The Tennis Ball Phenomenon: How Atmospheric Pressure Affects Human Physiology, Psychology And Well Being

From chronic inflammation and digestive disturbances to blood pressure issues, anxiety and low morale, barometric pressure affects each of us in unique and consequential ways.

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
Mark Twain

Dear friends,

Where you live could be impacting whether or not you’re able to heal after acute injuries (and even minor bruises); whether or not you feel well on a daily basis, or fall chronically ill; whether you feel happy or depressed; have high or low blood pressure; tend towards daily bouts of constipation or diarrhea….it’s a big list.

More than just a passing curiosity or the not so mythical tales about people who can predict when a storm is coming because they feel it in their bones, barometric or atmospheric pressure is something I now believe we all ought to consider when getting to know how our unique body functions; why it behaves the way it does; and how to choose strategies that will actually optimize our physiology for a life of well being, vs throwing darts in the dark while hoping to feel better.

Health practitioners and doctors ought to take this very real phenomenon into consideration as well, but I have never heard of anyone who takes this seriously (including me; until now).

For example, if I had gone to a functional medicine doctor or general practitioner with my list of symptoms this past spring, I am certain they would have suggested that I go on an anti-inflammatory diet. And they probably would have tested me for Celiac or Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, or more serious issues like MS; none of which I believe in, by the way.

Of course, I acknowledge that we experience illnesses, many of which seem to baffle modern medicine; but I am not a fan of diagnoses and labels that turn human beings into victims of their own body. And I do not believe for one moment that bodies malfunction for no reason; there is always a root cause, and root cause discovery always reveals the solution.

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Sometimes “miracles” are a simple matter of physics!

In July, when I was merely considering a move back to Boulder, Colorado from southern California (where I lived for the past 2+ years), I had no idea how profoundly this decision would impact my physical and psychological health.

As an open minded person with an already unshakeable conviction that environmental factors - like light, electromagnetism and toxicity, to name a few - have serious implications for human health and well being, I was still shocked when my body changed so dramatically within mere days of arriving to Colorado in August.

For almost the entirety of my time in California, I had entertained theories that the growing list of sick symptoms I was experiencing - chronic inflammation; edema; stiff and achy joints; goopy eyes and puffy face; ears and a brain that always felt under water, digestive issues; a painfully distended belly; feeling cold every day; malaise that was creeping towards depression; and (most surprisingly) a new propensity to experience what felt like radiation sickness, skin rashes and sunburn if I spent more than an hour in a tank top outside on a sunny day - were at least in part psycho-somatic.

After all, Stefan and I had separated a few months after landing in California; I was letting go of, and grieving, a long held desire to have a family, which means no children for me this lifetime; the future I had worked so hard to manifest for the past 5 years had disintegrated into dust, leaving me with a painfully blank slate; financial stress was becoming a growing concern given my departure from YouTube, the decision to stop teaching self fascia release (which has paid my bills for the past 5 years), and the fact that I no longer had a business co-pilot (Stefan had been my partner in life AND business); and then my dad’s health took a sudden decline, leading to his death in April.

With so many life stressors occurring at once, it would not have surprised me one bit if my body was simply reflecting back to me the state of my inner world.

However, I was also acutely aware of what ALL of these symptoms have in common: lack of efficient blood flow in my body. The question was: what, exactly, was causing such sluggish blood?

Then, in early August, I took my chronically ill body and headed east towards the Rocky Mountains; and to my utter shock, when I woke up in the hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona - which lies at 6,909 feet above sea level - I felt halfway normal. Other than a trip to visit my dad in South Carolina earlier this year, this was my first trip outside of southern California since I moved there in June of 2021.

A few days later, already in love with Colorado’s Rocky Mountains again, my body felt like my body again: the edema (fluid retention) was mostly gone; my brain no longer felt like it was underwater; my ears felt clear; my eyes were free of goop; my joints stopped aching; my digestion improved, and my gut de-puffed along with the rest of my body; my mood soared, and I found myself exuberantly happy for the first time in years; I was finally warm again after two years of feeling chilled to the bone every day; and I could breathe! To top things off, while enjoying a few good days on the trail hiking and running under the summer sun in shorts and a tank top, my skin absorbed enough melanin that I finally looked like my usually tan self.

Being the scientist I am, it did not seem plausible that all of these changes would occur because of a sudden exposure to a few days of sunlight; or because of the dry, high desert air; though, to be sure, these things likely had an impact.

There had to be something specific creating this sudden systemic change in my body.

My best guess: atmospheric pressure.

Vocalizing this theory aloud to Stefan - an avid tennis player - he offered up a piece of the puzzle that would help all of this make sense. (Yes, Stefan was with me on this trip, and no, we are not back together. We are best friends, much to the amazement of most people who hear this, which I find tragic; I wish we weren’t the exception, and that more couples could separate lovingly). Anyway…

Tennis players, Stefan informed me, have to use different balls if they normally play at sea level and travel to play at elevation.

