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.

First it started with mobility issues. Difficulty walking. Undiagnosed reasons for recently experienced footfall and inability to control forward movement on one side versus the other. Before long there were experiences of extreme constipation lasting for days. Occasional bouts of nausea, and no desire to eat or drink. And although unacknowledged, there have been signs of increasing depression, debilitating anxiousness, among other physical and emotional symptoms. They wax, they wane, but mostly shift from one to another or all simultaneously. “If it’s not one thing,” she says, “it’s another.” Her primary doctor is at a loss. Her specialists haven’t found any conclusive explanations.

The Long Voyage of Mysterious Ailments

For those who’ve been on a long voyage of seeking diagnoses and treatments, and the road never seems to end, there can be far too many questions, and frustratingly few, if any, answers. The pain is real, how can they not find anything? There are the symptoms that are clearly visible: rashes, inflammation, discolorations, ambulation difficulties, and yet, test results still come back negative or inconclusive for the causes. Often symptoms get lumped into a general autoimmune disorder. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a label. Other times, we accumulate labels like cluttered closets.

Connecting Mysterious Body Ailments Back to the Mind

One day you notice that your headaches worsen at the office after contentious meetings with your ego-centric co-worker. Traffic snarled commutes bring on blinding migraines. A fight with your partner causes your stomach muscles to tense up, your appetite to plummet, and an emergency run to the bathroom. A tense phone call with your mom left you with flaring hives up and down your arms. The room-to-room messy paper and clothes piles bring on reflux and your lower back to seize up. Your jaw and fists are clenched more often than not.

Eventually, you begin to suspect that your symptoms, your syndrome(s) may be the result of your mind and body conspiring against you. A psychophysiological or mind-body connection. Remember, a mind-body connection does NOT mean you are making this stuff up. It’s as real as the red rash, the itchy hives, the spazzing colon. But how do you know for sure whether it’s solely a physical ailment or it’s your mind influencing your body? Sometimes it’s evident. Other times, establishing certainty can be very tricky. But here are a few things to look out for to hypothesize a mind-body disorder and ideas to share with your medical practitioner for consideration.

Despite chronic pain or other on-going conditions, there doesn’t appear to be a structural, disease, viral, or bacterial cause as confirmed by blood tests, imaging, biopsies, etc.

But here’s where that guidance can go awry. Just because the condition is clearly diagnosable, that doesn’t mean the mind can’t be implicated in the origins. Think about stress-related ulcers. The ulcers are unmistakable. The cause may originate back to the mind and nervous system working distressingly overtime churning away at your gut.

Then there are structural issues like disc bulging or spine misalignment that can be very painful for some people and unnoticed by others, all with similar imaging results. Why are some people in pain and others not so much?

A surgical procedure, injection, or other invasive modality appears to do the trick. You finally experience relief, but it's short-lived. Recurrent pain returns a few weeks or months down the road. Chances are the malady wasn't technically resolved by that intervention. Then why were you feeling good?

There are personality traits described in January 2025's blog, "Are Chronic Symptoms a Character Flaw? When Your Traits Feel Like Betrayals." If a number of these characteristics apply to you, then consider the possibility that your symptoms reflect a mind-body connection. Click the button below to review the traits that could predispose you or someone in your life to mind-body disorders.

Are Chronic Symptoms a Character Flaw? When Your Traits Feel Like Betrayals

Then there's the case of of migrating symptoms or as the late Dr. John Sarno, MD of the Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation at NYU Orthopedic Hospital termed "symptom imperatives."

Chasing Migrating Symptoms

Today's another migraine day. Yesterday it was your right shoulder pain resulting in another sleepless night. Earlier this week your left knee pain meant missing tennis practice. Over the weekend, you were house-bound with irritable bowel symptoms. No errands were run, no fun with friends.

Ok, maybe your migrating symptoms don't happen in such rapid succession. Maybe it's weeks, months or years of a left-side ache. Eventually you’re cheering it’s long-awaited abatement. You’re finally free to get on with life. Before you know it, that ache is replaced by right-side elbow inflammation sidelining you once again. In the blink of an eye, you’re chasing another annoyance, like a food sensitivity or a mysterious skin outbreak. If it’s not one thing that has you running to your physician or wide array of specialists, it’s another. Seemingly endless “whack-a-mole,” yet the object getting whacked is your own body.

If you feel like you’re perpetually chasing one symptom after another or group of symptoms, there’s a very high probablity that you’re looking at a mind-body disorder or set of disorders. Despite best intentions to help you get well, if you’re doctor or medical team have reached their specialty limits, then it could be time to change tactics.

Use This Information to Leverage Your Healing Process

Why is this information helpful and how can you best put it to use?

Having this background info in your back pocket will increase the number of tools at your disposal to chip away at the condition. Think of it this way, suppose your leg is hurting. Your medical team tries several different approaches to fix your leg. Nothing is working. However, if the pain turns out to be radiating down from the sciatic nerve, treating the leg may be futile. The same goes for brain and nervous system. If your stressed out mind is churning away at your digestive tract, meds for your colon are less likely to yield positive preventative results. Opening up the scope of possibilties widens the range of approaches.

In the event your physician suggests that maybe your symptoms indicate a psychophysiological or mind-body related disorder, then you will be prepared to receive that information with curiosity rather than setting off a defensive stress-related chain of reactions when your brain goes to...

“they think I’m crazy”

“I’m doing this to myself,”

“they think I’m making this all up.”

Allow your mind the space to curiously consider that the pain or other symptomology might be emanating from thoughts, emotions, feelings rather than a cancerous tumor or some other scary supposition. Sidestepping that feeling of “this isn’t as scary as I make it out to believe until I have all the information,” (such as further diagnostics), could be just what you need to soothe your nervous system into settling down enough to give your body a break.

There are rarely disadvantages to mindfulness activities to give your brain and body a breather from physical or day-to-day emotional triggers. You can benefit even if your demeanor is calm as a cucumber. They’re beneficial to everyone. Try a few or more minutes each day of breathing exercises, meditations, regular exercise, yoga, tai chi, Qi Gong, self-soothing like softly rubbing down each arm, massages, nutritious eating, solid sleep habits. Notice I said sleep habits, not sleep. Please do not put more pressure on yourself if sleep eludes you. Stress can definitely influence insomnia tendencies or disrupted sleep. Until you get a confirmation diagnosis, a string of inconclusive results, or no helpful information at all, you can still boost your body, mind and immune system in the meanwhile.

Take this information for what it’s worth. Use what feels right to apply to your own circumstances or to assist others who could use your support. Next month we’ll go deeper into some of the research studies in this ever-evolving field. There’s still so much about the brain that is unknown, and may never be known within our lifetimes. Stay curious. Be well. See you next month.

Practical Solutions Blog