Arguing With Your Spouse Prolongs Your Life, So Do Not Control Anger
A good fight with your spouse may be good for your marriage while it may improve your odds for a long life. Preliminary results of the study conducted by the University of Michigan seems to indicate that couples where both the husband and wife suppress their anger when one attacks the other, die earlier than couples where one or both partners express their anger and resolve the conflict.
Arguing can be your best medicine
Researchers at the University of Michigan looked at 192 couples over 17 years. Dr. Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the U-M School of Public Health and the Psychology Department, and lead author, explains that the couples where placed into one of four categories:
- First category: Both partners communicate their anger.
- Second and third category: One spouse expresses while the other suppresses.
- Fourth, both husband and wife suppress their anger and brood on it.
“Comparisons between couples in which both people suppress their anger, and the three other types of couples, are very intriguing,” Dr. E. Harburg says. The study showed that in the cases where both spouses suppressed their anger at the other when unfairly attacked, earlier death was twice as likely than in all other cases.
“When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict,” says Harburg. “Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents they can imitate, that’s fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict.
The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it? If you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don’t try to resolve the problem, then you’re in trouble.” Although the preliminary numbers are small, Harburg says his research team is now collecting 30-year follow-up data, which will have almost double the death rate. 
How repressed anger affects your health
Many psychologists will agree nowadays that the biggest disturbing force in most people’s lives is repressed hostility. Suppressed anger can lead to coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis and you name it.
One of the consequences of anger is muscular tension. Muscular tension can cause backache and headaches, but in a severely repressed person, even these expressions are inhibited. Such a person forces him/herself to keep calm on the outside, but inside, there is all kind of tensions going on.
This tension can reach the autonomic nervous system (the nervous system over which we have no control) where it can cause spasms in the digestive tract or lungs. It can also cause spasms in the muscles of the artery walls, leading to high blood pressure or a heart attack.
People in war time may be healthier
People in wartime are healthier than they are in peacetime because war provides and acceptable outlet for feelings of hostility. During the Six Day War in Israel in 1967, the death rate from disease fell even in homes for the aged.
And when Germany invaded Holland in 1940, Dutch doctors were astonished by the overnight recovery of many patients, some of them seriously ill in hospital beds, whose symptoms evaporated when the Germans came.
The bottom line
Do not start a fight with your spouse just for the sake of it, but if you have an issue, have a healthy argument with your companion. Tell him/her how you feel about and what you guys can do to correct the problems. And by the way, a few screams won’t hurt.
To your health!
Emilia Klapp, R.D., B.S.
www.TheDiabetesClub.com
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