My Body, This Passive Aggressive Friend

How to listen to our anxious bodies, for real.

This one I’ve been wanting to write it for a while because I find it FASCINATING how much our body and our mind are connected, especially for people experiencing anxiety. Everyone is slowly starting to realize this but no one really understands how they are connected and how and why stress and anxiety are causing all those crazy manifestations in your body!

In the past few years, I cannot count the number of times where I have been to a doctor, for chronic digestion issues, for knee issues, for tingling sensations in my hands and legs, for lightheadedness etc. Every time, they could not find the physiological cause of my problems and just ended up throwing at me: “must be stress or anxiety”.

I should have “must be stress” tattooed on my arm at this point.

I know I’m not the only one. For some people it is migraine, for others, it is back pain or rash, but everyone has experienced at some points weird unexplainable physical pain that is due to psychological causes.

Anxiety and panic attacks are also other drastic physical body manifestations of our unhappy minds. Actually for many people, when they experience their first panic attack they think that they are having a real physical breakdown: they think that they are having a heart attack or hypoglycemia. Only to realize later on, that this was a panic attack due to their mind panicking and their mind only. There is nothing “wrong” with their bodies, their heart or their glycemia levels.

I find that what also distinguishes normal anxiety that everyone experiences once in a while, from anxiety experienced by someone with “chronic anxiety, anxiety disorder or panic attack disorder“ is that in the first case, it is your mind that is being anxious, in the second case, it is your mind AND your body feeling anxious. For example for me, it means a really fast heartbeat, feeling dizzy, lightheaded and feeling removed from reality. I think there really should be two different words for those two experiences. When I hear: “oh my god, I was like sooo anxious waiting for my passport to be stamped in the airport line”, I get a little enraged because to me, that is not feeling anxious, not the way I experience it. But anyway, that’s another issue.

The way I’ve come to see those body manifestations through time is that all of those very real body sensations are being caused by an unhappy mind, who doesn’t really know how to express its dissatisfaction so delegate the task to its friend, the passive-aggressive body. The passive-aggressive body friend is not gonna tell you exactly why she is not happy but will let you know that she is not happy by basically letting you feel pain or discomfort and leave you to figure out how to read that. I saw this meme online which sums it up well:

Passive Aggressive body (PAB): “somethings off”

Me: “How so?”

PAB: “somethings wrong”

Me: “So, what is it?”

PAB: “something”

Me: “like, can you give me a general idea?”

PAB: “somethings off”

When you haven’t been listening to your passive-aggressive body friend for a while and the situation has still not changed, let’s say you are still super stressed out by your environment your job, etc. then, your body might react in more dramatic ways. For me, besides from panic attacks, I’ve had an episode where my body literally did not let me sleep for 4 days straight. That was a pretty aggressive signal. I only realized much later on, after many days that I had to take off from work, that my body was telling me: “ You are going to stop working like that okay?! And that promotion you wanted for June, do you really want it, what is it going to bring you except more work and stress? You silly!” (this is, by the way, what triggered my 25 years old midlife crisis) Maybe you are thinking that I am reading too much into it, but I honestly don’t think so, I think the body is much more intelligent than we think. It takes some time for the conscious self to realize what the body is trying to tell us.

So how to engage in a healthy relationship with that passive-aggressive friend?

• 1.     Take care of that body: your body is not just a “vehicle” that carries your precious brain from home to work and work to home every day. It wants to have some fun too. So exercise, move it and feed it well. If you don’t treat it well, she will let you know.
• 2.     Listen to your body signals without becoming paranoiac. This is a tricky one and I’ve experienced one extreme and the other. On the one hand, I’ve had some periods where I have just completely ignored my body sensations unless they became painful. That’s not super healthy. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been interpreting everything, every tiny body sensation like a signal and something being wrong. That’s probably even less healthy. So, the difficult happy medium is probably somewhere where you can feel and detect body sensations and evaluate how much importance and attention you should pay to them, depending on how persistent these sensations are, the intensity of the discomfort, whether the sensations have been experienced before and so on. Easier said than done, I know, but hey! This one I am still figuring out myself so if you have the answer let me know.

• 3.     If something is becoming chronic or intense, and it’s not due to a medical condition, explore its unconscious meaning. Of course, the first step is always to check whether your problem is being caused by a medical condition or whether it is “caused by stress” as they will say. If it’s the latter, look, with the help of a psychotherapist if you need, into your current environment and conditions to find the conscious and unconscious reasons for this problem to manifest now and address those reasons! Remember that the body doesn’t care about pretending. If the cause is actual stress, if you only pretend to address the sources of stress in your life, without making actual changes, your body will not care and will keep sending you signals until you listen.

Also, remember that it’s not always clear cut what is caused by the mind and what is caused purely by the body. I’ll give an example. I suffered from IBS for the past 10 years, doctors were all quick to say “its IBS”, “its caused by stress” “there’s no cure”. When really they didn’t (and still don’t) understand the complex digestion system and what can influence it. While I thought it was stress, for a long time (and tried to enter in spiritual communication with my belly many times), I then did some more advanced test and tested positive for a condition called SIBO (Small Intestinal Overgrowth Syndrome) which can be treated with a certain combination of antibiotic and probiotic. All that time talking to my stomach to try to see what was the underlying message, wasted you will say? Not so much, because the condition indeed tended to get worse in times of intense stress and change of environment. So, in that case (and many others!) it is an interaction between the psychological and medical aspects of the problem.

As I said, all of this is not clear cut and there’s a lot that I/no one has figured out about how the mind and body interact. Maybe one day I’ll become a psycho-hormo-neuro-immuno researcher and look at all the links between mind and body through neurons, hormones, immune system and, all that jazz, but in the meantime, I’ll just keep listening to my body, for real.