This is because of the effect that atmospheric pressure has on the air-tight tennis balls: the ones manufactured for use at sea level will travel farther, faster when taken to elevation; which is bad news for tennis players, because if they play with the same level of skill developed at sea level and then play with the same balls at elevation, those balls will land outside the white lines every time. Lucky for them, this is a known phenomenon and special balls are manufactured for use at elevation.

We can take this piece of commonly known sport science and apply it to human beings.

First of all, conducting an internet search about atmospheric pressure will mostly yield generic scientific “rules” that are then applied to all human beings - as if we all function the same.

What I hope to achieve with this letter (and every piece of content I produce) is to help us wake up to the very real fact that what affects you negatively may positively impact me and my body; and what you need to thrive might make me sick. As human beings, we are unique in our physical, psychological and spiritual make-up, and we need to start addressing the individual rather than applying generic protocols to everyone.

In order to simplify the science today, I’m going to ignore some elements that factor into barometric pressure (like temperature).

I’m using the tennis ball phenomenon as a permission slip to isolate a single phenomenon - what happens to the functionality of a self contained system when exposed to differences in elevation - that remains consistent despite other factors (like temperature). As far as I can tell, tennis players don’t need different balls for cold vs hot weather in addition to elevation changes (imagine the complexity!) If it’s good enough for tennis players, it’s good enough for us. We will apply this same thinking to our bodies.

QUICK ASIDE: this is a great example of why I like to find topic adjacent - or completely unrelated - science, and then apply that science to the human organism to see what maps onto what. Just like it’s hardest for us to see ourselves accurately, it seems to me that the closer a scientist is to a study subject (and, indeed, the more passionate they are about that subject), the harder it is for them to see their subject with true objectivity. We would benefit greatly if, for example, scientists were constantly rotated between fields so that those studying economics or social sciences, say, were asked to study human physiology; and maybe those studying physics would be asked to apply their scientific discoveries to human psychology; and so on. But I digress…

In simple terms, what we are exploring today is increasing vs decreasing pressure on - and within - different objects, like tennis balls and human bodies.

The tennis ball phenomenon:

A tennis ball is air tight - its perimeter has little, if any, capacity to expand.

All objects on planet earth are subject to the laws of physics, and some of these laws have to do with how far and fast an object or element (like a water or gas molecule) will travel when it is struck by another object, or when it is exposed to differences in atmospheric pressure.

Generally speaking, there is more atmospheric pressure at sea level and less at higher altitudes.

Anything “air tight” will expand as far as its boundaries will allow when taken to elevation.

Think about bringing a bag of chips on an airplane: if you resist the temptation to eat them right away, the air inside the bag will expand as the airplane travels higher into the atmosphere - until it is fully expanded like a balloon.

This same “expansion” is happening to the tennis ball, but it is NOT visually observable like it is with the bag of chips, because the tennis ball has inflexible walls; all of the pressure, therefore, remains within the boundaries of those walls.

However, this change in internal pressure is functionally observable when a tennis player uses that ball in a game of tennis: the ball taken from sea level and struck by a tennis player at elevation travels farther, faster.

Here’s why:

The less external pressure there is, the more internal pressure there will be when an object or element is taken to higher elevations; and because of this increase in internal pressure combined with less resistance from the air, the object (in this case, a tennis ball) travels farther, faster when the same force (a tennis racket wielded by a human) strikes its surface.

Internal vs external pressure:

These two forces - the pressure pushing into us from the outside, and the pressure pushing outward from the inside - need to meet each other in a harmonious dance for us to be healthy. Disturbances in this balance can lead to processes of disease.

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Like a puffer fish out of water.

In a healthy human organism, we have relatively “air tight” systems inside of us: blood vessels, stomach, intestines, bladder, lungs etc.

Relatively is the key word here, and in a moment - after we establish some of the basic science needed to understand this phenomenon - we will explore how differences in human physiology play a critical role in specifically how atmospheric pressure affects us at a uniquely individual level. Some of us will thrive at sea level while others among us (like me) will suffer greatly there. Meanwhile, some of us will thrive in the mountains, while others struggle to feel well or, potentially, become chronically ill.

All of these relatively air tight systems are embedded in an organism that has both normal and emergency exits: we can open our mouths and take in a big gulp of oxygen if necessary, or push out carbon dioxide through our nose; we can vomit up poisonous food, or belch and fart to release gas (hey, we all do it so we might as well talk about it!) Sweat is released through pores in the skin, and all of the liquids we eat and drink, plus all of the solids we consume, get broken down by the digestive organs, pass through a series of tubes, and exit the body as pee and poop. 💩

We aren’t exactly air tight; unlike the tennis ball.

What we are is a column of liquid fluids; mostly water. Blood, for example, is mostly water. All of these fluids need to travel certain distances at certain speeds for us to engage the all important process of allostasis, or the body’s ability to respond to stressors in order to return our organism to homeostasis.

