How Does an Emotion Become Biology? | Ep. 059

Grief is one of the most natural experiences we will ever have. So is sadness. So is fear. When loss arrives, the emotions that follow are not evidence that something is wrong. They are evidence that something mattered. We are meant to feel them. We are meant to sit with them. We are meant to allow them to move through us in their own time. The presence of emotion is not the problem. It never was.

What becomes fascinating is what happens when an experience is never fully resolved. When a loss remains unfinished. When a wound is carried long after the moment has passed. The event may be over, yet something may still be asking for attention. Over time, that unanswered signal can become part of the background noise of daily life, so familiar that we stop noticing it altogether. When we begin exploring health through that lens, a different question emerges. Not simply what is happening in the body, but whether there are parts of our story that continue influencing us long after we believe the chapter has closed.

Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue

Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue

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Transcript

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One of my favorite sayings is this your organs shed tears, your eyes cannot. And I think most people know exactly what that means. Because we've all lived it. You get bad news, and suddenly there's a pit in your stomach. You lose someone you love and your chest physically hurts. You go through a stressful season, and your shoulders feel like they're carrying bricks. You lie awake worrying about something, and the next day you're exhausted. Why? How does a feeling become something physical? Because the moment your brain perceives the threat, messages begin moving throughout your body. Adrenaline rises, cortisol rises, heart rate increases, blood sugar increases, blood flow changes, the body begins preparing for survival, and mitochondria receive that message too. Stress may be one of the loudest messages the body can send. Inside the mitochondria, energy production pathways begin shifting. The body starts diverting resources towards dealing with the perceived threat. That's incredibly useful when the threat is temporary. The problem is that modern stress rarely lasts a few minutes. It lasts for weeks, maybe sometimes months or even years. This is where conversations about HPA access dysfunction and adrenal fatigue begin. The brain continues signaling that the body is under threat. The adrenal glands continue responding. The stress response stays active. And over time, biology changes, along with inflammation as well as energy production. You'll find that oxidative stress increases while energy production becomes less efficient. And eventually, people begin feeling that difference. This is also one reason fatigue is so common in chronic disease. Whether we're talking about cancer, autoimmune diseases, chronic infection, or other long-standing illnesses, the body is constantly being asked to adapt. The mitochondria are asked to produce more energy under increasingly difficult conditions. Imagine asking a factory to increase production every single day while the machinery slowly becomes less efficient. Eventually production starts falling behind, and that's when fatigue begins to appear. At first, it may be subtle. You need a little bit more caffeine, you don't recover quite as well, or maybe you don't have the same stamina you once had. But as the gap between energy demand and energy production grows, fatigue becomes harder to ignore. This is when people start saying, I don't feel like myself anymore. I'm exhausted all the time. I wake up tired. Everything feels harder than it should. Not because that's all in their head, it's because the biology of energy production has been changing for a long time. Stress can also affect the body's ability to recover. The body becomes very good at responding to threats, but less efficient at returning to a state of rest and repair. And once you understand that, you begin to understand why stress, burnout, chronic illness, and fatigue are so often found together. Because stress doesn't just affect how you feel, it affects how your body functions. And before we finish today's episode, I want to take a moment to speak from the heart. The reason this conversation is so important to me is because I see this every single day in clinic, especially in people dealing with chronic illness. When you sit with someone long enough and really listen to their story, you start to notice something. Very often there was a season of profound stress, a loss, trauma, maybe heartbreak or a difficult season. And I want to be very clear. The purpose of this episode is not to make anyone feel uncomfortable or guilty, and it's definitely not to suggest that stress causes every disease. I don't want to imply that sadness, grief, fear, or anger are somehow wrong. Because life can be really hard sometimes, and it comes with pain and profound heartache. That's part of our journey as human beings. In fact, emotions are meant to be felt. They're meant to be processed. The problem isn't that we experience the emotions themselves. The problem is when we never process them, when we keep them bottled up, ignored, suppressed, carried for years. That's when I think about one of my favorite sayings. Your organs shed tears that your eyes cannot. Because eventually the body starts carrying what the mind never fully released. And that's why one of the questions I often ask a patient is simple. Do you have a healthy outlet for your emotions? For some people it's prayer. For others, it's exercise. For others, it's time with family, maybe journaling, meditation, therapy, a trusted friend. The outlet itself doesn't have to look the same for everybody, but the need to process emotions is universal. Because there's a difference between experiencing an emotion and allowing that emotion to quietly shape your biology for months, years, or even decades. The goal isn't to avoid stress or grief or fear, but to recognize these emotions, process them, and move them through in a healthy way. Because as we've discussed today, emotions don't just affect the mind. They affect hormones, inflammation, energy production, and mitochondria. And understanding that may be one of the most important steps towards healing.