If you find that you eat well and exercise regularly, yet you still don’t feel 100% or can’t seem to reach your exercise goals despite sticking to a consistent schedule, then you might be dealing with some emotional inflammation.
Many don’t realize that anxiety, shame, and trauma can cause just as much inflammation as a diet full of ultra-processed foods. If you feel like you’ve hit a wellness plateau lately, these actionable tips below should help you cross the finish line.
Unresolved trauma
You cannot expect to move forward with your health if you have unresolved trauma stored in the body. It’s an incredibly common scenario. Some estimates suggest 70% of adults in the United States have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives, oblivious to how the traumatic event affected your mitochondria, your nervous system and your inflammation levels.
Chronic stress
Think of your body as a cellular library – our thoughts, words, and experiences will be the books that fill up those cells. So when you emotionally suffer, your body feels the effects, and when your body is constantly in fight-or-flight mode, it’s impossible to truly reach your health goals.
While managing stress is not a one-and-done venture, you can do your best to soothe the everyday stress in your life. Here are some relaxation techniques to try.
Anxiety over Health
The saying ‘worrying yourself sick’ is true.
Emotional stress is a major contributor to disease and puts us in a state of fight or flight, which effects the way our body functions and causes reactions like:
- Increased stress hormones
- Digestion shuts down
- Suppression of the immune system
- Increased heart rate and blood pressure
- Raised blood sugar levels
It’s difficult for the body to heal when it’s in this state.
It is important to identify when we feel anxious, and learn how to manage and reduce it’s impact.
Toxins
We get exposed to toxins in the air, water and food, cosmetic care products, cleaning products, mercury fillings, medications, vaccinations, cigarette smoke and pvc containers, and when they enter our bodies, they can disrupt our hormones, change the composition of our gut bacteria, create autoimmunity, are neurotoxic to the brain, damage the body’s tissue and organs, suppress the immune system, cause disruption and function in the body and last but not least, cause inflammation.
Though it’s tough to avoid toxins in our daily lives, it’s important to reduce our exposure to as many toxins as possible and remove the ones that have built up over time, by choosing the safer alternative whenever you get the chance.
Diet
This one seems obvious, but many are still unclear how a diet of sugar, dairy, gluten, coffee, unhealthy fats, meat and alcohol can cause inflammation.
A healing diet should be low in processed and fried foods and high in low allergen, whole foods.
