Adversity in life can be in the form of worries, emotional pains, anxiety, etc. Somehow, they tend to affect your internal body system — the immune system.
It is said that Health is not just about what you’re eating, It’s also about what you’re thinking and saying. Meaning that your thoughts can affect the condition of your body.
According to research, psychological challenges are capable of modifying various features of the immune response.
Sapolsky (1998) wrote, stress-related disease emerges predominately, out of the fact that we so often activate a psychological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgage, relationships, and promotions.
The cells in our body react to everything that the mind feels. Negativity somehow downs the immune system while positivity elevates it.
You don’t really need an experiment to know these things, you only need to observe your body system when you go through difficult situations.
What are the effects of adversity?
The effects of adversity can be detrimental especially to the human body which is very likely to be affected by its impact.
Reflect back to a time when you were low in spirit. It took me years to realize how psychological stress, emotional breakdown, heated augments could affect the body system.
The effect can be so damning that some people wouldn’t even notice where the problem is coming from.
To some, it slims them down, others lose focus of what is in sight, to some, body pains, to some, it causes them to fall ill overnight.
It happens to us all especially when we are deeply worried, maybe about
- an event that went south,
- a deal that didn’t go well,
- an investment that didn’t fall through,
- a lost job,
- a failed contract,
- a failed examination
- a failed relationship etc.
It can come in many forms, and its effect begins in the mind. The breakdown always starts with the mind thinking about it over a long period of time.
This is adversity to the mind and since the mind has its ways of passing down information to the immune system, it always reacts in accordance with the condition of the mind.
This is why when you feel excited, you always feel you can do virtually anything.
For instance, let’s say
- you won an award for the first time to your surprise,
- you won a scholarship,
- you got your first baby after a long-awaited time in your marriage,
- you won an election with a landslide, unbelievable to you!
- your team won in a final for the first time in history
- you came out first in a tough competitive examination
- you were given a double promotion to your amazement
- you won a big contract
- you found your dream job with a high paycheck
- your business made a profit far off the margin line
In most cases you will find yourself in height of excitement, saying things like, ‘I feel like flying right now’, or you might find yourself making a promise you aren’t sure if you would ever be able to keep, but you still make it.
You get energized or supercharged that you feel you can fight anything. You might be thinking; how does the mind pass down the information to our body system that gives us such energy to do what on a normal day we might not be able to do.
Most times when we are in a bad mood or on a sickbed and eventually something exciting happens or a piece of good news related to us is shared, we tend to suddenly gain energy, like a surge.
So good news lit up our face and sort of sends energy down to our body system.
I read of a story reported by the Polish newspaper Fakt of a 14 years old Polish boy called David Pawlaczyc who is a staunch Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid fan. It happened that he has been in a coma for about 3 months in a hospital specialized in child recovery after being knocked him off his bicycle in August 2013 by a car. According to the story, the doctor suggested playing the audio commentary of a match which he believed David may benefit from as they wanted to try a new method of treatment.
It happened that Cristiano Ronaldo found the back of the net in Portugal’s World cup playoff match against Sweden immediately he scored, the boy came out from the coma. The story was shared with Ronaldo who said that it’s the power of Sport.
Now, this is how much powerful psychology plays in our body system. In this case, it resulted in positivity, in other cases, bad news disrupts the body system making some people get High Blood pressure. Some end up with heart attacks, stroke, etc.
How do you handle adversity?
You might be asking the question…How do you persevere through adversity? In essence, how do you deal with adversity? How do you deal with stress, worries, or challenges especially when things don’t go as planned?
The best way to handle adversity is to be prepared for it. This is because it surely comes to everyone at some point in life.
The process of getting the mindset prepared beforehand gives the mind an upper hand to deal with adversity when it finally catches up with someone.
Another question that should be on your mind is, how is your adversity quotient doing? What is your adversity score? Is it on the low or on the high?
Or the bigger question is, have you ever given it a thought? Have you ever considered its effect on your body system (mentally and physically) and how your body reacts when you are passing through one?.
Having this knowledge at the back of the mind would go a long way in relieving you from the deep effect of adversity in cases where they set in. No one is immune to this effect, but being prepared puts us in a much better position to deal with them when they arise.
