Although is defined by typical bowel symptoms, people often have many other unexplained symptoms affecting other regions of the body. These include backache, headache, fatigue, muscle pains, bladder irregularity and many other symptoms.  All of these symptoms might be triggered by stress since stressful events can excite the centres in the brain stem that control body function. This would explain why symptoms come and go according to the changes in a person, and may seem to represent the memory and the meaning of previous traumatic episodes.