After years of a tense and disparaging marriage, Becca Scott became so tired that she struggled to stand up. When she’d finished the school run, masking her exhaustion with a smile as she waved her children off for the day, she’d come home and crawl back in bed, where she’d remain for hours, with little strength to do anything else. “I just remember the heart palpitations,” she says. “My legs were heavy like I’d been running and running and running.”
We often speak about bad relationships making us sad – but we rarely mention them making us sick. Scott was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which she struggled through for 18 months. When she left her husband, it disappeared. “That really just blew my mind,” she says. “I suddenly got my strength. It was like a light bulb switching on.”
Muriel Wallace-Scott, an autoimmune clinic nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner, frequently treats women with chronic fatigue. “When you’re being exposed to stress, we end up getting stuck in a fight-or-flight state,” she explains. While cavemen remained alert for predators, we’ve become alert for lower levels of conflict, like arguing over where things go in the fridge, or how the house should be cleaned.
“What happens then is our body’s priority is to survive, not thrive,” she says of the eternally alert state. “It doesn’t focus on hormones, or a healthy menstrual cycle, having a good thyroid function or digesting our last meal. It’s sending all of your available resources and energy to your extremities and muscles, so you can run away as fast as you can.”
Scott’s chronic fatigue first came on after a nasty bout of flu, which turned into pleurisy (inflammation around the lungs) that lingered in her body for months. “The immune system works really closely with our nervous system,” says Wallace-Scott. “When you are in a state of hypervigilance, your immune system has a tendency to overreact to very small threats too. So, your inflammatory response (the way that your immune cells work as a team) isn’t happening well anymore,” which can lead to autoimmune disease like Lupus or Crohn’s.
Scott developed Crohn’s disease (a lifelong inflammatory bowel disease) when she was a child growing up in a conflict-ridden family home. She also developed Hashimoto’s, which is an autoimmune thyroid disease. Both of these, which can cause weight gain, sensitivity to cold, constipation, dry skin, hair loss, and muscle or joint pain were exacerbated by the tension in her romantic relationship later in life, she says.
When you’re in a high-stress situation, it will also affect your adrenals (the two small, triangle-shaped endocrine glands on top of each kidney), which produce hormones that regulate your metabolism and blood pressure. “First, we have our adrenaline and our noradrenaline; then, within a few minutes, our cortisol kicks in,” says Wallace-Scott. “It’s not uncommon for me to do a 24-hour circadian rhythm test looking at cortisol through different points in the day and finding that the person’s response is actually really low, because of poor regulation. People with autoimmune diseases are put on steroids for aggressive flares because they need more cortisol, which has anti-inflammatory properties, but we lose that effect when our immune cells become resistant in the same way diabetics can to insulin.”
If an individual is feeling really inflamed, fatigued and impaired, they’re going to feel stuck and more dependent on their partner. It’s about trying to make the person as resilient and healthy as they can be
On the other side of the coin, “If you’re constantly producing cortisol (the stress hormone) you’re going to be really fatigued, you can experience more brain fog and you can feel very unresilient,” Wallace-Scott says. “This can lead you to not exercising as much as you used to or to building an intolerance. There’s so much that someone can do with diet, supplements and medication to manage a condition – but they’re ignoring the big elephant in the room.”
“In homoeopathy we call it a maintaining cause,” says Wallace-Scott, who’s been a women’s health practitioner for 25 years and published a book of what she’d learned about relationships and health, Bloom Through Life, last month.” If somebody lives with or is constantly surrounded by people who make them feel rubbish, they’re never going to have lots of confidence, vitality or joy. They’re going to be chronically stressed – and that will impact their health.”
“It’s about assessing how much that relationship, that toxicity, that stress is having on their health, because it’s a chicken-and-egg situation,” says Wallace-Scott. “If an individual is feeling really inflamed, fatigued and impaired, they’re going to feel stuck and more dependent on their partner. It’s about trying to make the person as resilient and healthy as they can be so they feel in a position to start making bigger changes to their life.”
After years of disagreements over the family finances, Scott hit her limit in a car showroom. Her husband had just bought a new family vehicle without even consulting her. He didn’t ask for her input because, to him, her voice didn’t matter. After years of disregard and feeling degraded, it was like a switch was flicked in her brain. She was done. “We had children and were together for a long time,” she says, “You just go ‘it is what it is’ because you don’t know anything different. You think that’s what love is.”
In pop culture, particularly on social media, we speak a lot about newly single people having “post-breakup glow-ups”. But, in many cases, this almost overnight exuberance isn’t down to a new haircut or gym membership; it’s the freedom from a situation that’s, often, literally draining the life out of you through your nervous and immune system and making you sick.
This, notably, is only the physical side of things. It almost goes without saying that when relationships are strained, it can lead to feelings of isolation, insecurity and emotional distress, which can in turn trigger an overproduction of cortisol, tying the emotional and physical symptoms together in a neat anxiety and depression-inducing bow.
In the UK, the number of women killed by men has sat between 124 and 168 per year. 62 per cent of these women have been killed by a current or former partner. When I ask Wallace-Scott whether stress-induced illness could be a quieter fatal factor in relationships, she says she expects so – but it’s yet to be proven. While a number of studies have reported that single women tend to be healthier, less depressed and live longer than married women, the causes for this lengthier lifespan are harder to track. “There need to be more studies done,” Wallace-Scott says. “More research with our current generation, rather than using old data.”
What we do know is this: People who experienced severe stress or trauma have been found to be 36 per cent more likely to develop autoimmune diseases like Rheumatoid arthritis, Lupus, Psoriasis, Hashimoto’s and Crohn’s disease. Living in fight-or-flight bumps up cortisol, which can lead to a suppressed immune system, increased inflammation, leaky gut, hormone imbalances, and autoimmune flare-ups. A 2010 study even found that bad relationships increase the risk of death by 50 per cent, the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
“Your home, your relationships, should be the safe place that you can go to switch off, recover and reset,” asserts Wallace-Scott. “When people can’t rest and digest, that really does take its toll. But when people finally get this weight lifted off their shoulders, they have so many opportunities to live their life completely differently from what it could have been.”
Wallace-Scott notes that she sees a lot of middle-aged women coming to the realisation that their lives, the way they’re spoken to and treated by the people around them, is no longer serving them. She’s pleased to see this recalibration taking place but wishes it could happen much sooner for people. “We only have one life,” she says. “And it’s very short.”
