Does Stress Cause Inflammation? Here’s What It Feels Like in My Body
CONFESSIONS SERIES – POST # 3
Today, I want to write about some struggles of mine and see if any of you feel the same. I have a master’s degree in psychology, and I have fairly well managed bipolar disorder. Both me and my family took the time to educate ourselves about bipolar disorder. But what I want to talk about to today is stress and how I think it affects inflammation. I will surely write a Research Simplified post about this as well. But this one is personal.
Stress is stressed upon a lot by several medical practitioners, yoga practitioners, healers, meditation practitioners and these days almost every other person one could meet. But I think it truly is one of the most underestimated factors contributing majorly to chronic conditions. I am not saying necessarily causing it but perhaps exacerbating it.
At least in my case, only recently has this idea even crossed my mind. Because in passing I have said to others, ‘hey don’t stress’ (and meant it too). I have had so many people tell that to me too so many times over years since my school days. I guess unknowingly I conditioned myself to get stressed out. So I never really took the word stress seriously because I think subconsciously my brain had decided, stress is an inevitable part of life. But just recently in the last few months, especially more so in the last few days, I have been wondering, well, stress is an inevitable part of most of our lives but how much stress really should we allow ourselves to put up with, how much is really tolerable. Granted each one’s stress thresholds might be different but many of us stay very oblivious to what our threshold is until we really reach a breaking point.
I think all said and done, last week I finally reached my breaking point (even though in the past I have been able to tolerate and put up with even more bullshit in life and for longer) but with all my chronic issues and pain, I guess it took a while for me to see I have hit my breaking point, although I think it has been in the works for a while now. It finally hit me once I admitted that after years of managing my bipolar fairly well, I am depressed. And this time it doesn’t even seem to be because of my bipolar. My pain levels of almost 9/10 everyday continuously for about a year and half with no medication working so far being one of the reasons. My workplace is really driving me nuts; I dread going to work every day. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t suck at my job but without going into details, let’s just say I work in an overcontrolling environment, where I am often expected to the impossible and even if I manage to do that, I am rewarded only with more work. May be because I keep working, they think I am not sick, even though they know about my issues. What they don’t realize is that I am stressed out all the time, I am so anxious all the time that most weekdays as I cannot lose my job, my health insurance considering the myriad of unsolved health issues I have and meds I take, my sleep is messed and you guessed it right, my pain levels shoot up even more.
In addition to my RA (systemic inflammation which affects multiple joints), I also have Gastroparesis and Small fiber neuropathy. One day I was randomly talking to my dad and saying I think I am so stressed out at work that my nerves are now getting damaged. This is kind of a naïve, probably irrational connection but small fiber neuropathy does involve nerve damage – damage to the small nerve fibers in your body, that send pain and temperature signals to the brain and also regulate involuntary body functions like heart rate, digestion, and sweating. This kind of was an aha moment for me because as silly as it sounded I heard myself and thought wait a minute, yes I have been extremely stressed at work for the last 1.5 plus years so much so that even after my myomectomy, I came back to work after 5 days of rest (despite having an infection as well right after surgery) against the advice of my doctor who had said I needed to be on bed rest for atleast 2 weeks.
Such kind of prolonged stress which kept getting worse over time, I am wondering how much it has exacerbated all the issues I have been diagnosed with. But more importantly it got me thinking into how much was it preventing my meds from not working as effectively as they should and in turn I started to wonder, hey if I keep exposing myself to this level of fight or flight mode day in and day out, will my body really respond to any of the biologics, will it even have a shot at getting better. As it is our because chronic conditions and for some of us pain, with each new diagnosis we get and each time we get dismissed by a doctor, each time we lose hope that no treatment is working we feel stressed out, which in turn probably makes things worse and we continuously get stuck in the vicious cycle of never getting better. Now I might be wrong in my thinking.
But have any of you had a similar experience?
Do share with me your experience in the comments if this resonated with you. But two next posts I would be working on is Research simplified about stress and the effects of stress on inflammation and a personal confessions post about how much I have been dealing with confusion, forgetting things – not sure if I think it is exactly brain fog.