Long Term Effects of Trauma on Your Immune Response
It's common for people to face some form of trauma within their lifetime. Whether it be from physical trauma like a car accident or sporting injury, or emotional trauma from childhood, the long term effects of trauma can impact your health.
When that trauma is not dealt with properly, it becomes a huge, long-lasting stressor on your body. This constant stress can contribute to your declining health and make you more vulnerable to Lyme disease, mold repercussions, and chronic diseases.
The weight you feel from a traumatic event(s) can contribute to your "stress bucket". If it gets too full and overflows, it can reduce the strength of your immune system.
While severe trauma can have negative consequences, mild trauma can cause just as much damage. Having multiple traumas can increase your susceptibility to health problems later in life.
Trauma can show up as:
parental separation or divorce
physical neglect
emotional neglect
witnessing domestic violence
physical abuse
sexual abuse
emotional abuse
substance misuse within the household
mental illness within the household
Long Term Effects Of Trauma On Your Body
While initial effects of trauma may present as the following symptoms, these effects can endure over a long period of time, eventually progressing into more serious consequences.
Effects of Trauma
persistent fatigue
sleep issues
fear of recurrence
anxiety focused on flashbacks
depression
avoidance of emotions
Your Body Gets Stuck in "Fight or Flight" Mode
When you experience trauma, your body can get stuck in a hypervigilant, "fight or flight" state. Your body stays in this high alert mode, even though these dangers are often not real.
As your body is trying to respond to that perceived "danger", being in that fight or flight mode constantly can contribute to cortisol and adrenaline imbalances. In times of distress, these hormones signal your body to slow down non-life saving bodily functions like digestion, reproduction, hormone production, and metabolism. This can affect your sleep, your ability to cope, your mood, even your microbiome, and yup, your immune system!
When your body produces constant cortisol, when it shouldn’t be, your adrenals are working overtime to try to respond to the stress. It’s putting energy into responding to your underlying stress rather than toward immune function.
Your Bucket is Too Full!
Your trauma is just one stressor in your "stress bucket". Most of us, however, have many more stressors in our everyday lives as well.
Bucket Stressors could be:
financial stress
relationship stress
workload stress
loss of a loved one
family life
environmental toxins
poor diet
mental health issues
changes due to a pandemic
Your past wounds can even exacerbate your stress bucket levels, leading to those more severe long term effects of trauma. Maybe the trauma you experienced has led to sleep issues, adding another factor to your stress bucket. Now your body cannot repair and restore its cells during the vital sleep period, leading to more oxidative stress and systemic inflammation!
While one stressor can negatively impact your body in itself, it can also contribute to the severity of other stressors. All these underlying stressors can even allow underlying infections to surface.
Long term trauma can contribute to:
heighten repercussions to mold toxicity
Impact on Your Immunity
When your body responds to trauma, like an injury, your cells and chemical messengers of your innate and adaptive immune systems change into proinflammatory and counter-inflammatory immune states.
Injuries (physical and mental) from a traumatic event can initiate increased inflammation. This can cause remote organ damage, and induce a complex response that disrupts that immune system balance.
Reduce Th1 and Increased Th2
There has to be a balance between Th1 and Th2 responses for optimal health, whereas any disturbance would influence many pathological processes. The effects of the stress hormones, cortisol, can cause this shift and increase your vulnerability to infectious diseases.
However, after trauma, the stress can cause Th1 cytokines, which activate your cellular immunity to defend against many kinds of infection to be suppressed.
The suppression of Th1 cytokines then has permissive effects on production of Th2 cytokines, enhancing Th2-mediated humoral immune response which could increase your vulnerability to autoimmune and allergic diseases.
More Prone to Illness and Infection
Because your immune system is compromised, you can be predisposed to opportunistic infections, like Lyme disease and inflammatory complications.
If your body does face an infection, that's a cherry on top of your stress bucket. Not only is your immune system already compromised by the initial trauma stress, but now your body has even more to deal with.
If your body does experience this back to back impact (trauma and opportunistic infection), cells of your innate immune system, like macrophages and neutrophils, become hyper-reactive to bacteria and bacterial toxins.
These macrophages and neutrophils can then create elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines and reactive oxygen species (ROS), known to cause systemic inflammation and tissue destruction- all of which can impact your immune system once again.
5 Steps to Enhancing Your Immunity
To boost your immunity, you have to lessen your stress load within your bucket. Right now, it's overflowing! You need to address the root cause of these stressors to alleviate pressure on your body and reduce the long term effects of trauma.
Address Mental/Emotional Trauma
Talk to a therapist to address any conscious or subconscious thoughts that may be adding to your stress bucket.
People often don't even realize they are dealing with trauma until they start talking to a professional therapist. By doing so, you can learn how to address trauma properly and lighten the stress load on the body.
Learn to Manage Stress
You can't avoid stressful situations 100%. But, you can learn how to manage stress so that you can get your body out of that "fight or flight" mode and into a parasympathetic state of "rest and digest".
Try incorporating yoga, mediation, journaling, and breathing exercises into your daily and weekly routine.
Boost Mitochondrial Function
Your mitochondria are known to be the powerhouse of your cells, but did you know your mitochondria also play a big role in immune function?
When your body comes into contact with a bacteria or virus, your mitochondria switch from producing energy to playing a role in immune defense.
Make sure your mitochondria are optimized so they can battle the infections and then produce that energy your body so desperately needs!
Enhance Mitochondria Health by:
using a sauna
taking mitochondria boosting supplements
decreasing toxin exposure
consuming foods high in antioxidants
making sure you aren't deficient in necessary nutrients
Prioritize Sleep
During your deep sleep cycles, your body can remove or repair damaged cells and restore itself. If you aren't getting quality sleep every night, your body's immune response is going to take a toll. Trauma can commonly impact the amount of sleep you get, so prioritizing it should be your goal.
If you have emotional trauma, journaling can help get your thoughts out, so they don't build up inside, keeping you up late at night. Supplements for sleep can also be beneficial to allow your body to fully rest.
Moderate Exercise
Getting in exercise is excellent for your immune system. Depending on the type of trauma you have experienced, you may want to consider different forms of exercise. Swimming, yoga, walking, and bike riding are all great options.
You want to be careful not to overdo it. Intense exercise day in and day out could contribute to more inflammation and actually inhibit optimal immune response.
Ready to Take Charge of Your Health?
If you've been bouncing from doctor to doctor trying to combat a chronic illness like Lyme disease or mold conditions, please know that there are answers. Unlike conventional medicine, functional medicine providers look deeper into the root cause of why you are experiencing your debilitating symptoms.
If you experienced trauma and are now dealing with health issues, please contact Dr. Jaban Moore. Your risk for chronic illnesses may be elevated, so you must support your body to function optimally.
Dr. Moore will address the root cause by running functional lab tests and analysis to develop a specific protocol that is unique to you. You can give the office a call at (816) 889-9801 to make an appointment.