When you are stressed or not feeling well, you can have all kinds of aches and pains throughout your body. If you are stressed, you can get a headache or even a migraine. If you have a fever, every joint in your body can ache. But is there a connection between your mental health and your back health? Can something like depression cause back pain?

First, let’s look at what depression is and what happens to our bodies when we are depressed.

Depression is an illness that causes you to always feel sad and have no interest in doing anything. If you are depressed, you will have insomnia or you will sleep all of the time. You will be irritable and have angry outbursts.

In some people, the symptoms are so severe that they are completely aware of what is happening and what is wrong. If your depression is mild, you may not know what is wrong just that you are unhappy or miserable.

Our minds and our bodies are connected. What happens in our minds is sent as a message throughout our bodies. So, if you think about jumping off a cliff, your heart rate will increase and you will become tense. Just the thought of that will cause your body to react.

When you react to something and you become tense, you restrict the blood flow through your body. Your blood vessels will constrict and you will create a muscle imbalance. When this happens, the toxins and the waste do not get removed and they build up. This will activate trigger points in your muscles and you will feel pain.

Depression is a negative emotion. When you get depressed, everything else is affected. You don’t sleep well, you don’t eat right, you don’t exercise and you become irritable. You have everyday stress, stressful episodes that happen unexpectedly, major stressful events, and emotions that we keep buried deep inside of us. These emotions can all come together and create a severe depression.

There is a name for back pain that occurs from these stressful events in our lives. They call it tension myositis syndrome or TMS. People who have this disease don’t respond to normal back pain treatments. They have no physical problems that are contributing to their back pain. These people work with psychologists to help bring to the surface their repressed emotions and that actually cures their back pain.

Yes, depression can cause back pain. If you are feeling alone or you feel that you have a lack of support, those feelings could be causing your back pain. Take some time to ask yourself just what is bothering you. Is it your back or is it something else and that is causing your back to react.