Image: Jesper Aggergaard
I have a theory about stress, tension, and illness.
It’s not fully substantiated—I am no physician and my knowledge of anatomy is rudimentary—but working off of common assumptions about the body it makes sense. At least to me.
It’s got to do with blood.
I’ve always kind of figured that the body was something like a car. If a car stands for too long, components rust, oil turns to sludge, and batteries eventually die. It’s why cars shouldn’t stand for too long and why it’s good to take it out on a longish drive from time to time. Cars feel a little more vital when their tyres have been stretched.
Driving a car causes circulation. Oil is filtered by the oil filter, fuel by the fuel filter, components are lubricated, and the battery gets charged. While my knowledge of cars is also fairly limited, it feels like the oil and fuel is cleaner because of it. And that results in a better running car.
I think similarly about the body.
Exercising circulates blood throughout the body. It is filtered through the kidneys and the liver—and other organs I guess—and is distributed to where it’s needed. After a long run or a good session at the gym, my body feels cleaner. And it results in a better running body.
So much so, that I often remedy a hangover with a long, slow run. It works, and well.
But when one thinks about the function of blood, it all becomes a little clearer. Its purpose is to distribute oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. Deliver all the good stuff to muscles, organs, bones, and, so I recently discovered, tendons. For whatever reason, I didn’t think that tendons had blood capillaries—please see my disclaimer in the first paragraph.
It also carries carbon dioxide and other toxins away from muscles, organs, and so forth. Its function is two-fold: nourish and clean.
Stress, on the other hand, causes tension. When the body encounters something stressful, muscles contract, hormones are released, and the body prepares to protect itself from injury. When stress subsides, the body relaxes again. With chronic stress, however, the body doesn’t really get a chance to relax and remains in a state of tension.
That tension restricts blood flow.
Like a hosepipe. When you create tensions—say, folding the pipe in half—water flow is severely restricted. So when there is tension in muscles, blood not only struggles to bring nutrients and oxygen, it struggles to take toxins away.
What I never really considered before, was that many organs are susceptible to tension too. In a very obscure video on Easter organ massage, the practitioner describes how muscles around organs, and even the organs themselves, can become tense and restrict blood flow. The limited nutrients and surplus of toxins cause the organ to function improperly and eventually becomes diseased.
The practitioner even describes a little test you can perform yourself. Start by firmly pressing the index and middle finger of your left and right hand into your left and right inner thigh respectively. You’re looking for the pulse of your femoral artery. Relax and just feel it out. Then, try and discern if they are pulsating at the same time. When I did it, I noticed that my left side was milliseconds slower than my right. This means that there is tension on the left side of my body.
Then, if you firmly stick your fingers into your abdomen where major organs are supposed to be, you can actually feel a pulse within them. This is blood doing its thing. I noticed that some organ’s pulse was a little weaker than the others. For those, give them a nice little massage. Keep doing this until you feel your femoral arteries are back in sync.
It makes sense to me that all the things that are good for your health are also good for stress relief. Exercising, stretching, eating well, drinking less, not smoking, on and on and on it goes. But above all, how underrated massage might be.
Maybe the real reason our society is getting more and more sick is because of the extra tension that has been created by a busy world.
Or maybe, I should leave things like this to the professionals.
This is a newsletter for the curious.
Subscribe. Or don’t.