Treatment Table Podcast

Mini Consult | Why Stress Shows Up in Your Body (And Why You Feel So Tight)

• Mathew Ah Chow • Season 1 • Episode 26

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 15:31

Have you ever felt tight through your chest, sore around your ribs, struggled to take a deep breath, or carried constant tension through your neck and shoulders, even though nothing appears to be physically wrong?

In this Mini Consult, Doctor of Physiotherapy Mathew Ah Chow explores one of the most overlooked connections in health: the relationship between your mind and your body.

Using real patient stories from the treatment room, Mathew explains why stress doesn't just affect your thoughts; it can change the way you breathe, move and experience pain. You'll learn how your nervous system influences muscle tension, why unresolved stress can become physical symptoms, and simple strategies to help your body switch out of "survival mode".

If you've ever wondered whether stress could be contributing to your pain, tightness or fatigue, this episode will help you better understand what your body might be trying to tell you.

In this episode:

  •  Why stress commonly causes chest, rib and neck tightness 
  •  How your nervous system influences pain and muscle tension 
  •  The surprising connection between past experiences and physical symptoms 
  •  What zebras can teach us about recovering from stress 
  •  Simple breathing and movement strategies to calm your nervous system 
  •  Why your brain and body should never be treated as separate systems 

Key Takeaway

Your body isn't working against you, it's communicating with you. Learning to recognise the physical signs of stress early can help you reduce pain, improve recovery and build greater resilience.

Listen now and discover how reconnecting your brain and body could be one of the most powerful things you do for your health.

🎧 Episode Resources & Links

See you next week on the Treatment Table!

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Treatment Table Podcast. This is your mini console. This is where I get to take one question or one topic, break it down into one easy takeaway. I'm your host, Doctor of Physiotherapy, Matthew Archell. Hey Renel, do you want to read out today's question for the tweak?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, this one's actually something that I really relate to, and it comes from Jess. And she says, I've been under a lot of stress lately, and my body feels so tight. My ribs are sore, my chest feels tight, and I feel like I can't take a deep breath. Is it all in my head?

