We’ve long known that emotions create physiological changes in the body. For example, sadness can create tears, fear often leads to sweaty palms, and anxiety or excitement can give us butterflies in the stomach. As for embarrassment—who hasn’t experienced those tell-tale red cheeks?
In other words, while you can try and deny your emotions, your body doesn’t lie. It will communicate what it’s feeling inside through postures, the tightening or relaxing of muscles, facial expressions, nervous system arousal, heart beats, and breathing patterns. This is a perfectly normal part of being human. However, over time negative emotions can manifest in physical pain or ailments and even contribute to injury.
Read on to learn how emotions impact your body—and some simple ways to start breaking any negative patterns you may have developed during the pandemic.
Negative emotions and our learned physiological response
When pain or uncomfortable symptoms from emotions, like anxiety or depression, become chronic, it creates a learned physiological response. More and more research is highlighting the link between mental health struggles and physical ailments. Just like you can practise to become good at soccer, you can also incidentally “practise” being good at pain responses or negative emotions.
Throughout covid, we’ve all been pushed into survival mode for a very long time. This extended period in “fight, flight or freeze” mode can cause our Nervous System to become dysregulated—intensifying emotions and creating rigidity in our bodies.
Returning to normal life after a prolonged period of stress
Even though we’re now trying to regain our routines and activities, some of you may be experiencing more niggles and flare ups of injuries or finding that you don’t have as much energy or motivation. This is completely understandable, as the negative emotions or pain from the last couple of years may have built up in your body, keeping you stuck in these automatic patterns or habitual postures.
However, don’t worry as there is some good news. With a few simple lifestyle tweaks, you can start to unlearn these patterns and gradually build up the resilience of your Nervous System once again. Keep reading to learn how.
Simple ways to strengthen your Nervous System
The most powerful tools to regulate your Nervous System (and relieve pain and stress) include:
EXERCISE: Your strength and capacity to withhold load may have significantly reduced over the last couple years so the emphasis is on GRADED exercise. If you find your body is more reactive, you may want to start with lower-grade exercise like walking, cycling, clinical pilates, yoga or hydrotherapy. From here, a progressive exercise program can be developed.
MASSAGE/MOBILISATION: Releasing tension in the body will directly release tension in the mind through the vagus nerve connection. As well as this, eliminating pain and stiffness will allow you to move freely, breathe freely and stop pain from using up your energy reserves.
BREATHWORK: We can hack our parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) through our breath.”1:2 breathing”, where you breathe out for twice as long as you breathe in, can facilitate the relaxation of your aroused Nervous System. It is also good to identify your pattern of breathing as this will determine which muscles have become more rigid and we can teach you how to make this more efficient.
MEDITATION: Whether you love it or hate it, meditation is the most effective way of taking control of our brains and thoughts—where both pain and emotion originate. Just like a massage can relax mental stress, learning to relax the thoughts in your mind will help you relax the autonomic bracing and tension in your body, again through the vagus nerve.
The Vagus Nerve and the mind-body connection
The vagus nerve is a two-way communicator between the brain and body (the mind-body connection). I recommend looking this up to find out just how important nervous system health is. You can also read our previous blog, How to Alleviate Pandemic Stress Via the Vagus Nerve, for more information on its vital role.
How emotions impact your body – chronic stress & body hyperreactivity
Now you have an idea of how emotions impact your body, we hope you’ll understand the hyperreactivity you’re experiencing may be a residual effect of the chronic stress we’ve all been under. There are multitudes of strategies to help regulate your Nervous System once again, but it starts with figuring out where your current baseline is.
If you’re interested in discussing this further, getting some manual release work, or developing an exercise program that’s the right fit for you, please book an appointment with one of our physiotherapists. We’d love to help.
Image Credit: Megapixl
Pete Hunt is a highly skilled physiotherapist with nearly three decades of experience working in sports physiotherapy and private practice. The Director of The Alignment Studio, he has a special interest in musculoskeletal and sports injuries, orthopaedic rehabilitation and postural syndrome. With a caring, communicative approach, Pete uses a combination of joint and soft tissue mobilisation and exercise prescription to treat his clients. He’s also passionate about education for injury prevention and lasting results.