How Emotional Stress Affects Your Spine (Very Valuable Info)!

Ask anyone what they mean by ‘good health’ and everyone will almost unanimously agree that ‘good health’ comprises of physical fitness and a disease-free body. While that is not an inaccurate definition, it is definitely an incomplete one. Your mental or emotional well-being is as important as your physical health. In fact, if your psychological health is severely affected due to stress or any other similar factors, you can expect your physical health to suffer too.

Take back pain, for example. You’ve definitely experienced a debilitating pain in your spine at least once your lifetime. Backaches are very common and all over the world, they are known as the number-one reason behind disability (1). However, when treating it, it’s not uncommon to focus only on the physical aspect of it, never realizing that emotional factors may be major contributors to the pain too.

That said, this isolated approach to pain seems to be changing with the evolution of medical science, and doctors now take emotional health into account when treating conditions, diseases, and aches and pains. In fact, there’s a term for the connection between the physical disorders and psychological health, which is known as psychosomatics (2).

Medical science may have only recently discovered the link between emotional health and physical disorders, but ancient Chinese experts have known it all along. They have always firmly believed that the link between the body and the emotions a person experiences is a strong one and can help in bringing forth the proper and complete treatment of the health issue a person is suffering from. In that light, let us take a look at how your spine can be affected by the emotional stress you experience.

The Relationship Between Your Spine Health And Emotional Stress

As mentioned above, emotional stress plays a major part in your overall health and well-being. If you don’t believe us, think of all the times you’ve had a headache. Haven’t you been supremely stressed almost every time your head throbbed? This happens due to the fact that stress and other negative emotions put a lot of pressure on you. In order to deal with added pressure, your body adapts itself to it, which leads to pain in different areas, according to Chinese medicine.

However, pain is not the only thing stress can cause. It can also lead to a number of diseases and conditions such as obesity, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and many more, thereby establishing that your emotional state can certainly have a deep impact on your physical state (3).

Out of all these diseases, emotional stress can also cause one particular condition that takes place early on in the stages of your life and can possibly last a lifetime (at least until the stressor causing it is removed). This disorder can damage your spine, requiring some sort of treatment or the other if you want to lead a normal life. And although the exact cause of it is unknown, ancient Chinese specialists believe that emotional pressure is a definitive cause.

We are talking about scoliosis (4). This condition only takes place in children, and in it, the spine of the child is curved towards the side, forming a C or an S shape.

Chinese doctors say that scoliosis generally develops in those children who live in highly emotionally stressful environments. For example, if a child faces emotional trauma on a constant basis, they may be overburdened by negative emotions. The pressure of these negative emotions can cause their spine to curve in order to adapt to the pressure experienced. However, if the factor causing the emotional trauma is removed, the child’s health may improve greatly, eliminating the pain and leading to the straightening of the spine.

Now, this might sound far-fetched, no doubt, but as we have shown before, even medical science supports the fact that your emotional condition definitely has a major role to play in your physical one. So, if you ever notice a curve in your child’s spine, it might be wise to analyze if they are suffering from any sort of emotional problems. Obviously, a visit to a doctor is also a must, but detecting the emotional cause can help in bringing about a holistic treatment of the problem. You can watch out for other symptoms such as neck pain and slouching to be sure scoliosis is the problem (5).

Besides causing some amount of damage to your spine, emotion stress is also one of the top reasons behind lower back pain, with studies even showing that most back pain is, in fact, purely psychological in its origins, having nothing to do with any kind of physical cause such as injury or diseases (6).

So, if you want permanent freedom from back pain or scoliosis, it’ll be wise to adopt a psychosomatic approach instead of a purely physical one.

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