Social media is full of influencers and other accounts promoting self-care. In this fast-paced world we live in, it’s sad to think that we need reminders to prioritize ourselves. But women tend to neglect themselves. They let their needs go by the wayside to take care of their kids, spouses, homes, and work, rarely leaving time for themselves.
But this can be so detrimental to their physical and emotional health. We always hear “You can’t pour from an empty cup”- but that is oh-so-true.
When we are stressed out or anxious and not taking care of ourselves, we get into a vicious cycle of always being in a fight or flight mode. This impacts every single system in our body. And if you are experiencing pelvic health symptoms, living in this constant cycle makes those symptoms worse.
But taking as little as 5-10 minutes every day for yourself to just breathe, can make all the difference in the world.
What happens when you're stressed?
When you are stressed, the body responds by releasing cortisol. This increases heart rate and respiratory rate and decreases digestion, immune function, energy levels, and sex drive. It essentially prepares your body to “run from the bear” (the “fight or flight” part of the sympathetic/parasympathetic balance). And normally once that danger is over, the cortisol is reabsorbed and everything goes back to normal.
But when you live in a constant state of “The bear is gonna get me!”, these cortisol levels don’t get absorbed. Instead, the cortisol accumulates making it harder for the body to reabsorb or produce more cortisol, draining the body of energy and leaving you feeling tired.
This negative cycle causes the nervous system to go into hyper-overdrive and every system in your body remains in an on-alert state. You become more sensitive to everything around you which causes physical and emotional symptoms.
Chronic stress not only affects the nervous system but every system in the body. As discussed above, cortisol decreases digestion, immune function, sex drive, and energy levels. It also causes muscles to hold tight and ready to spring into action at any moment to escape the bear that is never really coming.
You can see how not taking a little time to decompress can wreak havoc on your body.
How does the way you breathe factor into your stress?
Breathing is an essential component of life. Aside from sustaining life, breathing also helps to maintain postural stability (inner core piston). It can also influence homeostasis, regulating all of the body’s systems.
Most of the systems in the body such as heart rate and blood pressure, for example, fluctuate in a rhythmic pattern to sustain life. But we don’t have control of these systems. Breath is one system that fluctuates automatically that we also have voluntary control over.
If our breathing patterns are inefficient, it can alter homeostasis, leading to musculoskeletal dysfunctions, stress, or anxiety. Inefficiencies in breath can be caused by:
Diaphragm movement (can become altered with pregnancy)
The Inner Core Piston is out of sync
Dysfunctions in the Shoulder/Neck Muscles
Weak abdominals (DRA)
By changing the way we breathe, we can influence the parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest, or the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, which in turn regulates heart rate, blood pressure, and stress and anxiety levels.
What does this mean for your Pelvic Floor symptoms?
When you’re chronically stressed and your nervous system is heightened, the pelvic floor muscles tend to be tight, making it hard for them to do their job. This can lead to increased leaking, pelvic pain, pain with sex, low back pain, or any other related symptoms.
When you come to physical therapy, our goal is to uncover the root of your symptoms. We will ask you about your lifestyle, stress levels, sleep, diet, etc because it all impacts your physical symptoms. And we have to figure out what is feeding into those symptoms before we can cause sustained change. If we just start giving stretches and exercises and don’t address the ramped-up nervous system, your symptoms will return.
One of the first things I teach my patients is diaphragmatic breathing. This is probably the most important exercise I give my patients. When you perform diaphragmatic breathing, it helps the nervous system to relax and shift to the “rest & digest” parasympathetic nervous system.
When you practice this type of breathing for just 5-10 minutes/day, you start to create new neuronal pathways in the brain allowing your body to decrease response to daily triggers.
Another type of breathing shown to reduce stress and improve pelvic health symptoms is resonance frequency breathing. With this breathing pattern, you work on slowing your breathing to about 6 breaths/minute. You can try resonance frequency breathing yourself by following along with this YouTube video.
We can also incorporate gentle stretching of the hip muscles such as the adductors or piriformis to reduce muscle tension. But this is most effective after we’ve done the deep diaphragmatic breathing or resonance breathing to calm the nervous system.
Once we get the parasympathetic nervous system to activate, and the sympathetic or “fight or flight” response to turn off, healing begins and you get you back to the activities you enjoy doing.
Resources:
Courtney, R. (2009). The functions of breathing and its dysfunctions and their relationship to breathing therapy. International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, 12(3), 78–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijosm.2009.04.002
Steffen, P. R., Austin, T., DeBarros, A., & Brown, T. (2017). The impact of resonance frequency breathing on measures of heart rate variability, blood pressure, and mood. Frontiers in Public Health, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2017.00222