Top 3 Signs of the Body Under Stress
How your body reacts to stress isn’t something you can rationally control. It lives completely in the body and is always trying to communicate with you. When we refuse to acknowledge the depth of stress we are under the only language the body has to get our attention is sensation, dysfunction or eventually pain.
Stress alone doesn’t cause things like cancer and autoimmune diseases but a chronically elevated nervous system can hold the door open and make them worse.
The first time I remember noticing my body reacting to stress was in the 90”s. My husband was deployed and I was alone in Germany taking care of my 4 year old and helping with the family support group. Because this was the first time this unit had deployed, there were a lot of scared wives left behind. That translated into a lot of evening phone calls. At the time, I hadn’t heard from my husband for 2 months so I felt chained to the phone. (Remember this was before cell phone & email was very new) I didn’t want to miss a call but every phone call was a distraught wife. Soon every time the phone rang, the palms of my hands started itching. I would scratch the palms of my hands for the entire call, even if it wasn’t a military related call. I didn’t realize I was doing it until it started to break the skin.
I finally asked a nurse about it because it seemed like some kind of allergic reaction but there wasn’t anything new...except the deployment. I asked her if something like that could be caused by stress and got a resounding “possibly”.
This is a mild example of how stress can affect the body without any rational connection to the stressful situation. Is a deployment stressful? Yes. Is taking care of your baby alone in a foreign country stressful? Yes. Trying to calm the fears of other stressed out, anxious women stressful? Yes. Does it make sense why any of that would cause itchy hands? No.
Stress of any kind, big or small causes a physiological response in the body.That response in the short term is supposed to help you survive the tiger attack then return to normal. When it doesn’t return to normal or the lion never leaves that’s when things can go sideways. Too much stress from long term fight or flight activation can create stress overwhelm and lead to physical pain, serious dysfunction or disease throughout the body.
How do you know when you’re in stress overwhelm when something as small as a phone call can trigger your stress response? Start by listening to the body. Here are the top 3 ways your body tells you the stress is too much and how you can start to take back control.
Chronic muscle tension, pain and inflammation
Part of the body’s response to any kind of threat is to get you ready to run away or fight. That means all of your muscles start to tense up so you’re ready to go. Your circulation, blood pressure, heart rate and breathing pick up to give you the burst of energy you need to get yourself to a safe place. Certain hormones are released to increase your pain threshold for the moment and allow for instant access to energy in the bloodstream. Your body is ready for action. It’s ready to fight the lion...or run like the devil.
But what if you don’t take action or there’s no action to take? What if the lion moves in? Over time that chronic physical tension creates knots of restricted blood flow to the muscle.Those areas eventually firing. This leads to incorrect movement patterns and compensation injuries throughout the body as well as entire areas that can no longer communicate with the brain.
The fascia, which is a spider web of support that surrounds your muscles, tightens down to compensate for those movement patterns. It learns your new survival posture and tries to help by keeping you there further locking in the tension.
The combination of excessive levels of stress hormones left in the bloodstream for too long and chronic physical tension can trigger inflammation throughout the body. Now, instead of helping you survive, your body’s stress response is causing restriction and pain.
Take back control
Movement
When you are feeling tension in the muscles that leads to areas of pain, it might seem intuitive to rest. Tension that’s locked in the body through chronic stress is actually craving movement. Exercise.
Not the hard core, boot camp kind of exercise that only adds more stress but light to moderate movement that lets you stay present, challenge the muscles and satisfy the call for fight or flight without damaging impact on the joints and muscles.
We call it active rest. It gives you the opportunity to shake off the tension and recover. TRE® (Trauma Releasing Exercise) is a great example of this type of exercise. So is Yoga or other types of mindful movement practices. It’s important when incorporating exercise for stress relief to keep light and early in the day so it doesn’t sabotage your sleep cycle.
2. Chronic Insomnia
Sleep habits are the canary in the gold mine when our stress levels start to escalate. We’ve all occasionally experienced a sleepless night or two, but chronic sleep deprivation is a serious health concern. The same hormone cocktail that helps you fight the lion in the room is the same one that helps you pull an all nighter before a big exam. That hormone combination won’t let you sleep because in your body and primitive brain there’s no difference between surviving a lion attack and cramming for a test. Memories or worries about the future can do the same thing. To your body and primitive brain perception is 100% reality. The physiologic stress response drives your brain into hyper alert mode. It’s almost impossible to shut it down.
Chronic sleep deprivation then becomes its own stress trigger in the body compounding all of the other physical symptoms of stress overwhelm. In other words, stress causes sleep deprivation and lack of sleep then increases stress. It’s a terrible stress cycle that causes junk food and sugar cravings as well. Caffeine to stay awake or alcohol or other drugs to help you fall asleep just make the problem worse.
