Understanding your unique symptoms
Just because people share the same symptoms doesn’t mean they share the same causes.
Sometimes our bodies feel strange or uncomfortable or don’t do what we expect. These experiences are a normal part of life.
Most of the time, there’s nothing seriously wrong causing these experiences, and they go away on their own. But sometimes these symptoms stick around and start to impair us in daily life.
Othertimes we get sick, but even after treatment, our symptoms persist, taking on a life of their own.
What causes symptoms
Symptoms can be caused by different things, but it’s usually a combination of many factors.
In western societies we usually distinguish between symptoms we experience in the mind and symptoms we experience in the body.
In reality there is not such a clear divide. Instead, the systems of the mind, body and environment all continuously interact.
They cannot be seperated
Many symptoms, even those experienced as coming from the body, are not caused in a simple way by damage that we can see on a blood test or scan.
We get further if we understand these symptoms as products of the complex functioning of the body-mind in its environment.
If the functioning in one part of the system is pushed out off balance, it can have knock-on effects in other, seemingly unrelated, places. New dynamics are set up that can maintain symptoms.
We call these Functional Mechanisms
We can also think of causes based on when they happened in time.
Causes that were set up a long time ago, or are part of our biological make-up, might be called ‘predisposing factors’. There are also ‘triggers’, such as an infection or a stressful time, which coincided with the symptoms first developing.
Identifying these historical causes often helps us make sense of our life story. But because they happened in the past, there is not much we can do to change them.
’Maintaining factors’ are the mechanisms that keep your symptoms running today. These are the most helpful causes to identify because you can interrupt these mechanisms to begin to feel better.
Most symptoms you can think of can be partly or fully maintained by functional mechanisms.
It is not the symptom itself, but the pattern or character of symptoms that helps us understand if it has a functional or structural cause.
Because of the adaptations of the body, functional mechanisms maintain most persistent or chronic symptoms, even those that were initially triggered by structural diseases (damage).
Common functional symptoms
Each person has a unique puzzle of causes.
Working out the causes of persistant symptoms is like a puzzle with different pieces, some on the level of how you think and feel, some on the level of how your brain works, and some on the level of how your body functions. Your surroundings and life situation may also play a role. Some pieces of the puzzle might ‘show up’ on medical tests. Other pieces do not.
For example, subtle problems with the rhythms or regulation of bodily processes are not usually visible in a laboratory sample or scan, but can still have a big impact on how the body is functioning.
Your personal causal network
Bodysymptoms is based around 28 of the best understood functional mechanisms that maintain common symptoms.
However, this does not mean that all the topics are relevant to you. Stress or trauma-based explanations are very relevant for some people’s symptoms, but not all. Some, but not all, have symptoms exacerbated by health anxiety. Some experience more prominent dysfunction of the immune system, the circadian rhythm, or the autonomic nervous system.
The good news is, you do not need to work out the whole picture, to begin to feel better. Once one or two pieces become clear, you can start working with these. In complex systems, what you do to benefit one part has a positive effect on the whole system.
This is also a learning process. As you understand your body’s unique condition better, more pieces of the puzzle will become clear.
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Which explanations fit with the pattern of your symptoms?
Explore bodysymptoms to draw up a personal causal network.
- 1. Explore the mechanisms. Use the questions on each topic to reflect on whether the explanation might be relevant to you.
- 2. Let your instincts guide you to explore interacting mechanisms. Clicking through via the icons or menus in the top left corner.
- 3. As you go, jot down any explanations that seem to resonate. It may be helpful to sketch a diagram to visualize how these mechanisms connect.
- 4. If an explanation feels meaningful for your symptoms, ask yourself: “What actions might follow from this understanding?”
Unsure about which mechanisms might be relevant to your symptoms?
Our symptoms quiz will suggest a place to start.