What the BodyCarries

The Arm

Where this question started.

Let me tell you about my left hand, because it has been trying to say something to me for most of my life, and I am not sure I have been listening.

When I was ten, I had a stroke. Ever since, when I have not exercised, or when I get stressed, the left side of my body acts up. My hand and arm start to contract, as though I had cerebral palsy. It has been a pointer my entire life.

My answer, then and now, has been to go move. Get on the bike. Row. Lift something. And here is the part that makes it tricky: it works. A good ride almost always makes things better. It has kept me fit and strong, and I am not about to give up the bike.

But lately I have wondered whether my solution has been standing in front of the question. Every time the arm tightens, I go off and exercise, with great fitness and good intentions, and maybe I have been outrunning the message before it could finish its sentence. Perhaps my body has been trying to tell me something about what I carry. Or perhaps I just have post-stroke spasticity, which is what happens to some nerves and muscles after the brain has been injured, and the bike is simply good physical therapy. I do not know. Both could be true, and I have not worked out the split.

Here is what I can say. A patient leaflet from an NHS hospital trust lists tiredness and "stress or emotional changes" among the things that can make spasticity worse, and lists exercises and stretches among the things that help. So my habit is sound whatever else is true. The research on exercise and spasticity is thin and mixed: a review of nine small trials of strength training found no solid evidence that it improves spasticity, though it did not seem to make it worse. And an arm that tightens under stress does not tell me what the stress is about. I am not claiming my arm is sending me letters. I am saying I have started asking it a different question. Not "how do I make you stop?" but "what was going on just before you started?" I am still collecting answers.

If you live with a medical condition of your own, keep your doctors in this. Nothing here replaces them. My hope is only that you, too, have a pointer like this somewhere, and that you get curious about it before you get clever.

That is the question behind this essay: what can the body tell us about stress and emotional experience, and how much can science actually say about it? I went looking. This is what I found, including the places where the answer is "we don't know."

A word on how to read it. Nothing here says anyone caused their own illness. The causes of most chronic conditions are mixed and mostly not chosen. What follows is a set of places to look, with the evidence labeled as honestly as I can manage. Medical care comes first and stays. This essay has a companion, The Load That Was Never Yours, which asks the larger question of what we carry and what it costs us. You do not need to read either to follow the other.

What the Research Can Say

Smaller than the slogans, and still worth taking seriously.

You will hear that the body keeps the score. Take that as a metaphor, not a finding. The best-known book to say it has drawn serious criticism, including a 2025 review of 122 of its claims that, as summarized, found its claims about trauma-induced brain damage and the special power of body-based treatments were not supported by current research. What the evidence does support is smaller, and still worth taking seriously:

• Holding in is physical work. In a lab study of 168 students, those told to hide their reaction to a disgust film showed more sympathetic nervous activity and higher blood pressure than those who were not. It was one emotion, young people and a lab, so it shows a cost in the moment. Whether decades of it harm the heart is still a hypothesis.
• Early hardship travels into adult health. A CDC analysis of 144,017 adults estimated that preventing childhood adversity might cut depression by about 44%, smoking by 33%, stroke by 15% and coronary heart disease by 13%. It rests on self-reports and cannot show cause. A pooled analysis of 25 studies found each extra adverse experience raised the odds of having several chronic conditions at once by about 13%, with wide variation between studies.
• Pain keeps company with it. In about 24,000 UK adults, recalled abuse, feeling hated as a child, and anxiety that showed up as muscle tension were each linked with more pain. The links were modest and the study was a snapshot in time.

Taken together, these findings are modest but consistent in direction. Holding in has a measurable cost in the moment, and early hardship travels into adult health as a risk, not a destiny. None of it shows that a particular feeling causes a particular illness.

How it shows up

Here is how people describe it. This list is mine, drawn from common clinical description and not from a study I can cite item by item: a jaw that clenches at night, shoulders that live near your ears, a held or shallow breath, a stomach that reacts before you do, tiredness that sleep does not fix, headaches, being easily startled, trouble relaxing when nothing is wrong, a flat numbness where feeling should be, or tears and anger that arrive larger than the moment. Every one of these also has ordinary medical causes. Get anything persistent checked by a doctor first, and only then ask what else it might be saying.

