Almost everyone can remember a time when their feelings caused a physical response in their body. For example, have you ever experienced the following?
- Blushing due to embarrassment?
- Butterflies in your stomach due to anxiety?
- A racing heartbeat in response to something potentially dangerous in your environment?
- A gnawing pit in your stomach due to intense hunger? (Hunger is a feeling too!)
The impact of emotions on our physical sensations is embedded directly into the English language! Consider the following expressions, which reflect how we sometimes feel in response to powerful emotions:
- “Her stomach sank”
- “My skin was crawling”
- “My heart was in my throat”
- “His blood was boiling”
Emotions can cause many different physical sensations, most of which are temporary and easily linked to the cause. However, many of us experience powerful emotions that are buried below our level of consciousness, and that we only recognize when they cause physical symptoms– we feel the effect without recognizing the trigger. In this case, we frequently go searching for other causes of our physical sensations. For example:
- An otherwise healthy 30 year old graduate student starts to develop chest pain and palpitations, without any obvious cause. Immediately he starts to worry that there is something wrong with his heart, despite the fact that serious heart problems are almost unheard of in young healthy people without a family history of heart disease.
- A 45 year old office worker with frequent headaches that have been present and unchanging for many years starts to wonder if she might have a brain tumour, despite the fact that most brain tumours do not cause pain.
- A 53 year old single parent of two teenagers has developed worsening muscle pain all over their body in the last few years. They wonder if perhaps they might have rheumatoid arthritis, which their mother developed around age 50.
Do you think there could be other possible reasons
for these symptoms?