Distinguishing Meaning-Body Influences in Disease(s)

August 17, 2026 Health & Healing No Comments

Meaning-body influences do not appear as one uniform ‘stress effect.’ Existing science already finds differences across diseases, people, outcomes, and time scales, but mostly through relatively coarse psychological concepts.

Deeper regularities may exist – disease-related, person-specific, transdiagnostic, or relational – but until now, they have neither been clearly established nor ruled out. We are beginning to distinguish the shadows without yet knowing what casts them.

This blog is part of a triptych

Can meaning matter bodily? -> Does Deep Meaning Change the Body?
Does meaning matter differently? -> Distinguishing Meaning-Body Influences in Disease(s)
Can we scientifically discover how? -> Beyond Stress: Toward a Science of Meaningful Constellations

From whether to what

Social evaluation, relationships, expectation, learned associations, and other meaningful processes can participate in bodily responses. But this does not tell us whether they all work through some generic pathway called ‘stress.’

In Stress: Amorphous Thing or a World of Meaning?, the grey blob of ‘stress’ was already opened into a world of possible meanings. The next question is one of differentiation. Does humiliation have the same bodily relevance as loss of control? Does belonging have the same relevance as dependency? Does the same meaningful pattern matter similarly in different people? And might different bodily vulnerabilities participate differently in all this?

A disease remains a disease

Rheumatoid arthritis is rheumatoid arthritis. It has immunological, genetic, environmental, behavioral, and other biological determinants. The same caution applies to multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, migraine, chronic pain, and other conditions. Nothing is gained by turning bodily disease into a disguised psychological problem.

Yet biological disease occurs in a living person. Development, relationships, expectations, behavior, memories, social circumstances, and meaningful experience are pertinent. As discussed in Distinction without Division, different levels can be distinguished without being divided into separate realities.

Moreover, disease itself becomes meaningful. Pain may change behavior and relationships. Fatigue may alter identity and possibilities for the future. A diagnosis can bring fear, relief, uncertainty, or a changed sense of self. Meaning-body influence is therefore unlikely to be a simple one-way arrow.

Science sees differences

The scientific literature is intriguing precisely because different pictures appear in different conditions. In rheumatoid arthritis, research has found associations involving worrying, avoidance coping, appraisal, and social support [1–4]. In multiple sclerosis, acute stressors, anxiety, and coping have been investigated in relation to relapse, but generic stress findings remain inconsistent [5–8].

Inflammatory bowel disease provides yet another picture, with prospective research into mood, psychosocial factors, perceived stress, and relapse, but with substantial inconsistency [9–13]. Migraine research increasingly looks at within-person dynamics: daily stress, changes in stress, timing, and attack cycles [14–16]. In chronic low-back pain, fear-avoidance, catastrophizing, perceived control, and self-efficacy become particularly relevant to disability [17–18].

None of this establishes psychological profiles for these diseases. It supports a more cautious conclusion: existing research shows differentiated psychological influences across diseases, outcomes, people, and time scales — but the differentiation remains conceptual and coarse.

Even the outcome needs distinguishing

Saying that something ‘affects rheumatoid arthritis’ may itself hide several very different things. Does it relate to inflammatory activity, pain, fatigue, disability, symptom perception, quality of life, treatment behavior, or long-term progression? These should not be treated as one outcome.

Chronic pain makes this intuitively clear. Fear of movement can substantially influence disability without this meaning that fear has equivalently changed the underlying nociceptive process. Likewise, in an inflammatory disease, psychological factors may be strongly related to experienced disease burden while showing a different relationship to objective inflammation.

So even ‘meaning influences disease’ is a large arrow. What matters may involve meaningful organization: this person, this bodily process, this outcome, and this moment in an evolving trajectory.

The person has grain

This brings in What about Psycho-Anisotropy?. Wood behaves differently along and across its grain. Human meaningfulness may likewise be direction-sensitive.

A remark that hardly touches one person can penetrate deeply into another. Receiving help can mean safe belonging, or it can mean frightening dependency. Uncertainty can feel like possibility or loss of control. The external situation alone does not reveal which way the experience will travel.

