What is Stress and how does it lead to illness?

According to The Mental Health Foundation, nearly half (47%) of adults in the UK feel stressed every day, or every few days, and 59% of British adults say their life is more stressful now than it was five years ago.

Stress has become quite a frequently used term among a whole range of groups from the therapy community, to the medical community and the general public. Many people acknowledge stress to be one of the biggest causes of ill health. 

What is stress?
According to Anxiety UK, the word ‘stress’ is usually used to describe feelings that people experience when the demands made on them are greater than their ability to cope. What we need to understand is where/what our threshold is which stops us from being able to cope and leads to illness.

Stress is so widely talked about and used that it has become a blanket term for a whole range of emotions, including social anxiety, worry, anger, irritation, overwhelm, inferiority and many more.

It is understood that stress can cause a whole host of different illnesses including headaches, IBS, back-ache, eczema, heart disease and lots more. What is not understood is why the same stressor can cause two people to react in different ways. For example, the loss of a partner may lead to eczema for one person and digestive problems for another.

It seems we need to look beyond the vague ‘stress’ label and start to pinpoint the specific causes and triggers in our lives, and figure out how to resolve them. Meta-Health helps us understand health and what really causes illness. 

How does stress turn into illness?
I’m sure we all know someone that is under a large amount of stress and yet never seems to get ill, and likewise someone who appears to have a stress free life, yet gets ill all of the time. 

Meta-Health explains why…
It is not general, ongoing, day-to-day stress that causes illness; it is significant emotional events that are unexpected, dramatic and isolative, giving us a shock and generating a specific negative emotion.

The body responds to these negative emotional events in the same way it would to physical danger. In the moment of shock, the body temporarily freezes. It is in this moment, when mentally we don’t know what to do, that the body’s emergency programming takes over. We enter the ‘fight or flight’ state, and begin the emergency process that we’ve labelled ‘disease’.  

Although they are not causal, high stress levels can make us more susceptible to getting shocked by unexpected events. For example, if we’re already under a lot of pressure at work, or at home and we feel low in energy, a small unexpected shock may be enough to begin a minor disease programme.

This is also why ‘risk factors’ correlate to increased illness. Smoking, high alcohol intake, obesity and poor diet lower our general vitality and increase the levels of stress in the system, making us weaker and less able to cope when we get a shock.   If we’re feeling energetic, positive and strong, and get shocked, we’re more likely to be less affected.   

How stress and ill health link
In Meta-Health, symptoms are biologically meaningful reactions. Symptoms are the body’s response to emotion we feel at the moment of shock. Meta-Health explains which negative emotions trigger which dis-ease processes, based on an understanding of functional biology.

Some Examples:

•  Eczema and other issues of the epidermis (outer skin) are caused by separation shocks – a sudden loss of contact or connection to a significant other or the social group.
• Aches and pains of the musculoskeletal system, such as lower back pain, knee pain or neck pain, are caused by feelings of unworthiness or inferiority.
• Digestive issues such as gastric reflux and IBS are caused by shocks that we can’t swallow or eliminate.

Our emotional reaction to the shock is what determines which organ will react. This explains why different people get different reactions to ‘stress’. Suddenly separating from a partner could cause eczema in one person, because of the sudden disconnection, and aches and pains in the other person because they are devaluating themselves because of the break up.

Using the Meta-Health enquiry, we can uncover the significant emotional event that started the illness and the emotions that are keeping us stressed. Meta-health enables us to be really specific and understand our own individual stressors.

Stress and Regeneration: A Two Phase Cycle

Every disease process has two phases; after a significant emotional event, we experience the first phase (stress phase). In the stress phase, we usually don’t feel ill but are often stressed, tense, have difficulty sleeping, have cold extremities and reduced appetite. Depending on the specific organ that reacts and which part of the brain directs it, the organ either increases in cells or function, or it decreases. Which organ is affected will depend on the shock and the emotions and feelings it brings up for you.

These symptoms are not a mistake – they body’s heightened stress state gives us the energy to deal with the threat. The problem in today’s society is that we’re in Phase 1 most of the time, which lowers our vitality and makes us susceptible to subsequent shocks.   

When we resolve the shock, either through a change of circumstance or internally letting go of the emotion, we go into the second phase, (otherwise known as regeneration or the healing phase). During regeneration the affected organ begins to re-balance, either reducing or rebuilding to counteract the effects of the stress phase. It is in this phase we usually experience the disease symptoms along with increased appetite, sleepiness and increased temperature.

To summarise, stress alone is not the reason we get ill. It is down to our beliefs, thoughts, emotions and responses to our experiences. By understanding and overcoming our own unique stresses, we will be able to achieve greater health and well-being.

If you are interested in learning more or would like to book a session to start to identify and overcome your stresses, please give Sue a call or drop her an email.

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Email: info@themindandbody.co.uk
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