What if biggest risk to our lives comes from our own unhappiness?

By David McElroy · September 17, 2017

I like to pretend death doesn’t exist.

When reality forces me to admit death is waiting — even for me and for those I love — I like to at least pretend that life and death are purely mechanical processes. I like to pretend our bodies are just sophisticated biological machines.

Most of all, though, I like to pretend I don’t understand the role my emotional health plays in the physical health of my body. I like to pretend I don’t know that what goes on in my heart can kill me.

It’s as though there’s a self-destruct sequence in each one of us. When acute emotional distress hits us, that self-destruct sequence is activated. I’ve felt a nagging suspicion lately that the sequence has started for me — and I saw evidence this afternoon that terrifies me, because I’m not ready to die.

It’s not hyperbole to say that emotional distress can destroy the human machine. In the 1990s, Japanese scientists identified one specific way that Broken Heart Syndrome can kill a person. (This particular condition mostly affects older women, but I’m certain there are plenty of other pathways through which emotional problems achieve the same thing.)

Humans seem to have known for a long time that there’s a connection between emotional pain and physical problems. How else would we have come to see love as being in the heart? And how would we have come to see loss of love leading to “a broken heart”?

Why did the writer of the biblical Psalms say, “Scorn has broken my heart and has left me helpless…,” in the first part of Psalm 69:20 (NIV)? There’s a lot of knowledge and wisdom which we somehow know — things which rational people might write off as “old wive’s tales” — that come to us instinctively.

For me, this is one of those things. It might be for you, too.

Why does extreme emotional hurt lead people to want to kill themselves? Why does unhappiness cause people to act in ways that are self-destructive and will lead to their own deaths indirectly?

How much of our behavior is an unconscious form of slow suicide? How many of the physical problems we see happening in our bodies are warning signs? What if something inside our bodies is saying, “Hey, you’re going to kill yourself with the path you’re on, so change your mind and your heart before you destroy both of us”?

For the last couple of years, I’ve been experiencing that nagging feeling that the self-destruct sequence has started for me. The warnings have mostly been subtle, but the blood clots in my lungs 18 months ago spoke very clearly.

Lately, though, it feels as though the process has moved to another level. It’s not that I am ignoring the warnings. I simply haven’t known how to change the internal heartbreak that’s pushing the process forward.

For the last month or so, I can’t sleep well. No matter how much sleep I get, I wake up exhausted. I feel listless and purposeless during the day. It seems as though I’m just staggering through each work day, barely staying awake long enough to fake normalcy until I can get home and collapse in unhappiness. And then the sequence starts each morning all over again — with a growing sense of unease and even panic.

Today, my blood pressure is 157/104, which is considered serious hypertension. It’s just below the level at which you’re advised to immediately go to an emergency room. (The second number is apparently the more critical number and 110 is the level at which the online guides say you’re in an immediate emergency. Just a few weeks ago, I was regularly around 115/76.) Oddly, my heart rate was also unnaturally low today at about 60 beats per minute. This is an unusual combination which seems to suggest potential problems, according to what I read online.

I’ve called a doctor friend of mine for an opinion about several issues, including blood pressure, heart rate and hormonal levels. He’s out of town at a conference, but I hope to talk with him Monday.

I appreciate medical science and I’m thankful for those who can help patch us together when we’re having problems, but I’m also convinced that the issue I’m dealing with is far deeper than what he can fix.

I have a heart problem — but it has a deeper cause than any doctor can deal with. My body is taking a cue from my unhappy heart. It seems to be starting to shut down.

Have you ever heard of a “dead man’s switch”? It’s a safety device built into some machines which could be dangerous if they continued to operate after the human controlling them were to die or become unconscious. As long as the switch is held down, the device will work fine, but if the operator were to suddenly die, he would no longer hold the switch down — and the machine would quit.

The heart is like this, too. When something inside of us dies, we quit sending the signal to our bodies to go right on operating in healthy ways. It doesn’t seem to kill us immediately, but if we spend too many days without something inside saying, “I am happy to be alive and I have the love and purpose to go on,” that’s when the body breaks down.

You won’t find that in any medical textbook. Doctors have much more sophisticated biological and chemical explanations for why physical systems fail. I know that.

But I also know the self-destruct sequence I feel inside is real. I know something inside keeps looking for love and other necessary emotional “fuel” to give me reasons to stay alive. And I know I’m not finding it lately.

If I were to die tonight, it would probably be recorded as a heart problem. Doctors can look at my physical heart and maybe even patch me up for awhile — but there’s nothing they can do about the hidden self-destruction that originates in a broken heart.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts