Living With Psychosomatic Disorders: Mental Health Coping Skills & Treatment Options

Psychosomatic disorders can create challenges in many aspects of someone’s life; they’re often impacted physically, emotionally, and even socially. Fortunately, the right mental health treatment program can help people recover from these disorders.

However, even when receiving mental health treatment, people should develop coping strategies for psychosomatic disorders to ensure they’re making the life changes they need to curb their stress levels.

In other words, to cope and recover effectively, treatment must be multifaceted and holistic. For example, alongside therapy and counseling, someone might benefit from certain self-care practices. Mission Prep can help you create a holistic treatment plan that incorporates coping strategies that work for you.

This article can also help, as it details different approaches to living with psychosomatic disorders to illustrate the many ways of coping and types of treatment. It explores:

Challenges of psychosomatic disorders
Daily stress management tips
Mind-body activities to heal from psychosomatic conditions
How to build emotional awareness and relationship support
Mental health treatment options for treating psychosomatic disorders
Where to find professional support

Challenges of Living With Psychosomatic Disorders

Living with psychosomatic illness can be tremendously difficult physically, emotionally, and socially. Psychosomatic disorders occur when psychological stress takes a physical toll on the body, causing or worsening symptoms of illness.¹

Unfortunately, people are living increasingly stressful lifestyles, with immense pressures from the world of work and social media imprinting unrealistic expectations about productivity, health, and success. Furthermore, conventional lifestyles don’t give us a lot of room to cope with and process traumatic experiences, which are highly linked with psychosomatic symptoms.²

Factors such as these mean that people with psychosomatic disorders are often faced with challenges like:

Persistent illness, pain, or discomfort
Confusion over the cause of their symptoms
Difficulty explaining their condition to doctors, friends, family, and colleagues
Embarrassment or shame around being unwell or “mad”
Not being believed or supported effectively
Difficulty adhering to “normal” work and life expectations
Reduced ability to engage in daily activities and relationships
Social rejection and misunderstanding
Delayed access to appropriate treatment
Financial strain from paying for multiple treatments

These impacts can reach every aspect of someone’s life, shaping their entire experience and interactions with the world. Therefore, to effectively deal with a psychosomatic disorder, treatment and support must be holistic and multifaceted. For example, it should target mental and physical health, as well as include social support.

Holistic treatment can be achieved by having a toolkit of coping skills that meets different needs in a person’s life. Therefore, people must consider the life domains in which they experience stress and the best ways to implement changes in these domains. The next section explores ways of doing so.

Daily Stress Management Tips

One of the key psychosomatic mental health resources you can have under your belt is stress management. Therefore, recognizing, reducing, and managing stress is particularly important for those with psychosomatic illness.

Stress management shouldn’t necessarily replace psychotherapy or counseling, but these mental wellness techniques can mean that skills learned in therapy can be transferred to the outside world. Some daily stress management tips include:

Stress-reducing nutrition: A balanced diet can reduce stress, improve brain and immune function, lower blood pressure, and reduce toxins in the body. Nutrients that help manage stress hormones and chemicals include complex carbohydrates, proteins, vitamin C, vitamin B, magnesium, and selenium. It can also help to reduce intake of foods that put the body under stress, and eat mindfully without distraction.³
Physical exercise: Regular exercise routines can help alleviate and relieve stress, but they don’t have to be strenuous activities. Gentle walks before work, or regular yoga, can create a consistent stress-busting habit.
Mindfulness practices: Some people may benefit from a dedicated meditation practice. Those who prefer a more relaxed approach can still profit from mindfulness by increasing their awareness of breath, body sensations, and the present moment. These techniques can improve the ability to process thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations as they arise.⁴
Setting realistic goals: Many of us feel the pressure of the high expectations we put on ourselves, and perfectionism may be a root cause of stress in some people. Being kind to ourselves about our achievements and taking things more slowly can reduce the stress we feel in daily life.

These tips are general guidelines for managing stress, but they’re a good starting point. Next, we delve deeper into what people can do to cope with psychosomatic disorders, manage their symptoms, and treat the root cause.

Mind-Body Activities for Psychosomatic Conditions

Psychosomatic conditions prove the important connection between mind and body. Therefore, many people benefit from engaging in what’s known as “mind-body” techniques, such as yoga. Practices like these are proven to reduce inflammation, improve quality of life, and reduce symptoms like pain, fatigue, and depression.⁵

You may choose to implement a mind-body coping strategy in your routine to take care of your mental health and treat the root cause of your psychosomatic disorder. For some, a mind-body therapy might be enough to manage stress by itself. For others, options such as the following can be a beneficial accompaniment to other mental health treatment:

Yoga: Yoga stems from ancient Indian philosophy and involves moving between different postures to connect the body, breath, and spirit. There are many types of Yoga that people can choose from.⁵
Tai Chi and Qigong: These are practices from traditional Chinese medicine that combine specific postures with breathing and mental focus. They are both gentle forms of exercise suitable for people who prefer something low-impact.⁵
Meditation: Meditation is another practice that has many variations but doesn’t usually involve much movement. It involves focusing attention either on the breath, body sensations, or external sounds and allowing them to pass without judgment or attachment.⁵
Progressive muscle relaxation: This technique involves scanning the body and systematically tensing and relaxing different muscle groups one by one. For example, starting at the toes, then the feet, and then the calves, and so on. It may be combined with mindful breathing and relaxing music to create a deep sense of physical relaxation and mental stillness.

