When you are experiencing physical symptoms, you may think only of potential physical causes. It’s natural to do so, but your emotional health can have a huge impact on your body. Trauma and negative thought processes can exacerbate existing health issues or manifest through physical symptoms. For instance, stress or an emotional crisis may manifest as a rash. Conventional, western doctors may first look for a pathogen as the cause.
It is just as important to consider mindset and trauma as the trigger.
Trauma, stress, and neuroplasticity
We all know the saying “children are resilient.” We hear how they are malleable and able to bounce back. Physically, there is evidence that supports this view. They tend to recover faster and more easily from physical injuries like broken bones because their bodies are still developing and growing.
Emotional development occurs during childhood as well. This includes neuroplasticity, which is the forming and reforming of neural pathways. Children learn and unlearn mindsets and habits easily during this time.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change, adapt, and modify functionally and structurally in response to lived experience. Most neuroplasticity develops in childhood, but it can change throughout adulthood as well. In fact, neuroplasticity can change as we age by responding to trauma and stress. It enables the neurons to compensate for disease and injury throughout life. If one hemisphere of the brain is damaged, the other hemisphere may compensate by performing some of the other’s functions. It can reorganize old connections and form new ones between intact neurons.
According to a study conducted in 2012, 60% of adults report a type of trauma during childhood. Trauma can occur during adulthood as well and impact the brain’s plasticity. When the brain experiences a traumatic event, our working memory, which is in the prefrontal cortex, is seriously compromised. Prolonged stress and flashbacks to the trauma can eventually cause long-term damage to prefrontal neurons. Chronic stress, such as exposure to threatening or emotionally charged stimuli, can injure the amygdala and neuroplasticity.
Research shows that stress elevates glutamatergic signaling in the basolateral amygdala, which results in enhanced brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression and dendritic outgrowth. This and other issues surrounding chronic stress result in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation.
This HPA axis dysregulation causes many of the unpleasant symptoms that come from experiencing trauma.
How does trauma manifest in the body?
If you visit your doctor to discuss symptoms, you will want to bring up the issue of stress in your life if your health care provider does not. It may be difficult to do so, but chronic stress can produce real symptoms. Taking a pill to mask those symptoms will not alleviate the trauma. Think about anger, rage, or emotional trauma that hasn’t been processed thoroughly. Recognizing and facing emotions is a crucial element in dealing with trauma.
If you are seeing a functional medicine doctor, he or she will most likely explore those issues with you. Emotions are essential to survival, and certain emotional responses can be your body crying out for help. Emotions are intrinsically linked to the mind, and they can trigger a strong physical response.
The body’s physical responses to trauma occur in two key ways: initial and delayed. Initial reactions occur due to emotional processing, including a palpable response because of overwhelming emotional experiences and symptoms, like depression and anxiety. Initial reactions can remain in your body in dysfunctional ways. However, initial imbalance in emotional functionality may not be recognized until it results in a pattern. The patterns then lead to a delayed trauma response. You may suppress and ignore the initial responses because you believe it is just an emotion rather than stress memory held onto by your body.
As the symptoms become more intense, the delayed responses become more frequent and tenacious. A delayed reaction presents with a physiological response that is a more serious illness. It may result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Symptoms can include:
Cognitive Reactions
- Difficulty concentrating
- Distortion of time and space
- Memory problems
- Rumination or racing thoughts
- Strong identification with victims
Emotional Reactions
- Anger
- Anxiety or severe fear
- Denial
- Disorientation
- Exhilaration as a result of surviving
- Feeling out of control
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Guilt
- Helplessness
- Numbness and detachment
- Sadness
Physical reactions
- Depersonalization
- Elevated heartbeat, respiration, and blood pressure
- Extreme fatigue or exhaustion
- Greater startle responses
- Muscle tremors or uncontrollable shaking
- Nausea and gastrointestinal distress
- Sweating or shivering
Trauma and chronic stress can severely impact your body for many years. One study showed that people within 1.5 miles of the 9/11 attack had heightened amygdala reactivity compared to those 200 miles away for several years afterwards. They had symptoms like recurrent memories, hypervigilance, self-isolation, hypervigilance and more.
How trauma impacts your mindset
Trauma can happen to anyone, and it is painful to live through whether the trauma is large or small. The stress can result in harmful mindsets, which lead to further health problems. Many health care providers focus on masking symptoms rather than dealing with mental health and emotional well-being. In addition, your mental and emotional state can impact how you heal from physical issues. By addressing the mind-body connection, you can work towards greater healing. However, it is crucial to actually do the work rather than faking a positive attitude, which can result in suppressed emotions, chronic stress, and depression.
Rather than force positivity, you need to feel your emotions completely and honestly to begin healing from trauma. No matter what these emotions are, it will benefit you to accept the emotions rather than repress them in lieu of trying to “be a good person” or “being positive.” These feelings and symptoms are not a sign of weakness, a character flaw, being damaged, or going crazy. If you force positivity, or a “forced happiness,” upon yourself, it doesn’t address your harmful mindset. This does not encourage a healthy processing of trauma or a rewiring of the neural pathways. Trying to change your mindset without dealing with the underlying cause is simply a band-aid to cover the issue.
