How Does Anxiety Impact Your Pelvic Health
===
[00:00:00] Hey guys, time to talk about anxiety and how it impacts the pelvic floor and your pelvic health. Let's jump in.
So anxiety, it is on the rise. It affects a lot of people. General anxiety disorder effects. 6.8 million adults of the US population according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. That is a lot of people and women are twice as likely to be affected by men. Did I say by men? I meant twice as likely than men.
So how is this impacting our physical body and especially how is this impacting our pelvic health? Well, first let's just define anxiety for a moment. So straight off the American Psychological Association, and this definition is adapted from the a PA dictionary of psychology. Anxiety is an emotion [00:01:00] characterized by apprehension, so fear or anxiety, that something bad or unpleasant will happen.
And somatic symptoms. So body-based symptoms of tension in which an individual anticipates impending danger, catastrophe, or misfortune. The body often mobilizes itself to meet the perceived threat. Muscles become tense. Breathing is faster. The heartbeats more rapidly. I think you guys might be able to identify with that.
Have you ever been anxious and you feel like your heart is really fluttery? You feel like maybe if you've been especially just more stressed and more anxious, you might feel more tension around your neck. And also I wanna note that anxiety doesn't always present exactly that way. It can also look a little bit more numbing and avoiding, and it doesn't look the same for everyone, and it doesn't look the same for every person all the time.
Also, a quick note, you might hear me talk about this sympathetic fight or flight response versus a [00:02:00] parasympathetic rest and digest response. The nervous system is a bit more complex than that, and we can talk about that more in other times. But just for the simplicity of this episode and understanding this response, we're going to just kind of think about it in that two model system.
Okay. So an important thing to note here is that anxiety and fear and stress, these are not bad emotions. These are not bad things that we experience. They're there to help us. At the end of the day, almost everything our body is doing is for survival, even when it doesn't feel like it. However, it's when we get stuck in this anxious cycle that issues can arise, or if we feel this anxiety more intensely than others, and it's impacting our daily life.
Or this anxious response is just frequent and constant, and the body is constantly going through this state of perceiving threats and responding to that in the body, which I want to add your body at any normal state, everybody, we are [00:03:00] constantly, and I mean constantly assessing our environment, both internally and externally for a threat.
However, when we are in more of this anxious nervous system state, we are even more alert to threats in our environment and we are hyper aware of possible threats and we might be perceiving something as a threat when really it isn't a true threat to us. So how does that impact your pelvic health? I just said in that definition how it increases your tension and your heart rate and your breath rate.
So if that's happening constantly, think of the impact that that can have when you are tensing up and that's happening all of the time. Your pelvic floor is included in that. Those muscles are becoming tense and they could be staying tense or frequently tensing up, not getting a lot of time to relax and lengthen and be mobile, and this can actually make them weaker.
So tight muscles are not necessarily strong [00:04:00] muscles. When they are tight and holding something and holding that tension all day, they are not going to feel strong. When an increased force of pressure comes at them, they might just let go, which is what can happen when experiencing a leak with high pressure.
So these pelvic muscles, this bowl of muscles at the base of your pelvis, they are a door for things coming in and out of your body. So for. Poop pee coming out , for babies coming out for, anything going into the body as well. We want them to be an open door. However, if the muscles are really tight and tense, it can be harder for that to happen.
So it could be more difficult to release a bowel movement. It can be even harder to release a urine stream. It can be , harder to engage in insertion, whether that's during. Sexual activity, or even just with menstrual products or a gynecological visit. So basically when these muscles are tight, especially if they're tight [00:05:00] almost all the time, then they're not going to work for us as efficiently as they could.
And this tension can also be in the core and in your abdominals. And so when you are clenching your stomach with that anxiety, we are creating more tension around the bladder, we're creating more tension around the bowels, and things aren't able to be as mobile. Things could be irritating to those areas.
Put pressure on them. And this can create urinary urgency, for example. So feeling the need to pee frequently or really urgently and. It. That's just the tension piece. There's also a physiological piece, so a piece happening with the nervous system in the body that influences that as well. But just sticking with that tension for a minute when things are tense.
So think about when you have tension in your neck. It can be tender when that is massaged or pressed on. Same thing with the pelvic floor. When we feel pressure on these [00:06:00] tight, tender muscles, it can. Present as discomfort or pain. So this can appear as pain with a bowel movement. This can appear as even pain with peeing.
If you have a lot of tension around the muscles, around the urethra. It can also present as pain with insertion or during intercourse. Plus, when we are in this hyper alert state, think about it, you need to be very alert of if something is actively threatening your safety right? Which again, it's kind of always happening in the background at a low level, but this is a high level.
This is an extra level of alertness that we are at to both our internal environment, so things happening inside of our body and also our external environment. So the things that we perceive outside of our body. So when in this state. When we receive a certain type of pressure, we can experience that pressure as pain when we might not have experienced it as pain if we were not in that state.
The threshold to detect pain is low, [00:07:00] so just a little bit of a sensation could create that pain response. When we are in that state, it can also be harder to experience pleasure because our body is not in a state of receiving pleasure. It's in a state of receiving a threat. So we are going to be more.
