Are Your Brain, Body, and Mind Connected?

Our emphasis on ignoring our emotional health can have severe consequences for our physical health. The mind and the body are connected in the most magnificent ways and our lack of understanding of the relationship between them makes us negate the importance of one, i.e. our mental/emotional wellbeing, and focus instead on the other, our physical health.

But these two are connected.

For example, if you have a panic attack, there’s a surge of hormones your body experiences with adrenaline, cortisol, and immune-system activity. This is an explosive mix for your heart because if that arousal happens too often (people with the worst forms of the disorder can have attacks several times a day), it can cause the heart to beat erratically, increasing heart attack risk.

One study showed that people with panic disorder face a 47 percent higher risk of heart disease. Similarly, having Depression can trigger the same response as it involves an onslaught of adrenaline and cortisol.

Depression can also make your platelets (cells that help your body to stop bleeding) stickier and more prone to forming clots that can stop blood flow to the heart.

The same thing applies to trauma; it can be stored in your body. By trauma we don’t necessarily mean war, a violent attack, rape, abuse, or near-death experiences (it could be that, but doesn't have to be), it can be a range of other less obvious experiences that can be traumatic and that have the potential to seriously disrupt our lives. The negative impact of trauma doesn’t get neutralized by itself and can persist over time if not effectively addressed.

“Trauma often represents the violation of all we hold to be dear and sacred. Such events are often simply too terrible to utter aloud, and hence they often become unspeakable,” says Shaili Jain, M.D. a clinical associate professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “But when these traumatic thoughts and memories remain unspeakable or unthinkable for too long, they often impede our brain’s natural process of recovery after trauma. They become stuck points that inhibit the mental reintegration that is needed for healing to occur.”

There are studies that associate trauma and physical health since experiencing trauma has been linked to chronic pelvic pain, sexual problems, infertility and miscarriage, preterm delivery, and low birth weight.

Mental health issues are often dismissed because they don’t demonstrate physical bruising. But the fact that mental health issues, like Depression, can literally kill you because of the physiological changes it begets needs attention and we need to talk about it.