Why does your body feel physically unwell after going through emotional trauma?
In: Biology
At a certain basic level, stress is stress is stress. Your nervous system doesn’t always differentiate between kinds of stress in as much depth as we might think. Most stress responses are designed to protect us in situations of physical stress / trauma. Classic example: running away from a tiger; your body does things like increase adrenalin / cortisol and moves blood to your arms and legs to help you run faster, downshifts long-term housekeeping functions because they’re not as important in a crisis and it doesn’t want to waste energy on them; etc.
Running away from the tiger not only potentially saves your life; it also “uses up” the stress hormones/ shifts in circulation/ etc because that’s what the response was designed for.
However, when we have an emotional trauma, we have very similar physiological and hormonal reactions; stress is stress. But now we’re not “using up” the response physically, instead it’s sitting around in our bodies, where those stress hormones, redistributed blood flow and downshifting of basic functions can make us feel terrible.
TLDR: Even very gentle physical activity (walking, stretching, massage) is helpful to “undo” the stress response, as are all the actions that help invoke its opposite “housekeeping” response: companionship, safety, rest, mindfulness, etc.
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