voices.

Evidence suggests that since the heart is the body's most powerful energy generator and rhythmic oscillator, the hearts of two people in love can become entrained, synchronizing the rhythm and beat of one with the other.

Heart-to-Heart Talk. Literally

Research also shows that the electrical waves of the heart can act like radio waves and be transmitted from one person to another. The electromagnetic field of one person's heart can be picked up by the brain of another. So the silent communication between two people can be especially strong when love is the limbic message being exchanged.

A resonance is felt without a word spoken.

The health effects from such harmony come through autonomic coherence, a balancing of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Love makes for restoring calm in times of stress.

Love's Alchemy

In the Middle Ages, when this whole thing of exchanging Valentines began, chemists were practicing alchemy, working to transform dross or base metals into something valuable, especially gold. That is what love does. It transforms the baser aspects of ourselves into something better. Our faults and weaknesses can be changed into something golden when we are loving and loved. Our profane becomes sacred. Illness can become a blessing. In both acute life-threatening illness and chronic disorders, we are confronted with existential issues out of which to mine something of value.

So this Valentine's Day, give of your love and let yourself receive it in return with an open heart. A sweetheart isn't required, only loving compassion for yourself and at least one other sentient being.

UPDATED: 2-09-2004