Can emotional stress make you physically sick?
I've recently dealt with some emotional stress going from exhilarating happiness to deep depression in one day. This started on Sunday, I was fine physically, and suddenly I started to feel worse and worse and on Wednesday I woke up with a fever, nausea, a sore throat, aches, slight shakes, and all congested. Would the emotional stress I experienced have something to do with this, or is this just me getting sick all of the sudden? Thank you so much.
Does chronic stress, trauma, and mini-trauma physically build up inside ones body? If so, in what form?
“Does chronic stress, trauma, and mini-trauma physically build up inside ones body? If so, in what form?”Whether it’s medically accurate or not, I tend to view stress, chronic stress, mini-trauma and trauma as points reflecting different expressions of intensity and duration within a continuum of one type of experience.We know that chronic stress manifests biochemically in the levels of cortisol and some neurotransmitters, as well as in levels of muscle tension. The same seems to be true in PTSD[1], the point being stress of any duration and intensity can leave tell-tale physical signs long after the stressful situation has passed.I would not think of these states as representing a build-up as much as a lack of release. Because a return to baseline doesn’t occur, the threshold for the perception of stress and the experience of it, as well as the tolerance of the experience, can be lowered long term. This results in situations where stressors of smaller magnitude and shorter duration can activate or amplify symptoms that would normally be associated with more stressful circumstances.Footnotes[1] PTSD is a chronic impairment of the body sense: Why we need embodied approaches to treat trauma
How does stress affect the body?
Like many other things in life , it depends upon the intensity and duration of stress and the status of person (perception of stress and reaction towards it). If someone takes stress positively, stress might be a good thing, we call it “eustress”. On the other hand, if we allow stress to impact negatively, we call it “distress”.I am assuming that you are curious to know about the effects of distress on the body. Stress causes wide range of biological changes in body, increased production of cortisol (aka stress hormone) being one of the major effect. Cortisol in turn leads to various changes which helps to cope up the stress, but when chronically elevated, it causes lots of harm.(Image source - beautifultothecore.com )Especially chronic psychological stress affects almost all organ system of body negatively. To name few, it causes memory impairment (see How does stress affect memory?) , decreases threshold for physical illness, deteriorates cardiovascular status, causes psychological problems such as depression and anxiety creating a vicious loop, increases the risk for metabolic diseases (e.g., diabetes), and so.on. The following picture summarizes those effects comprehensively -( Image source - healthline.com )Now we have some idea about the negative impacts of stress, next answer we need is of the question, “How can I decrease stress?”.Further readings -Stress (if you are interested to know the mechanism of hormones acting on various organs), Chronic Stress Induces Contrasting Patterns of Dendritic Remodeling in Hippocampal and Amygdaloid Neurons, Effect of repeated stress on body weight and body composition of rats fed low- and high-fat diets, Learning under stress.
How can stress affect someones mind?
it really doesn't, it's the mind that creates the stress through our thoughts which translate into emotions and then manifest through our physiological response, such as raised shoulders or headaches.
Why do our bodies have physical reactions to emotional problems, such as dizziness when stressed?
Because cognition, i.e. thoughts and feelings are an enmeshed emergent property of the 3 domains of a Biological platform (body/brain/environment) a psychological domain, (the way someone orders information) and a social domain (social being placed in social environment is subject to societal pressure)Like a 3 tray balance scale, anything added or subtracted to any of those 3 domains will have an immediate effect in movement on the other 2.
What does guilt do to your body mentally and physically?
Guilt is one of the most useless feelings one can have, especially when we have been manipulated into feeling that way. Most humans are hardwired to have this feeling. In a positive light, guilt can make us change, say when we do something wrong to someone, we can make it right, and change our behaviour. However some institutions and manipulative people try and make us behave to their standards by preying on our guilt feelings. Tommy has a good answer for how we are physically affected by feelings of guilt so I will focus more on the psychological effects.Mentally, guilt feelings are designed to make us act in a certain way. For instance when we break a rule of say a church, we are required to feel guilty and confess. Guilt is not particularly well studied and there are many theories about how it works. We typically have a stress response when we feel guilt so you can add all the negatives that stress does to us to your list. Psychologically it tends to trigger negative thoughts so if you tend to lean that way, guilt can bring on a real clusterfuck of negative thinking, creating more stress. So not only do you feel bad for breaking a rule, but now you are a bad person and don't deserve forgiveness. Guilt can also reinforce beliefs we have about the world if we don't examine them closely. So not only did you do something wrong, and are a bad person, but it also reinforces the belief that bad things happen to bad people. In serious cases, a sense of helplessness takes over and depression can result. These are only a few examples of the fruits of guilt feelings, there must be many others.