Wellness Wednesday with Alexa Kowaluk - The Mind-Body Connection: How Stress Shows Up in Your Body
- Alex Kowaluk
- Jan 12
- 7 min read
Stress is a word that we hear about often. Whether it's talking to friends and family about day to day stress or rating your stress on a scale from 0-10 at your doctors appointment. Stress is something that we have to navigate constantly through our life, and just like everything else, it often ebbs and flows depending on what is going on in our life. Stress isn’t always one big moment, it’s usually a collection of little things we navigate every day. A busy morning with the kids… the pressure of work piling up… or even something bigger, like a major life change. We do our best to cope, adapt, and keep moving through our routines.
But what happens when that stress doesn’t just stay in our thoughts?
Stress can start to show up physically, in tight shoulders, tension headaches, a stiff low back, jaw clenching, or that “wired but tired” feeling in your body. When our system stays in go-mode for too long, our muscles, joints, and nervous system begin to carry that load.
Understanding the mind-body connection is a huge part of healing. Your body is always communicating with you. Sometimes it just speaks through tension instead of words. It's time for us to pause and start to listen to it, everything connected.
Stress isn’t just an emotional or mental experience, it is actually a physical one as well. As women, we often push through our days carrying work responsibilities, caregiving roles, emotional labour, and the constant pressure to “keep it all together”. What many people don’t realize is that the body is always listening. And it communicates through tension, breath changes, posture, and yes… pain.
As a chiropractor who works closely with women in all seasons of life, I see the mind-body connection every single day. The women who come into my office often think something is “wrong” with their body, when really, their body is just overwhelmed and doing its best to keep them going.
What Happens Inside the Body When You’re Stressed
Let's talk about the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is your body’s built-in “alert mode.” It’s the part of your nervous system that activates when you’re stressed, rushed, or dealing with something challenging. When it switches on, your heart rate goes up, your breathing gets quicker, your muscles tense, and you actually become more sensitive to pain, all to help you react and stay safe. This isn’t a mindset, it’s a full-body reaction.
It’s incredibly useful in short bursts…but when it stays active for too long, it can lead to tension, pain, and burnout in your body. This is your body trying to keep you safe. The problem is that modern stress isn’t a quick sprint or a moment of danger, it’s ongoing and continuous. So the body stays “on,” even when you’re exhausted.
The Physical Signatures of Stress (If You Know, You Know)
Most women can immediately recognize the “classic” stress patterns, the tight shoulders, the stiff neck, the upper-trap tension that practically screams "I'm carrying everything right now”. But in practice, I often see stress showing up in ways many people don’t realize are connected at all. Stress does not just live in the obvious places.
It can settle into the jaw, leading to clenching, grinding, or tension headaches. It can show up as rib stiffness and that shallow, high breathing pattern that makes your whole chest feel tight. For many women, especially postpartum or during hormonal shifts, stress can create low-back guarding or even pelvic floor tension from constant bracing. Surprise, sometimes we need to learn how to relax our pelvic floor instead of always focusing on strengthening. And then there’s the mid-back pain collapse symptoms, the overwhelmed, overstimulated posture that creeps in when your body is simply tired of holding it all together.
These aren’t personal flaws or signs that you’re “doing it wrong.” They’re patterns, your body’s way of coping and communicating. And the best part? Patterns can be changed once you know what they’re trying to tell you. If listening to your body or trying to figure out the pattern feels confusing or overwhelming, that’s exactly when someone like me can help you make sense of it. You’re not meant to do this on your own.
Why Women Feel Stress in Their Bodies Differently
Many women don’t realize there are very real reasons their bodies hold tension the way they do. Hormonal shifts across the lifespan can change how muscles fire, how joints move, and how sensitive the nervous system feels. The constant emotional labour and caregiving (often invisible and unacknowledged) keeps the body in a low-grade “on” state, creating a baseline of tightness and vigilance. Add in sensory overload from noise, clutter, demands, and interruption, and the body starts bracing without us even noticing.
Pregnancy and postpartum bring their own mechanical shifts: changes in rib position, core recruitment, breathing patterns, and load on the pelvis all influence how the body copes under stress. And for many, long-standing people-pleasing patterns show up physically as holding, shrinking, or bracing. For example, if you grew up being told to “be good,” “be quiet,” “be easier,” or “don’t complain,” your nervous system may have learned early on that tension equals safety. Over time, these messages and responsibilities don’t just shape personality, they shape posture, breath, muscle tone, and fatigue levels. It is all connected, the mind-body connection is a very strong one.
This is why your body reacts the way it does. And it’s why your tension is not a character flaw, but a nervous system story that can absolutely be rewritten.
