RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Healthy Emotions – Part 1
Sammy Tippit: We’re continuing our devotional discussions with Dr. Walt Larimore. We were talking the last two days about the physical health. I want us to move into the mental and emotional realm of health and how that affects our lives and how we can become better people, more Christlike. We can become more productive through having and developing mental and emotional health.

Walt, let’s talk about that a little bit, because we were talking about physical health and exercise and eating. But a lot of lack of exercise or eating binges comes from a mental or emotional state. So what is the correlation between physical health and mental/emotional health?
Walt Larimore: There’s connection that’s absolutely dramatic. The two are intricately tied together. As we have done surveys over the last 10 years of looking at the 10 Essentials of Highly Healthy People, we’ve found three areas of emotional health that are potentially problematic: sadness, anger, gratitude.  In sadness, think of the acrostic SAD: stress, anxiety, and depression. Those can be crippling to our emotional and our physical health. We’ve built into our assessment tool a measure that helps people see is the stress they’re under, the anxiety they have, the mood changes they have something that’s crippling them? You may not know it without measuring it.
When it comes to the area of gratitude, so many of us aren’t grateful for what blessings we have. Sammy, they did a wonderful study up at Michigan. They broke volunteers into three groups. One group they said, “At the end of the day, just write down five things you’re angry about, that irritated you, that aggravated you. Then spend three minutes thinking about it.” They called that group the “grumbling group.”
They took another third of the volunteers, and they said, “We want you to gloat.” The way they said that was, “Think about five ways you’re better off than people you work with or people in your neighborhood. Then spend three minutes thinking about that.” That was the “gloating group.”
The last group they said, “At the end of the day, just write down five things that blessed you, five things you’re grateful for. Spend three minutes thinking about that.” They followed those people over three years. Their emotional and physical health began to change within three weeks.
Sammy: Wow! Wow!
Walt: The only group that became healthy was the gratitude group, learning to be grateful as opposed to gloating or grumbling. Last but not least is that anger and unforgiveness. Those of us who choose to carry the burden of anger, of unforgiveness for stuff that’s been done wrong to us, even things unjustly done wrong… If we do not learn how to let that go, how to forgive it, it will cripple us not only emotionally but physically for life.
Sammy: I know that ties so closely, of course… The core of the gospel is in the forgiveness Christ brings, but there are a lot of Christians who are struggling with this.
Walt: Oh, absolutely.
Sammy: So what do you do as a Christian or as a non-Christian? How do you deal with the forgiveness and letting it go?
Walt: You know, one principle that helps my patients… I tell them, “If you choose not to forgive someone…” Now they may not deserve it, but if you choose not to forgive them, to hold onto that anger is like drinking dilute cyanide trying to hurt the other person. You don’t hurt them. You only eat out your own insides, your own heart.
The divine design is, as we begin to forgive, God begins the process of healing us. We can choose to forgive or not to forgive. We can’t undo what’s wrong, but we can make that choice.
Sammy: I want us to go a little further into this tomorrow as we talk about this and also go back to how we can make some real changes in our attitude. Thank you so much, Walt. We’ll look forward to tomorrow and our devotional time with you again.