When Democracy Falters, Our Bodies Feel It Too
Exploring the physical cost of sustained political strain, and the bodily systems most affected by it.
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Dear friends
At last, I’m here to follow through on my promise to share how collapsing democracy may be affecting us at a physical level, because what we feel as headaches, gut trouble, or constant weariness may in fact be our bodies registering the erosion of political stability. Recognising the impact is the first step to changing it.
When political systems shift, the stress does not remain in our minds — we carry it in our bodies.
Living through the slow erosion of democratic norms brings with it a sustained kind of physical pressure that is difficult to release. No matter whether we read the news, talk with friends, attend rallies, or withdraw in exhaustion, our bodies don’t draw a line between what’s happening with our government and what happens within us. We respond physically to the uncertainty, the constant vigilance, the sense that what once felt secure may no longer be relied on, and over time, that response takes a toll.
What we call mental health is not separate from our physical health. Our minds and bodies form one system, and prolonged stress touches every part of it. When stress continues over months and years, it can reshape how the body works at every level. Understanding this connection matters, because it helps us see the full picture of what sustained political upheaval demands of us. It is not only a civic or moral challenge; it is also biological. And when we understand that, we are better equipped to support one another and ourselves in ways that make endurance possible.
The Musculoskeletal System
Your musculoskeletal system is most often where stress shows itself first.
When you live under sustained pressure, your body holds itself in readiness. Your muscles contract, preparing you to move quickly or defend yourself if needed. You experience this as tension — most often in your shoulders, jaw, or lower back.
When the pressure does not ease, those muscles never get the signal to fully release. Your muscles remain partially contracted — sometimes for months, and even years — and that constant tension strains your wider network of muscles, bones, joints, and connective tissues. Keeping your muscles in this state of constant readiness also consumes energy, leaving you more prone to fatigue and weariness, even when you consider yourself to be resting.
What begins as tightness in your shoulders or jaw can develop into persistent back or neck pain. For many, it also leads to tension headaches or migraines. Prolonged political stress leaves an imprint on your musculoskeletal system that is slow to undo.
The Digestive System
Your digestive system is another place where prolonged stress takes hold quickly.
Your gut is governed by the enteric nervous system, which is one of the three main divisions of the autonomic nervous system, alongside the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. It is sometimes described as the body’s “second brain”, because of the sheer number of neurons it contains and the degree of independence it has in regulating digestion. This means that when your body prepares for danger, your gut is directly affected. Signals that normally regulate your appetite, acid production, and the movement of food through your intestines are disrupted. Digestion either slows down or speeds up, depending on how your body is trying to cope.
For many of us this shows up immediately — a tight stomach before reading the news, nausea after a tense conversation, or an unsettled appetite during weeks of political upheaval. For others, the effects creep in more slowly: persistent bloating, indigestion, diarrhoea, constipation, or an ongoing cycle of comfort eating followed by fatigue.
Over time, the strain extends further, until your gut’s microbial community — which is essential for breaking down food, absorbing nutrients, and supporting your immunity — becomes unbalanced, a state called dysbiosis. That imbalance will not simply resolve on its own when the stress is unrelenting. It compounds, reducing your ability to draw energy from what you eat, weakening your gut’s protective barrier, and disrupting immune regulation. The result is not just discomfort in your digestive tract but wider effects: deeper fatigue, increased inflammation, and greater susceptibility to illness.
Political stress is not just something you feel — it is something you metabolise, absorb, and carry deep into your body.
The Immune System
Your immune system is also deeply affected by prolonged stress. Its role is to defend you against infection, repair damage, and keep inflammation in balance, but when you live under sustained pressure, that balance is disrupted.
Stress hormones such as cortisol are part of the problem. In short bursts they help regulate inflammation and mobilise your body’s defences, but when cortisol stays elevated for months or years, its effects shift. Immune cells become less responsive, wounds heal more slowly, and your ability to fight off viruses and other infections is reduced.
Alternatively, stress can drive the immune system into overactivity. Instead of controlled inflammation that protects you, your body generates a low-level, chronic inflammation that wears you down from within. This kind of inflammation is not only painful, it has been linked to a range of long-term conditions, from heart disease to diabetes.
Either way, the result is that living under prolonged political strain makes you less able to mount a strong defence when you need it, and more likely to experience damaging inflammation in the background of everyday life.
The Cardiovascular System
Your cardiovascular system — your heart and blood vessels — are under constant influence from stress. In moments of danger, stress hormones raise your blood pressure and quicken your heart rate to pump more blood to your muscles and vital organs. For short periods, this response can help you survive.
