The topic of mental health was very popular last year, with all of the social, mental, physical, and emotional adjustments everybody had to make to their lives due to COVID-19. To say that it was a hard year for us would be an understatement. Even though 2020 put a spotlight on mental health, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been important.
For some people, the topic of mental health is completely foreign. They don’t know how to properly take care of theirs, and they don’t understand the importance of doing so. However, I believe that if people understood the impacts their mental health can have on their physical health, they’d pay more attention!
How are physical, mental, and emotional health linked?
When a person experiences any kind of injury, stressful situation, or trauma (for example, an intense surgery), their health is going to be directly affected as their bodies try to heal.
Oftentimes patients deal with physical limitations as a result of an operation. It’s very common for these people to become discouraged, anxious, and depressed because of their condition. They don’t feel as if they’ll ever get better or regain their previous strength and abilities. They may even become disengaged from their treatment, which will only result in more pain down the road.
If your physical health is declining, or temporarily affected because of an illness or injury, your confidence and mood may plummet. It can be a very hopeless feeling. The same is true in reverse as well; if your emotional and mental health are not what they should be, it will take a toll on your physical health.
For example, someone could lose their job and suddenly find themselves in a constant state of stress. They may be so anxious and worried over how they’re going to pay their bills that their eating habits are negatively affected. When a person doesn’t eat or overeats, it can cause several problems, including unexplained chronic pain.
The issue with cases such as these is that the root cause of their symptoms goes unnoticed. The root cause is poor mental health.
Pain and mental health
Mental health gets overlooked often. Why that is, I’m not sure, but I do suspect it’s because many people forget about it since it doesn’t present itself the way a physical ailment would (for example, a cut, scrape, burn, strain, broken bone, etc).
What’s important to know is that just because you can’t touch something that hurts, doesn’t mean it can’t be healed. The root cause of many chronic pain problems starts with the state a person’s mental health is in.
If someone is depressed, their pain tolerance is much lower and when something hurts, they notice more and tend to fixate on it. When they go to the doctor for help, the topic of mental health may never even come up.
Healthline states: “One 2015 study showed a correlation between people who are depressed and decreased pain tolerance, while another study in 2010 showed that pain has a greater impact on people who are depressed.”
It is much more difficult for a person to heal after physical trauma or after receiving an injury if their emotional and mental states of being aren’t operating at a high, normal level.
Take the example I gave before about surgery. The body interprets surgery as a traumatic injury. Its first response is going to be to start trying to heal itself through inflammation and swelling, which results in pain. “Newer studies suggest that inflammation in the body may have something to do with the neurocircuits in our brain. It’s thought that inflammation may interrupt brain signals, and therefore may have a role in depression and how we treat it.”
So you see, it’s all tied together. If your mental health is poor, then your physical state is negatively affected. You may notice pain more often and be unable to make yourself stop worrying about it, or you may lack the willpower to do the work you need to to recover. When your physical state is poor, your mental health can take a nosedive as you try to recover and deal with movement restrictions.
How to keep yourself healthy and balanced
When it comes to mental health, no matter what age you are, you should never feel ashamed to reach out for help! Struggling with depression and anxiety can exacerbate an existing pain problem, or cause one to crop up on its own because of the stress your body is harboring.
It’s important to talk with a medical professional and have a plan of action for recovery after major surgeries or injuries that take a while to heal from. The more proactive you are about your mental health, the easier the road to physically feeling better will be.
Contact For Health’s Sake today to learn more about the options available to you to take care of your physical, mental, and emotional states. We’ve been through enough the past several months. It’s time for you to start finding the root cause of what hurts and handle it once and for all.
SOURCE:
https://www.jns-journal.com/article/S0022-510X(15)00392-5/fulltext