Therefore, it is required that we raise the intelligence of our adversity quotient. We must focus on solving problems even in adversity.
As nothing is 100 percent in life so is our adversity quotient which is not required to rate 100%. You only need to deflect a little percentage of the hit so as to stay strong and sound in other to be in a mindset to find solutions so as to forge further ahead in life.
Our inner being is as important as the outer part. We are so conscious about our well-being that we try our best to avoid having physical injuries and wounds, most times leaving the inner being vulnerable to emotional wounds.
Without health, there wouldn’t be wealth. Our inner being is part of our whole being which goes a long way to determine how much progress we can make in life. If the mind is out of shape, then progress will be delayed because every outer manifestation is usually first ignited in the mind.
So if the mind is the foundation of a process, it then means that sickness to the mind is a sickness to the entire body system.
I once visited a clinic, and the doctor who attended to me told me that a lot of people give less priority to their health than they give to their businesses, jobs and which is more of the reason a lot of people die even before they get treated.
He was trying to say that when symptoms of illnesses come, we fail to receive medical advises or treatment until the matter gets worst and then we come running to the hospital.
This is how we neglect to find solutions to emotional breakdowns when adversity faces us and then we allow it to take its toll on us. The same happens to our psychological mind, the more we compile worries, the more we deteriorate health-wise without noticing.
What does overcoming adversity mean?
Overcoming adversity means getting over a tough life situation which may in one way or the other affected your emotional mind.
A friend of mine once told me a story of how a breakup kept her on a hospital bed for weeks with bleeding.
I couldn’t fathom her story, I was left in disbelief, but I had no cause to doubt her either, given her kind of personality. According to her, a laboratory test was taken to determine the cause of her illness as to why she was deteriorating in health, but the results couldn’t detect anything and yet she was bleeding.
The cause of the illness still unknown and she wouldn’t tell her parents what was wrong, neither could she come out from the situation until she was able to convince herself to get over the situation.
Through long self-thoughts, thinking and assessments, she was able to come to a decision that no she just had to get over this issue, and that was her tough decision.
What impact did it have on her? It made her stronger emotionally and more exposed to adversity related to such life situations.
The breakup was her own adversity and trust me, she learned more by experience than she would have if only told.
But experience is not always enough because a lot of people experience bad situations but never learn anything from it because they never took their time to think and analyze the situation so as to draw lessons from it.
They just wake up and continue their lives without having any deep assessment in case such incidents eventually happen in the future.
By going through such emotional breakdown, she has increased her emotional and adversity intelligence which would position her on a better stand for future related or unrelated similar issues.
William A. Ward said Adversity causes some men to break, others to break records. Given his words, you have to decide what effect it should have on you when they hit you.
The bottom line
The moment you decide to raise your adversity quotient is the moment you decide to begin to work on yourself emotionally.
How you handle bad news and how you respond to life situations, especially, the hard challenging ones, go a long way to define how far you can go in life because life isn’t a bed of roses and those who survive it are those who are tough.
It is a certainty that in life there must be ups and downs, haters, betrayals, cheating friends, backstabbers, pretenders. It’s a complex world, you just have to prepare for it by finding ways to simplify life for your own good.
Like the saying “Health is not just about what you are eating, it’s also about what you are thinking and saying.” So, if you dedicate your time thinking of what someone did wrong to you then be ready to have health-related issues. It will surely get down to your body.
Do your best to take care of your emotions no matter what, this will enable you to safeguard your immune system from emotional harm.
Remember: When you are happy, your immune system is at its strongest point. And when you think negatively, or when you hate or allow yourself to grow emotionally out of control, you are weakening your immune system. —-Frederick Lenz
Be good to yourself, learn to forgive yourself and other people. Increase your adversity quotient and emotional intelligence. Learn to move on and away from the things that hurt you even if you don’t forget them.
Learn to find peace of mind and to live a happy life by finding peace within you. You only have one life to live. The ball is waiting in the court for you. Do with it what you so wish.
Have you ever been a situation where you found yourself so ill that you ended up in the hospital or you lost touch of events happening around? Let us know what you think in the comment section.
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