When the pressure does not lift, however, your cardiovacsular system does not return to baseline. Your blood pressure remains higher than it should, so your heart works harder and rests less. Blood vessels exposed to ongoing strain become stiffer and more vulnerable to damage. Over time this steady pressure increases the risk of hypertension, heart disease, and stroke.
Chronic stress also alters the balance of cholesterol and other fats in your bloodstream, while inflammation accelerates the build-up of fatty deposits in your artery walls. This combination makes cardiovascular disease more likely, even if you appear otherwise healthy.
Living under prolonged political stress means your heart and blood vessels are not simply reacting in the moment, but carrying the imprint of that strain day after day, shaping your long-term health in ways that often remain invisible until serious illness develops. The cost of your political vigilance then becomes embedded in the rhythm of your heart.
The Respiratory System
Breathing is one of the clearest signs of stress working in your body, because your breathing pattern changes as your body prepares for action.
Under threat or stress, your breath shortens and moves higher into your chest. Instead of allowing the diaphragm to draw air deeply into your lungs, you slip into a faster, shallower pattern designed for immediate readiness. In short bursts this helps you take in oxygen quickly, but when it becomes your default pattern it reduces the efficiency of gas exchange and keeps your body in a cycle of alertness. You may notice this this as tightness in your chest, breathlessness during ordinary activity, or a need to sigh or yawn as you try to deepen the breath.
Over time, shallow breathing can increase fatigue, because your body is working harder for less oxygen. It can also worsen feelings of anxiety, as your nervous system reads rapid breathing as a signal of danger and responds by ramping-up vigilance. If you already live with a respiratory condition such as asthma, chronic stress can intensify symptoms and trigger more frequent flare-ups.
When you live under prolonged political strain, even something as fundamental as your breathing — the process that sustains you from moment to moment — becomes entangled with your body’s response to the daily news.
This connection is why breathwork is such an integral part of my early series In Uncertain Times, Start Here. Regulating how you breathe is one of the few ways you can actively interrupt your body’s stress response in real time.
The Endocrine System
Your endocrine system is the network of glands that release hormones to regulate energy, growth, reproduction, mood, and stress.
Cortisol and epinephrine — also known as adrenaline — are the most obvious stress hormones, but they do not act in isolation. Prolonged political stress shifts the balance across your whole system. When cortisol remains elevated, it changes how your thyroid regulates metabolism, how insulin manages blood sugar, and how your reproductive hormones are produced. These changes can leave you feeling depleted, affect the menstrual cycle, and raise the risk of metabolic disorders such as diabetes.
Your endocrine system also feeds back into your mood and mental health. Imbalances in your stress hormones can heighten anxiety, lower resilience, and intensify cycles of sleeplessness. What begins as your body’s effort to cope with political pressure then becomes a pattern that reinforces the very stress it is responding to.
Living under sustained political strain therefore reshapes the hormonal signals that guide your daily life, leaving you with less capacity to rest and recover.
The Reproductive System
Your reproductive system is especially sensitive to prolonged political stress because it depends on a delicate balance of hormones, many of which are disrupted when your body remains in survival mode. When stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine stay elevated, they interfere with the production of oestrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.
For women, this can mean irregular or missed menstrual cycles, more painful periods, or changes in fertility. For men, it can reduce testosterone levels, lower sperm count, and affect sexual function. In all of us, prolonged political stress can lower our libido and make intimacy more difficult to sustain, not simply because of mood, but because our bodies are rerouting resources away from reproduction towards survival.
These changes are not trivial — if you’re affected by them, they affect how you feel about yourself, your relationships, and your future. Living under prolonged political and social strain places pressure not only on the systems that keep you alive day to day, but also on the systems that carry life forward into the next generation.
The Integumentary System
Your integumentary system — your skin, along with hair, nails, and the glands within your skin — also bear the brunt of prolonged stress. As your body’s first barrier of protection, it is not immune to strain. Stress hormones alter how your skin produces oil, how blood flows to its surface, and how effectively it repairs itself after damage.
For many of us, this shows up in visible ways: acne flare-ups, rashes, hives, or eczema that becomes harder to control. Wounds may take longer to heal, and conditions such as psoriasis often worsen under strain. Even without these, your skin can appear duller, feel more sensitive, or show signs of premature ageing.
Because the integumentary system is outward-facing, these changes can be particularly difficult to live with. They not only signal what is happening inside your body but also affect how you feel in public, how you present yourself, and how others respond to you. Prolonged political stress becomes inscribed on the surface of your body, as well as within.