These mind-body practices can improve mental health by reducing anxiety and depression. They may also help by increasing awareness of physical and mental stress, allowing it to be, and moving through it without suppression.

Emotional Awareness and Relationship Support

The most essential aspect of coping with and healing from a psychosomatic disorder is addressing the emotional factors that caused it in the first place. While this can be achieved in therapy, there are also things people can do in their personal lives to support this process.

For instance, people could focus on aspects such as:

Alexithymia:

Occurs when emotional awareness is disrupted, as people are less aware of their feelings and struggle to identify and describe them accurately. This phenomenon was first described when people sought treatment for psychosomatic symptoms. They knew they were in distress, and could describe their physical symptoms, but couldn’t clearly articulate their emotions.⁷

Emotional awareness:

Paying attention to and understanding one’s emotions is important when coping with somatic symptoms. People who can understand their emotions well ruminate less and take more steps to actively cope with their feelings.⁶

Deepening emotional awareness may require slowing down, journaling, and engaging in a mind-body therapy that cultivates awareness. Further, noticing when we’re acting from a place of emotion, such as holding tension when queuing in a store, can be a good opportunity to acknowledge underlying feelings. Processing emotions then reduces the likelihood that they’ll be stored as physical tension in the body and allows us to identify patterns.

Close relationships:

Having a loving support network can be tremendously positive for our well-being. Equally, toxic relationships can have significant consequences on emotional and biological health, namely anxiety, ulcers, gastrointestinal issues, and headaches.⁸

This is because toxic relationships in which someone feels constantly criticized, unappreciated, controlled, or dismissed may keep the nervous system on high alert. People healing from psychosomatic disorders may benefit from being curious about whether they have relationships like this in their lives. Stepping away or creating firmer boundaries may be what’s needed to manage this source of stress.

Mental Health Treatment Options for Psychosomatic Disorders

Finally, many people wishing to manage a psychosomatic disorder will benefit from mental health treatment to learn to manage their stress or identify its source. You may choose to consider one of the following evidence-based options:

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Proven to be as effective as escitalopram (an SSRI medication) in people with anxiety disorders, MBSR is an evidence-based treatment. People in these programs can expect structured guidance through mindfulness practices, including breath work, meditation, and yoga positions. This may be suitable for those with psychosomatic symptoms caused by persistently holding tension and racing thoughts.⁹

Psychodynamic Therapy

With roots in the psychoanalytic tradition, psychodynamic therapy aims to explore your past in order to understand the present. For example, to treat psychosomatic disorders, therapists may enquire about traumatic experiences in early life to help people feel safer within themselves.¹⁰

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for psychosomatic disorders is typically interested in the automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that relate to symptoms and life stress in general. People may be asked to keep a diary to identify these. CBT may be ideal for those whose condition is caused by certain lifestyle factors, such as perfectionism, or whose thoughts about being ill are making it harder to recover.¹¹

These options provide different approaches to navigating the challenges caused by psychosomatic disorders and varying methods for treating their causes. The psychosomatic disorder therapy that you choose should feel authentic and comfortable to you. Plus, it shouldn’t be the only supportive thing in your life. Engaging in the other forms of self-care discussed in this article can create a holistic recovery strategy for you that meets different needs.

Mission Connection: Get Psychosomatic Support Today

While psychosomatic disorders can cause challenges in many aspects of life, a holistic approach to recovery can create significant change. People should aim to follow a psychosomatic disorder care plan that tackles the root cause of their condition, supports them in daily life, and creates long-lasting healing for the future.

At Mission Connection, we understand how important it is for people to receive personalized mental health treatment. Our team of licensed professionals always endeavors to accurately assess and treat individual needs, whether this involves one-to-one therapy, group support, or telehealth services. Get in touch today for more information about our services and tips for living with psychosomatic disorders.

References

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‌Bower, J. E., & Irwin, M. R. (2016). Mind–body therapies and control of inflammatory biology: A descriptive review. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 51, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2015.06.012
Eckland, N. S., & Berenbaum, H. (2021). Emotional Awareness in Daily Life: Exploring Its Potential Role in Repetitive Thinking and Healthy Coping. Behavior Therapy, 52(2), 338-349. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2020.04.010
Hogeveen, J., & Grafman, J. (2021). Alexithymia. Handbook of Clinical Neurology, 183(183), 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-822290-4.00004-9
‌Forth, A., Sezlik, S., Lee, S., Ritchie, M., Logan, J., & Ellingwood, H. (2021). Toxic Relationships: The Experiences and Effects of Psychopathy in Romantic Relationships. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 66(15), 0306624X2110491. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624×211049187
Hoge, E. A., Bui, E., Mete, M., Dutton, M. A., Baker, A. W., & Simon, N. M. (2022). Mindfulness-Based stress reduction vs escitalopram for the treatment of adults with anxiety disorders: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 80(1), 13–21. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.3679
Luyten, P., & Fonagy, P. (2020). Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Patients With Functional Somatic Disorders and the Road to Recovery. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 73(4), appi.psychother. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20200010
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