When the Body Says No

“We have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The Body mounts a stress response, but the Mind is unaware of the threat.” Gabor Mate

The Mind-Body Connection – Healthy Ways to Work with Stress

“I am stressed out!”

“Wow, that situation was stressful.”

“I am under a lot of pressure.”

“I am up to my ears in work.”

How often does the word stress land in our language to describe an aspect of our life?

Quite frequently. After all, stress is a normal aspect of modern life.

However, it has become chronic and out of control. Our stress levels are so high that we believe that this is a normal situation. Most people are on high alert with their sympathetic nervous system ready to fight, fly and freeze.   High levels and ongoing stress are damaging to our mental and physical health.

What if we were to say, “This is not normal; this is not how the body is supposed to be”?

We would have to re-evaluate our way of living. Maybe we could take charge of our stress.

The Body as a Machine

For the last 300 years, we have lived under a false premise that has disempowered our ability to be an active agent in our healing. Since Descartes, the Mind and the Body have been considered separate and distinct systems. The prevailing attitude in the medical profession is that there isn’t a connection between the two. What we think and feel does not affect our overall health.

In this attitude, the Body is seen as a machine. Our physical and emotional well-being can be treated with an outside agency – prescriptive medication and/or surgery that swaps one part for another.

I love idioms because they say so much about what we already intuitively know in the depths of our being. Our language already portrays what lost ancient knowledge, and wisdom traditions have already known. Whether we are aware of it or not, our language pulls together the connection of the feelings in the Body with our subjective experience. We use the phrase “feeling sick” when we want to describe physical symptoms, like when we are fighting a virus or have a fever. We also say that when we are overwhelmed emotionally. For example, if we see someone being treated cruelly or inhumanely, we say, “It made me sick to watch what happened.” When we are sad or grieving, we feel the emotion physically in our hearts.   We know on an intuitive level that our emotional life impacts our physiology.

What the Research Shows

The list of peer-reviewed scientific research studies grows longer every year. These studies correlate the behaviour of our cells and our behaviour in everyday life. The conflict between the brain and the body and chronic stress weakens our immune system and makes us more susceptible to illness

In 1996, the authors of a Canadian Medical Association Journal article wrote that healthy people have neuroimmune mechanisms that provide the host defence against infection, injury, cancer, and control immune and inflammatory reactions. And conversely, disease and inflammatory reactions reflect a situation where the internal environment is disordered”. The message is that stress knocks our bodies out of balance, making it difficult to be resilient in the present.

Research from the HIV institute at UCLA found that the stressed patients didn’t respond as well to the drugs to fight the virus as those who weren’t so stressed.

Research also demonstrates that we add to our stress by remembering or dwelling on stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations that may or may not happen in the future. By remembering or anticipating, we release the same stress hormones into our body, activating our fight or flight mode.

Other studies of patients with serious illnesses found that a risk factor is the inability to express emotion, especially negative emotions such as anger. Although it is not the only risk factor, the researchers found that repressed anger increases physicality stress on the body.

Three Elements of Stress

We can imagine chronic stress as a simple equation –  “excessive stress occurs when the demands made on the organism exceed our reasonable capacity to address them”  Whenever we encounter a stressful situation, over 1,400 chemical reactions occur in the body, producing thirty hormones and neurotransmitters.

We can break stress down into three components or elements.

• The event: the outside situation we experience as threatening, beyond our control or triggering in some way.
• The processing system: the system that experiences and interprets the outside threatening event. One could say that this is the nervous system of the body. I would like to expand that to include the psychological system of our past and the attitudes that make up our complexes. In this case, our attitudes and beliefs formed from our experience come into play and colour our interpretation of live events. It is often the interpretation or the outer event or stressor that compounds the chronic stress we experience in the body. The negative beliefs that we have of ourselves or others, that is.
• Our response to the stress: how the system responds to the threat. This is both physical and behavioural. This is our reaction to life. What is your natural response to stress? Some people drink, some people repress their emotions out of a powerless belief,

Awareness and Responsibility

Gabor Mate, in his book “When the Body says No,” opens the pandora’s box of blaming the victim of profound suffering of physical disabilities. He suggests that the conversation about blame misses the essential point. He writes, “blaming the sufferer – apart from being morally obtuse – is completely unfounded from a scientific point of view.”

Instead, he advocates expanding awareness and perspective and assuming responsibility for our lives rather than just reacting to the circumstances. The ability to respond, that is, to make accurate and true decisions about our lives and our health, demands that we are aware, that is, conscious. Taking responsibility is related to being conscious, to cultivating consciousness, that is, the capacity for awareness.

Consciousness and Well-Being – the 7 “A” s of Well-Being

We live in a stressful world. There is no getting around that. We must, however, understand the intricate and delicate balance between our internal psychological dynamics, our emotional environment and our physiology.

Chronic stress occurs when our body doesn’t return to a place of homeostasis when we are in a constant state of flight or flight mode. The longer our innate stressful survival mechanism is constantly activated, our systems become maladaptive, and our bodies cannot rely on its own internal resources to create balance and health.

So how do we help to reduce our stress and to create more balance? We first need to know what it feels like in our body to feel well and be in a healthy state.

Gabor Mate advocates the 7 “A” of Health

Acceptance: the courage to recognize and accept things as they are. Acceptance challenges our natural denial mechanism and our “not good enough” story.

Awareness: of our emotional inner life, for this is where our truth lies. It also means that we need to learn the signs of stress and be willing to take care of ourselves.

Anger: We need to accept anger as an essential emotional experience and learn how to express it healthily.

Autonomy: We need to have a strong internal center of agency.

Attachment: Social connections to the world is essential to our health. Study after study has proven that lonely people are at a greater risk for illness.

Assertion: This is the declaration of who we are to ourselves and the world.

Affirmation: We need to affirm creative and life-given values, including cultivating a spiritual practice that connects us to something larger than ourselves, however, you define it.

Christina Becker
August 2022

Have you found value here? Have you been inspired or moved?  Please consider sharing the post on your social media networks by using the buttons below.

I love to hear your comments and ideas. Use the comments below or send me an email.