What Stress Can Do To Your Body Physically
Everything you need to know about the importance of physically processing your emotions for stress and pelvic pain management
We hear it all the time: “Stress makes _______ worse”. We could fill this blank in with any number of chronic illnesses, chronic pain points, chronic symptoms or risk factors for diseases.
“Stress makes your risk of cancer worse.”
“Stress messes with the blood sugar levels for diabetics. “
“Stress makes chronic migraines worse.”
And guess what, stress also makes chronic pelvic pain, constipation and bladder symptoms worse!
How do we use stress management to reduce pelvic dysfunction?
We need to learn how to become less stressed and more regulated with our nervous system throughout the course of the day.
Now, that may sound all well and good, but how do we even do that?!
First, you need to reconnect to your body.
Why we need to reconnect to our body
Many times, we feel tight or stiff but none of the stretches seem to help at all! Or we are stressed out and have a flare in our chronic illness, which only makes us more stressed! This is because there has been a disconnect between our brain and the rest of our body. We are not talking about the conscious part of the brain, we are talking about the part of the brain that controls our background noise, the automatic stuff that keeps us moving that we don’t even think about.
Sometimes this background noise was set in place in an attempt to protect us from something a long time ago but the patterns aren't really helpful anymore and these persistent patterns can keep us in survival mode.
Many people experiencing chronic illness, pain, anxiety or other symptoms have a nervous system that is in survival mode. This means that their pain tolerance (how much one is willing to tolerate) and pain threshold (when one’s body perceives pain versus anything else) are not aligning and their nervous system is feeling overstimulated on a regular basis. To combat this, the nervous system can basically ignore signaling that is not immediately presenting danger.
Learn more about pain tolerance vs. pain threshold here, but at its basic level, people with chronic pain have lower pain thresholds (meaning they feel pain sooner) and higher pain tolerance (meaning they tolerate more overall stimuli).
What this means practically is that if you’re someone experiencing chronic pain, stress, illness etc then the amount of stimulus (what your body is trying to tell you) has to be a lot higher for your brain to hear the message than someone without chronic symptoms.
For example, if you’re someone experiencing chronic anxiety and you’re worried about scheduling the carpools, whether you found the right balance between nice and assertive in that email you sent earlier, what that tone meant in your partners voice when they said “bye” on the phone, and how you’re going to pay for the new dishwasher you know is right around the corner because your current one is on it’s last leg, you’re less like to be able to hear the signals of “hey, you’re hungry, go eat lunch” or “hey, you’re thirsty, drink something” or “hey, you have to pee, get up and go.”
When we don’t listen to our body's signals, we don’t give it what it needs to thrive and we keep ourselves in survival mode. When we are in survival mode, our brain has a significantly harder time finding solutions to problems (like “how can I calm down” or “how can I get this pain in my pelvis to go away”) and we get stuck in these patterns that keep our bodies locked into the persistent symptoms.
The Power of Interoception
One of the best ways to reconnect to the body is by understanding the power of interoception.
Interoception is the perception of what is happening inside of your own body —a vital starting point for change. If you've struggled with chronic symptoms and past treatments have fallen short, this is crucial for you!
My favorite thing to give my patients to help with this is Tension Checks:
Set a timer for every 2 hours on your phone or watch.
When the timer rings, pause for 10-30 seconds and feel what you can release in your body without changing your posture.
Any tension you let go of was unnecessary, subconscious holding patterns.
Regular practice with this reveals hidden tension and its impact on your well-being.
Once you've mastered the art of basic relaxation through Tension Checks, progress yourself to the Elevated Tension Check, a game-changer:
Lay down in a comfortable position (on your back with a pillow under the knee tends to be easiest for most) and start with a Tension Check
Progress to Elevated Tension Checks, delving deeper into conscious relaxation across key areas: sacrum, rectum, uterus, bladder, abdominals, hips, legs, and pelvic floor.
Visualize and relax these regions to target specific symptoms. Sacrum relaxation may help with back pain, relaxing the tissue around your uterus may reduce groin pain, relaxing your abdominals can decrease bladder urgency—you name it!
