Stress regulation, emotion regulation, and workings of the body

If you’ve ever experienced the following (even parts of it), then this was written for you:

You’re either working with a professional or by yourself, you’re doing an exercise to improve some physical function to get your body working properly again. Whatever exercise you’re doing at the time feels hard but the original symptom that signaled the problem was significantly improving as you’re doing it. Next thing you know, it feel like you’ve just ran a marathon in the span of four breaths. You need to sleep and are barely “there”. At this point, all attempts to communicate with you by others feel like a distant knock on the door. You feel dazed and confused. Immediately afterwards, you can begin to reflect on this experience, it feels like your head had been somehow removed from your body.

On the journey to restore our bodies’ optimal functions, we can run into some pretty strange issues. One of them is this baffling fluctuation of energy levels. We might be way too hyped up or “tired” for no reason, often at inopportune times. In this post, I’d like to elaborate on the organization of these phenomena, and discuss its relevance to stiffness and uncomfortable (or even painful) sensations in the body.

The Regulation of Energy

It will be very cumbersome to have a discussion about how energy works in the body without first laying the groundwork here. The autonomic nervous system (ANS), among other things, control the energy output of our bodies. It may be helpful to think of it as something akin to how gearboxes work in a car.

The ANS is organized into three dedicated branches, called sympathetic, ventral vagal, and dorsal vagal (Hill, 2015, pp. 61-63). They are responsible for an increase of energy output, the maintenance of a flexible energetic equilibrium, and an emergency freezing of all energy output, respectively. For the sake of being user-friendly, let’s call ventral vagal “mammalian vagal” and dorsal vagal “reptilian vagal”, to reflect their evolutionary timeline.

While entire books have been written about the functional organizations of the ANS, our protagonist today is the reptilian vagal system.

Like the other two modes of ANS operation, the reptilian vagal system corresponds to a specific scenario that is learned (as opposed to genetically inherited) during our development. However, unlike the other two modes that operates to solve specific problems, the reptilian vagal system represents an escape when there is no escape (Schore, 2003a, p. 248). It shuts us down when things are not going our way and we’re stuck with no other options than to just sit there and take it. This way, we can conserve our efforts in a no-win situation and live another day. Unfortunately, it also represents a short-circuiting of various regions of our brain.

Trauma and stress response

The operation of this system corresponds with psychological trauma of some kind (Schore, 2003, pp. 61-62). More specifically, trauma refers to situations when we are overwhelmed by powerful emotions (shame, uncertainty, excitement, happiness, etc.) without anyone there to help us make sense of them. So our brains never learn to regulate emotions. For anybody who grew up this way, the reptilian vagal system’s short-circuiting of our brain became our default way of dealing with overwhelming experiences (or even just moderately stressful situations). We end up not being able to sense the body, feel emotions, and think thoughts. In some occasions, this system can lead to out-of-body experiences where our bodies somehow disappear from our experiences in the moment. As adults, this can make our attempts to understand our emotions and bodily feelings triggering. After all relational trauma is encoded in the workings of our body through the ANS, rather than what we normally think of as memories.

One crucial thing to understand about these escape sequences is that they begin with a massive activation of the sympathetic branch, flooding the system with stress hormones of all kinds. If this is followed up by a reptilian freeze response, then the brain shuts down without getting rid of the stress hormones that are, at this point, running rampant throughout our body’s tissues.

So what does this mean for our body’s physical functions?

Locking things down

When under stress, our brains secrete a variety of hormones that have profound impacts across our physiology. One of them, is the non-conscious contraction (thereby stiffening) of the connective tissue network (fascia) that covers every organ (including muscles, bones, and nerves) of our bodies (Schleip et al., 2022, pp. 272-273). While the nature of connective tissues will have to wait for another post, for now, suffice it to say that the stiffer they are, the less they’ll be able to support healthy functions of our bodies. Though this is very far from a complete list of compromises caused by stress, it can impair the transfer of fluids in and out of joints, proper contractions of the muscles, and accurate perception of where our bodies are in space.

In reference to the scenario described in the beginning of the post (which actually happened during one of my sessions with a client), these bodily events and functional impairments are functionally tied to our brain’s capacity to regulate emotions and energy states. The body and the mind are seen as truly two parts of the same thing. When our learned response to severe stress is simply to disconnect the various parts of our brains, our minds struggle to function. Thinking, feeling, relating, remembering all become insurmountable tasks. At the same time, the stiffening of our connective tissue makes movement difficult, pathological, and even painful.

Summary & Conclusion

Today, I laid out a very brief overview of how the autonomic nervous systems regulates our energy output, how issues in our energy output can lead to stress unmanaged, and how hormones produced during stress states can impact our bodies.

This has been my attempt to shine some light on this difficult and misery-producing issue. If you found this to resonate with you, feel free to comment below on what other topics you’d like for me to write about!

References 

Hill, D. (2015). Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model. Norton.

Schleip, R., Stecco, C., Driscoll, M., & Huijing, P. A. (2022). Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body. Elsevier.

Schore, A. N. (2003a). Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of The Self. Norton.

Schore, A. N. (2003b). Affect Regulation & The Repair of The Self. Norton.