In short: yes. Although there are other reasons for pain besides fear.

In order to better understand if fear might be affecting your pain level, please consider the following questions:

1. Do you feel anxious, emotionally, or tense throughout the day (even if on/off)?
2. Do your emotions control you more than you control your emotions?
3. Does your mind race?
4. Do you worry?
5. When you feel these emotions, do you notice an increase in your physical pain level?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above questions and you are currently experiencing pain, it’s a good bet that fear is a contributing factor.

This being said, pain has many causes. Physical pain is caused by:

• Trauma
• Digestion
• Thoughts
• Feelings
• Spiritual origin

So when it comes to creating relief, it’s important to test each cause and see what works best for you; ideally without judgment. For example, you might have an objection to the idea that your thoughts and feelings could be contributing to — or even causing — your health issues.

And this resistance is normal. I don’t blame you one bit. Especially in the society in which we live, where we have assigned a negative connotation to the idea of anyone working on their mental or emotional health. Yet, these are two pillars of health out of four, which means that without putting emphasis on these two pillars, we have two legs out of four on our ‘health table’.

Now, consider where your “spiritual health” comes from. Do you feel and experience connection on a regular basis? Throughout the day? With yourself? With others?

If it turns out that you are relying on a religious organization to help you feel healthy spiritually, rather than creating this relationship for yourself, I might suggest you strengthen this pillar as well.

Otherwise, we’d be down to one leg of your ‘health table’, and that makes it too easy for the table to fall down. Plus, all the pressure on that leg makes the wood swell, splinter, crack, and wear down more quickly.

In other words, fear is caused by opportunities for improving mental and emotional health (unless of course, we are talking about a truly life-threatening situation happening right now at this moment).

And when we ignore these opportunities and persist in a state of fear, our health table becomes unstable. And we end up putting a bit too much weight on the leg(s) that is/are leftover.

Is this making sense? I sure hope so.

Fear causes pain because it’s a symptom of the system being stressed already. And when the body communicates with you, it communicates in all ways, including physical pain.

have a wonderful day,