My reading, held loosely because my own arm keeps me honest: what looks "stored" is less a memory sitting in a muscle than a habit of the nervous system. Bracing, scanning, holding the breath, kept running by repetition and by a threat that left long ago. That is a kind of good news, because habits can be retrained. It is also why change here is slow and steady, the way fitness is built.

Back to the arm

Here is what the tightening is actually like. It is not constant. It shows up when I try to do something delicate with my left hand, when I am stressed, and when I have gone a while without exercise. The harder I think about the movement, the worse it gets: it is the thinking of the movement that seems to create the spasm. When I work the arm to exhaustion, it quiets. Once a movement is automatic, the left side works perfectly, which is why it never failed me in a race. In the boat I rowed starboard, because my right hand was stronger, which meant the delicate half of the stroke, squaring and feathering the blade, fell to the left. Nobody in the boat knew. My friends eventually nicknamed me The Hammer, maybe for the fist my left hand can make, maybe for how hard I push my body. Both are true, and there are far worse nicknames.

My first response to the tightening is not curiosity. It is to go and move. What I wonder about now is whether the stress that tightens it works the same way as the thinking does: watching myself, bracing for a mistake, attending to what I am doing instead of doing it. I do not know. It may simply be how a nervous system injured at ten behaves. But it is the closest thing I have to a measurement of what watching myself might cost.

When the Body Takes It On

Autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, Crohn's and the rest. No blame. Places to look.

Some of you are reading this with a diagnosis: autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, Crohn's, irritable bowel, a pain that has no tidy name. So here is what this section is and is not. It is not saying you caused your illness. It is offering places to look, because stress, old hurts and the beliefs we hold seem to shape how the body carries a condition, and those are things you can tend. Tending them is unlikely to hurt, and it may help. It does not replace medical care.

What causes these conditions

The prevailing view is that autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease arise when environmental exposures act on a genetically susceptible person. Cigarette smoke, silica dust, Epstein-Barr virus and reproductive hormones are among the exposures named, and a review of the field says many environmental risk factors remain unidentified or unproven. Stress and emotion sit on the list of candidates, not at the top of it. Fibromyalgia and irritable bowel are generally classed as disorders of pain processing or gut-brain interaction rather than autoimmune disease, which is general knowledge and not drawn from the sources here.

What the research shows

If you read only three rows, read these. The Swedish registry study, because it is large and the finding held in a sibling comparison: people diagnosed with a stress-related disorder had about 36% higher risk of later autoimmune disease. The Crohn's and colitis analysis, because the link plausibly runs both ways, with depression and flares feeding each other. And the fibromyalgia studies, because they show a recurring association with reported abuse histories, which describes populations and not any one person. The rest of the table is here for readers who want it.

Most people with a trauma history do not develop these conditions, and many people who have them have no such history. A higher rate across a population is not an explanation for any one person.

Beliefs, and unresolved trauma

Stress is only part of the picture. What we believe about ourselves and our circumstances may matter too. Here is what I found, and how far it goes. If you read only two rows, read illness perceptions in multiple sclerosis and self-efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis: both show moderate links between beliefs and outcomes, and both are snapshots that cannot show which way the influence runs.

"Unresolved trauma" is not a clinical term, so the nearest evidence is on PTSD and adverse childhood experiences, which is the Swedish finding above and the graded link between childhood adversity and chronic illness. Those studies show an association. They do not test beliefs, or whether working through trauma lowers anyone's risk. In the one arthritis trial I opened, coping-skills training reduced pain and distress with small to medium effects, and neither it nor emotional writing changed inflammation markers consistently.

Self-criticism, shame and the rest of the inner weather

Stress is the best-studied path. Self-criticism and shame have a smaller evidence base, and I want to say so. In 56 young women at risk for depression, higher shame went with more sympathetic arousal and more inflammatory IL-6 in stimulated blood. That was a snapshot in a narrow group, and it measured shame, not self-criticism. A pooled analysis of 15 samples found self-compassion went with better health habits (average r = 0.25), all from one research group. And a large meta-analysis found social isolation went with 29% higher odds of early death, loneliness 26% and living alone 32%. Self-loathing often shows up as pulling away from people, so that may be one route. I found no large study that follows self-criticism itself to a physical disease. The idea that it harms health is plausible, and inferred.

A way to put it: self-criticism is the part of stress that lives inside us, an attack that keeps the alarm running with no outside threat. That image is mine, not a finding.

