Episode 406: You Can’t Manifest Your Way Out of a Dysregulated Nervous System
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Let’s talk about manifestation, but not in a vision boards and affirmations kinda way. In this episode, Erin is diving into three of her favorite topics: manifestation, the subconscious mind, and the nervous system, and how they’re ALL deeply connected when it comes to your health.
Did you know that 90-95% of what you experience as “reality” is shaped by subconscious patterns? Your subconscious mind is constantly scanning for evidence of what you already believe, which influences how you think, feel, and respond on a daily basis. And all of this is the foundation behind the Manifest Your Health app, which launches on April 27th.
In this episode:
The moment Erin’s nervous system shut down before a mastermind and how she rewired it
How your perception of safety directly impacts digestion, immune function, and emotional regulation
Why your body already knows how to heal and what might be blocking you from accessing it
How visceral hypersensitivity turns normal sensations into pain (and why that matters beyond IBS)
How to expand what your brain allows you to see so you can access more opportunity and possibility
Resources mentioned:
The doors for Manifest Your Health officially open on April 27th. Join our neuroscience backed membership that blends systems biology with nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring and emotional release.
Subscribe to Erin’s Substack for a no-nonsense space about health, entrepreneurship, and manifestation.
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
OneSkin (Use code FUNK for 15% off your first purchase)
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Manifestation is not just a mind game. When we are trying to consciously manifest meaning, call in what we actually want and desire, we have to take into account the physical body and the nervous system. We can't just override the body's sensory system. The nervous system is the body's complex communication network, and it transmits signals to and from the brain, the spinal cord, to all parts of the body, every single cell, every single tissue, every single organ in your body. Your nervous system is bas your personal surveillance system, and it decides how safe you feel. And that perception of safety determines everything else.
Welcome to the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™ where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend because you never know whose life you might change.
Oh, boy. Get ready for this one because we're talking about manifestation, the subconscious mind and the nervous system. Like all of my favorite things today, specifically, we're talking about why you can't manifest your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. So let's start by defining manifestation, because I know it's like kind of a little bit of an esoteric term, but to manifest is to call something into your reality. Part of doing this, part of this process is shifting your internal state so that your external state can match.
A big part of understanding manifestation is understanding the neuroscience of reality, how our individual brains construct our individual experience of reality. And it can be really difficult and frustrating to attempt to change anything in our lives, whether that be our health or otherwise, if we don't understand this and leverage the power of it, because it absolutely is a power. Part of this is changing the filters in your mind so that you see more evidence of what's possible. And that is what allows you to create more opportunity. Your mind body blocks out so much of what is going on around you all the time, meaning it is blocking a lot of possibility. It is blocking out a lot of opportunity. And the reason that it does this, the conscious thinking mind can only take in a very, very small fraction of what you see, what you hear, what you sense, what you experience, all the information, all the Inputs coming at you every second of the day, we can't consciously take all of that in. It is millions of bits of information every second.
So it has to have, your brain has to have some way of filtering some of the stuff out and only keep things conscious, only keep things in your conscious awareness that it deems really relevant and really important. And how it does this is basically by searching out more evidence of your beliefs. It is taking in basically everything that is in alignment with your current beliefs and throwing out, deleting, distorting, discarding and blocking the rest. So whatever you believe to be true about yourself right now, whatever you believe to be true about the world, about your place in the world, about your health, about your symptoms, about your diagnosis, if you've got one of those, about your ability to heal, whatever those beliefs are, your brain will actively search for more evidence that they are true. And they will show your mind that over and over and over again. It will show you evidence of that very same stuff. And I know that I've talked about this so many times on the show, so I'm kind of cruising through it pretty fast, but it is something that bears repeating. I have to remind myself of this basically on a daily basis.
Many of those beliefs, these identity contracts, how you see yourself, how you see yourself in the world, your beliefs, your ideas, many of these things are subconscious, meaning they are below the level of your conscious awareness. You're not aware of them, so you're not consciously directing this. You're not telling your brain, hey, go find more evidence of this. It is an automatic process that is happening below your conscious awareness. It's just happening, happening all the time, automatically. So most of our daily thoughts, most of our daily actions, even our daily emotions are driven by automatic, automated subconscious patterns in the brain doesn't just passively receive information. So we're talking about millions of bits of information per second coming out our brain. It's just not passively receiving it, it filters it.
