Three biggest causes of stress in your life that you might not know exist
You feel like you’ve got your lifestyle stress pretty under control, you have a great work life balance and you’re happy in your human connections, but you still feel run down? There are a huge number of physical reasons your body might still be under stress. From a physiological point of view, whether your stress is physical or mental, it makes no difference to your body’s stress patterns. So while you take care of your wellbeing, there are some physical things you may need some support with.
Vestibular Dysfunction
The vestibular system utilises gravity to determine where the body is in space. It is a wonderful system, if things are going smoothly. Unfortunately, if it receives the wrong messages, the vestibular system will tell the brain there’s a threat when there isn’t. You don’t have to feel off balance to have a vestibular problem – you might only get car sickness, or migraines, or maybe some tinnitus. Vestibular issues present in a number of ways and a lot of people aren’t even aware they have one. Because the vestibular system has direct stimulatory input into the sympathetic nervous system, many people find they have been trying to ‘fix their stress and/or sympathetic dominance’ without much result. Once the vestibular dysfunction is picked up and healed, the sympathetic dominant symptoms start to subside and it becomes easier to maintain health with stress-lowering lifestyle measures.
Midbrain Over-stimulation
The midbrain is the stress response centre in the brain. It is primitive in its functioning and serves to help the body run away from lions (so to speak). Unfortunately for us, our modern day life can wind up this part of the brain and have it be hypervigilant even when there are no threats. For example, all of our devices and their blue lights automatically put stress on our midbrain and get it winding itself up. So spending too many hours at a computer or on your device can impact your brain health. Another large trigger of the midbrain is TMJ (jaw dysfunction), so if you’ve had any kind of jaw pain, clicking or discomfort in the past, you may automatically have a sensitive midbrain without knowing! In practice, I also use phototherapy patches to reduce any inflammation in the midbrain.
Vagal Tone
Our vagus nerve is the largest nerve in the body, and it is a calming nerve. It is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is known for “rest and digest”. The vagus nerve controls our automatic processes such as digestion, heart rate, and blood pressure. The problem is, our modern lifestyle leads to a reduction in vagal tone, meaning it functions less. You might notices your digestion is slower when you’re stressed, we know blood pressure and heart rate goes up with stress.. you get the idea. The moment the vagus nerve slows down, stress patterns can be left uninhibited. And the kicker is that high levels of stress hormone cause the vagus nerve to work less. So stress leads to low vagal tone, which leads to stress being able to dominate and never get back under control. On top of that, the vagus can be inhibited with jaw dysfunction, infections, and food reactions too. It’s a really important thing to heal when working with stress and chronic health issues.
