Please note, I’m not a medical practitioner. Consult with your doctor for diagnostic and treatment options related to any health conditions. That being said, suppose you’ve been on an endless pain relief scavenger hunt. Despite concerted efforts, you’re no further with symptom abatement. Maybe it’s time to step outside conventional boxes. Physical and/or psychological incapacitation keeps us stuck. You’re unable to do the things you need to accomplish or wish to do. What if there is potential for a reprieve, no matter how slight, at no cost to you except for a few minutes of time? Would that be life-altering? If nothing else, the data that you gather from this blog series might offer possibilities for a more informed, comprehensive understanding. Use the information for future conversations with your well-care practitioner(s). Best wishes along your healing journey.
Catching Back Up
Hello and happy new year. My hope is that you ended 2024 on a high note. Then you sailed into 2025 with optimal health, financial security, safe surroundings, and if nothing else, curiosity. To anyone in SoCal, I’m deeply saddened by the devastation. Keeping you all in my thoughts.
This month, my blog restarts the chronic condition series if you’ve been following along. We pick up where we left off in November with “Where Does the Brain End and Body Begin?” December, I deferred to focusing on seasonal joy.
I encourage you to begin reading or reviewing September’s “Emotional Experiences & Symbolic Expressions” and October’s “What's My Body Telling Me?” as an introduction to this chronic condition exploration. As a reminder, I’m not a medical health practitioner (see the italic statement above for caveats). Why am I addressing chronic conditions? When was the last time you gleefully launched into any type of project or task when you felt unwell, physically or emotionally? Even worse, if pain has sidelined you completely, unless you’ve got extra hands and bodies to help out, not much is getting accomplished. For those able to play through the pain, that’s great. Playing through gets things done, and the effort is admirable. Plowing forward can exacerbate all types of stress. In turn, every step feels harder, more exhausting. Difficulty creates heightened resistance and procrastination or possibly resentment, anger, and fear. Chronic conditions are challenging on many levels. Finding physical and/or emotional relief is key to forward motion with degrees of less stress. Onward we go. For January, we’ll dive into how character traits may influence or play a role in our well-being.
Sally's Case Study
Sally (not her real name) was saddled with (as she perceived) enormous responsibility from an early age. When she was in first grade, her mom took on a part-time job. Sally became a latch-key kid. After school each day, she had a list of chores to address once her homework was finished. While her friends were outside playing, she was dusting, vacuuming, raking leaves, loading and unloading the dishwasher, practicing for piano lessons, and prepping dinners as she got older. Unfortunately, in her estimation and from the verbal feedback she received, her efforts were inevitably criticized. No matter how hard she tried, she never met her parents' high standards for cleanliness or job completion. Even as their daily pressure waned once she was an independent adult, she continued to place extraordinarily high pressure upon herself and those around her to do more, to do it better.
By the time she was a pre-teen, physical conditions creeped in. First skin flare ups. Then stomach and headaches prior to tests or big projects. During tests, her brain would freeze as her anxiousness increased. She had to keep her grades as high as possible to please herself, to avoid parental disparagement. As she took on more responsibilities, there were bouts of insomnia and eventually autoimmune disorders, food sensitivities, digestive distress, a variety of skin disorders, inflammatory symptoms, anxiousness, and sporadic depressive episodes. It wasn’t until much later in life that she began to notice a connection between stressful events and intensifying migrating symptoms. Why did it take so long to draw a parallel? Mainly because there was a delay of hours or days before any reaction would occur. Even vacation anticipation could bring on flu-like symptoms. Each time, she would wonder if she had contracted a viral bug. Should she cancel her plans?
Her early adulthood emergency room visits for excruciating intestinal pain and menstrual disorders led to the start of eternally seeking diagnoses for compounding illnesses. As one malady would abate, it was replaced with another. The cycle continues.
If Your Symptoms Feel Like a Character Flaw…
Your character may actually provide clues to chronic condition tendencies
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
Although there are times my own mind would refute the following statement, “your chronic symptoms are not a character flaw”, it’s nevertheless true and at the same time, can be hard to believe. It’s important to understand that, even if you don’t accept it…yet. In fact, the good news is that your character, your history (nature and nurture), along with your DNA prospectively provides clues to chronic condition tendencies. How’s that useful? With more awareness of the roots, there could be avenues to pursue in order to make adjustments. Let’s take a look at how this is possible through expanding research. The more we know, the more tools we have to navigate through.
Textbook Examples
There are people who take things in stride. A textbook example is my yoga/tai chi/qi gong instructor. She wears the world with loose elegance. On the flip side, there are people like me. Those who view the world, view personal circumstances with deep levels of concern. Our passions and emotions are perceivable to casual observers. We may or may not be conscious of how deeply we feel. We may or may not be aware of the degree of relevance our emotional paraphernalia has to our inner workings. Those attributes are not flaws. They are simply traits.
People like me, also embody hyper-constitutions. What do I mean? We experience knowingly and unknowingly untenable levels of hypervigilance, hypersensitivity, hyper-observance, hyperactivity, hyper-impulsivity. Also common are hyper-reactivity to foods, beverages, odors and scents in the environment; to synthetic and bio-chemicals; to mold, to dust particles, and other kinds of inert and toxic substances; elements benign or mostly unnoticed by others.
We feel plights deeply and compassionately. The suffering of humanity, animals, the environment all take a toll. Our compassion tends to run higher for other people, things, and benevolent causes than for ourselves. Self-compassion is un-relatable, most of the time. We know we need it. Feels foreign to embrace it.
We are plagued by emotions that are so vast and so wide. We have no idea how to get a grip on them in order to reign them in when the world (internal or external) spins out of control.
