Mental Health ~ What it's really doing to our bodies.
Dr. Starr Ramson wrote an article, that I love referring to every now and then, called The Vagus Nerve, Low Stomach Acid, and SIBO.
“The vagus nerve governs our most basic functions of life, from the rhythm of our heartbeat to the rate of our breath to the gentle waves and secretions of our digestive system. Since the vagus nerve governs the rest and digest division of the nervous system, imbalance arises from chronic emotional stress that forces the body into a fight or flight dominant state. The vagus nerve can also be damaged by physical stressors, including, an episode of food poisoning, chronic gut infections and mononucleosis. Regardless of the triggering event, the consequences of vagal imbalance generate a vicious cycle of damage in the gut.”
Dr. Starr highlights the scientific proof behind the relationship between mental and emotional health, in relation to the physical function of the human body.
Like I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t understand what my mental health was truly doing to my body. I always saw my depression, lack of energy, and chronic illness as who I was, my natural state, rather than a culprit of experiences in my life or the biology of my brain.
When I was thirteen, I started feeling symptoms of depression. I didn’t understand what it was, or why it was happening, all I could grasp was the fact that I felt sad, misunderstood, and lonely in a crowded room. I thought these feelings would go away with time, until I experienced a traumatic death of a dear friend of mine when I was fifteen. This loss sent me in a downward spiral, catapulting my chronic illness into full force. Each year, a new death came around the corner, pushing my feelings a little more over the edge. I grew to be passionately angry and isolated myself from social situations. And like any other young adolescent, I dealt with body image issues, physical and verbal bullying, and social anxiety.
A few years later, I left for college, and moved to an entirely new state, where I sought a new life, a new me, and a new beginning. I was a wild college student. I nearly failed out of school my first year, drank myself half to death, and developed an eating disorder. Luckily, a close friend of mine saw this darkness and pain in me, and told me I needed help. So for the next five years, I went to intensive therapy sessions, and slowly pulled myself out of the hole I was in. But my growth didn’t stop there, nor will it, anytime soon.
In 2016, I moved to a new city, fell in love with my person, pursued my career, and felt true, unaltered feelings of joy for the first time. A weight had been lifted, but my body started catching up to me. Although I had always felt symptoms of impaired gut health, chronic fatigue, and depression, it wasn’t until 2017 when my body began breaking down. This is when the fatigue turned into body aches and pain, inflammation, brain fog, dizziness, lightheadedness, a lack of mobility and the strength to get myself out of bed. But this was different. This wasn’t the mental pain I felt years ago. I wasn’t having trouble getting out of bed because I felt sorrow or emptiness. I was having trouble getting out of bed because my body physically lost the ability to do so.
After seeing Dr. Starr for the first time, summer of 2018, it finally clicked. The relationship between mental health and physical health started making sense to me. “This is a lifestyle approach,” she told me. This isn’t about the diagnoses I was receiving, the food I was eating, or the medicine I was taking, this is about my mental health, the emotional turmoil I felt, the breaths I forgot to take.
Dr. Starr explained the correlation between the vagus nerve and the gut to me; when there is emotional or mental stress on the body, including depression or anxiety, the communication between the vagus nerve and the rest of the body, shuts down. The vagus nerve does not communicate to the gut or the brain, sending the message to begin digesting or to take rest. As mentioned previously, the vagus nerve governs our most basic functions of life. When the communication that governs our most basic functions of life is shut off, then that’s exactly what happens to our bodies. They shut off.
I finally understood that for all of those years that I lived with depression, anxiety, and unhealed wounds from past traumas, my vagus nerve was shut down. My vagus nerve was not communicating to my gut, letting it know when to begin the digestion process, when to release stomach acid secretions, or when to tap into rest and digest mode. My body was in fight or flight, and it was slowly killing itself.
Some may say that diagnosing a patient with stress, depression, and anxiety, while encouraging them to lower their stress levels is a BS diagnosis. Doctors tend to simplify this, leaving us with comments like, “It’s probably just anxiety,” or, “You should try lowering your stress levels.” The over-simplification of this idea is what leaves people feeling like they don’t believe in stress management, or the affects stress has on the body. But the fact of the matter is, stress and mental health are key parts to our health, and the understanding of our vagus nerve, is the concrete, scientific proof behind that.
So, what do you do when your doctor diagnoses you with stress? To learn more about the approach I took to lowering my stress and healing my body, click here.