Is Your Pain a Function of Stress?
How many times have you felt a weird pinch or ache in a part of your body that popped up out of nowhere? Maybe you have experienced a stomach ache, rash or acne breakout that wasn’t caused by food or an allergy. You could have experienced a stress induced ailment. Stress is one of the more complicated mechanisms in the human body, and has the ability to affect our entire body and lifestyle. It has emotional, physical, and behavioral manifestations and the more we learn about it, the more we realize its significance. With this in mind, I want to focus on gaining a better understanding of the physical indicators stress can have on our body and when we may want to look deeper within ourselves to find the cause of such pain.
This topic is a personal one for me, as I have dealt with the physical manifestations of stress my whole life, but haven’t really been able to pin point it as such until my post graduate education. When I was in seventh grade, the school I attended required us to take Latin, as well as either French or Spanish, along with the other general education curriculum. For the end of year exams, my schedule lined up so that my Latin and English exams fell on the same day, back to back. The night before my exams I slept fine (although I never really slept well) and I took my Latin exam in the morning and went in for my English exam. About five minutes into my English exam, I was silently crying at my desk chair trying to get a teacher’s attention. I couldn’t move my head to the left and the neck pain was so bad I couldn’t write or think about the correct answers to the test. I left the exam and luckily for me, my dad was ahead of the curve in the alternative medicine game and he took me to his Muscle Activation Therapist. Thankfully, she was able to relieve the temporary neck pain, but this started my journey with understanding that my mind had control over my body in strange and unsettling ways.
Athletes are more aware of muscle tensions and sensations in their bodies than the average person, but are quick to write off the pain as overuse and push through it for the sake of their sport. If you experience something out of the ordinary that doesn’t directly relate to your sport or activity, you may want to dig deeper to determine its cause. Pushing through is very rarely the appropriate action and there are many interventions that would be more productive and helpful to your body in the long term. Taking note about how your body feels on the good or great days is an extremely important part about understanding when things are out of whack so that you have a point of comparison. Once you notice an abnormality – heart racing, sweating, stomach ache, muscle pain, acne, or trouble sleeping you can begin to examine the cause of the stress rather than ignoring it and setting yourself up for future suffering.
If you experience these symptoms often, you may suffer from chronic stress and haven’t found a way to cope with the everyday stressors in your life. If this is the case, please reach out to a mental health professional. While stress is normal, your reaction to it can be controlled and you don’t need to live in pain. If you experience what I have described above as regular occurrences, but not constant, then you also would benefit from working with someone to figure out the best ways to cope with your stress. Solutions may include just talking through a situation, meditating, exercising, cleaning, or writing (there are endless ways to cope depending on the individual). Stress is normal and happens to everyone, and how we react to the stress is really our choice. For a quick starter guide to understanding how to cope with stress, when you feel any pains of clenching in your body try to step outside the situation and describe it from a third-party perspective. This will help determine if the stress is being brought on by 1) yourself, 2) someone else (or a group of people), or 3) your environment or situation. Once you have determined the source of the stress you can more appropriately take action toward reducing your reaction.
Keep in mind, stress is not always negative, even if it is causing temporary discomfort, if you have the skills to find the root of the discomfort you can tackle your stress head on. Good stress can push you to work out and stay on top of your routine, or give you the adrenaline to finish an intense game. I cannot emphasize enough that stress is normal, and everyone experiences it. What differentiates people is whether or not they have the tools to recognize and address the stress before it creates unwanted physical or emotional pain.