The Nervous System
Your nervous system is the thread that runs through all of this. It is divided into the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, which carries signals to the rest of your body. Within the peripheral system lies the autonomic nervous system, which regulates functions you generally do not consciously control — your heart rate, breathing, digestion, immunity, and hormonal balance.
Under prolonged political stress, the sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system is activated again and again. This is the branch that prepares you for threat, keeping your body in a heightened state of vigilance. Normally, the parasympathetic branch would step in to restore balance once danger has passed, slowing your heart, deepening your breath, and supporting digestion and repair. But when the sense of threat does not ease, that shift back to balance does not occur.
The result is a body that spends more time in a state of activation than in recovery. Muscles, digestion, immunity, breathing, hormones, and reproduction are all governed by these same circuits. Your nervous system coordinates the response that you then feel as tension, stomach upset, lowered immunity, shallow breathing, disrupted hormones, or exhaustion.
Living under sustained political and social strain means your nervous system is being asked to carry more than it was designed for. That burden radiates outward into every other system of your body, shaping your health in ways that accumulate over time.
All of this can sound overwhelming, but we are not without a path forward. The changes stress creates in our bodies are real, yet they are also manageable when we have the right knowledge, tools, and skills. Even under unrelenting political strain, there are ways to support our health, reduce the load on our systems, and build capacity for endurance.
In my next post, we’ll look at what happens when political strain and civic responsibility begin to ask more of us than our bodies can sustain — when prolonged stress tips into burnout, and the drive to stay engaged becomes part of what wears us down. Understanding that threshold is vital, because how we navigate it determines not only our personal wellbeing, but our collective capacity to keep going.
In the meantime, if you want to begin with practical steps, I encourage you to start with my earlier 7 part-series, In Uncertain Times, Start Here*. It will walk you through small, concrete actions you can begin right away.
In solidarity, as ever
— Lori
© Lori Corbet Mann, 2025
Before I close, I want to thank you all, and share how profoundly I’ve felt your support since I told you of our recent family bereavement, last week. The messages, the prayers, the kind thoughts, and the quiet act of holding me and those I love in the Light have carried me in every sense. You didn’t only offer me comfort, but strength — the kind that reaches across distance, steadying both heart and spirit.
This community has helped carry me through my shock and grief and reminded me, in the most tangible way, what shared care can do. I’ve felt it. And it has helped me steady myself a little more each day, in unimaginable circumstances .
Because of that, I’ve been able to hold and steady my own community here — to do for them what you’ve done for me. That circle of care has been a living reminder of what we talk about so often: that community itself is a form of resistance, and that when we keep one another steady, we keep something vital alive.
Thank you for that. For the light you’ve sent, the patience you’ve shown, and the generosity of heart you’ve shared so freely. I’ve felt every bit of it.
You’ve proven that even when life narrows to its hardest passages, we rise by holding one another up.
*“In Uncertain Times, Start Here” is a series of posts with some simple but highly effective practices for managing your stress response.
We start with the breath — the only part of your stress response you can shift at will. When you slow and deepen your breath, you send a powerful signal to your entire system: it’s safe, you can rest, you’re not in immediate danger.
Part 1: Developing awareness of the way we breathe naturally — because we can’t change what we’re not aware of.
Part 2: Diaphragmatic Breathing — the foundation on which all calming breathing techniques are built.
Part 3: The science of therapeutic scent — a powerful, layered intervention that interrupts the stress response and supports a shift toward regulation and calm.
Part 4: Three-Part Breath — helps you build up the capacity of your lungs without forcing it.
Part 5: Constructive Rest — a simple and relaxing position that allows your body to release physical tension without strain.
Part 6: This shares the most effective calming breathing technique I’ve learned in 30 years. Simple yet exceedingly powerful — it’s my go-to.
These posts will also help you make sense of what you’re feeling, and find practical ways to recover your balance:
3 Fast-Acting Tools to Help You Tackle Overwhelm Simple, science-backed, therapeutic practices to reset your nervous system, fast.
What It Means to Stay Human When the System Has No Shame How to understand moral outrage, survive moral injury, and protect your capacity to resist.
6 Steps to Recalibrate Without Giving in How to live with clarity and purpose in a system designed to confuse and exhaust you.
Before I turned to creating our current guide, readers found these posts the most steadying. I’ve unlocked each one in the archive so they are all now free for everyone to read. I hope they provide you with some much-needed relief.
An entire world (with a few exceptions) suffering from PTSD...
Reality feels increasingly at arms distance.
Lori, thank you for caring about all of us.
What a fascinating essay on the nine systems and how they function. Plus, hooray for the community, which provides the comfort and strength you like to see in your circle of care. Also, thank you for unlocking the posts you featured in your archives.