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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
There is a well known overlap between hard early lives and diagnoses such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and several autoimmune conditions. Overlap does not prove that one caused the other, and it does mean the two are worth asking about together. If you are living with something like this you deserve a proper medical work up, and separately somebody to talk to about what you have lived through. Not one instead of the other.
'that weighed so heavily on your back' (Quran 94:3). The burden is placed in the body, which is where a great many people carry it.
الشرح
ٱلَّذِيٓ أَنقَضَ ظَهۡرَكَ
that weighed so heavily on your back
Qur’an 94:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of early life adversity found a blunted rather than heightened cortisol response to social stress, which the authors interpret as long term recalibration of the stress system. There is a real physiological trace of early adversity. It is an association at group level and it does not establish that adversity causes any particular later illness.
Bunea IM, Szentágotai-Tătar A, Miu AC. (2017). Early-life adversity and cortisol response to social stress: a meta-analysis.. Translational psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A stress system that has been running differently for years has effects that show up in tissue as well as in mood.
New or worsening physical symptoms need medical assessment first, not a psychological explanation first.
People carrying long term trauma often show low stress hormone levels rather than high ones. Flat and exhausted is a stress presentation too.
When the danger still feels like it is happening, that is not a mistake in your thinking. It is a sequence in your body that never got to finish.
Cold water on your face, particularly at the hairline and around the lips, sets off a reflex that slows the heart. It is one of the few things fast enough to interrupt real panic.