Normal emotional activities are the protective reactions of the organism to the outside irritating factors and harmless to somatopsychic health. Optimistic emotions and being full of vigor are of great significance in maintaining health, eliminating diseases and prolonging life. Nevertheless, extreme emotional activities may turn out to be pathogenic factors, giving rise to the occurrence or the deterioration of diseases. The commonly-seen emotional pathogenic factors fall into two categories. The first category is the great emotional variations, extreme and violent emotional activities like overjoy, fury, sudden terror and great fear. More often, these emotional activities may cause diseases and injure people such as mental diseases due to sudden psychic trauma and abrupt onset of apoplexy due to great anger impairing the liver. The other category is the less extreme emotional variations with long duration like prolonged melancholy, prolonged grief or overanxiety. If such bad states of the mind last long, people are also very susceptible to diseases like neurasthenia, ulcer, hypertension and cancer. The occurrence and development of these diseases are all related to the chronic mental stimulation to a certain extent.
Attention should be mainly paid to the following aspects during life and clinical practice. First, develop good moral cultivation, treat people magnanimously and handle things without seeking fame and wealth. During daily life and work, people should actively create a happy environment, treat others open-mindedly and kindly; properly handle the relationships between neighbors and colleagues; do not seek for fame and wealth; do not worry about personal gains and losses. Only in this way can emotions be stable, qi and blood harmonious. Secondly, overcome the mental pressure due to diseases. Some patients lose their confidence in treating their diseases and are of- ten depressed. Therefore, they may become agitated and furious just for some trifles. As for these patients, the medical and nursing staff should enlist their trust and then help them establish their confidence in defeating the diseases and root out the bad emotions with scientific reasons and specific examples. Thirdly, the medical and nursing staff should try to seek the patients' cooperation and straighten them out with scientific and proper methods as far as the bad emotions are concerned. The methods to regulate emotions include patient-pleasing method, method of checking one emotion with another, suggestion method, and method of straightening out patients, etc.
