Vent Your Emotions to Live Longer

If you're mad and you show it, you might just live longer than those who simply seethe, new findings from an ongoing study of elderly priests and nuns show.

Researchers report those who failed to vent their emotions were twice as likely to die over a five-year study period. On the other hand, "the tendency to get angry and do something about it was not really related to mortality at all," says study co-author Robert S. Wilson, a professor of neuropsychology at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

The 1,000 people in the Religious Orders Study came from all over the United States and included brothers in addition to priests and nuns. This isn't the first time they've made the news. In 2002, researchers announced those who kept their minds active appeared to be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.

In their new project, researchers examined the medical records of 851 subjects from 1994-2002. More than two-thirds were women, and their average age at the beginning of the study was 75.

The goal was to examine how expression -- or suppression -- of anger contributes to life span, Wilson says. "From the time of the ancient Greeks, people have thought that personality and the way you express your emotions are related to health. There's a long history of studying that in medicine."

But while studies have shown depression is related to shorter life spans and heart disease, there's less research into how people cope with negative emotions such as anger, Wilson adds.

The priests and nuns are an especially good group to study, he says, because they live in almost identical socioeconomic and social worlds.

He and his colleagues noted when some of the subjects died -- 164 of them did -- and looked at tests measuring their level of negative feelings and their ability to express it. Their findings appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Over an average period of five years, the 10 percent of the subjects with the greatest tendency to keep negative emotions bottled up -- those who "sit and stew" -- were twice as likely to die as the 10 percent on the other end of the scale.

The winners in the life-span sweepstakes were those who said, "'I get angry and I slam a door, I curse a lot,'" Wilson says.

Cursing? Priests and nuns? Yes, indeed. "The Catholic clergymen and nuns feel the full range of emotion that everybody else feels," he says.

For now, it's still unclear how anger management -- or the lack thereof -- affects health. "There are studies that suggest negative emotions have been related to cardiovascular disease, and it's possible the mechanism could be through that," Wilson says. "They've also been connected to immune function and hormonal changes in your brain."

Dr. John E. Morley, a professor of gerontology at Saint Louis University, says emotional outbursts "remain a better coping mechanism than internalizing and continuing to fret about the reason you are angry." Even so, he adds, people can find healthier ways of releasing their emotions.

"It is much better to be able to talk things through, but the old Saturday Evening Post cartoon of the husband yelling at the mother who yells at the kid who kicks the dog who bites the cat who claws the mouse remains a classical American coping strategy, no matter how non-politically correct it may be," he says.

More information

If you'd like to manage your anger, visit the American Psychological Association. You could also try the University of South Florida.

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