In the modern era, it’s hard to avoid back pain. It seems like everything is coming after our backs, from our phones to our office chairs, to our beds and there’s little you can do to stop it. In fact, back pain is really easy to blame on external factors, much easier than looking introspectively at what else could be causing your back pain. Sure, the way you sit, slumped to the left while typing vigorously, does your back no favors, there might be something else causing your back pain. As you likely already know, the parallels between mental and physical health are constantly being discovered and mental health is being given a greater role in the health of your body. Specifically, back pain has been studied recently for its correlation with stress symptoms and how it may be one of the many ways your body shows symptoms of stress and prolonged mental health issues.
Can Stress Cause Pain?
Beyond the emotional pain that makes you feel like you’re pulling your hair out, it does indeed cause physical pain too. Specifically, it’s linked to back pain issues due to how stress works. The stress hormones that are leftover from when we needed our fight or flight mechanism, cause the entire body to tense up. Before office jobs, farming and other human inventions made life easier on us, when we were hunters and gatherers, we’d get stressed for a short period of time and then that stress would leave our body with the threat leaving the vicinity of said human. Because the threats we face on the day-to-day nowadays don’t really ever leave, neither do the stress hormones making our muscles in our body tense up, ready to spring. So when you start experiencing back pain from stress, it’s likely because your muscles have been so bound up for long, they’re starting to ache from the mere exertion. This often manifests itself in the lower back muscles and is known as “Tension Myositis Syndrome.”
You may think the answer to relieving back pain from stress is easily done with the saying “stop being stressed,” however, it’s not so simple. Even if you manage to stop being stressed for a week, you’ll become stressed again and fall into the easy pattern that makes tension myositis syndrome (TMS) become a chronic condition. It’s known primarily for starting a cyclical pattern of pain. Essentially, this works by making you feel bad because you’re constantly in back pain. This will cause your mood to suffer and it will take away your desire to do things like exercise or any real physical activity. Thus, you’ll limit your own stress-relief tactics by eliminating exercise due to the pain in your back, which will cause the muscles in your back to start getting weaker and tighter over time.
How Can Back Pain Be Treated?
Around 29% of people experience stress-caused back pain, so that’s a common question but one that doesn’t always have an easy answer associated with it. First, however, back pain is one of the most difficult issues to treat because it’s one of the hardest to diagnose. Lower back pain is one of the most commonly complained about pain types, and sometimes it is just a result of a bad office chair. At other times, it’s something more serious like TMS or a spinal infection. The most important part of treating back pain from stress is, indeed determining it’s only stress causing this back pain. Symptoms for TMS are broad and include back and/ neck pain, pain while moving around, sleep disturbance, fatigue, muscle tender points and hard to pin-point muscle aches in the region. Unfortunately, those symptoms are shared by a wide variety of other more serious back problems that require more aggressive treatments.
Get Your Back Pain Properly Diagnosed and Treated at the Spine Care Center in Manassas
Concerned that you may have some illness developing in your back? Back pain isn’t something you should ignore and accessing treatment quickly and efficiently might not just improve your comfort, it could save your life. Reach out to a skilled team of spine specialists and start getting to the bottom of where your pain is coming from. Reach out to us today to schedule an initial consultation so you can be comfortable once more.