We like to split ‘physical health’ and ‘mental health’ as if they are two separate things. Like our brains don’t live in our bodies?! Like our thoughts are some separate phenomena happening in a different realm from our physical bodies. It's so dumb!
Everything that happens to us physically and mentally has a knock-on effect elsewhere in our bodies. Our thoughts trigger physical, hormonal, and chemical reactions in our bodies, and the things we do physically can have both beneficial and detrimental effects on our minds.
It seems so ludicrous to me that we split these two things when really, the more we better understand the symbiosis of our mind and body, the better off we would all be.
I am on a bit of a journey at the moment, trying to understand and manage the physiological impact my thoughts have on my body, and vice versa.
My body often feels stuck in a fight-or-flight response. It’s ready to go – to fight or flee from that 'threat.' The cortisol and adrenaline are running through my system with no real life threat to tackle.
Usually, for me, it’s an imagined threat, or a perceived threat. I’ve pictured how I might crash my car, how my daughter might get sick and die, or how I will get into tons of debt and lose my house. I can spend a lot of time imagining the threats – imagining the worst that could happen, just to be properly prepared, obviously!
But really, no one is prepared for those things happening to them. They are horrendous, awful experiences, and no amount of imagining them will prepare you for them in reality.
What imagining them does do, however, is constantly tell your amygdala (the threat response centre of your brain) that there are threats aplenty surrounding you. That your body needs to respond to the threats.
My body feels like it is chronically responding to threats that are either completely imagined or threats to my ego or pride – but not to my life. I have sore muscles, headaches, jaw ache, and stomach pain, all connected to chronic levels of cortisol and stress in my body.
So there’s work to be done on the catastrophizing (or imagining and preparing!), but there is also work that I am currently doing on just soothing my nervous system. Telling my nervous system and my body that it is indeed safe through various techniques, especially somatic exercises where I am beginning to release some of the built-up chronic stress in my body. Letting that cortisol out of my system and letting my amygdala know that I hear him (he yells at me all the time and takes over everything – it is definitely a 'him!') and that I thank it for alerting me to a threat, but I am okay, we are okay.
We are safe.
How does stress show up in your body?
I was literally talking to someone about this today! I fidget a lot, and I think it's my body's physical response to feeling stressed. The worst symptom is my leg-jiggle - I've had countless comments from whoever I'm with telling me to stop jiggling my damn leg. I don't even know I'm doing until the other person tells me it's driving them mad. I jiggle it a lot, and I'm stressed and anxious a lot - so I defo think the two are connected!