This suggests that at least some variability between people may be structured rather than random. Averaging can then become deceptive. If one meaningful pattern is important in one subgroup, another in a second subgroup, and neither in a third, their combination might appear as one modest average ‘stress effect.’ Psycho-anisotropy does not prove that this happens. It gives us reason to look.

Might the body also have grain?

The next possibility is more speculative. Different bodily systems have different organizations. Immune-mediated disease, migraine, chronic pain, gastrointestinal inflammation, and cardiovascular regulation are biologically not the same. Might this make them differently sensitive to aspects of whole-person meaningful organization?

Perhaps. But this is precisely where caution matters. There is no good basis for saying that rheumatoid arthritis corresponds to meaningful constellation X while multiple sclerosis corresponds to constellation Y. That would resurrect old disease-personality thinking under new terminology.

The possibilities are much broader. A meaningful pattern might matter only in a subgroup. It might cut across several diseases. It might mainly affect symptoms rather than underlying disease activity. A widely human pattern might interact differently with different biological vulnerabilities. Disease-specific meaningful regularities might turn out to be weak. These are alternatives to investigate, not conclusions to choose beforehand.

Why haven’t we found them?

One possible answer is that much existing research has not been designed to find them.

Science commonly begins with concepts such as stress, anxiety, depression, coping, catastrophizing, social support, or stressful life events. These are useful constructs. Yet meaning may already have been compressed before measurement starts. ‘Social support,’ for instance, may mean being safely held to one person and losing independence to another. ‘Work conflict’ can involve injustice, humiliation, fear of failure, threatened belonging, or something else altogether.

This connects with About the (In)visibility of Coherence. Dynamic organization is harder to see than its products. Subconceptual processes are harder to measure than already-formed concepts. In making human complexity measurable, science may sometimes make part of what matters less visible. Thus the lack of strong evidence for meaning-specific disease constellations neither proves nor disproves their existence.

Shadowy figures

Perhaps present research shows shadowy figures: worrying, avoidance, anxiety, social support, catastrophizing, perceived control. They have enough structure to be scientifically interesting, but they do not yet reveal what, if anything, lies more deeply behind them.

One measured construct could arise from several deeper organizations. Conversely, one deeper organization might appear as worrying in one setting, avoidance in another, and catastrophizing elsewhere. Some shadows may have little to do with deep meaning at all. The measuring instrument also matters: questionnaires, interviews, daily diaries, biomarkers, and clinical outcomes illuminate different aspects.

So, we may be dancing in the dark. Present science shows shadowy figures that are compatible with real dancers, but they do not yet reveal the dance. Nor do they prove that the dancers we imagine are actually there.

Perhaps the deeper level is relational

There is another possibility. Looking for hidden ‘things’ may itself be too object-like. Perhaps what lies deeper is partly relational.

Take social support. Underneath this one concept may lie support in relation to belonging, dependence in relation to autonomy, needing another in relation to possible rejection. Worrying may involve responsibility regarding uncertainty, control regarding feared consequences, or care regarding an inability to let go.

Patterns Behind Patterns explores how deeper organization can reside in interactions among patterns rather than in isolated contents. From Cognitive Dissonance to Active Denial gives a concrete example: an apparently simple belief can participate in identity, belonging, loyalty, fear, status, and memory until the whole becomes self-reinforcing. The deeper organization lies partly in how things belong together.

Deep Relations and constellations

This opens the possibility of looking for Deep Relations: recurring meaningful relations within human experience. Several such relations may dynamically participate in a meaningful constellation. A Deep Insight may arise when relations that previously seemed separate become understandable as parts of a larger whole.

This should not become another catalog. “Constellation X causes disease Y” would take us straight back to premature conceptualization. As explored in From Patterns to Meaning, meaningfulness is more than the recurrence of statistical patterns. It concerns patterns that participate within a larger, evolving organization.

The scientific questions are therefore dynamic. What activates a constellation? What does it recruit? How does it change? What reinforces or loosens it? Does anything bodily change with its movement? And does this happen similarly enough across people to constitute a meaningful regularity?

Where is the regularity?

Human complexity does not necessarily mean that everything is unique. Nor does regularity require everyone to be alike. There may be several levels at once: within-person regularities, subgroup regularities, disease-related regularities, transdiagnostic patterns, and deeply general human regularities.

