Stress & Trauma

Everyone says stress is the most common HSV trigger, but this is too general a term. When someone says, "Oh, you're just stressed," it implies that if you just relax, you'll avoid frequent outbreaks, which isn't necessarily true. Not all stress causes outbreaks. Ongoing stress and chronic stress are to blame. They dysregulate the nervous system, where herpes lives and reactivates in response to changes within it. When your nervous system is dysregulated, chemical changes take place that signal herpes to reactivate. Looking at it this way, herpes becomes the messenger that is telling you your system is too stressed, unbalanced, and in survival mode. There are ways to reduce stress to keep it from reaching this point, and other ways to regulate your nervous system when it's out of balance, which is what this page is about.