How is stress linked with cancer?

It’s probably good to be clear: everybody lives with stress, some people with a lot of it. And not everybody has cancer. Not everybody will get cancer.

Life contains stress. Not all of it is bad. A life with no stress whatsoever is probably a pretty dull life. It’s important to realise that we can be stressed at a deep cellular level while being only aware of feeling normal and ok. Just because you don’t feel stressed, doesn’t mean you aren’t.

Some of our modern-day stresses are particularly unhealthy to live under. In a former time of history, a threat would result in a healthy and perfectly normal ‘fight or flight’ response.

For example: scary animal or person- run away!

Or: scary animal or person- fight!

Both of these responses use up a lot of physical energy and so the cortisol stress hormone has a great channel for moving through the body and helping us to escape or beat the enemy, keep us and our loved ones safe and live to fight another day.

The ‘fight or flight’ response was first understood by Walter Cannon (a physiologist) in 1927.

Later, the ‘freeze’ response was also observed and labelled by Gordon Gallup jnr in 1977, an American psychologist. He called this state ‘tonic immobility’ and observed it in some animals when they ‘play dead’ in order to survive while a threat passes. This is an extreme response and is only used by animals when the fight or flight responses have little chance of working.

If you’ve walked in the English countryside (like me) you may have seen rabbits freezing like this when they are close to a dog or wild animal. Their first choice would be to run away, but sometimes the threat is too close to make running an option. So they freeze and hope not to be noticed.

These 3 categories have widened since then to include ‘fawn’ (appeasing a threat), ‘flop’ (a state of complete dissociation, often giving no memory of the event. This is sometimes experienced by victims of sexual assault).

It is important to know that the fight or flight responses are not going to make you sick. They’re going to save you from danger. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

The freeze response is what is going to give you problems. And while the fawn and flop responses are separate for psychologists, it is my opinion that for the purposes of cellular cancer beginnings, they are versions of the freeze response. They involve the same suppression of emotions that actually need to be expressed, the same cutting-short of emotional processes in order to keep the peace or to ‘make everything alright’. Lots of my clients are very good at keeping the peace, not being a burden, carrying other people’s emotional loads and rescuing others. Laughing out of a crisis.

Many doctors will tell you that cancer is multi-factorial and things like bacon, alcohol, smoking, obesity are some of the things that influence it. None of this is completely wrong (apart from maybe the bacon…). It’s just not deep enough. Why do we smoke, drink, gain more weight than we want to? That might be a question worth asking. Often we use unhealthy lifestyles to numb the emotions we can’t tolerate feeling.

How are we going to tolerate these emotions and stop burying them?

Let’s find out.

Welcome to the Root Cause work. This is where your journey begins….