Because everyone responds to trauma and chronic stress differently, emotional clearing becomes important. You need to express authentic emotions in order to understand that your emotional state derives from the trauma and not who you are as a person.
Ways to rewire the brain and process trauma
In order to strengthen the neuroplasticity of your brain and process emotional trauma, you need to look at your post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth is a psychological transformation that looks at finding the purpose of the pain. This means finding a way to look beyond the trauma and have a greater appreciation of life while increasing resiliency. It’s an acceptance of your self and improving positive self talk.
We have the ability to rewire and renew our brains at any age. It can be challenging, and you need to remember that it’s a marathon not a sprint to heal trauma. Neuroplasticity can help halt the damage done from trauma, possibly helping to reverse it. Research has shown that “day-to-day behaviors can have measurable effects on brain structure and function.”
This means that you can take a proactive approach to healing from trauma and its physical symptoms by using some easy, actionable steps to rewire your brain. The brain constantly rewires neural pathways when it engages in activity that stimulates it. Basically, any action you focus on creates changes in thought patterns and leads to rewiring their brain. Follow these steps:
Physical health
You need to start with your physical health to help renew brain plasticity. For instance, intermittent fasting increases synaptic plasticity and optimizes brain function. It can also help optimize brain function and decrease the risk of metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. A healthy diet can also help in increasing brain plasticity. The neuroprotective actions of dietary flavonoids include the potential to:
- Promote cognitive function, learning, and memory
- Protect neurons against neurotoxin injury
- Suppress neuroinflammation
Physical activity and fitness can also prevent or slow the normal age-related neuronal death and encourage neuronal plasticity. Physical activity increases the size of the prefrontal and hippocampal brain areas, which may lead to a reduction in memory impairments. Working with a trauma therapy specialist can lead to happier, positive emotions that help mitigate those initial and delayed trauma responses. Ultimately, this leads to a happier, healthier lifestyle.
However, there can be negative habitual actions that can hurt the mind and the body because neuroplasticity works both ways. Working with a trauma therapy specialist can help address this especially if you are having difficulty coping with the trauma. Trauma specialists can also help with accountability to make sure you are rewiring your brain to positively change your thoughts versus cementing negative habits that prevent you from progressing forward.
Creative expression
Engaging in a creative activity strengthens the neural pathway that controls attention and focus. Any type of artistic expression helps with cognitive processing and improved brain connectivity.
Creative expression helps to stimulate your neural pathways because it enhances the connectivity of the brain at rest. This “default mode network,” or DMN, helps with empathy, introspection, and memory. Dancing is also healthy for the brain because it doesn’t retrace memorized paths. In fact, in a study that looked at senior citizens, dancing had the greatest risk reduction for dementia because it integrates emotional, kinesthetic, musical, and rational functions of the brain, which further increases neural connectivity. Having a creative outlet can help establish moments of clarity if the brain is stressed or experiencing episodes of emotional trauma since creativity via action can rewire the brain. Plus, this flow of creative movement and thought increases dopamine in the brain, leading to more sustained feelings of happiness.
Mindfulness and relaxation
When it comes to handling stressful situations, relaxation and mindful awareness becomes an intrinsic part of rewiring the brain. You can integrate mindfulness practices like meditation and breathing. Certain slow breathing techniques enhance autonomic, cerebral, and psychological flexibility. Breathing in many traditional practices is the representation of life that encapsulates an energetic state of consciousness.
A study on how breath rate affects the brain showed that paced breathing uses neural networks beyond the brainstem that are tied to attention, body awareness, and emotions. After doing three different breathing exercises, the researchers found that there was an increased activity in the amygdala when participants breathed rapidly. The amygdala is responsible for processing fear and other strong emotions, so by slowing down the breath, the brain receives the signal to reduce that fear.
Another integral part of relaxation is sleep. Researchers at NYU published a study that showed that sleep after learning encourages the growth of tiny protrusions from brain cells that connect to other brain cells and facilitate the passage of information throughout the brain. These tiny protrusions are called dendritic spines. This growth also enhances memory because neurons fired during learning are also fired again during slow-wave sleep.
New experiences and learning
You should strive to continually challenge your brain by learning new things and embark on new experiences. When we learn new things, a new pathway in the brain is formed with the potential to connect new neurons. For instance, when people expand their vocabulary, it activates the brain’s visual and auditory processes and memory processing. In fact, reading can create neural changes associated with physical sensation and movement. In a study done by Emory University, 21 undergraduate students participated by reading the same novel. The results showed a heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with language, and in the central sulcus, the primary motor region of the brain. Biologically, neural changes were being made just by readers immersing themselves in the story. Neuroscientists explain that playing a musical instrument is an intense, multisensory experience because the plasticity in the neural network affects cognitive enhancements. Plus, music-making places unique demands on the nervous system, which helps shape the organization of the brain. You can also incorporate memory training to retrain memory patterns, such as using a non-dominant hand to brush their teeth. These can be relatively simple tasks, such as traveling to expose the brain to new environments, or even changing up a daily routine.