Along with the emotional baggage it carries, extreme sadness can cause distinctive physical sensations in the chest: tight muscles, a pounding heart, rapid breathing, and even a churning stomach. As you can see on the body map, survey respondents pinpointed the chest as a major spot for the manifestation of sadness.
Take time to slow down and be alone, get out into nature, make art, listen to music while you cook your favorite dinner, meditate to cleanse your mind and relax your body, take a bubble bath or a nap to restore.
The physical sensations that accompany sadness can feel as undesirable as they are intense – a constriction of the chest, watery eyes and a raw throat, to name a few.
Sadness and grief
Sadness affects the Lungs,61 the Liver,62 and the Heart and may influence the functional relationship between these organs. Sadness and grief induces Heart and/or Liver Blood Deficiency and may also impact the functions of the Uterus.
Feeling sad can alter levels of stress-related opioids in the brain and increase levels of inflammatory proteins in the blood that are linked to increased risk of comorbid diseases including heart disease, stroke and metabolic syndrome, according to a study by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science ...
Sadness can feel like a heaviness in the heart. Anger can be accompanied by a tension in the arms, neck, or shoulders. These are just examples, of course. Every body is different, and how you feel may be totally different from what I've described.
Emotional trauma can last from a few days to a few months.
Some people will recover from emotional trauma after days or weeks, while others may experience more long-term effects.
Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain.
Intrusive memories
Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.
How to release trauma stored in the hips? Exercise – Whether or not there is an emotional connection to the tension in the hips, physical relief is often needed to alleviate the pain and discomfort. Light walking, yoga or swimming will get the muscles and joints moving and promote circulation and healing in the area.
Lower Back = Guilt, Shame, and Unworthiness
Lower back issues often correlate with feelings of low self-worth and lack of self-acceptance. Feelings such as guilt, shame, and even sexual inadequacy or trauma can be stored here as well.
During a particularly stressful experience, the anterior cingulate cortex may respond by increasing the activity of the vagus nerve—the nerve that starts in the brain stem and connects to the neck, chest and abdomen. When the vagus nerve is overstimulated, it can cause pain and nausea.
What is this? “The deep muscles of our hips are closely connected to the adrenal glands, which are responsible for processing our fight-or-flight emotions. They are also our biggest stabilizing muscles and can often clench or become tight in moments of emotional activation or trigger.
Tight hips, psoas, and hip flexors can mean that we're hesitant about facing the future. More specifically, we fear living up to our own expectations and those laid out by others.
To sum up, since hip muscles are where emotions are trapped caused by events that switch your fight or flight mode, working on deep tissues in hip-focused postures like pigeon pose can release both physical and emotional stress.
The neck is one of the most common places to store emotion, with tension and tightness arising from fear, anxiety, grief, anger, and other strong emotional experiences. Neck tension can also be associated with trust issues, feelings of insecurity, and weak willpower.
Treatment for trauma
By concentrating on what's happening in your body, you can release pent-up trauma-related energy through shaking, crying, and other forms of physical release.
There are absolutely health impacts from unresolved trauma. Unresolved trauma puts people at increased risk for mental health diagnoses, which run the gamut of anxiety, depression and PTSD. There are physical manifestations as well, such as cardiovascular problems like high blood pressure, stroke or heart attacks.
Smiling when discussing trauma is a way to minimize the traumatic experience. It communicates the notion that what happened “wasn't so bad.” This is a common strategy that trauma survivors use in an attempt to maintain a connection to caretakers who were their perpetrators.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
Some unpleasant experiences produce permanent changes in the brain and corresponding shifts in intelligence, emotional reactivity, happiness, sociability, and other traits that used to be thought of as set for life.
If a person is crying over a prolonged period, the continuous contractions of these muscles may result in a tension headache. Tension headaches are the most common primary headache, a headache that is not the result of another condition.