Your body getting sick every time you’re stressed is a biological design feature. Your nervous system constantly interprets your environment, and stress in any form (mental, emotional, or physical) is its number one signal to prime your body for danger. This activation of your survival response, your sympathetic nervous system, automatically deactivates your self-healing system. Your body cannot be healthy or balanced under conditions of chronic stress, because its innate healing capabilities only activate when you’re in a state of rest and regulation.

What happens in my body when I’m stressed?

Your nervous system is an ancient, primal system primarily concerned with survival, so it does not discriminate between stressors. Whether you’re running from a physical threat or harboring deep shame, your subconscious mind directs your body into a fight, flight, or freeze response. This immediately diverts energy from crucial long-term functions like digestion, immunity, reproduction, and detoxification, which are deemed unimportant when survival is threatened.

If your mental and emotional states are chronically tense, your body operates under the same stressful conditions. This leads to dysregulation and ultimately dis-ease, not because your body is broken, but because it prioritizes survival over long-term health. When this state becomes chronic, your self-healing capabilities are suppressed.

How does relaxing help my body heal?

True healing requires a relaxed state, where your parasympathetic nervous system, your body’s natural self-healing system, can activate. This system prioritizes growth, repair, and rejuvenation, optimizing your innate healing capabilities. Your physical health directly expresses your inner mental and emotional states. This is what I call The Downstream Body. When I learned to stop approaching healing with force and stress and instead cultivated an inner environment of ease and unconditional self-love, my body finally received the right messages of safety and healed decades of chronic conditions on its own.

I share more about how your mind and body are designed to heal themselves when you are in a state of regulation and rest in an episode of my podcast, The Simple Source, called “How to Stress Less and Heal More.” You can also learn about the fundamentals of self-healing in Chapter 2 of my book, Unconditional: You Are Perfect As You Are.