We hold ourselves to very high standards lest we let others down. We may hold others to unreasonably high standards too. We know that can be hurtful. High standards have gotten us to where we are. How do we let them go and still achieve?
Tracing the Traits Back to The Brain
Where do all those traits begin? Behavioral character traits reside within the brain. Partially our characteristics, behaviors, intellectual and emotional intelligence et. al. are part of our nature, we’re born that way. Partially we can chalk them up to nurture. We learned essential qualities along the way. We reinforced compensatory habits. Our brains are neuroplastic, changing over time; therefore, our traits aren’t necessarily set in stone, or at least not all of them. Neuroplasticity gives hope when particular traits aren’t serving us well. One study reported in the Association for Psychological Science contends that not only do certain areas of the brain correspond to personality traits, the size of the region also has influence. For example, researchers learned initially using a personality questionnaire followed by brain imaging of 116 participants “conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior”.[1] Other traits, brain areas and structural size differences were also noted.
Here’s where things go a bit haywire. Those predisposing traits can correlate to TMS tendencies also known by a host of other names such as Mind/Body Syndrome, Mind/Body Connection, Psychophysiological Disorders.
What’s TMS? Surgeon Dr. John Sarno, M.D., practiced for many years at New York University (NYU)’s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation. Dr. Sarno was one of the pioneers of the Mind/Body field of medical science. After years of observing conventional medicine practices weren’t necessarily relieving pain in his patients post-surgery or through other modalities, or the relief was temporary, he looked beyond his western medical education. He defined Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) later recoined as Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) as a process in which the central nervous system is the driver for pain not associated with any diagnosable abnormalities. More curiously, in many cases, there were no plausible reasons for structural abnormalities to be painful for some patients and completely pain-free for others. In treating over 10,000 patients, he noted that many of his patients and other sufferers demonstrating TMS symptoms expressed common personality traits. Other experts have recognized additional characteristics. I’ve included a few of my own below from personal and professional experience. But first, it’s important to reiterate as mentioned in previous blogs in this series…
TMS is not fully accepted by conventional mainstream medicine. During his years of practice in the 1980s until his death in 2017, Sarno was ostracized by his colleagues as a result of this departure. It’s worth keeping in mind that medical science is showing progress toward reconnecting with the dualistic influence of the brain on the body. There’s a growing body of research into the apparent role in which neuroscience plays in the sphere of chronic health conditions. References to a mind/body connection can be found way back in traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic healing practices, classical Greek history, with further interpretations by French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century.
That mainstream view is changing, “Mounting evidence for the role of the mind in disease and healing is leading to a greater acceptance of mind–body medicine.”[2] A selection of medical schools including Columbia University; Harvard University; University of Pittsburgh; University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); as well as the Mayo Clinic are among those with mind-body curriculum, research, and treatment protocols.
Which Traits Could Trigger Nervous System Dysregulation and Vice Versa?"
Back to the traits and why they’re important. There are numerous traits common to those who tend to experience chronic ailments. Traits that could potentially trigger nervous system dysregulation. Chronic nervous system dysregulation potentially aggravates certain traits. Hence, a continuous cycle of dysregulated behaviors and biological responses.
Dysregulation, in turn, can precipitate muscle and blood flow restriction, release of brain chemicals such as cytokines that can cause inflammation, [3] insomnia, anxiety, depression, digestive distress, and other symptoms may pop up nearly anywhere in the body including migrating symptomology. One day your wrist aches, the next day your shoulder hurts, a day or two later you’re experiencing constipation. More on that in a future blog. It may be helpful to return to previous blogs in this series to familiarize yourself with how useful fight and flight reactivity becomes locked into a perpetual state of alarm and responsiveness.
TMS predisposing traits include, but are not limited, to the attributes below. Some may seem contradictory. See if any or how many apply to you.
Knowing more about the predisposition traits, the person, the psychology, can provide some insights into how characteristics and past experiences, particularly traumas, might contribute to chronic conditions. Those insights could hold the keys to determining what types of treatment protocols are indicated. “Additional research is required to clarify the relative efficacy of different mind–body therapies, factors (such as specific patient characteristics) that might predict more or less successful outcomes, and mechanisms of action”. [4] For example, those prone to repression will likely require a different approach than those prone to hyper-expressiveness.
“In 1964, psychiatrist George Solomon noticed that people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) got worse when they were depressed. He began to investigate the impact emotions had on inflammation and the immune system in general. The new field was called psychoneuroimmunology ("psycho" for psychology; "neuro" for neurology, or nervous system; and "immunology" for immunity).”[5]
“In the 1960s and early 1970s, a physician named Herbert Benson, who coined the term "relaxation response," studied how meditation could affect blood pressure. More understanding of the mind-body link came in 1975, when psychologist Robert Ader showed that mental and emotional cues could affect the immune system.” [6]
That’s a lot to process for now. Next month we will go deeper into the mind/body connection research and interventions.
1 “Brain Structure Corresponds to Personality”, Association for Psychological Science, June 22, 2010 https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/brain-structure-corresponds-to-personality.html
2“Mind–body Research Moves Towards the Mainstream,” Vicki Brower, National Library of Medicine, April 7, 2006, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1456909/
3 “Neuroinflammation: The Devil is in the Details”, Damon DiSabato 1, Ning Quan 2, Jonathan P Godbout 1,3,4, 2016 May 4;139(Suppl 2):136–153. doi: 10.1111/jnc.13607, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5025335/
4 “Mind–body Research Moves Towards the Mainstream,” Vicki Brower, National Library of Medicine, April 7, 2006, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1456909/
5 “Mind-body Medicine,” 2025 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/treatment/mind-body-medicine
6 “Mind-body Medicine,” 2025 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/treatment/mind-body-medicine
