Psoriatic Arthritis and Emotional Stress

There is no doubt that life’s daily stresses play a major role in sparking a flare when you live with psoriatic arthritis. When life has me all stressed out, you can bet big money that I will be down and out with a flare in no time.

Even something as simple as a shift in the barometric pressure can keep me couch-bound for days. Sometimes daily life is just stressful and there really isn’t a whole lot you can do about it except hold on tightly and hope that things don’t get too out of control.

More often than not, many of us have a whole additional form of stress that impacts our lives. It is called emotional stress.

What is emotional stress?

Maybe you are fighting with your spouse, having issues with a coworker, or even just doing a remodel on your home. Whatever it may be, emotional stress plays a major role in our ability to manage our psoriatic arthritis.

We seem to always put our many emotions, feelings, and things going on in our lives on the back-burner or tuck them away in the secret closet of our hearts. This emotional stress can fester causing resentment and sparking physical manifestations and psoriatic arthritis flares.

Even though we don’t like to think about it, or heaven forbid talk about it, the emotional stress we experience is always there impacting our lives with psoriatic arthritis every day. Many of us tend to shy away from this topic because it gets too personal. It involves delving deep into our emotional health and finding those times when you felt wronged.

Working through the emotional stress of psoriatic arthritis

Maybe you feel like your psoriatic arthritis symptoms are marginalized by family members. Or friends don’t offer up the empathy and understanding you so desperately need. Or worse, coworkers mock your condition and refuse to acknowledge your contributions to the team.

The only way to attempt to rid ourselves of these emotional stresses is to drag them out into the light of day and deal with them. That doesn’t mean that you have to get confrontational at work or start an argument with your family. But it does mean that you need to search your heart and search your soul and figure out what it does mean for you.

Maybe you need to have a conversation with friends. Or perhaps you need to forgive your family for potential misunderstanding of the past. Either way, you need to deal with the emotional stress that you may be feeling in order to better manage your psoriatic arthritis and your overall physical well being.

Psoriatic arthritis and emotional stress

Sure, you might think, “Well gee Leanne, this has nothing to do with how I manage my psoriatic arthritis!” But clearly I beg to differ. Research is ongoing about the relationship between trauma and psoriatic arthritis.

It isn’t too big a stretch then to believe that emotional triggers, left undealt with, can make managing psoriatic arthritis difficult. Holding on to anger, hurt, and pain can trigger harmful and in some cases debilitating emotional stress leading to all sorts of physical manifestations.

What types of emotional baggage do you have tucked away in your closet? Go ahead and clear some of it out and you just might find that it makes daily life with psoriatic arthritis just a little more manageable.