Root Causes of Stress

In this lesson, I'm gonna talk about some of what I see as the root causes of stress in modern women. I've been working with women in holistic medicine for close to 15 years, and I realized at some point, I had to look beyond just what was happening in the individual. I really had to look at the context of women’s lives and why so many women are living in this place of chronic stress, and how that's impacting their bodies. So I just wanted to share with you some of the things that I notice are contributing to the root causes of stress in modern women. So, the first is trauma and nervous system dysregulation. Trauma isn't just those big T events. It's whatever we couldn't fully digest or process in our system. One of the things that's really interesting in nervous system work is recognizing that wild animals don't really experience trauma. They have ways of moving that out of their system. But humans and domesticated animals tend to have trauma because we have social constraints that limit how we're able to process and move our experiences through our system and complete those nervous system responses. One of the really common things that can happen is if we're running this state of trauma or nervous system dysregulation in our system, it may affect our hormone balance. It may cause us to be pumping out more stress hormones that can cascade through our system. Nervous system dysregulation related to the social nervous system. Because the social nervous system dynamics impact women more — because of our role, the role of bonding hormones like estrogen and oxytocin in our system — we're more likely to sacrifice our own needs for others, to people-please, and to camouflage our needs and wants. So, this isn't something that's terrible to think about ever happening. We will tend to do that. We’ll tend to sacrifice for the benefit of the group. When that happens in a really chronic way, where we're chronically overriding our needs, that's where it becomes problematic. And I see this really often in my practice, where maybe women have been mothers and they’ve been 20 years of parenting, and they realize they’ve been chronically overriding their needs, and in the process overriding their body's signals to care for themselves — and then that leads to a lot of imbalance. That's just one example, and it's not from a place of judgment or shame. It's just what I notice in terms of how this social nervous system dysregulation can manifest. Disembodiment. Modern people are largely living from the neck up. We're in our screens. We are not out in the world, out in nature in the way that maybe our ancestors were. And we can be disconnected from the sensations and emotions that our bodies experience. We can be disconnected from the natural impulse to move in the way that our body wants to. And so we lack the sense of understanding about how our body communicates to us, and also a paradigm for understanding that. That's why I feel like somatics in Ayurveda is so powerful — because it really gives us a paradigm for understanding how our body is speaking to us, so we can address that early on before things become deeper imbalances. Disconnect from the cycles of nature. I'm gonna go into this much more deeply in future modules, but from the Ayurvedic perspective and Eastern medicine, people living in a symbiotic relationship with nature understood that our body is a reflection of the natural world. Mother Nature is the great nervous system regulator. We are part of nature. Our body is designed to move in rhythm with nature’s rhythms — like our circadian rhythm, our monthly rhythms, our seasonal rhythms, and even the different phases of life. Modern life has largely disconnected us from that. We can get food that's not seasonal any time of the year. We have a lot of things that disrupt this natural rhythm within our physiology, and that leads to imbalance. We are rhythmic bodies moving in a linear world. Our modern world — particularly our Western world — is largely built around the design and the needs of the hormonally male body. Our work culture, our medicine, is largely rooted in the patterns of the hormonally male body. The female body is deeply rhythmic, and in order to survive in that world, women have had to run on stress hormones in order to override those natural rhythms. And that’s what I'm going to go into more in this course: how we source our energy differently by understanding that our bodies are deeply rhythmic. I'm also gonna talk about a paradigm for understanding how to understand your body in that way. And one thing I want to talk about is how a lot of our culture, and even our wellness trends, are based on this more dopamine-driven reward system, which is ideal for the male body, but it actually depletes women — because dopamine depletes oxytocin, which is one of the main regulators in a woman's hormonal system. The loss of the village. Remember that the social nervous system plays a significant role for women, and we were never designed to be doing this work of living and raising families and doing life all on our own, individually. Because we are wired for bonding, we receive oxytocin boosts from being in safe and supportive connection. Oxytocin plays such a huge role. Think about oxytocin bathing — where we would be doing just our daily tasks with other women around us or other people who felt really safe to us. And now, a lot of women are working and raising families and living life in a way that's much more isolated, and that has a direct impact on our sense of stress and our hormones as well. The override. In order to do a lot of the things I talked about, we have to override our body's needs for rest and nourishment. We are pushing ourselves beyond our capacity, pushing down the signals that our body sends us to care for ourselves. And because we've lost this understanding of the language that our body speaks to us, we may not even be realizing that our body is asking for rest, nourishment, or other needs. So the override that happens — it's not to say that we're never going to override as a mother. Yes, there are times where I absolutely just need to override my own needs. But when we're chronically in that place, it leads to a state of imbalance in our body and mind. And obviously, inequity and violence — women are much more deeply impacted by that — and we have to take that into account in terms of the context of women's lives. That’s beyond the scope of this course, but it’s important. I do want to address that institutional and interpersonal violence have very real physiological impacts on women's bodies, and that can be passed down for generations. So you can go find the resource, the guide that’s in your hub, and then in the next module, we'll talk about what you can do about supporting yourself.