I asked my wife, Stacy, to write a series of posts on how to fix your emotional health – this is part 2 of the series by Stacy Hirsch, MES, ACC, CDWF 

 In part 1 of this series, I shared my own personal journey and we discussed the emotional experience. In this post we will discuss the 3 components of that experience in greater depth and also learn how stress makes you sick.  

Physiologic Response                   

The sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body’s fight-or-flight reactions, controls the body’s subjective experience of emotion. The amygdala, part of the limbic system in the brain, is made up of two tiny almond-shaped structures that are sensitive to fear and threatening situations. It reacts to your emotions and patterns in your physical environment faster than your conscious awareness can detect.

Behavior Response

This is the component of emotion most people are familiar with because it is often easy to see. You raise your voice, wave your hands, you begin to sweat, or your face turns red. Why do some people blush with embarrassment while others don’t? It is the subjective experience of the emotion that determines the expressive response. 

Emotional Regulation

From an evolutionary perspective, and first written about by Charles Darwin, emotions keep us alive. Fear guides us away from danger, while love and desire ensure we procreate.  

When you can no longer respond effectively to the ongoing demands of your environment, you become less organized in your thoughts, actions, and interactions. You enter a state of emotional dysregulation. Your responses become exaggerated, you overreact, you take on unappealing behaviors, and you are more likely to create chaos, drama, or conflicts. Emotional dysregulation is often relational and triggered by those closest to you or by those in positions of power. 

How Stress Makes You Sick 

Challenges with your ability to regulate your emotions can manifest in a wide array of symptoms. For me, it began with how I related to common, everyday life stressors. I might raise my voice or sink into despair. It was painful, but it seemed mostly normal. As more dysregulation surfaced, it resulted in difficulty sleeping, depression, night terrors, fatigue, anxiety, and panic attacks. 

Symptoms of emotional dysregulation may include: 

1. Difficulty sleeping, insomnia

2. Chronic fatigue, low energy, apathy

3. Physical symptoms with no apparent cause

4. Anger that is difficult to control

5. Difficulty quieting the mind

6. Obsessive-compulsive behaviors

7. Loss of sexual desire

8. Difficulty making decisions

9. Brain fog or memory issues

10. Difficulty tolerating social activity, the need to avoid others

11. Erratic behaviors, easily agitated, mood swings

12. Feeling overwhelmed, on the edge, or hopeless

13. Racing thoughts

14. Engaging in risky behaviors to relieve stress or numb

15. Withdrawal or isolation from other people

16. Increase in negative or difficult emotions

According to the popular website Mercola.com: “the American Medical Association (AMA) states 80 percent of all health problems are stress related, and even the conservative Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated that 85 percent of all diseases appear to have an emotional element.” 

What you feel and how you feel matters. 

Find Your Emotional Comfort Zone

“The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it's your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can't package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking.” ~ Wayne Dyer

Stress, like emotion, is highly individualized. Your nervous system begins to form while you are still in your mother’s womb and continues to wire during the early years of your life. This wiring happens differently for each person, depending on the support available in the environment. Without the proper support, an individual can experience difficulties in self-regulation throughout their lives, leaving them more vulnerable to stressors in their environment. The good news is that you can re-wire.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of stress, but few of us take the time to assess the various stressors in our lives or attempt to understand the underlying emotional triggers and internal conflicts that impact our well-being. Your thoughts, feelings, and experiences form your beliefs. It is these beliefs that are often at the root of stressful moments. How can you become more mindful of this process? How do you shift your subjective experience and create healthier physiologic responses? 

What we also know is that moderate amounts of stress and tension can be motivating and provide opportunities for your brain to grow and learn. With enough higher functioning available during a stressful episode, you can examine the thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that are leading to the tension. 

The tricky part is knowing when you cross a threshold, where moderate stress starts to become overwhelming and chronic, and where you can no longer regulate your emotional response. 

The graphic below depicts a continuum between healthy stress and distress:

1. A low amount of activity combined with too little stress or tension results in boredom. 

2. When activity increases and one becomes more engaged with life, there is the potential for healthy or creative tension moving a person into a comfort zone. Inside this zone, a person functions well with the proper amount of motivation to feel productive and without the overwhelm that often accompanies greater activity. People often refer to this as a flow state. Your emotional state is easily regulated, and you feel resilient. 

3. If activity and tension continue to increase, a person may move into a space between comfort and the first signs of fatigue. The early signs of distress may appear as this is where old fragmentation may surface in response to increased tension.

4. If you are experienced in the realm of self-care, you may recognize the early signs of distress and take action to avoid more tension, while creating opportunities to reconnect with your comfort zone. This is the space where resilient people engage their support system and avoid crossing the threshold. They read the signs and determine what needs to be addressed.

5. When you do not know what to look for, or you don’t recognize the early warning signs of distress, you may begin to feel tired with long bouts of fatigue. Exhaustion and other symptoms follow, and if you remain in a state of dysregulation, a breakdown is inevitable, resulting in a chronic state of fatigue and complete burnout. 

How do you learn to stay in your comfort zone? Take care of what arises when it arises. Become equipped with the right information and attuned in a moment-to-moment awareness. It requires you to know yourself, your needs, and your healthy limits and then be equipped to respond accordingly. 

This type of awareness is elusive for many people. We often aren’t encouraged to know ourselves or to ask for what we need. We get disconnected from our bodies and our emotional selves. We feel pressured by those in our lives and by our high expectations. We search for ways to stay in control, even if it means drifting toward greater distress.

This can also be challenging if you feel the stressors in your life are out of your control, for example, if you experience an infection in your body, long-term illness, a sick loved one, chronic poverty, neighborhood violence, politics, or world events. Understanding what to do doesn’t always mean you can make these stressors disappear. When you cannot remove the stressor, you need to look at how you can respond differently or find support to buffer the impact of the stressor. Stress that remains constant changes the brain and impacts the stress response system, creating more stress in the body and increasing the risk of developing chronic health conditions such as fatigue. 

Take Action:

• Now that you understand the power of emotions and the impact they can have on your fatigue, we will discuss how to identify specific causes impacting you and what to do about them in Part 3 of the series on How to Fix Your Emotional Health (available on Oct 31, 2022).

• Join the conversation in the Facebook Group.

• Share this article with your friends and loved ones on social media and help me achieve my mission of helping 1 million people increase their energy!