Sociopaths cause stress. Whether it’s their lying, manipulation, aggression, whatever, the effect on you is stress. Ongoing interactions with sociopaths mean the stress doesn’t let up, and this is bad for your health. Very bad, which I will soon explain. EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Tapping, however, reduces stress and can therefore improve your health.
Illnesses caused by stress
High stress is linked to virtually every type of disease. If you’ve developed any of the following medical conditions since becoming involved with a sociopath, the level of stress you’re experiencing may be a contributing factor. According to Health Today, the following 10 illness are caused by stress.
Cardiovascular disease
Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol can increase heart rate and tighten blood vessels, straining the heart over time and causing long-term damage.
Gastrointestinal disease
Stress increases risk of irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease, leading to cramping, pain, bloating, diarrhea and constipation.
Cancer
Although the link between stress and cancer is not fully understood, chronic stress may increase inflammation and suppress the immune system.
Autoimmune illnesses
Stress has been associated with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and Graves’ disease.
Insomnia
High stress levels can impact sleep patterns, shortening the duration of sleep phases and interrupting REM sleep.
Depression and mental health
Chronic stress releases cortisol, serotonin and dopamine, which disrupts emotional balance and leads to depression.
Alzheimer’s disease
Stress aggravates the symptoms and progression of Alzheimer’s, while also disrupting the neural circuits that mitigate stress.
Diabetes
Stress increases risk of diabetes by encouraging poor lifestyle choices and directly influencing glucose levels in the blood.
Obesity
Stress makes it difficult to control eating habits, leading to consumption of high-calorie foods, and changes the body’s homeostatic functions, contributing to weight gain.
Headaches
Stress is a well-known trigger for tension headaches and migraines.
How stress affects your body
So how does stress lead to all these medical problems? It triggers your body’s fight or flight response. What does this mean?
Your body’s main objective is survival. Therefore, your body is always scanning the environment for any threat to survival. This function is managed by your autonomic nervous system, which is not under your conscious control at all. It evolved millennia ago, when your ancestors were running away from saber-toothed tigers.
Today, anything that your body perceives as a threat — like the sociopath yelling at you —triggers the same fight-or-flight response. It starts in the amygdala, which is a small, almond-shaped structure in your brain that plays a role in detecting danger.
When the amygdala perceives danger, it sends a message to your hypothalamus, another part of the brain that begins your fight or flight response by sending a message to your adrenal glands. In less than three seconds, they pump out large quantities of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones.
The stress hormones cause your heart to race and your blood pressure to rise. At the same time, blood is sent to your arms and legs, while flow is constricted for all your systems not needed for running or fighting, such as digestion, reproduction and thinking. Your immune system shuts down. Your pupils dilate, breathing quickens and muscles tremble.
When there’s no relaxation
Those are the physical effects of stress. Our fight-or-flight response is supposed to prime us for action when we face physical danger. When the danger passes, our bodies are supposed to return to relaxation.
But when stress is ongoing, that doesn’t happen. The cortisol and adrenaline keep flooding your body so you stay primed to fight or flee. Eventually, you experience loss of bone density, loss of muscle mass, increased skin wrinkling, cognitive decline, the inability to turn short-term into long-term memories and more. At some point, your body reacts to nonstop stress by getting sick.
Memories of stressful events
As part of the body’s drive for survival, when you face threatening experiences and situations, your brain and body remember them.
The hippocampus is the memory center of your brain. The hippocampus remembers the sensory aspects of your experiences — what you saw, heard, felt, smelled, tasted or thought as an event happened. When the experience was threatening, the hippocampus tags the sensory aspects associated with it as potential future threats.
For example, suppose the sociopath got drunk and assaulted you. During the assault, you smelled the alcohol on his breath. In the future, your hippocampus may identify the smell of alcohol on someone’s breath as potentially threatening, triggering a stress response.
As if all of that isn’t scary enough, there’s more bad news: Your body can’t distinguish between a stressful event that is happening right now and a memory of a stressful event that happened in the past.
So every time you think about what the sociopath did, how you were assaulted, how he or she betrayed you, and your feelings about what happened, it sets off another cascade of stress reactions. The more you think about what happened, the more stress you experience.
How Tapping reduces stress
EFT Tapping reduces stress by reducing the emotional charge that you feel about painful memories. You still remember what happened, but the memories no longer upset you.
Scientific research indicates that EFT Tapping sends calming signals directly to the brain. Dr. Peta Stapleton, a researcher from Australia, explains how it happens in her book, The Science Behind Tapping: A Proven Stress Management Technique for the Mind and Body. She writes:
EFT appears to affect the amygdala (stress center in the brain) and hippocampus (memory center), both of which play a role in the decision process when you decide whether something is a threat. EFT has also been shown to lower cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone. Too much cortisol can result in lowered immune function and ultimately affect our physical health (e.g., fatigue illnesses).
Stimulation of acupoints like those used in EFT is believed to send a signal to the limbic or emotional system in the body and reduce its arousal. This is why you tend to feel calmer after tapping. It is also why some people yawn while tapping!
EFT can also decrease activity in the amygdala, which is part of the brain’s arousal pathway. And studies with long-term follow-up points are showing the changes last over time, so there may be changes in the brain’s neural pathways over time.
More information
The stress caused by sociopaths is hazardous to your health. Even if you have escaped the sociopath, memories of your experiences may still be causing you stress and therefore continuing to affect your health.
Scientific research studies show that EFT Tapping calms the stress centers in your brain and reduces cortisol. That’s how Tapping helps you reclaim your health.
If you’d like more information, here are a few of the studies:
Emotional freedom techniques for treating post traumatic stress disorder: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis, by Peta Stapleton, Kevin Kip, Dawson Church, Loren Toussaint, Jacqui Foorman, Pat Ballantyne, Tom O’Keefe
Energy psychology: Efficacy, speed, mechanisms, by David Feinstein
The effect of Emotional Freedom Techniques on stress biochemistry, by Dawson Church, Garret Yount, Audrey J. Brooks