It actively filters it. The brain acts like a prediction machine and it's utilizing these internal models, these internal patterns, these internal automations that are all formed by past experiences. And that is what is creating the filters that we have in our brain. This means that we perceive a version of reality that is heavily filtered and heavily projected based on our past beliefs, our past experiences, our wounding, our patterns and our subconscious ideas. 90 to 95% of what we label as reality is essentially a subconscious projection. It's a well known idea in neuroscience that what we label reality is actually a constructed perception you're not seeing the world as it is. You're seeing the way your brain perceives the world. The construct that your unique brain has created.
So hence the saying, perception is reality. What you perceive, you perceive to be real. So essentially we have a very limited and narrow scope of what we call reality. But to us it feels like the real reality. The good news is that if your reality feels limiting or limited, you, you are actually able to reprogram this. You can reprogram the subconscious mind, you can rewire your brain so that you're able to see more of what you'd like to see, more of what is available to you. More of the possibility, more of the opportunity, more of the good shit. I just saw this on substack yesterday.
It says the amount of good things in your life depends on your ability to notice them. That is so true. It is real and it's neuroscience. It's how your brain works. So, bad news, Good news. Bad news is that many people get stuck in their current reality and they think that that is the only reality that exists. They stay stuck, they stay limited. They say exactly where they are.
The good news is that your brain has the ability to rewire. You can change these things. You can change your perception and therefore you can change your lived reality. And that is part of what we help you do in Manifest Your Health™. I know I've been teasing this out, but Manifest Your Health™ is coming at you soon. It's going to be live next week, April 27. Manifest your health is a neuroscience backed membership that blends systems biology with nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring and emotional release. So you can reconnect with your body's natural ability to.
To heal. Because that is the reality that some people have not tapped into yet. They have not corded into yet. Here it is. You're living in a body that knows how to heal. You right now, at this very moment in time, are living in a body that is designed to heal, that is programmed to heal. You might not be conscious of that truth yet. You may have been through really hard shit.
You might be navigating it right now. So you might have filters in place that disallow you from seeing that truth, that version of reality. So we help you make space for that to become a possibility for you. Manifest Your Health™ helps you find this truth. It gives you the opportunity to continually plug back into this version of reality and continue to see it as more and more and more possible. This, you guys, this is how I put an autoimmune condition into Remission. This is how I put serious chronic illness into remission. It is a thing of the past because of this.
Because of this. So once we see and once we know that more is available, that it is one piece of the puzzle, one part, we then have to be sure that our nervous system is actually able to receive that. Because if we do not feel safe enough to hold the experiences that we call in and manifest, if we do not feel like we deserve to have them, if they're in conflict in any way, shape or form with our beliefs about ourselves, if we feel like we're going to have to sacrifice some part of ourselves in order to get them, then these things that we're attempting to call in, they're not going to stick. They're not going to land. So manifestation, whether you're manifesting your health or something else, manifestation isn't just about attracting something to us. It's also about our capacity to receive in. This often gets missed when people talk about manifestation, which is why manifestation as a concept can get a really, really bad rap. If you desire something consciously, but any part of you believes that this thing, if you had it, would create friction, what is going to happen is that your subconscious is going to pump the brakes in the way that the subconscious does this is through the body, specifically through the nervous system.
The nervous system is the physical manifestation of the subconscious. These two guys, they are linked up. They are super intimate. They are super, super, super close. The nervous system's response is based on the subconscious programming. It's kind of like a. A brake pedal or a gas pedal on the car. And if it's pumping the brakes or if it's ramming on the gas, it can cause physical reactions.
We can see fight, flight, freeze. And that, again, is really dependent on the current belief system, the current programming of your subconscious. So I want to give you a real world example to anchor this concept in.
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A few years ago I signed up for a Mastermind that was in Santa Monica which obviously requires some travel because I live in New Hampshire. It was right before Christmas, which is a notorious busy time of year. And at that point in my life, my programs, my subconscious patterns, my beliefs were that if I overdid it, if I pushed myself too far or too hard or too far outside of my comfort zone, I would get sick. I often would feel really run down with travel.
Oftentimes when I traveled I would get a flare up. So I didn't like to travel because I had this fear that if I travel I will get a flare up of symptoms. And this could often happen around the holidays too just because it's such a go, go go busy time. And like I said, this whole thing was way outside of my comfort zone. It was kind of A last minute decision. I used to not travel alone. I like a little adult chaperone with me when I travel. Like I'm not great on my own with traveling.