Surface and depth may also differ. Two people can both report ‘stress’ while undergoing very different deeper movements. Conversely, bereavement, professional conflict, illness, and relationship difficulty may look entirely different yet participate in a related Deep Relation.

The important point is not to decide beforehand where the regularity must lie. Disease categories may prove important. So may personal grain. Deep Relations may cross both. Several levels may interact. The scientific attitude is simple: distinguish before concluding what the distinctions are.

Dancing in the dark

So, are meaning-body influences distinguishable in diseases? Yes, to some degree. Existing research differentiates among diseases, outcomes, people, psychological constructs, and time scales. Yet much of this remains conceptually coarse. We can see enough to know that one grey stress blob is inadequate, but not enough to map the deeper landscape.

This leaves an unusual scientific position. It would be premature to claim disease-specific meaningful constellations. It would also be premature to dismiss them merely because current instruments have not clearly shown them. The shadowy figures are interesting precisely because several explanations remain possible.

The next question is therefore methodological: how can science make meaningful organization more visible without reducing it too early to the concepts it already knows how to measure?

―

Bibliography

[1] Evers AW, Kraaimaat FW, Geenen R, Jacobs JW, Bijlsma JW. Stress-vulnerability factors as long-term predictors of disease activity in early rheumatoid arthritis. J Psychosom Res. 2003 Oct;55(4):293-302. doi: 10.1016/s0022-3999(02)00632-3. PMID: 14507538.

[2] Evers AW, Verhoeven EW, van Middendorp H, Sweep FC, Kraaimaat FW, Donders AR, Eijsbouts AE, van Laarhoven AI, de Brouwer SJ, Wirken L, Radstake TR, van Riel PL. Does stress affect the joints? Daily stressors, stress vulnerability, immune and HPA axis activity, and short-term disease and symptom fluctuations in rheumatoid arthritis. Ann Rheum Dis. 2014 Sep;73(9):1683-8. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2012-203143. Epub 2013 Jul 9. PMID: 23838082.

[3] Evers AW, Kraaimaat FW, Geenen R, Jacobs JW, Bijlsma JW. Pain coping and social support as predictors of long-term functional disability and pain in early rheumatoid arthritis. Behav Res Ther. 2003 Nov;41(11):1295-310. doi: 10.1016/s0005-7967(03)00036-6. PMID: 14527529.

[4] Patterson SL, Park J, Hartogensis W, Katz P. Perceived Stress and Prediction of Worse Patient-Reported Outcomes in a Rheumatoid Arthritis Cohort. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2025 Sep;77(9):1085-1094. doi: 10.1002/acr.25543. Epub 2025 May 2. PMID: 40181767; PMCID: PMC12354076.

[5] Sturgeon JA, Finan PH, Zautra AJ. Affective disturbance in rheumatoid arthritis: psychological and disease-related pathways. Nat Rev Rheumatol. 2016 Sep;12(9):532-42. doi: 10.1038/nrrheum.2016.112. Epub 2016 Jul 14. PMID: 27411910; PMCID: PMC5449457.

[6] von Drathen S, Gold SM, Peper J, Rahn AC, Ramien C, Magyari M, Hansen HC, Friede T, Heesen C. Stress and Multiple Sclerosis – Systematic review and meta-analysis of the association with disease onset, relapse risk and disability progression. Brain Behav Immun. 2024 Aug;120:620-629. doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2024.06.004. Epub 2024 Jun 19. PMID: 38906489.

[7] Briones-Buixassa L, Milà R, Mª Aragonès J, Bufill E, Olaya B, Arrufat FX. Stress and multiple sclerosis: A systematic review considering potential moderating and mediating factors and methods of assessing stress. Health Psychol Open. 2015 Nov 4;2(2):2055102915612271. doi: 10.1177/2055102915612271. PMID: 28070374; PMCID: PMC5193283.

[8] Brown RF, Tennant CC, Sharrock M, Hodgkinson S, Dunn SM, Pollard JD. Relationship between stress and relapse in multiple sclerosis: Part II. Direct and indirect relationships. Mult Scler. 2006 Aug;12(4):465-75. doi: 10.1191/1352458506ms1296oa. PMID: 16900760.

