I'm completely the opposite. Emotional stress doesn't affect any of my physical symptoms. The only physical reaction I have to emotional stimuli is that I can shake more (I have a tremor) in situations when I'm anxious or embarrassed - i.e. when talking to doctors! And emotional stress does exhaust me and actually what I often do after being upset is go to sleep and fall asleep right away. But I don't react physically to emotions in any long-term capacity. These reactions that I do have are very much instantaneous, in the moment - I'm anxious, I shake; I have an upsetting day, I sleep. Then I wake up. As soon as the stimulus is gone, the physical reaction stops. If I go through a period of weeks or months when my stress levels are above average (e.g. long-standing family problems) I never get physically ill from it.
But other than that, no. None of my Crohn's symptoms respond to emotions. They respond to my diet (not to individual foods, mainly to how much I'm eating and how much fibre I'm eating) and for some reason are often worse if I've been on my feet all day, whereas if I've not done much activity they're better.
I really really wish doctors wouldn't always assume that bowel problems relate to emotional stress. When I was first getting ill and was undiagnosed, I went to a doctor and told him the bowel problems I was having. The doctor asked me loads of questions about school and exams and such. I was so confused - I had no idea what he was on about. I was having these terrible bowel problems and he wants to chat with me about school?! Then he revealed that he had decided he knew that my bowel problems were Irritable Bowel Syndrome and were caused by my anxiety over doing well at school. :confused2:
This made absolutely no sense to me - for one thing I loved school! I had loads of friends, loved my teachers, got good grades and I'm one of those weird people who enjoys doing exams and studying rather than getting stressed by them. But it was like the doctor had, before I even began answering his questions, made up his mind that the cause of bowel problems in a teenage girl must be school anxiety. So after I told him how much I was enjoying school - whilst wondering when we going to get back to the issue I'd actually come to see him about - he said without a shadow of a doubt that all the diarrhoea I was getting was a result of my stressing over exams.
And basically this was the start of an endless stream of doctors appointments in which they would declare various emotional problems as the source of my physical symptoms, whether or not I even had the emotional problem in question in the first place. :ybatty:
It's happened to me so much and been so wrong that I just can't stand anyone suggesting my illnesses are psychosomatic or stress-related anymore.
