There’s nothing worse than having to suffer from physical pain that gets further amplified by emotional stress. More specifically, a study done in 2010 reported that repressing negative emotions like anger increases chronic pain for people who suffer from fibromyalgia. If this is the first time you’ve heard the word “fibromyalgia,” keep reading to find out all about it.
What You Need to Know About Fibromyalgia
Fibromyalgia syndrome or FMS is a disorder that causes a person to experience musculoskeletal pain throughout their body. It is accompanied by fatigue, mood, and memory issues. You should know that doctors don’t know what causes fibromyalgia and it can be attributed to a variety of factors including genetics, infections, and physical or emotional trauma.
There is also no cure for fibromyalgia but living a lifestyle with exercise, relaxation, and stress-reduction can certainly help in reducing chronic pain issues. As for symptoms, people with fibromyalgia experience widespread pain and tender points all over their body. Check out this article for an extensive list of 43 symptoms of fibromyalgia.
Study Shows That Repressed Anger Heightens Symptoms of Fibromyalgia
The European Journal of Pain conducted a 28-day study in 2010 involving 333 older women with fibromyalgia (average age is 47). The study aimed to examine whether anger during the everyday life of someone with fibromyalgia amplified pain and whether repressing anger or expressing anger had a link to the level of pain they experienced.
What researchers found was that trait anger, which a personality characteristic that causes a person to get angry even when slightly provoked, was related to experiencing heightened chronic pain for the person with that disorder.
Take the Story of Vera
To paint you a better picture, we took the example written by Medical Health News of someone named Vera who was angry towards her father for not making her mother happy and at her husband for being insensitive and uncaring. The result of her anger caused her to experience pain that ranged from dull aches to excruciating pain, diagnosed as fibromyalgia.
Unfortunately, Vera struggles in talking about her anger and that causes her fibromyalgia symptoms to intensify. According to the study, the greater the inhibition of anger, the greater the experience of pain in women with fibromyalgia. On the other hand, those who got angry and expressed it in the situation in which it was aroused experienced the least amount of pain.
So, it’s not that Vera was more sensitive to anger compared to other women but she experienced them more often and failed to express them at the moment they occurred. Also, it’s important to note that focusing on positive emotions is an insufficient buffer to repress feelings of anger.
According to a 2010 study published in the Arthritis Care and Research, a situation like Vera’s repressed anger compromised her neuroendocrine functioning, which lowered her pain threshold both physically and psychologically. As a result, her anger worsened the pain she experiences with her fibromyalgia.
The Solution for Minimizing Chronic Pain Intensified by Anger