Alert and that means that something that might give us pleasure in a more regulated state will now not feel like a pleasurable sensation. So you can see how this would impact sex, whether that's with difficulty in with insertion , but also having pain with insertion or, you know, that could be deeper, that could be closer to the entrance.
It could be hard to insert anything at all. It could be harder to experience pleasure. And then plus. When you are at this more tense state, we could have decreased blood flow to the genitals, and with that decrease of blood flow to the pelvic floor and the genitals, it can be harder to experience arousal.
With arousal. We have this flow of blood [00:08:00] that creates more engorgement and erection, and that's for any anatomy and also an openness as well. But if we are in this more tense, anxious state, then it can be harder to have and experience that engorgement in that erection and, even that openness or sensation of arousal.
So we talked about how we can have increased perception of pain and also specifically with the act of sex. The same thing can happen with bowel movements or even peeing, but we can have fear around that specific act, which can raise the nervous system even further and sense more of a threat and create more of a response of closing off tension or pain.
Also this anxiety can impact sexual functioning. A similar but a little bit different on if we were just experiencing anxiety in that moment or if we were chronically experiencing that stress and anxiety every day. If you're experiencing it every day, your muscles could be at just this more [00:09:00] tense state where you might have more tender points or, harder insertion to begin with. And anxiety in the moment can also create those same symptoms. But you know, we could feel more safe and relaxed in the moment of sex and not really feel too anxious. But if we're experiencing that anxiety and stress every day, then we could still have tight and tender points on those muscles and experience some pain or discomfort.
Plus the kind of overthinking and busy thoughts that anxiety can bring can keep us in a more disconnected state from our body or to the experience that we're engaging in. Okay, so continuing with this physiological response, so basically just the response that's happening in the body that's impacting the way the body functions and with the nervous system.
So your gut and your brain, they are twins. They are best friends, they are siblings, however you wanna think about it. [00:10:00] They are tightly connected, and we will definitely dive into this more down the line and really hone in on this relationship. But right now, just really appreciating and acknowledging this relationship and think about it.
Have you ever. Had a really important or stressful meeting or a day that you had to encounter. You start a new job or a presentation and you had to go to the bathroom that morning more suddenly or urgently, or it was softer stool. That can happen with a acute stress. So , more of this short term quick stress, and then if you are in a chronic stress state, we can see more constipation.
So as we were saying before, when that , perceived stress, anxiety state, this is our fight or flight compared to if you've heard fight or flight compared to rest and digest. So if you're anxious, you're in that fight or flight, you're not in that rest and digest, [00:11:00] meaning our digestion. It's not a priority.
It's not something that our body is perceiving it needs to focus on for survival in that moment. So it's not focusing on digestion, it's not focusing on giving you a nice bowel movement. It's focused on survival, running away, fighting something off. So when we are in this anxious state, it's affecting the way that our bowels even digest and go about motility for a bowel movement.
And it's also affecting the ability for your muscles to relax, to release stool. So both that tension and that physiological response are at play that is making it harder for you to poop. And then with the bladder. You are again, can experience that tension, that can create increased urge , that can make the muscles actually weaker and create more leaking.
And then it can also even make it harder to release that pee. And then also that tension can be around the [00:12:00] bladder, which can create more of an urge to pee. It could even create spasms. It could create some bladder pain. And it could feel like you just have to pee more frequently. Or it could feel like when you do have to pee, it's super urgent and you need to run to the bathroom.
Now, there's a lot that can actually play into that, but right now we are just talking about the influence that anxiety has on that response. So think about a time where maybe you had, again, like a really important presentation or, meeting or workday or anything like that, an appointment, and suddenly you felt this strong urge to pee and you were like, what the hell?
I peed like a half hour ago. Why do I have to pee again? We're kind of just thinking of that nervous peeing. That's anxiety at play with your nervous system. So if that is happening constantly and every day, then that is a presentation that you could see as an influence from your anxiety. So as you can see, anxiety is playing a very large role on your pelvic health.
[00:13:00] So your bladder, your bowel, pelvic pain, or sexual functioning. And as we mentioned before, your pelvic health can also include your menstrual cycles and your fertility as well as other things, so anxiety can play a role in those as well. Without diving too deep into those right now, I want you to just think again about what role.
Tension or decreased blood flow or different hormones that are released in your body, or even just the, the nervous system and body prioritizing different functions could play on those things. And that can play a role in really almost every aspect of your health. So the too long didn't listen. TL DL is basically that we are.
Impacting the way our body is functioning in a way that we are kind of having this closed door for bowel and bladder and, things going into the body, whether that's during [00:14:00] sex or menstruation. And then also having this impact on the nervous system that is creating a prioritization for the body to focus on other things and not our.
Functioning of things like digestion and then can increase things like urinary urgency or frequency to pee. If this is something that you know that you have a hard time with and that you struggle with and you can even see the impact that it's having on your body or you're just. Nervous or afraid, anxious even of how it might influence your body in the future.
There is a lot of help and a lot of resources out there. If you want to head to anxious pelvis.com, you can find support on there and I'll provide more in the show note. And we'll also dive deeper into some of these concepts and topics in the future. As usual, feel free to let me know what you are most interested in, and I will see you next [00:15:00] time.
