The Way Out of Stress-Related Symptoms
Hello, world! What a time to launch. It’s October 2020 and so much is topsy-turvy. Before I get into that, know this is a safe space to explore, learn, grow and heal.
Now onto that collective sense of “what happened to the life I knew?” Just seven months ago, here in California, we could bop around to work, school, stores and concerts. I could give friends a hug or bump into a stranger without fretting I’d endangered my health. Wildfires are burning our blessed state and we’re reckoning with long-standing injustices in our nation. I’m not even going to mention politics. No matter where you are in the world, you may feel your beliefs, social structures and way of life are doing cartwheels on steroids.
If you’re noticing stress, you are indeed part of the species Homo Sapiens. But, where does that tension go? We may have more fatigue, back or neck pain, brain fog, body aches, bloating, insomnia or anxiety. Check the anxiety box. We may point to things like: I’m getting less exercise. I can’t go to the chiropractor. I’m sitting too long. Or, I’m not eating as well. Sound familiar?
Assuming you’re not drinking soda for breakfast or imbibing nocturnal doses of Netflix, new research shows that chronic pain has more to do with psychological stress than physical stress. Consider your mind and heart as first responders that make deliveries to your body. What is upsetting to your heart space or peace of mind? What, in turn, are you having to stomach?
The late, groundbreaking physician Dr. John Sarno, of New York University Medical School, realized that unconscious emotions—those that are too much to feel consciously—can indeed lead to a stomach ache, headache, back ache and much more.
In fact, the human brain can create chronic symptoms, even without an injury or illness, or long after we’ve healed. This is leading to epidemics of pain and fatigue, for which modern medicine has little to offer. In scans, the emotional brain centers are overactive in people with ongoing pain, even when their body scans are statistically normal. Most people without pain have things like bulging and degenerative disks, by the way.
Not only have we been chasing the wrong carrot, we’ve been obsessing over the carrot—that shiny medicinal thing—instead of the scary monster dangling it. Let’s assume that scary monster is a looming deadline, a hyperactive child or an invisible virus killing millions of people. We can prod our body and pop various remedies, which might make us feel a little better. (Placebos often work as well as the real thing.) But we have to keep going back for the medicine. We’re stuck in a loop, treating the effect rather than the cause.
What if we stop chasing the bright orange object, or whatever we think is the cure, and simply acknowledge we’re scared and angry about this threatening situation? When we express how we feel about the monster, it loses some of its power.
In the work I do, we ask, how is this making me feel? We attend to our emotions (hint, they live in the body) as we would a needy child. Because we are a needy child when we are hurting. Whether we have a physical symptom or emotional upset, we need loving attention and self-soothing.
Most of us didn’t get exactly what we needed as children. Most of us weren’t encouraged to feel our feelings in a safe and supportive way. Instead, we learned to push down anger, fear and sadness until we no longer recognize we have them. Before long, we have TMJ or a repetitive stress injury. For me, it was a very disabling case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME). It took me 13 years to understand that my brain was causing physical symptoms in order to protect me from unconscious emotions— thanks to pioneers in the field of mind-body medicine, like Dr. Sarno.
Whether we’ve had a trauma or a series of micro-stresses, we experience mindbody symptoms. We’re trained to blame them on how we moved (or did not move), what we ate (or did not eat), how the wind blew or some other purely physical phenomena. While I’m a big advocate of whole foods and exercise, if you have persistent symptoms, there’s likely an unconscious emotional process at play.