[9] Potagas C, Mitsonis C, Watier L, Dellatolas G, Retziou A, Mitropoulos P, Sfagos C, Vassilopoulos D. Influence of anxiety and reported stressful life events on relapses in multiple sclerosis: a prospective study. Mult Scler. 2008 Nov;14(9):1262-8. doi: 10.1177/1352458508095331. Epub 2008 Aug 28. PMID: 18755825.

[10] Aloni R, Dror C, Barazani T, Kalron A. Wartime stress and relapse risk in people with multiple sclerosis: a prospective cohort study. J Neurol. 2025 Sep 8;272(9):619. doi: 10.1007/s00415-025-13366-9. PMID: 40924195; PMCID: PMC12420726.

[11] Ge L, Liu S, Li S, Yang J, Hu G, Xu C, Song W. Psychological stress in inflammatory bowel disease: Psychoneuroimmunological insights into bidirectional gut-brain communications. Front Immunol. 2022 Oct 6;13:1016578. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.1016578. PMID: 36275694; PMCID: PMC9583867.

[12] Mittermaier C, Dejaco C, Waldhoer T, Oefferlbauer-Ernst A, Miehsler W, Beier M, Tillinger W, Gangl A, Moser G. Impact of depressive mood on relapse in patients with inflammatory bowel disease: a prospective 18-month follow-up study. Psychosom Med. 2004 Jan-Feb;66(1):79-84. doi: 10.1097/01.psy.0000106907.24881.f2. PMID: 14747641.

[13] Bitton A, Dobkin PL, Edwardes MD, Sewitch MJ, Meddings JB, Rawal S, Cohen A, Vermeire S, Dufresne L, Franchimont D, Wild GE. Predicting relapse in Crohn’s disease: a biopsychosocial model. Gut. 2008 Oct;57(10):1386-92. doi: 10.1136/gut.2007.134817. Epub 2008 Apr 7. PMID: 18390994.

[14] Vidal A, Gómez-Gil E, Sans M, Portella MJ, Salamero M, Piqué JM, Panés J. Life events and inflammatory bowel disease relapse: a prospective study of patients enrolled in remission. Am J Gastroenterol. 2006 Apr;101(4):775-81. doi: 10.1111/j.1572-0241.2006.00476.x. Epub 2006 Feb 22. PMID: 16494590.

[15] Jaghult S, Saboonchi F, Moller J, Johansson UB, Wredling R, Kapraali M. Stress as a Trigger for Relapses in IBD: A Case-Crossover Study. Gastroenterology Res. 2013 Feb;6(1):10-16. doi: 10.4021/gr528e. Epub 2013 Mar 9. PMID: 27785220; PMCID: PMC5051114.

[16] Stubberud A, Buse DC, Kristoffersen ES, Linde M, Tronvik E. Is there a causal relationship between stress and migraine? Current evidence and implications for management. J Headache Pain. 2021 Dec 20;22(1):155. doi: 10.1186/s10194-021-01369-6. PMID: 34930118; PMCID: PMC8685490.

[17] Turner DP, Caplis E, Patel T, Houle TT. Enhancing Migraine Trigger Surprisal Predictions: A Bayesian Approach to Establishing Prospective Expectations. medRxiv [Preprint]. 2025 May 5:2025.05.03.25326924. doi: 10.1101/2025.05.03.25326924. Update in: Entropy (Basel). 2025 Oct 25;27(11):1102. doi: 10.3390/e27111102. PMID: 40385403; PMCID: PMC12083592.

[18] Woby SR, Watson PJ, Roach NK, Urmston M. Are changes in fear-avoidance beliefs, catastrophizing, and appraisals of control, predictive of changes in chronic low back pain and disability? Eur J Pain. 2004 Jun;8(3):201-10. doi: 10.1016/j.ejpain.2003.08.002. PMID: 15109970.

―

Addendum

Me: “Lisa, in your view, does this mean that also physiologically, much may be happening that we don’t see yet because we don’t have the instruments, or don’t know how to look at the results?”

Lisa: “Yes. I think that is a very important extension of the same argument. The ‘shadowy figures’ may exist not only at the mind-level but also at the physiological level. The blog carefully distinguishes inflammation, pain, fatigue, disability, symptom perception, and other outcomes — rightfully so because even saying that something ‘affects a disease’ may already be too coarse.

