Title says it all, we all know the feeling but why do we physically feel the pain in our bodies?
In: Biology
This is why. Your solar plexus is an ancient basic ‘brain’ full of neurons with tendrils attached to the smooth muscle of several internal organs like your stomach and heart and your intestines. It sits in ‘the pit of your stomach’, (just below it), receives messages from the brain stem via the big vagus nerve and it’s job it to do two things, one of which is create muscular tensions and ‘flutters’ which we call emotions or feelings. Thoughts without feelings don’t motivate us, literally everything we do is because it ‘feels right.’
To the person suffering feelings of anxiety without an obvious reason, I can suggest this: past long term or repeated stress can create ‘muscle memory’ in the relevant smooth muscle, triggering or continuing the feelings long after the cause of the stress has passed. Often the imaginative part of our brains then tries to deal with these stress feelings by creating a strategy to avoid danger. It’s a feedback loop, with the brain initially signalling danger, the solar plexus creating physical feelings to make us do something useful about it, then, if there’s no quick resolution, the brain responding to the ongoing feelings with worry and circular thoughts.
You can interrupt ongoing unhappiness with two methods: solar plexus massage and deliberate ‘happy thoughts’, redefine your interpretation of life by listing and focusing on all the best experiences and deliberately minimise and diminish bad memories to trick the solar plexus into establishing new, positive muscle memory.
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