What Is Making Us So Sick/Anxious/Exhausted?

(Life 2.0) "Stress" is just the beginning

LIFE 2.0: This is part of a series where I share stuff I’ve learned about the hard way, so you don’t have to.

This was going to be Part II of The Art of Sinking and Rising. Part I was about sinking and what it feels like to be numbed out and overwhelmed. And this part was supposed to be about rising, or what I’ve learned about healing.

However, it has turned out to be about more than simply getting better. It’s about what is making us sick (or exhausted or anxious) in the first place and how the body holds the keys to our healing, if we listen to it. This is how to get out of the “sympathetic” nervous system cycles of fight-or-flight/flood/freeze that I think so many of us are in. Perhaps most of us are these days. It’s super stressful to be a human right now!!!

For those you interested in my journey and contemplating your own major life transition, and for those suffering from any chronic pain or illness, I hope you will find something helpful here. I’ll include some resources in the footnotes as well.

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“Stress” is Just the Beginning

I’ve been here before. It was December 2020 and I was having so much vertigo I couldn’t teach my online classes. All I could do was lie on the couch. That was when the first domino fell that led to me quitting my life a year and a half later.

I had already been struggling with Meniere’s Disease for almost 3 years, and it was clear that Western medicine was not going to help me. Doctors are only interested in identifying and monitoring symptoms and treating them with pharmaceuticals and other interventions. The only answer I ever got when I asked what was causing my symptoms was “stress.”

How many times have you heard that whatever you are dealing with is “just stress”? And what the hell are you supposed to do with that information? When I asked my doctor, he had no idea what to suggest.

I asked AI to create an abstract art image of a woman dealing with stress. Not bad.

So I did yoga and meditation and tried to cut out the things that were stressing me out—which happened to be my marriage and my job. That helped a lot, even if the process was stressful. My symptoms decreased dramatically as I disentangled myself from my old life (and meditated, journaled, reconnected with my body, and did a ton of therapy).

But here’s the thing:

“Stress is not a cause. It is a symptom.”—Sandy Newbigging

They tell us stress is the cause, as if that explained everything. But stress itself a bundle of symptoms. It’s is your body’s response to external stressors—everything from deadlines to money problems to life-threatening situations—and internal ones—the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening.

Stress manifests as the release of cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream and the shift into the sympathetic nervous system. When this happens,

• your heart rate goes up

• your blood pressure goes up

• your digestion goes haywire

• you can’t sleep properly

• and your immune system is activated, spreading inflammation throughout your body.

These are all symptoms under the umbrella of “stress.” And when you are chronically stressed, as I was, then all of these things are chronic too.

It occurs to me as I write this that in my old life, and carrying over into my new, I have been on medication for every single one of those symptoms—FOR YEARS! And no one ever talked to me about stress and what it does to the body. And Western medicine would keep me on these medications perpetually, treating my various symptoms without ever addressing their root cause.

Not only that, but I would most likely develop further chronic conditions, because the cause was never addressed. Once you have one autoimmune condition, you are likely to develop others. And ultimately, I would end up with heart disease and probably cancer.

Sounds extreme, I know, but I really felt in my old that I was on my way to more and more illness. My life had already been reduced down the space of my couch. I had to rescue myself from the downward spiral, and that is a big part of why I left.

(For more on the link between stress in childhood and adulthood and the development of chronic illnesses and cancer, particularly for women, see the work of Gabor Mate and Donna Jackson Nakazawa.)¹

Stress in My New Life

I learned most that stuff before, and I thought that by freeing myself from my old life I had more or less healed myself. What I hadn’t considered is how stressful my new life might be. Moving every month or less, waking up in the middle of the night and not knowing where I was half the time took its toll. I felt that when I was still in Edinburgh, and I was happy that I had found an apartment and didn’t have to keep moving around.

The thing that most anchored me as I moved around was a relationship with someone who was also starting his life over. It was wonderful for the year and a half that it lasted. He was a touchstone through a turbulent time and was very supportive. But he wasn’t “sorted,” as he liked to say. He was in limbo, like me, and our paths began to diverge. I hadn’t seen it coming, and it felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under me. I began to have symptoms again: extreme fatigue, brain fog, and dizziness.

Another AI image

Then, when I moved to Manchester, the vertigo slammed me. The first time was three hours after moving into my new apartment. I was in fight-or-flight for sure and ended up in freeze, as I wrote about in Part I.

It became clear to me that I needed help. After digging into the work of Nicole Sachs and The Steady Coach (both recommended by readers—thank you!)², I realized that meditation and mindfulness, journaling, or grief work wasn’t what I needed. They would over time, absolutely, and I’m not knocking them. But I’d done them before. Becoming aware of your early traumas and processing them make not be enough.

Finally, I read a book called Body Calm and found my way to the work of Sandy Newbigging.³ He is a therapeutic coach and meditation teacher who has an incredible history helping people understand the root causes of their illnesses, anxiety, or pain. He has helped me get on the road to recovery over 6 sessions, although I’m still in the middle of the process with him (so I’ll have more to say about it later). From him, I have learned so much about how our minds are really running the show.