The paths, at a glance

What About the Genes?

A short introduction to an unfinished field.

You have probably heard that trauma can be passed down through epigenetics: chemical tags, such as methylation, that sit on DNA and help turn genes up or down without changing the code itself. The idea is that experience can leave marks, and that some marks might be inherited. It is a seductive idea, and some people treat it as settled. It is not. Three different claims tend to get blurred together:

What the effects might be, if it holds. The studies so far point to tendencies, not verdicts. Researchers have looked at stress-hormone systems that seem to be tuned differently in some children of trauma survivors, not necessarily broken: in the Holocaust-offspring replication, lower methylation at one stress-related gene went with lower self-reported anxiety. Marks also respond to experience by their nature, so even if some are real and inherited, nothing says they are fixed. Whether therapy or changed circumstances can shift them in people is early work: one review describes a 2024 trial in which cortisol fell after family therapy, but no epigenome-wide differences survived correction for multiple testing. And a difference in how a gene is read does not automatically tell us how a person will feel, behave or live.

Where it stands. A 2023 scoping review found 22 publications from 19 human studies, mostly small, and called the support preliminary. A 2026 systematic review found no independent replication of the key findings. Critics such as Adrian Bird argue that mammals erase most methylation in the germline, which makes inheritance of acquired marks hard. The detail deserves an essay of its own.

For this essay, nothing depends on it. A child who learns what a house will tolerate, and builds a self around those rules, is enough to explain much of what people carry, and that is something we can observe, question and practice differently. In both stories, the biological one and the learned one, nothing is destiny.

What the Evidence Does and Does Not Support

Three problems recur in this research. Most of these studies are observational, so they can show that two things travel together without showing which pushes which. Many rely on people recalling their childhoods or rating their own stress, and memory and mood color both. And illness itself causes distress: depression can follow a flare as easily as precede one. The best designs follow people forward in time, compare siblings, or use records instead of recall. The Swedish study I lean on most uses national health records and includes a sibling comparison, and it still cannot say what happened inside any one person.

The evidence does not support the comforting idea that every illness has an emotional origin, or the crueler idea that we could cure ourselves if we simply learned to let go.

What it does suggest is that chronic stress, our habits of responding to it, and the relationships around us can influence health and how we experience illness. The size of that influence varies. For many conditions, we still do not know enough.

No study I found shows that beliefs or buried emotions cause an autoimmune disease, or that changing them reverses one. For most people, examining thoughts that do not serve you is low-risk, and it may ease how you carry a condition. That is a modest possibility, not a cure. It can also stir up distress, especially when trauma is involved, so go at a pace you can tolerate and bring support for the heavy parts. If someone promises you a cure, move on, and come back to it later if it still feels true.

I find this worth exploring, not because I expect to think my way out of a medical condition, but because I want to understand what makes an already difficult life harder than it needs to be.

The same question applies outside the body. What am I carrying that no longer helps me live?

Listening Without Assuming

Curiosity is a way of listening. A verdict is a story.

My arm taught me this last lesson. It tightens, and I am tempted to hear a message. Sometimes there may be one. Sometimes it is a nervous system that was injured at ten and does what such nervous systems do. Listening to the body and assuming we know what it means are different acts. The first is curiosity. The second is a story, and stories can hurt when they turn into blame.

So here is what I try, in order:

1. Ask a doctor first about anything persistent. Most body symptoms have ordinary medical causes, and those deserve ordinary medical care.
2. Notice what came just before. A few times a day, for sixty seconds, name three sensations (tight, hot, hollow, heavy) without fixing them, and note what was happening a moment earlier.
3. Move in a way you enjoy, at a dose you can recover from. I have no study to quote for this, only decades of my own experience that it helps, and a new question about whether it has also helped me avoid something.
4. Keep a note, not a theory. After a few weeks, read it back. You are not looking for a verdict. You are looking for patterns worth taking to someone who can help: a physician, a physiotherapist, a therapist.

One line belongs outside the curiosity. If low mood, anxiety or numbness has lasted more than a couple of weeks or is getting in the way of living, that needs care now, not another experiment. The work in this essay can run alongside care, not instead of it.

I still do not know what my left hand is trying to say. I have decided that asking is better than outrunning it.

The body keeps no score. It keeps company, and it is worth asking how it is doing.