Depression Can Be A Real Pain

Ever heard someone say, "He's a real pain in the neck" (or other body part!)? Did you know that stress in your life can quite literally be expressed as pain and illness?

To make this easier to understand, let's compare your body to a pressure cooker. If it's allowed to vent its steam, it will sit there and happily cook along. If it's not allowed to vent its steam, the pressure will build up and up until the lid blows off! We humans are no different. And, like the pressure cooker we "flip our lids" by becoming depressed.Now, lets say that we have a cooker under pressure, but we're applying pressure to hold that lid on (the human equivalent would be holding in our emotions). What will happen? Eventually, the vessel will break and the place it will break is at its weakness point.

The same goes for us human beings. If one of your body systems is weakened, this is where a stress-related illness is most likely to develop. If your weakest point physically is your neck, you'll develop neck pains. Or back pain. Or ulcers. Or frequent colds and flu. You get the picture.

Any illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness.

Although you may be told that it's "all in your head", these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat.

The key is to look for a source of stress in the person's life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.