The Connections Between Stress and Suffering

How Symptoms are Situational

This the third in a series of articles co-written with my friend, colleague, and therapist Lilian Sjøberg, who is the lead author on them. Lilian is a Danish coach and trouble shooter good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with chronic symptoms, from a practical perspective, for five years. These articles result from extensive conversations and Q+A’s I have had with Lilian.

Stress and Symptoms

It is in the nature of chronic diseases and trauma that symptoms manifest most when our survival instincts (fight, flight, freeze) take over our body's function.

Survival Instincts in the Modern World

This is why the severity and range of symptoms can vary moment to moment, hour to hour, or day by day, according to how stressed or how relaxed we are in that moment, for most chronic diseases. Here, I use the word stress in its widest possible interpretation, to denote anything which may be troubling us in the present moment, e.g. feelings, accidents, trauma, troublesome relationships, financial problems, small unresolved situations from childhood that may seem insignificant to an adult.

It is not possible to glean these most essential clues, unless we stop looking at the problem as just a brain damage issue, or as simply a disruption in chemical systems which are, in fact, more complex than any scientist can get to the bottom of in an entire lifetime. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of wild animals,

and to the real world, lived experiences of people with chronic issues.

The current approach to chronic diseases won’t change until enough people understand this real world evidence, new text books are written, and the old knowledge passes out of memory, maybe thirty to fifty years from now. Most people can not afford to wait for the clinic proof to be in place, so have a choice to make:

1.     give this real life evidence based knowledge due thought and attention, change habits, and continue to make this choice every day for life;

2.     stay with whichever devastating symptoms manifest, and fulfil the current belief that there is nothing that can be done but degenerate.

Suffering is Situational

It is easy to prove this idea by studying one person at a time, but there will probably never be support for large scale trials, or the millions of dollars that these would cost. Instead, we must use our logical skills, do our own research, and test out on ourselves.

One of the principal tests we can perform on ourselves, or with anyone affected by chronic disease, is to observe whether symptoms vary over short timescales, either hour-by-hour or day-by-day. If they do fluctuate, then there is a reason for this, and it is probably stress-related. We can investigate this for ourselves by keeping diary notes to see which factors provoke the change in symptoms, e.g. diet, sunlight, weather, moon, temperature, humidity, the company we keep.

If it is genes or previous toxin damage which are causing the symptoms, since these don’t change, the symptoms would be fairly constant too, like vitamin A deficiency could give you poor night vision. If the weather is extreme, we will see some correlations. However, under otherwise stable conditions, symptoms do still vary by a significant factor during a day or week. Maybe it is only the minute before falling into sleep that symptoms are lower, but that is also a clue.

Indeed, many people with chronic conditions will have encountered the experience of symptoms like tremors becoming more significant in restaurants when people are watching, or freeze in crowds when there is a need to hurry. What is then behind the change in symptoms?

Diary notes are our own proof of concept, and we will soon have our own handful of examples before a week has passed, with careful notes. In my online course, I provide a tailored diary format that I designed specifically for the purpose of keeping such records, which can be printed out, together with instructions on how to fill it out for optimal benefit. Keeping notes is also critical for evaluating if an intervention is working, because we tend to forget the past and think that current problems are the biggest. A video diary is the best way to record and remember the pre-intervention status.

Another place to look is to the changing prevalence of chronic diseases in the population. Indeed, one can find many articles which say that the percentage of people with chronic disease is increasing, and it is becoming an epidemic. This is also an essential clue to the root causes of the disease.

While it could be due to the food we eat or pollution, one other factor is obvious. The character of our lifestyle has changed markedly over the last century. We have developed from hardworking farmworkers and labourers, to sitting still as office personnel. From producing our own vegetables by digging our garden, to online orders. Even the elevator and television can be operated without the force of muscles.

As our bodies and brain are still essentially the same version 1.0 from 100,000 years ago, in this modern environment we can get out of our natural balance due to lack of movement and exercise. Daily physical hard work once provided a mechanism for reducing stress.

While we are now more aware of lifestyle diseases, such as being overweight and smoking, we have turned a blind eye to our instinctual stress responses. Hard physical work and exercise helps because it burns off the excess adrenaline that people produce during a hectic day at the office. It helps us to fulfil the cycle of instincts towards a calm body, which the animals do by running away or fighting. See my article on survival instincts for more information as to why we produce excess adrenaline, and why this is a problem in diseases like Parkinson’s.

Shell Shock, Survival Instincts, and Suffering

Summary

The severity and range of symptoms often vary considerably with the situation we are currently in. Examples include the differences in symptoms when we are in crowds, or in good company, in summer or winter, and in particular, in stress or in relaxation.

Any good theory of chronic disease needs to explain these fluctuations, and I propose that getting stuck in survival instincts mode, or defensive stress states, is in the majority of cases the greatest factor that negatively impacts on symptoms. Likewise learning how to relax and how to get unstuck from our survival instincts is the most beneficial factor and quickest route for reducing symptoms.

Part of my own "HOPE-shortcut" method is keeping track of symptoms with meticulous diary records, giving the ability to connect the fluctuations with the situations. This is the most practical way to make sense of our real world, lived experiences of symptoms, and hence for moving towards healing and progressive symptom reduction.

The main purpose of the self-observations is to focus the attention on the positive things which reduce the symptoms, and realising the situations which makes things worse, so as to eliminate the root causes . The more often a symptom occurs, and the more it varies according to a given situation, the easier it is to find the root cause. So by using the most varying symptoms as a guide to what to investigate first, a much faster result is achievable.