Your brain requires sleep in order to function at optimal levels. When you aren’t able to get deep restorative sleep, areas in the brain that are responsible for memory creation, emotional regulation and cognitive functioning start to decline and actually shrink. The PET scans and MRI’s of sleep deprived patients start to look similar to those with traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
Take back control
Sleep
Insomnia can get out of hand quickly because we try to counteract the fatigue with caffeine and energy drinks. Sleep deprivation has also been linked to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. This might be because insulin opposes melatonin, the hormone that helps you sleep. Too much insulin in the bloodstream will interfere with sleep cycles.
Start your day with a little sunshine, go outside a couple times during the day, limit your exposure to caffeine, alcohol and blue light in the evenings.
The light exposure during the day helps the brain shut down melatonin production during the day. Caffeine is a stimulant so try to avoid it close to bedtime. Alcohol may seem like it would help you sleep but it alters your blood sugar levels and actually wakes you later. Blue light is the light from back lit screens and disrupts melatonin production.
3. Chronic Gut Pain
The bacterial ecosystem that lives in the gut is the epicenter for digestion, nutrient absorption, hormone production and most importantly, forms the basis for your immune system. All of which can be disrupted by the cascade of hormones triggered by chronic stress. The result can be excruciating gut pain. It was once thought that anxiety and depression were the cause of so many cases of IBS and IBD. Now scientists are finding that it may be the other way around. The health of the gut (or lack of it) is what contributes to the frequency and severity of anxiety and depression.
Your gut is lined with over 100 million nerves and has a direct line of communication through the vagus nerve from that lining to the brain in your head. In fact the gut contains 5 X more neurons than the number in your spinal cord and is constant communication. Turns out, your gut is the body's brain and while it might not be able to do math, it's great at reporting on whether you’re ok or not. 90% of the time it’s the gut sending messages to the brain, instead of the other way around. So essentially it’s your gut that tells the brain when there’s a lion in the room.
Unfortunately for us, any threat signals the body to shut down all non- essential systems. Those include appetite (Who wants to run or fight with a burger in one hand?) digestion, and the immune system. This is brilliant in the short term. But when there’s a lion in every room there is no short term. When your enteric nervous system (the gut) stays shut down for too long you can start to feel GI dysfunction. That can look like chronic gut pain, constipation, diarrhea, IBS, IBD as well as autoimmune responses.
Along with these come a different type of hypervigilance, hypersensitivity to pain and a subtle loss of trust in the signals that your body is sending you. It can start feel like you’re fighting your own body. When you can’t trust your own body, how can you trust anyone else?
Take back control
Nutrition
Your overall health and resilience to stress depends on the health and resilience of your gut. And that depends on the biodiversity of the bacteria living in your gut. To support that diversity we need a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day. A probiotic or prebiotic supplement is a great option but by eating your greens you are providing the same things plus all the fiber and nutrient density they need to boost your immune system.
Avoid sugar and processed foods as much as possible and try to eat your last meal of the day early. Every time you eat, the body releases insulin to help with energy storage. Insulin blocks melatonin. Also the bacteria in the gut work on a similar circadian rhythm as you do, awake during the day, resting at night. Eating late and then trying to sleep just makes it harder for them to do their job and for you to sleep.
Making the Connection
When your gut senses a threat, it sends a message through the vagus nerve triggering a cascade of stress hormones to prepare you for fight or flight. Increasing the tension in your muscles. If you choose not to react physically to that threat or it doesn’t go away, that tension remains locked in the body.
Stress hormones flood your system, keeping you alert and awake. Sleep deprivation adds another threat to your survival and builds up more physical tension and hormone release keeping your normal digestion and immune system function offline. This in turn triggers another stress response and another round of threat as it affects the balance of the gut microbiome.
The microbiome disruption can cause even more hormone disruptions and lead to chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Chronic pain causes hyper vigilance, hypersensitivity and tension throughout the body causing another layer of threat and stress response leading to more physical tension, pain and more sleep deprivation.
Ideally, when you notice any of these signals from the body, you would be aware of where the stress was coming from and could act to limit your exposure to that threat. But anything can trigger a stress response. Even things that we aren’t willing to acknowledge as stress (like the ring of the phone). A lifetime of denial, resentment and repressed emotions can be a major source stress that’s not easily recognizable. Our modern culture lives in stress. Many people wear it like a badge of honor.
The autonomic fight or flight stress response is designed to help you survive immediate external threats. While not all stress is bad and stress by itself doesn’t cause disease, the stress culture of our modern world is rarely immediate in a way that the body understands. Today we can be under constant assault from external events past and present as well as our own internal perceptions. Chronic, high levels of stress from any source, can open the door for physical, mental and emotional dysfunction.
How your body responds to stress is our first line of defense against disease. When the body speaks, we need to listen. Movement, sleep and nutrition are simple ways to relieve the pressure and break the circle of stress in the body and build the resilience we need to live a life that goes beyond mere survival.
My name is Ericka Thomas. I offer trauma release yoga memberships and private coaching for survivors of stress injury and overwhelmed people just like you.
If you want to learn more about the trauma release process or find a certified provider in your area go to www.traumaprevention.com
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