Title says it all, we all know the feeling but why do we physically feel the pain in our bodies?
In: Biology
That feeling in your stomach is caused by anxiety. Anxiety triggers the ancient “Fight or Flight” response that is programmed in to your DNA. Anxiety manifests itself in complicated ways. Here are a few:
When you feel stressed or anxious, your body releases a rush of hormones. Neurotransmitters in the brain react by sending messages to the rest of your body to:
1) Get the heart pumping faster
2) Increase the breathing rate
3) Tense the muscles of you abdomen
4) Send more blood to your brain
Anxiety and stress can affect virtually every body system. This includes your cardiovascular, endocrine, musculoskeletal, nervous, reproductive, and respiratory systems. In the digestive system, anxiety can cause:
1) nausea, vomiting
2) heartburn, acid reflux
3) stomachache, gas, bloating
4) diarrhea, constipation, painful spasms in the bowel
All of these symptoms together create the feeling of “Butterflies” in your stomach.
In other words a panic attack. Your panicking. Your brain is stressed and your body doesn’t know how to respond and so is over responding in the only way it knows how. There are ways to get through it. If I’m at home I will take a shower with lots of cold water on my face to trigger the mammalian dive reflex.. this will slow your heart and breathing. If I’m out I will focus on making myself sleepy or tired by yawning a lot. Again this interrupts the stressed breathing and can relax your mind and body. If I’m busy with something I try to distract myself from it by focusing on getting through the attack and answering simple questions to distract my mind (what do I want to eat tonight, what shows do I want to watch, how might I solve a world problem). The worst part is the diarrhea though.. nothing you can do other than go to the bathroom and let it out.. it just makes it worse if you can’t get to a bathroom.
This is why. Your solar plexus is an ancient basic ‘brain’ full of neurons with tendrils attached to the smooth muscle of several internal organs like your stomach and heart and your intestines. It sits in ‘the pit of your stomach’, (just below it), receives messages from the brain stem via the big vagus nerve and it’s job it to do two things, one of which is create muscular tensions and ‘flutters’ which we call emotions or feelings. Thoughts without feelings don’t motivate us, literally everything we do is because it ‘feels right.’
To the person suffering feelings of anxiety without an obvious reason, I can suggest this: past long term or repeated stress can create ‘muscle memory’ in the relevant smooth muscle, triggering or continuing the feelings long after the cause of the stress has passed. Often the imaginative part of our brains then tries to deal with these stress feelings by creating a strategy to avoid danger. It’s a feedback loop, with the brain initially signalling danger, the solar plexus creating physical feelings to make us do something useful about it, then, if there’s no quick resolution, the brain responding to the ongoing feelings with worry and circular thoughts.
You can interrupt ongoing unhappiness with two methods: solar plexus massage and deliberate ‘happy thoughts’, redefine your interpretation of life by listing and focusing on all the best experiences and deliberately minimise and diminish bad memories to trick the solar plexus into establishing new, positive muscle memory.
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