Visualize your sacrum drop out of the pelvis and onto the bed, your leg bones gently falling away from the socket, your abdominal muscles gently falling away from midline, your uterus gently dropping toward your resting surface, etc.
After moving through various parts of your body, notice how relaxed your body feels.
Using Interoception to Physically Process Emotions
Once you’ve had time to practice the Tension Check and Elevated Tension Check, you can use these techniques practically to process the emotions physically in your body. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase to “sit with your emotions” or to “process your emotions” or maybe this is completely new to you.
Maybe you’ve heard these things before but have absolutely no idea what the heck it even means and when someone says “sit with your emotions” to you, you think they might as well be asking you to fly solo to the moon based on how foreign the concept is to you.
Here is a little background for you if you’re new to the concept. When we experience something, our brain releases chemicals (or neurotransmitters) throughout the body to tell us what we are experiencing. Each emotion has its own chemical signature which tells us if we are feeling happy, sad, worried, elated, fear etc. If you take the time to think about this, you may be able to describe what that sensation of joy, anger or annoyance feels like in your body.
Understanding these physical sensations can help you sit with and process your emotions. This is important because when we do not process our emotions, the chemicals sending the signals can sit in our bodies and be unused and cause their own host of problems (enter chronic pain and illness to the chat).
This is evident when we hear over and over again that stress makes every chronic illness worse and that people often feel better after a good cry or going for a run. Tears and sweat have both been shown to be avenues to release cortisol and other stress hormones from the body, leading them to be healthy options for processing emotions.
Now, how do we actually do it?
First, play some relaxing music. There are some great options for free online or you can use whatever your favorite flavor of music is. There are also different frequencies of sound that align with different brainwave frequencies and some people can find this to be helpful. My personal favorite is Steven Halpern’s Deep Theta Waves or Deep Alpha Waves which can be found on various music platforms and YouTube. These bring you into deeper parasympathetic states and out of the stress response.
Next, sit or lay down comfortably and do an Elevated Tension Check to assist with releasing any excessive tension you’re currently able to release.
Now, for the fun part:
Identify a circumstance to leads to you feeling an undesired emotion (nothing too traumatic where a mental health professionals assistance would be more appropriate)
Identify the stories you are telling yourself about this emotion (“I can’t believe I messed up again”, “That person is the worst”, “It will always be like this”, etc)
Scan your body and see where you feel this (maybe tension through your throat, heaviness in the chest, a pit in the stomach, etc)
Sit with that feeling, follow it through the body, describe it to yourself, give it a color/animal/shape, whatever feels right to you, but stay with it. Don’t get distracted by more thoughts or feelings, stay on this one thought and feeling. Our body can only sit with an emotion for 1.5-2 minutes chemically so stay with it, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Notice how this sensation subsides and lessens and take a deep breath to clear it.
Think about what emotion you’d like to be feeling toward this current situation instead (confidence, joy, abundance, safety, etc).
What stories would you have to tell yourself to make this feel true (“I made a mistake and I learned a lot”, “I can choose to share my love and light with people who value me”, “Life is long and I am capable of change whenever I choose” etc). Try to make this a positive action or thought versus an avoidant one (“I can learn to do things differently” vs “I don’t want to keep making the same mistakes”)
Feel this new emotion permeate every cell in your body, envision yourself living this new version of your life.
Notice how your body feels and carry this new feeling with you as you move through your day!
Doing this physical processing of emotional symptoms is a great way to check in with your body and listen to the signals it’s trying to send so that you can physically process the emotion (and the neurotransmitters in your body) and move on with your day instead of allowing these neurotransmitters to sit in your body, wreaking havoc and increasing chronic pain, anxiety and illness symptoms.
If you need help with this and are experiencing symptoms, specifically pain or physical symptoms resulting from a chronic illness, consider adding a physical therapist to your care team to work in conjunction with your mental health provider so that you can bridge the gap between the mental and emotional symptoms and the physical manifestation of them. If you are local to the Columbus, Ohio area and in need of support with this, reach out for help and we would be honored to be part of your care team!