I’m beginning to suspect that most chronic health conditions, anxiety, fatique, pain, etc., are probably our bodies’ way of communicating with us, but mostly we are deaf to what they are saying. Unfortunately, we have learned to look to medical authorities for all the answers. They do a lot of good, no question, but we can also recognize the limits of what they know and understand. So much comes down to the bias inherent in Western medicine that treating symptoms will treat the illness.

You may go to the doctor and complain of joint pain, and they tell you that you have arthritis and give you a pill for it. But what is causing the arthritis? Inflammation in the body. That is the physical symptom. But what causes the inflammation? Stress. But what is causing the stress? To put it simply: the mind. This doesn’t mean you’re making it up. It means that the way you think and feel about something in your life is triggering the stress reaction in your body that is causing the further physical symptoms.

In most cases, we learn to live with the condition, adapting to it and using medication to lessen its effects on our lives. But when you get to the point that medication isn’t enough and you simply can’t function or can’t handle the pain anymore, that is when you are likely to go deeper, to seek out the root cause.

Understanding the Body’s Language

First of all, the body is highly symbolic. It expresses itself symbolically, and the start of the healing process is then an act of interpretation. Isn’t that amazing?! As a former literature professor, I can really geek out on this. The body is a text, as feminist and cultural studies scholars will tell you. But this is much more fundamental than that.

AI’s image of the body as a text

The starting point is not the label doctors have given to your condition. You start with the part of the body that is affected and what it feels like—not just the symptoms itself. Consider that part of the body’s function and what it might be telling you symbolically by targeting that particular area.

The body is simply expressing what is happening in our minds, including our subconscious, our emotions, and our lives.

You’ve heard that the conscious mind is in operation only about 5-10% of the time, right? This is an oversimplification, but it’s true that so much of what is motivating us throughout our days and fueling our emotions resides on a subconscious level, which is why it is so important to become aware of the programming in our brains.

More than that, though, it’s not simply that we are unaware of what exactly we are thinking and feeling, but that our illness or pain is the result of a largely unconscious inner conflict. It’s that turmoil that festers and eats away at us. Newbigging explains that illness or pain is caused by “resistance to something you don’t want and an unseen attachment to something you think you need.”

But here is the truly amazing part: the body is expressing that internal conflict by creating pain or illness in a particular part of your body that corresponds to whatever is going on inside you!

Some examples that he witnessed over and over again from the 20 years of his work with people suffering chronic conditions⁴:

• Pain in the hips can mean that you’re feeling stuck, because the hips are what allow us to move forward.

• Lower back or knee pain can mean that you’re feeling unsupported, or are concerned about your ability to support yourself or others, as the spine and knees support us.

• If you’re having chronic dizziness, it can mean that you feel unstable, disoriented, or you don’t know where you stand. (A lightbulb went off when I heard that!)

• If you’re having skin problems, it can mean that you are feeling under attack or unsafe, because the skin’s function is to protect us.

• And if you’re experiencing chronic fatigue, it can mean that you are

He has a whole list of areas of the body and the conditions that can be related to them at the back of the Body Calm book. There he says that chronic fatigue can be caused by chronic resistance to something in your life that you can’t flee or escape from.

But the essential thing to remember is that it’s the conflict—resistance to what is and attachment to something that you want—that is making you sick or causing pain. Or the conflict could be between your head and your heart. In Body Calm, he writes,

“Stress is a symptom of there being a conflict between what your mind wants and what your soul knows you need, for you to fulfill your life’s purpose.

Furthermore,

“Health is the natural by-product of having harmony within your heart, mind, body, soul and life.”

As you can imagine, simply knowing the root cause conflict may or may not be enough to shift the symptoms you are having. That is where 1:1 work can help you get into the even deeper roots of the problem, which may be the programming of your subconscious, where the core beliefs you have developed in response to early traumas live.

There is so much more I wanted to say about this and the trauma release work I’ve been doing with him, which is still ongoing. That will have to wait for another post.

By the way, Sandy Newbigging has a Masterclass tomorrow (April 6, 1:30 Eastern), if you are interested. (Replay available. And he has lots of other videos and podcasts on his site.)

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Please let us know what thoughts all of this triggers in you. The comments section of each post is always so illuminating! I love to see how much you learn from and support each other! Thank you for being such amazing readers and members of this community!! And thank you for the support you give me, every time; it buoys me even when I don’t have time to respond to each comment. :)

Until next time,

Anne

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1. See especially Gabor Mate, When the Body Says No and Donna Jackson Nakazawa, Childhood Disrupted. She has some great posts on her website that give the basics: “Why Girls Who Face Toxic Stress are More Vulnerable to Adult Illness” and “Why We Need to Talk About the Unique Biological Effects of #ToxicChildhoodStress and #FemaleAdversity on Women’s Bodies and Brains.”

2. Nicole Sachs has a membership program and a new book called Mind Your Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain and Anxiety. The Steady Coach focuses on dizziness and has a free program as well as tons of YouTube videos.

3. Sandy Newbigging wrote Body Calm. He also has other books and a TON of free podcasts and videos, as well as a membership group, the Calm Clan (he’s Scottish!), and masterclasses and retreats.

4. These examples are from his Mind Detox podcast, episode #35.