There's a phrase you might have heard: "The body keeps the score." It's the title of a groundbreaking book by psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk but it's also a scientific reality that's now backed by research from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world.

When you experience emotional stress - whether it's a traumatic event, chronic anxiety, or unresolved grief - your body doesn't just "feel" it in the moment. It encodes it. Physically. In your nervous system, your connective tissue, and even your DNA.

Let's break down exactly how this works.

🧠 The Vagus Nerve: Your Body's Emotional Highway

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body, running from your brainstem down through your neck, chest, and abdomen. It's a core component of the parasympathetic nervous system - the system responsible for "rest and digest" after a stressful event passes.

But here's what makes it critical to emotional storage: research from the University of Virginia published in Behavioral Neuroscience found that the vagus nerve acts as a direct relay between the body's stress hormones and the brain's memory centres. When you experience something emotionally intense, your body releases epinephrine (adrenaline). That epinephrine activates the vagus nerve, which in turn triggers the release of norepinephrine into the amygdala - the brain's fear and memory processing centre. In their experiments, norepinephrine levels surged by 128% following vagal stimulation.

This is the mechanism that makes emotional memories so vivid and so persistent. The vagus nerve essentially tells your brain: "This is important. Store this deeply."

In people with PTSD, the Institute for Functional Medicine reports that this system becomes dysregulated. The autonomic nervous system gets stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode - even when there's no active threat. Your body continues responding as though the trauma is happening right now, driving chronic inflammation, immune dysfunction, and hormonal imbalance.

🕸️ Fascia: Your Body's Hidden Memory Network

Beyond the nervous system, there's a structure most people have never thought about: fascia. It's the three-dimensional web of connective tissue that wraps every muscle fibre, organ, nerve, and blood vessel in your body. For decades, surgeons and anatomists dismissed it as "packing material." That was a significant oversight.

A landmark paper published in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies examined whether fascia can hold memories. The researchers found that emotional trauma may alter collagen structure through the release of substance P from nerve endings - creating what they described as an "emotional scar" in the tissue itself. Because fascial cells like fibroblasts and mast cells are long-lasting, they may represent a form of "long-term memory" within the connective tissue.

This helps explain something bodyworkers and massage therapists have observed for years: patients spontaneously recalling buried memories, experiencing intense emotional releases, or trembling during myofascial release sessions. These aren't anomalies. They're the body surfacing stored emotional content when the tissue is manipulated. A 2025 scoping review in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences identified fascia research as a rapidly expanding field, with particular interest in the emotional and sensory roles of fascial tissue.

🧬 Epigenetics: When Emotions Rewrite Your Genes

Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from epigenetics — the study of how environmental factors change gene expression without altering DNA itself.

A 2025 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that adverse childhood experiences cause measurable changes in DNA methylation - particularly in genes governing your stress response system. The NR3C1 gene, which encodes the glucocorticoid receptor (your body's cortisol processing system), showed increased methylation following trauma, effectively disrupting the body's ability to regulate its own stress hormones.

The FKBP5 gene, a key regulator of the stress axis, showed similar alterations. These epigenetic changes don't just affect the individual; research published in Environmental Epigenetics (2025) found that trauma-induced methylation changes in genes like FKBP5 can be transmitted across generations. Descendants of trauma survivors exhibited the same methylation patterns as their parents.

Let that sink in. Your grandmother's unresolved grief may be influencing your cortisol levels today.

HIn 1998, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente published what became one of the most important health studies ever conducted. They asked over 17,000 adults about difficult childhood experiences - things like abuse, neglect, parental divorce, living with addiction or mental illness - and then looked at their health decades later.

They called these Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). And the connection to adult disease was staggering.

People with 4 or more ACEs, compared to those with none, had:

Plus a 2-4x higher risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke. And a 1,200% increase in suicide attempts.

Two-thirds of participants reported at least one ACE. This isn't rare. It's the majority of us.

The CDC now estimates that preventing ACEs could reduce depression by 78% and heart disease by 22%.

Here's the good news: the same body that holds onto stress also has the ability to let it go. The nervous system isn't a one-way recording. It's flexible and responsive - if you give it the right tools.

A field called somatic therapy (body-based healing) is producing real results. A randomised controlled trial found that Somatic Experiencing, a therapy that works with physical sensations rather than reliving memories, significantly reduced PTSD symptoms after just 15 sessions. And a study in Brain Stimulation showed that stimulating the vagus nerve calmed the brain's fear response in trauma-exposed individuals.

The World Health Organization has even called for more body-based mental health approaches, recognising that healing from emotional experiences requires working with the body - not just the mind.

You don't need expensive equipment or a therapist to start. Here are five things you can do today:

🛍️ TODAY’S RECOMMENDED SWAPS

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