BODILY SYMPTOMS OF STRESS: BREATHING TROUBLES AND CHRONIC CONSTIPATION
Breathing troubles
«Sometimes I can’t get my breath. Breathing won’t come naturally. Talking to someone and I have to gulp. Conscious of my breathing. If I was not conscious of it, I would not be ready to take a breath if it should stop. Does your breathing just sometimes stop? It must when you die. Worry about going to sleep. If I was asleep, and it stopped, I would not be awake to take another breath. Sometimes I breathe too much. Something must be wrong. I made him take an X-ray, but that was all right. »
Symptoms like this are due to the disordered function of the autonomic nervous system which controls the rate and depth of our breathing. The trouble is made worse by the individual’s obvious anxiety.
Disorders of breathing due to stress respond dramatically well to meditation.
«It is about three months since I first came to see you about my nerves. I don’t think I ever told you that I had been troubled with constipation for years. Laxatives. Dieting. Enemas. It had all come to be a part of my life. Physiotherapist with special exercises. Massage. Nothing really made much difference. It all became just a part of life and that was that.
The meditation fixed the nervous trouble. But in some strange way this other business has cleared up too. Gone. I’m normal. Not since a child. Can hardly believe it. »
Symptoms of stress like this are by no means uncommon. Just let us be clear about one point. There are many different causes of chronic constipation. Stress is only one of them. Sometimes stress is the prime cause. Sometimes it acts as an aggravating factor to some other condition.
The mechanism by which stress produces chronic constipation is simple enough. In stress the over-alertness of nerve cells comes to involve the sympathetic nervous system which is part of the autonomic system. The sympathetic system prepares us for action. Fight or flight. To achieve this, our heart output is increased, blood pressure is raised, and more blood is directed to the muscles so that they can work more effectively. That is all straightforward. But if we are going to be involved in action, in fight or flight, we do not want to be encumbered by having to use our bowels. So in stress, the sympathetic nervous system switches off the motility of our bowels, so that we will not have to stop and pass a motion when engaged in combat. If the stress is long-lasting, as in people whose coping capacity is not equal to all the problems of daily living, there comes about a general sluggishness of the bowel which we recognize as chronic constipation.
If the action of the bowel is impaired by some organic problem, the condition may be made worse in this way by the advent of chronic stress.
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