How Chiropractic Care Supports a Stressed Body
I could make a whole other blog about my love for chiropractic care and the important role it plays in our modern healthcare system now, but I will try and make it short about how chiropractic care can help support our stressed out body. The way that I practice chiropractic is with a wide, integrative scope because your body deserves more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Yes, I adjust when appropriate, but I also incorporate soft tissue therapy, medical acupuncture, red light therapy, and individualized exercise/rehab plans to support long-term change. We talk about lifestyle and nutrition in ways that are practical and aligned with your goals, not overwhelming. And when your care would benefit from a team approach, I collaborate closely with other practitioners, from physiotherapists and midwives to pharmacists, RMTs, and mental health providers to make sure you’re supported from every angle.
My goal is simple: to meet you where you’re at, address the root of what’s going on, and help your body function and feel its best.
One of the most powerful things chiropractic care can do is help the body feel safe again. When the nervous system senses safety, it finally has permission to unwind. For example, with adjustments, we restore healthy joint motion and improve the mobility to the areas that become especially stiff under chronic stress, caregiving demands, or hormonal shifts. Gentle work around the jaw, diaphragm, and pelvis helps release the muscular holding patterns that build up when the body has been bracing for too long. As these areas become more mobile and move more freely, the nervous system shifts out of “alarm mode,” reducing that constant sense of tension, guarding, or overwhelm. At the same time, improved movement creates clearer communication between the brain and body, allowing the system to organize, coordinate, and calm itself more efficiently. It’s why so many women walk out of a session saying, “I feel like I can finally breathe again.” That moment of spaciousness isn’t just physical, it’s the mind-body connection resetting in real time.
Simple Tools You Can Use at Home
These don’t take 20 minutes or fancy equipment, they take 20 seconds and you can do them right here and right now as you are reading this.
1. Belly Breathing
Place one hand on your belly and one on your chest. As you inhale, let your belly gently rise into your hand while your chest stays relatively still. This encourages your diaphragm to move fully, helping your body switch out of “high, shallow, stress breathing.” On the slow exhale, let your belly soften and fall. Repeat 3 calm breaths. Let your shoulders relax and unclench your jaw.
2. Shoulder Drop Check-In
Bring your shoulders up to your ears and hold for 2 seconds (a tiny intentional squeeze). Then exhale and let them fall. This resets the upper-trap “stress shrug” many of us hold without noticing. Most people feel an immediate sense of space in their neck and chest.
3. Cat/Cow or Pelvic Tilts
Gentle spinal movement is one of the quickest ways to dial down tension. Slow flexing and extending helps lubricate stiff joints, wakes up your core, and tells your system, “We’re safe enough to move.” Just 3-5 slow repetitions can shift you out of bracing mode.
4. “Name What’s Tight”
Sometimes the simplest regulation tool is awareness. Literally saying, “My jaw feels tight,” “My ribs feel stuck,” “My back is guarding” helps your brain process the tension instead of amplifying it. Noticing what you’re holding often softens it on its own.
Is my Pain Stress-Based or Mechanical?
Understanding whether your pain is stress-based or mechanical can be a game-changer in how you support your body.
Stress-based pain often moves around the body, flares during overwhelm, and settles when you rest, breathe, or ground your nervous system. It’s your body’s way of saying, “I’m carrying too much right now.”
Mechanical pain, on the other hand, follows predictable patterns. It shows up with certain movements, feels local and repeatable, and often points to a specific joint, muscle, or movement pattern that needs support.
The reality is that most women experience a mix of both, because the body doesn’t separate physical stress from emotional stress. Tight shoulders, jaw tension, rib stiffness, low back guarding, these can all be influenced by how you move and how you’re feeling. The good news? Both types of pain respond beautifully to a holistic approach that blends hands-on care, movement, breath work, and lifestyle support. When you address the mechanical pieces AND help the nervous system feel safe, the body finally has room to heal.
It's time to start listening to our body
Your body isn’t working against you, it’s communicating with you. Every tight muscle, every moment of stiffness, every flare of discomfort is your nervous system trying to keep you safe with the tools it currently has. When stress shows up in your muscles and joints, it’s not a sign of weakness or something you should “push through.” It’s a sign that you’re carrying more than your body can comfortably hold, and that you deserve real, whole-person support.
The beautiful thing is that your body is incredibly adaptable. With the right tools, care, and guidance, it can shift out of protection mode and back into ease. Gentle movement, breath work, hands-on treatment, nervous system focused care, and simple daily habits can create a powerful reset. Healing doesn’t happen by forcing your body to do more, it happens when you help it feel safe enough to let go. You don’t have to do any of this alone, we are not meant to do this all on our own. Find your community, find your village and your people, you deserve it.
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