Is it you? Or is your nervous system dysregulated?
Are your health symptoms stemming from a dysregulated nervous system?
I had a friend reach out this week asking me to clarify why I say that you need to start with nervous system regulation if you want to heal your body. She is trying to address multiple symptoms like low thyroid, hormonal imbalances, weight gain, and a lack of energy. She's been trying to work on all of these symptoms naturally, but nothing seems to be sticking. But she's also been stuck in a stress state for a long time.
Sound familiar?
This was also me. I had so many symptoms that I didn't think were related at all. Low thyroid, constipation, rosacea, weight gain, anxiety, PCOS symptoms, among other things. I did what I could to address each one singly, but once I was able to regulate my nervous system, most of them went away or decreased dramatically!
But why would that be? What could nervous system regulation have to do with rosacea?!
This is a super important thing to understand! Because EVERY body system is affected by the autonomic nervous system in one way or another.
What is the Autonomic Nervous system?
This is the branch of your nervous system that regulates things like breath, heart rate, smooth muscles like in your digestive tract, and glands like your thyroid. It's what keeps your body functioning without you being consciously aware of it.
So you can think of it as the driver of your body systems. It's telling everything not how to function, but how much. It's deciding how much gas to give, and when to brake.
Its decisions based on whether or not you are perceived to be in danger. It has two main modes: Sympathetic (fight or flight) or Parasympathetic (rest + digest).
If your Hypothalamus (often thought of as the control center of the brain) gets information that you are in danger, it then sends off a signal to the Pituitary (the gland in charge of your endocrine or hormonal system) to communicate with the Adrenals, Thyroid, and Reproductive organs and change what they're doing based on that threat.
If you are under a lot of stress, your body doesn't understand why you're stressed; it just knows that you are. Let's dig into some of the things that can happen when you're chronically in that Sympathetic state.
For women, one of the things that can happen is your reproductive hormones will slow way down. This happens for a couple of reasons:
Progesterone and Cortisol have the same pre-cursor. Which means if your body has a high need for Cortisol, it will prioritize making Cortisol over Progesterone. Low Progesterone can be linked to infertility, low libido, low mood, sleep issues, anxiety, depression, migraines, constipation, among other things.
The body will purposely lower your reproductive hormones because stressful times are very bad times to get pregnant. Which is actually brilliant when you think about it, but not so much when the stress you're feeling is because you're desperate to get pregnant. But your body doesn't understand the why, it just knows you're stressed.
But can you see how it's so easy to think the solution to low progesterone is just to replace it? The cause really could be because your nervous system thinks you're in danger when you're not. Adding in progesterone doesn't actually address the real problem.
And that is only one body system. The one that is most affected and also at the core of every other symptom is the gut.
When you go into your fight/flight/freeze response, your digestion stops. Either your body will try and eliminate everything (diarrhea) to get it all out, or your bowels completely stop and you end up with constipation.
Your stomach acids lower and smooth muscles get less energy, all because your body is prioritizing energy to the part of the body that will help you fight or run away. Digestion can happen later.
But when you're stuck in that state all the time, later never comes.
And all health starts in the gut. If you're not fully digesting your food, it means you're not fully breaking it down, which means you're not pulling the nutrients out of your food, which means your cells aren't getting the building blocks they need to function or repair, which then leads to your cells eventually breaking down.
When the gut is impacted, it also impacts the biodiversity that you have in the gut. The microbiome is not only responsible for helping you to break down foods, it also helps to keep the gut wall healthy. It helps to create neurotransmitters and greatly impacts immune function. Just about every other body system is affected by the microbiome. The stress state just destroys it.
And this only scratches the surface of how stress impact the body.
But it's not just about stress. We were designed to handle occasional stress. But we were not designed to be stuck in that state 24/7. A dysregulated nervous system is when our body is reacting as if our life is being threatened, when really we're just going through something uncomfortable.
This is why regulating your nervous system is where you want to start when you want to heal your body. It may not be all you need to do, but it is always the first step.
As I said in the beginning, so many of my symptoms went away once I was able to better regulate my nervous system. But not all of them. And this is because being stuck in that state for so long did a lot of damage to my gut especially. And that's just going to take time to address. But now that I'm finally in a more balanced state, I can finally address it and I know it'll stick.
A dysregulated nervous system is not the only reason why you might have symptoms. But it is a big piece! And at the very least, you won't be able to fully heal until it's addressed.
The good news is that you can learn to regulate your nervous system! And that means that you can heal.
You may have already seen it, but I created a resource to help you in regulating your nervous system. It's teaching you one of my favorite tools to do this: cold showers!
It's not just for the benefits of cold therapy, but by following my protocol it also works as an exercise for the vagus nerve. It helps to train your nervous system that being uncomfortable is okay. It's one of the most effective tools I have used to regulate my nervous system. Let me know if you try it!
