Emotional Fitness is manifested physically through posture and facial expressions.
Posture
The ideal posture involves an extended spine with:
Curved spinal column: S-shaped, with no kinks, backside extended out, with well developed sacral muscles (lower back/upper pelvis).
Open chest: well developed inter-costal muscles (between ribs), chest held extended, not slumped.
Postural features of emotional fitness coincide with postural features beneficial for physical health and fitness:
A curved spinal column is more flexible, can absorb impacts and enables greater skill performance as well as reducing the risk of back injury.
An open chest ensures freer breathing, better aerobic performance and reduction in bronchial ailments such as asthma
Strong inter-costal muscles contribute to physical strength and motor coordination.Facial Expression
Facial expressions are linked to emotions. Charles Darwin did some of the earliest scientific work on this and found considerable universality of expression across cultures. This universality suggests that facial expressions are not purely social but have a biological function as well. If you feel happy, you smile, whether there are people around or not. Smiling produces different internal sensations than sulking.
An emotionally fit person has well developed facial muscles, and might be able to do any of the following:
Facial muscles can be loosely divided into smile muscles and frown muscles. They tend to work antagonistically, in other words you don’t smile when you frown or frown when you smile. It’s an either/or scenario.
Smiling vs Frowning
The idea that smiling is easier than frowning because it uses less muscles is a fallacy when the smile muscles have atrophied to such an extent that it hurts to try to use them, which can become the case in emotionally unfit or deeply distressed people.
Smiling is supposedly easier because it uses the jaw muscle which is relatively independent and is more connected to the task of eating than to emotional expression. The main task of the jaw in most effective emotional activity is to remain relaxed which in itself can be a chore for some. However, smiling requires more than just using the mouth and usually doesn’t look natural when the cheek and nose muscles have atrophied or are not put into use, and aren’t stretched upwards, resulting in a ‘forced’ smile. Smiling is associated with singing, because in good singing the cheek and nose muscles need to be elevated to pull the palate upwards and direct the sound through the forehead.
Frowning is harder to do because it uses the forehead muscles which are less flexible, being connected to bone and more linked to other core functionalities such as the voice, just mentioned. It is hard to restore motility to the forehead muscles after it is lost, which is why emotional constriction in psychologically disordered people, which gives them a 'zombie' appearance, is considered permanent.
Essentially, emotional fitness in the face is a matter purely of physical muscle tone. In emotionally unfit people the facial muscles become atrophied and inflexible. However, it is not that simple, since facial muscle tone is linked to another factor, stored emotion.
Stored Emotion
The following represents a hypothesis whose validity can only be determined by experimental testing or collective observation and opinion.
Emotional energy is stored in the body in the stomach and intestines, especially the latter, in the form of bio-electrical charge.
It is stored there as part of the response system in association with activity in the brain. This happens when the individual is emotionally affected by a situation but fails to respond immediately and the event is stored both in the brain and the body, to be processed at a later date, if at all. As more and more emotional energy is stored in the intestine, it has increasing effect on posture and on all core functionality. Stored emotion is directly linked to psychological disorder. Clients undergo counselling in order to release emotional energy through cathartic events.
As the brain increased in size and computing power during human evolution, for every abstract thought generated by human civilization there evolved an equivalent concrete emotion. Emotions ensure that thoughts remain in context, an unavoidable physiological reality. As thinking processes developed so did cultural doctrines such as the Bible, Qu’ran, I Ching and Bhagava Ghita, which set guidelines for ensuring that emotional responses are regulated. Civilization became synonymous with peoples who had control over their base emotions and those doctrines that achieved this most effectively were the most successful, like the Bible and the Qu’ran. The main consequence of this civilizing force is the development of the habit of storing or repressing emotional energy. Human physiology provided a convenient storage mechanism in the form of the intestine which makes an ideal electrical charge capacitor, being cylindrical, having a large surface area and being moist all round.
Repression or storage of emotion is good because it enables civilization to function well. It is bad because it leads to psychological disorders when that emotion is not released.
Metabolism
The nature and amount of unreleased emotional energy that builds up in the intestines has an impact on metabolism. It affects the amount and type of food that is successfully digested, providing a direct link between emotional fitness and eating conditions such as obesity and anorexia, and helps account for why different people metabolize the same food differently. Anyone who has ever mulled over some emotional event will have experienced the feeling of the stomach churning.
Posture
Emotional activity in the intestines affects posture by pulling the shoulders over and causing the chest to slump, and making it harder to retain a healthy S-shaped spinal column. If the activity is persistent enough and not resolved, then it can cause permanent postural change and reduced core functionality.
Facial Expression
Stored emotion affects the ability to use facial muscles, leading to facial and emotional constriction. If emotions are being stored rather than expressed then the face is not getting the exercise it needs in facial expression. Also poor posture contributes to diminishing facial ability by pulling on the face via the neck muscles.
Inter-connectedness
All the factors are interconnected:
Posture, facial expression, stored emotion, emotional fitness.
It is very difficult physically to flex certain muscles in the face, or to improve posture while there is emotional stuff still unprocessed in the body.
Emotional fitness is best improved by working on as many aspects as possible at the same time. This means:
Mind and body work together, which means that it is necessary to change the way the body is used as well as work through thought processes. The Emotfit programme has been set up to help people with this.
Emotional fitness is relative to the life situation. There is no absolute state of emotional fitness. We develop emotional fitness during our lives to suit the social and physical environment we live in and the skills we develop.
It varies with all the demographic variables such as age, gender, socio-economic status etc.
Human functionality can be explored through a multitude of different viewpoints, through cognitive, social, cultural, physical, or chemical processes to name just a few. This document explores the human experience from the viewpoint of something called ‘emotional fitness’. It is not the be all and end all of everything, but simply a system of knowledge that I have found useful and other people might find useful in making sense of themselves and the world around us. All definitions made here serve simply to help make that system of knowledge work better for the user.