Psychosomatic diseases are ailments that are aggravated against the background of certain emotional states. In the Taoist tradition, every bodily ailment is associated with a certain “chronic” negative emotion. How does excess responsibility affect our physical condition?
When we experience some kind of emotion, it is also expressed through bodily symptoms. The simplest and most obvious example is tears. This fluid our body produces in response to feelings of intense joy, sadness, resentment or pain.
A less dramatic way in which the body responds to emotions is through tension. For example, when a person is frightened, he pulls his head into his shoulders. Similarly, in response to stress, his pelvic floor muscles tighten and the abdominal diaphragm tightens. And there are hundreds of varieties of such tension. Some of them are universal, some are strictly individual, because not everyone, say, shakes his leg when he is worried.
Let’s consider such an emotion as hyper-responsibility – the scourge of our time. Oddly enough, it manifests itself differently in men and women.
Male and female type of responsibility
You have probably heard a friend or colleague complain that the whole family rests on her shoulders. This phrase is not used by chance. Girls, as more emotional creatures, often associate hyperresponsibility with anxiety: one develops against the background of the other and eventually becomes a tangle that is extremely difficult to unravel.
This type of emotional tension leads to a very real muscle clamp in the neck and shoulders. Therefore, the neck of hyper-responsible women who simultaneously raise children, monitor the health of loved ones, work at several jobs or occupy a leadership position in a company, is very often in suspense. Against this background, they can also develop chronic headaches.
In men, the emotion of responsibility is not associated with anxiety at all, but with aggression – with the desire to “push”, to prove, to take what is theirs. Such an emotional background is realized through the tension of the abdominal diaphragm, which affects the health of the lower back.
It turns out that in women, against the background of stress associated with responsibility, the neck most often suffers, and in men, the lower back. In addition, if the situation has a chronic course, that is, a person is in a stressful state regularly, then protrusions and herniations of the intervertebral discs begin to form in these parts of the spine.
What to do?
If the disease is of a psychosomatic nature (and in order to determine this, it is worth consulting with specialists), there are always two treatment options:
go away from the body
You can master gymnastics, which will relax the muscles of the problem area, providing them with better blood supply and innervation. This method will also affect your psychological health: by relaxing those zones that literally store emotional stress, we reduce the “heat of passions”.
This relationship can be easily traced by the example of people who practice Qigong Xing Shen Juang: the more relaxed a person is, the better he controls negative emotions.
Even if you have an “attack” of responsibility and experiences that completely subjugate your nervous system, you will have a tool to influence the situation – due to relaxation, you will regain control over it and balance the emotional background.
Go from psychology
Or turn to a psychologist to change the usual patterns of emotional response. In this case, your emotional background will first change, and then, thanks to it, the body will also relax. Make no mistake, this connection works both ways.
Imagine what a change awaits you if you get down to business using each method! Working with a psychologist and practicing relaxation is a “cocktail” that will allow you to quickly take control of the emotions that have subjugated your body.