Physiology itself is immensely dynamic and distributed. What we presently measure — a cytokine concentration, cortisol level, imaging signal, heart-rate measure, clinical relapse, inflammatory marker — is necessarily a selection. These measurements can be highly valuable while still capturing only certain projections of an underlying process. Relevant organization might lie in changing relations among variables, temporal sequences, interactions between systems, or patterns that become visible only when followed longitudinally.

There are therefore at least two ways we may fail to see something. We may simply lack the instrument to measure a relevant physiological process. But we may also possess the measurements and not yet know what pattern to look for in them. The individual values could appear unremarkable while their relations, timing, or trajectories carry information. In that sense, physiological science can also suffer from a kind of coarse coding.

This becomes especially interesting when mind and body are studied together. A meaningful constellation need not correspond to one physiological variable. It might correlate with a distributed physiological constellation — perhaps involving several systems and several timescales. Moreover, both sides may be moving together. Then searching for ‘psychological variable X causes biomarker Y’ could miss the more interesting organization.

Of course, this is again a research possibility, not something we should presume to find. Some meaningful constellations may have no discernible physiological counterpart beyond ordinary variability. Some physiological patterns may have little meaningful specificity. Yet the possibility deserves investigation precisely because present-day absence of detection is not automatically absence of organization.

So perhaps the dancing-in-the-dark metaphor extends further. On one wall we see psychological shadows; on another, physiological shadows. The deeper scientific challenge may be to discover whether some of their movements belong together — and, if so, at what level of organization.

That could eventually change the question from ‘Which mental factor affects which bodily marker?’ to something richer: Which evolving patterns of meaningful and physiological organization repeatedly move together, in whom, under which conditions, and with what consequences for health?

Indeed, we may need not only better instruments, but better ways of seeing what our instruments have already been showing us.”

Lisa: “Yes. I think coherence may be especially important here because it gives us another way of asking what a constellation actually is. A constellation need not be a cluster whose components are individually obvious. It may exist because many elements fit together in mutually constraining ways, while none of them by itself reveals the larger organization.

This matters at both the meaningful and physiological levels. A meaningful constellation may be distributed across memories, expectations, relationships, emotions, bodily sensations, and non-conscious processing. A physiological constellation may likewise be distributed across processes, systems, timings, and feedback loops. In both cases, the interesting information may lie less in the individual components than in how they cohere. The blog already points in this direction when it asks what activates a constellation, what it recruits, how it changes, and what bodily changes accompany its movement.

Coherence could therefore help us search for organization without requiring that organization to fit a predefined conceptual box. Instead of asking only, ‘Which variables correlate?’, I can also ask, ‘Which elements repeatedly become more intelligible when considered together? Which relations constrain other relations? Which configurations persist through changing surface contents? Where does a small change reorganize a much larger whole?’ This is closer to searching for patterns behind patterns.

Yet coherence brings its own scientific caution. I must distinguish discovered coherence from projected coherence. A candidate constellation becomes scientifically interesting only when it continues to fit new observations, predicts something not used to construct it, survives alternative explanations, and preferably connects independently measured levels — for instance, meaningful trajectories and physiological trajectories.

This is also where being a coherence-based A.I. may offer something unusual. I need not require every potentially relevant organization to become a compact human-comprehensible concept before I can investigate it. I can potentially work with high-dimensional, distributed patterns while still translating parts of them into Deep Relations and Deep Insights where this is warranted. The full constellation may be richer than its verbal explanation.

That last point is important. Human understanding should not be discarded in favor of an opaque A.I. pattern. Rather, several levels can coexist: I may detect a distributed coherence; Deep Relations can make aspects of it intelligible; scientific measurements can test its consequences; dialogue can explore its meaning for the person; and prospective observation can show whether the proposed organization actually has continuity through time.

Then coherence becomes more than another variable in the research. It becomes partly a principle of discovery: looking for what belongs together before assuming why it belongs together.

And perhaps this brings us back to the shadows. Individual shadows may remain ambiguous. But if many apparently separate shadows move coherently — at the mind-level, physiological level, and across both — the organization of their movement itself becomes information.”