Contrary to popular opinion, we are not meant to be in a constant state of homeostasis; instead, we are designed to consistently engage minor and major stressors, both external and internal, with the competence and capacity necessary to bring ourselves back into balance. This competence and capacity can be both unconsciously (somatically, or physiologically) and consciously directed. As always, my mission is to help you become a powerful co-creator with your body by making these processes conscious.

Summed up: fluids that are moving too slowly or too quickly inside a human organism can lead to processes of disease.

As I discussed in this exploration of birth stories, my body seems to be seriously lacking a healthy degree of internal pressure. Which means that when I take my body to sea level, all of my tubes and organs expand outward, and my fluids move as slow as sludge.

I’m like a puffer fish taken out of the water when I spend even a few days at sea level! 😂 Bring me back to my natural habitat - the mountains - and I instantly de-puff while my internal functions return to baseline. (Those poor puffer fish 😢).

Here in Colorado, my body automatically has what it needs to engage in processes of allostasis, whereas at sea level there are far too many physiological (and other) stressors, and not enough capacity to meet them.

This is the question we should be asking in order to understand how atmospheric pressure affects each of us individually:

Is living at sea level, or living at higher altitudes, helping OR hindering someone’s ability to meet the many physiological (and perhaps emotional, financial, environmental etc) stressors of life?

How your body reacts to increases and decreases in atmospheric pressure will be unique to you, your life history, the circumstances of your birth, how much touch you received as an infant, and many other factors too numerous to discuss in one sitting. But I’ll share one more short story to illuminate this phenomenon:

Walking through a parking lot back in August when I first arrived in Boulder to look for housing, I ran into one of my first (and favorite) clients who worked with me for years to keep his knee pain resolved. We found a nearby table and caught up for an hour, and during our chat I couldn’t help sharing with him what I’m sharing with you today. Immediately he perked up and declared that whenever he travels to sea level, he feels so much better; but his wife, like me, needs the mountains.

This man is highly anxious, doesn’t sleep well, and his body struggles to regenerate easily. His eyesight is diminishing, he’s nearly deaf in one ear, and while he never needed the knee replacement surgery he was told back in 2011 was the only thing that would eliminate his knee pain, he doesn’t feel able to be as active as he’d like.

I would bet almost anything that his symptoms are due to fluids traveling too far, too fast inside his body as a result of living at elevation (his house sits above 7,000ft). Blood, in particular, is likely moving too fast for his tissues to make good use of it; and without blood, the human organism can’t regenerate.

By the way: women have fascia that can expand to a much higher degree than a man’s, because of our capacity to grow babies and give birth. Men, generally speaking, have much more rigid fascia. This is one reason why men are more prone to high blood pressure, heart disease and heart attacks than women.

Naturally high blood pressure will likely get worse living at elevation, whereas naturally low blood pressure will likely worsen at sea level (though it will be a case by case basis). Blood flow, as I wrote about last week (linked above), is one of the most important factors to consider when assessing issues of pain and disease.

If we want to target root causes of chronic pain and disease, we have to look at the WHOLE human being - made of body, soul and spirit - in the context of its whole environment: society, planet and cosmos.

Assessing environmental factors like elevation seems like a no-brainer now that I’m aware of it. I hope more people, including health practitioners, make good use of this data.

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I want to make this information actionable for you, but is so highly individual that I am struggling to do so.

In the very least, I hope you will consider the impact that changes in elevation could be having on your body; and from there, on your psychology and overall well being.

With a little sleuthing, it would be pretty easy for a knowledgeable health practitioner to help you assess whether or not your pain and/or sick symptoms might be related to where you live; with a lifelong devotion to understanding yourself, you can become your own best practitioner.

If you really want to test this theory, there’s no better experiment than traveling from the mountains to sea level, or from sea level to altitude, in order to observe - for yourself - the functional differences that your body expresses in each location. This is a process that can be both curative and diagnostic at the same time (like it was for me).

All remedies that represent root cause solutions are, in my opinion, innately diagnostic and curative: they reveal the root cause because they are curative (like putting a puffer fish back into the sea).

Let me know your thoughts on this fascinating topic below!

As I type this, it is a beautiful Sunday evening in Colorado. I went hiking before coming back to finish this letter to you, and while I was headed uphill, a huge bald eagle came soaring over the ridge only to stop and circle above me for a few magical moments.

I am home. ☺️

Thank you for joining me on this grand adventure called life!

With love,
Elisha

P.S. If you’ve been following my curious case of plantar fasciitis that disappeared when I began compressing my gut fascia, you might be interested to know that I traded in my car 🙌🚗 and I already feel better!

This whole saga really got me thinking about the consequences on our bodies of all the driving we do in the modern world; and how important it is to choose a car for comfort vs bells and whistles.

That’s my new (old - 2008) car below. I LOVE it the way I love artful pottery pieces, or the adobe architecture of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She’s a functional work of art, and I have no doubt we’ll go on many adventures together.