SPEAKER_01

Great question, Jess. Thank you for sending it in. And it might feel like you're going a little bit crazy and not knowing exactly what's going on, but this is something that it is quite common. And I thought today, maybe rather than me just talking away, um, is to kind of give you three client stories, maybe four, if you've got the time, and just to kind of break down of how common this is and what generally tends to happen, what I tend to see on the treatment table, and how do we fix it, most importantly? So once you start to be aware of how your body is responding to stress, and if you can catch it early, and there's a few things I'm gonna give you really kind of simple takeaways from today, that if you implement that early, it can have a big, big effect, and you can kind of catch it early. Most of the time, after a few weeks of this building, building, building, the time clients come to see me with pain. There's a layer of stress on top of a layer of stress, on top of a layer of stress. And by the time the physiological effects, or that's what's happening in their body, you know, I have to work through all of those layers, and then we start to get to an area where their body and mind start to connect together. So last week we talked about how the flu and the cold is going around. And this was quite interesting. So this is, I just wanted to kind of draw the lines between our body and our mind and how sometimes we don't link the two. So I had a client come through the other day. She'd been sick, coughing, um, hadn't exercised as much because she'd been unwell, had gone back to exercise, but was still having this intense chest tightness. Now, had been to the doctor, got all cleared, wasn't anything cardiac related, wasn't chest pain, wasn't pneumonia. And she was like, my ribs are tight. I'm getting this pressure on the right side, and I'm having nightmares, I'm not sleeping well, and I can't figure out what it is. And I've seen her previously with shoulder issues and lower back issues. So this was something new. And we talked about a lot of how her ribs and that feeling of tightness was linked into her stress. And what we found was because she'd been sick and coughing and not moving as much, she got this sensation of tightness and not being able to breathe. And just through conversation, what she linked it to was also causing her sleep disturbance and nightmares. And it was quite a profound moment because she started opening up about how the same feeling, the physiological feeling of what she's feeling now after being sick, had linked back to years and years ago of when she went through a very traumatic divorce. And it was a really, really good reminder that sometimes that stress that we hold in our body might go, but when it comes back, it can be associated with a previous trauma or previous stress. And so it wasn't necessarily the stress that was causing her tightness, but the tightness was causing the stress. And once we gave her some breathing exercises, some mobility exercises, we did some release around her shoulders and neck, her back, she felt a lot better. Her sleep improved, you know, she was able to kind of get back to exercise and it went away. But it was just a really incredible reminder of how closely related our brain and body is. And again, it's another similar client, a younger client, you know, she works quite a lot and trains quite a lot. She's training five days a week. She came in very, very concerned, very stressed, and she said, I'm getting sharp chest pain. Now, again, luckily, you know, it wasn't on the heart side, it was on her right side, you know, it was, you know, when she was rotating, twisting, getting up from bed. And so check with the doctors again, nothing from a medical side. There was no injury, there was no trauma, she hadn't been hit in the ribs. And she was like, Where is this coming from? And once again, there was no point of injury, there was no change. If anything, she was getting better um prior to this incident. And then she said to me, Hey, could this be linked to stress? And I said, Tell me more. And she said, you know, prior to this happening, I'd been going through a bit more stress um at work, and I'd get this feeling of tightness in my chest, and it's been a bit harder to breathe. And once she identified that, her whole body kind of again, it felt like she started to process that and made the connection of her mental state to her physical state. And once we talked through that process, gave her more understanding of where that pain is coming from and why that tightness is there, you could almost see her body relax. It was such a physiological response. Now there was no more exercises that were going to fix that in that sense. Because doing more was only going to irritate it more and make her more stressed and more tight. She needed that understanding of knowing that the stress was the cause to creating that tension that was then leading to a physical outcome. So it's again really, really important to see. We tend to think of our brain and our body as two separate things. So it's like if our brain is doing one thing, it cannot in any way have an effect on our body, right? And this is what we get told at school. And even at uni, during my undergrad degree, it was like you would study one part at a time. So you looking at one thing in isolation. Because our body is so complicated and there's so complex, you can't delve in everything all at the same time. So we break it up into chapters and we look at the foot and we look at the elbow. But at no point do we come back to the point that our brain and our body is connected. And this is a great example. And it's this is our body talking to us. The stress and the tension is our way of our body telling us that something isn't right and we need to listen to it. If you keep ignoring it and you keep ignoring it, it doesn't go away. It doesn't fix. Now, there's a really good book that I want to recommend. So if this resonates with you, if you feel like you hold a lot of stress, a lot of trauma, there's a book called The Body Keeps the Score. And this is by, see if I can say pronounce it correctly, Bessel van der Koelk. And look, there is some stuff in this book that is probably a little bit traumatic and it does kind of link into more PTSD, but it is really, really good at drawing the connection between our brain and the body and how sometimes that can get disrupted and different types of treatments. Some of the therapies described in this book can get classed as alternative. Now, alternative sometimes gets a bad rap. Alternative can sometimes mean that it's not science-based or there's not an evidence to approve it. Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't work. Now, there's a lot of alternative therapies that I am happy with people to try and see if it works because the way our medical system and the way we are trained is in a medical approach. We look at things in isolation. Alternative therapy is really good at connecting the brain and the body, and a lot of that comes through some of the older types of medicine. So, like we referenced in one of our episodes with Dr. Rabbi Rizzuli around longevity medicine, sometimes our understanding and these effects of different therapies can take a while to come through and ask to really understand the way that it works. So, some of the concepts of the book goes through, like particularly with really significant trauma or PTSD, is a therapy that's again kind of viewed as alternative and it uses the eye movements to connect and reconnect the brain and the body. And it's called EMDR. So something to look into again, more for your significant traumas and stress and PTSD. But today we're talking about more about the everyday stresses and how that affects our body. So we know when we get into a stressful situation, we talked a little about this through different episodes, but our body reacts like it's being attacked, and it's a primal instinct. So if you think about when you're on stress, or even when you get shocked, our shoulders come up, our jaw clenches, we brace everything, and that holds that tension. Now, most of our stresses don't go away. Our work stress is there, our family stress is there, mortgage stress, cost of living, all of these things impact and constant stress, constant stress. So our body doesn't have a chance to switch off. There's another really book, another really good book I would like to recommend. And it's why zebras don't get ulcers. And this kind of relays a lot of that fact of in nature, if you think about a zebra eating, minding its own business, and a lion decides to come up and it's like, you're my lunch. Now, in an instinct, that zebra to survive, the chemicals that has to shoot through its body to go, hey, wake up. We need to run very, very fast. Everything, the blood is going to be pumping, the body's gonna be super tense, the nerves are gonna be firing, and it's gonna be, you know, literally life or death, or lunch or no lunch for the lion. And the really cool part of this is once, and if you've seen this on the National Geographic videos, once that lion maybe has lost its chase and the zebra survives, it will literally shake its body, do a few huffs, and then just go back to eating grass. And it's a really cool moment where the way that our body's designed to have that survival impact of like, let's go, we're fighting or we're flighting, and the way that it then ables to switch off is a really great example of how the system works well. Where the system doesn't work well for us is when it doesn't switch off, and that tension and that stress and those neurochemicals that drive in that survival instinct stay in our body the whole time. So, how do we fix it? What I want you to think about, the main takeaway I want you to get from today's podcast, is how do we put our nervous system into a state where we're not getting chased by a lion? So we want to reframe and not think of our brain as separate to our body, but something that has to work together. And so you can use, like we spoke about those different clients, we can change our physical body to help our mind, and we can change our mind to help our body. A great example with Chris, our breath work coach, we talked about how to use different breathing techniques like box breathing to start to lower our nervous system state. And so that's using physical breathing, changing, using our diaphragm, big breath in, holding for four seconds, releasing the breath, and that will automatically have a mental and nervous system response. Now, for me, the other thing that really helps physically is just physically releasing all that stress and tension through jujitsu. We spoke about that with our jujitsu coach as well. Another interesting way to think about it is that we can also influence how we feel just by the way we move. And I was reminded about this the other day. And uh, so my four-year-old uh daughter, we play this silly game where we fake laugh. And she started this thing, and we will fake laugh, fake laugh until we're both in hysterics and we're actually really laughing. And it is the funniest thing because again, we may not be in a state where it was funny or we were smiling, but we tricked our brain into thinking that this is hilarious, this is so good, and all of a sudden, all these good chemicals and hormones are pumping through our body, and we're almost in tears from laughing. So, a great way to connect our brain to body is using these different ways of movement, different ways of tricking our body to make us feel a lot better. So, the main takeaway for this week's mini console is remember, your brain and your body is connected. Sometimes it might not feel like that way, but there's simple exercises, simple breathing, simple movements that you can do to decrease your stress and make your body feel better. So it can be really simple. Go out for a walk in nature, do some deep breathing, get some exercising, get some good sleep, tick those three legs, and you'll feel better. That's a wrap for this week's treatment table mini consult. We'll see you next week for another mini consult. Don't forget, if you have any questions, you can DM us on Instagram, the Treatment Table Podcast, or send us an email, treatment tablepodcast at gmail.com. We'll see you next week on the treatment table.