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A person’s psychological state can both cause a disease and aggravate existing ones.
Psychosomatics is a separate interdisciplinary branch that studies the relationships between psychological, behavioral and social factors that influence bodily processes. And RBC-Ukraine talks about how psychosomatics affects our body with a link to the medical Instagram portal Take care of yourself.
How psychosomatics works and what our body tells us
Let’s imagine you regularly shake off work. During stress, the body changes its functioning and it does not matter what the scale of the problem is. Physiologically, the body’s reaction will be more or less the same under low and high stress.
The main goal is to optimize the body’s energy expenditure to perform one of these three scenarios: “fight, flight or freeze.” The heart begins to beat faster, the blood vessels constrict so that the blood can quickly bring oxygen and nutrients to the muscles and organs necessary for survival.
“Strategic” programs, such as reproductive systems, are stopped because energy needs to be conserved. The functioning of the hormonal system, which actually regulates all this, also changes significantly.
All these changes have certain consequences for the body. For example, with frequent spasms, blood vessels lose their elasticity over time and are constantly narrowed. condition. This leads to increased blood pressure and further disruption of the heart.
Or a less obvious example is the condition of our skin. With chronic stress, we often change our lifestyle, choosing unconstructive ways to deal with stress:
- we eat fast food
- relieve stress with alcohol or other psychoactive substances
- we move less and sleep less
- We take less care of ourselves.
These changes may not be reflected on the skin. In addition, stress affects the gut microbiota, which also affects skin health. Stress can trigger acne. Nervously scratching or squeezing hard-to-control pimples leads to worsening skin conditions, increasing the risk of infection and scarring.
In addition, stress promotes inflammatory processes: sebum production changes, the skin becomes more vulnerable to the effects of the external environment, and recovery from wounds slows down. If there is a hereditary predisposition or chronic skin diseases, stress becomes a catalyst for their manifestation.
Does this mean that hypertension and acne are psychosomatic diseases? No, because purely psychosomatic diseases do not exist. A more medically correct term for such conditions would be the definition of psychosomatic disorders.
These are complex diseases that have a psychosomatic component and require interdisciplinary cooperation between several and a psychotherapist.
A person’s psychological state can both cause a disease and aggravate existing ones. Therefore, to combat psychosomatics, awareness skills are needed in order to notice what and how affects the condition. Also the skill of stress management – to minimize negative consequences.