So it makes me very nervous. I didn't know one single person that was going. So I was going solo. And that is also not my style. I had just never done something like this before. And as we're gon discuss in a couple of minutes. Familiarity is safe to the subconscious, to the brain, to the nervous system. Unfamiliarity is really unsafe.
That registers some of the alarm bells like, hey, we've never been here before. What's going on? So my nervous system slammed the brakes on me. I committed to it. I paid for it. I RSVP yes. We booked the airfare. Like all systems go. And then my nervous system was like, no, it laid me out sideways.
And the nervous system has the ability to do that. Why? Because it's connected to every single other thing in your body. Every system, every organ, every single thing. So I got so run down. I like literally could not get up. I didn't catch a cold. Like nobody around me was sick. I just was down for the count, like sideways.
And this had become a little bit of a predictive pattern of my nervous system. It's like the belief. The idea is like, well, she's going to get it sick or a flare up if she travels. She doesn't want to flare up. So we'll just take her down right now so she doesn't have to travel. Boom. This is really scary for her. This is a big step.
This is a lot of growth. This is a lot of visibility. This is doing something way outside her comfort zone. Alert, alert, alert. Let's take her down now as a form of protection so she doesn't have to go. So luckily, because I consciously desired this so much and it was in lockstep with a lot of the manifestations that I was actively calling in, I was able to catch this. I was able to catch this subconscious pattern in real time. I'm like, I know what's going on here.
And so because of that, because I brought awareness online, I was able to do some reprogramming work in real time. I literally used the tools for Manifest Your Health. I was able to go on the trip. It was amazing. I did not get sick. I did not get a flare up. Despite a lot of travel, a lot of late nights, lack of sleep, I was totally fine. And in addition to that, I never got a flare up from travel again.
My nervous system just kind of learned to encode a new program. And so travel doesn't take it out of me. I don't get anxious. Before travel, I really broke that pattern for myself. But in order to do that, I really had to get the nervous system on board. Manifestation is not just a mind game. When we are trying to consciously manifest meaning, call in what we actually want and desire, we have to take into account the physical body in the nervous system. We can't just override the body's sensory system.
The nervous system is the body's complex communication network. And it transmits signals to and from the brain, the spinal cord, to all parts of the body. Every single cell, every single tissue, every single organ in your, your body, your nervous system is basically your personal surveillance system. And it decides how safe you feel in that perception of safety determines everything else. Your digestion, your hormone balance, your inflammation, your immune response, your emotional regulation, how you feel, your symptoms. And all of this is subconsciously regulated. It's not consciously directed. You're not telling your nervous system what to do.
It's happening automatically all the time. And so this is why I say that manifestation is not a mind game. We can include the mind, it's important that we do, but it's not just a mind game. So manifestation techniques. And again, this is kind of where manifestation can get a bad rap. Techniques like affirmation, visualizations, positive thinking, they can be really effective strategies when your system is calm, when you feel grounded, when you feel regulated. But when you're feeling anxiety, when you're in a state of panic, when you're feeling helplessness or hopelessness or despair, or you're in fight, flight, freeze response, those strategies are rarely useful. They're not super supportive, they're not super effective.
I mean, have you ever tried to think positively through a panic attack? Yeah, it doesn't work right now. As somebody who does a lot of affirmations, visualizations and positive thinking, I do want to say that there are specific ways to do these things that aren't just top down, that aren't just a mind game, that actually involve the body. So they're more potent and they're more effective. For those of you guys who are my paid subscribers on Substack, the morning practice that changes everything. That blog post outlines one way to do that. So you can go look that up now. And by the way, if you're not a subscriber over there, you can join anytime. I gotta shout out my substack because I am just absolutely loving it over there.
It's basically where I'm hosting my personal blog. I started this whole thing, my whole biz. It was originally called Erin Holt Health, and I started it with a personal blog. So it feels like such a return to my roots and I'm absolutely loving it. I've been sharing more personal stuff, personal practices, things that I'm working on, things that I'm working through, and it gives me a space to share all of that. I will say that most of the posts that I write are for my paid subscribers. That's just what feels good to me right now. As somebody who has spent over a decade creating a lot of free resources, free education, free content to the public.
Having this behind a little bit of a paywall makes me feel more comfortable because it is a little bit more private, a little bit more personal. And it's also a no niche space for me. So I don't have to worry about what I'm saying is like the right type of content, you know, that feels so, so good to me. It feels really good to my nervous system. It really, really does. So I show up here on the podcast, I show up on my Instagram and I'm teaching, right? I'm usually showing up to teach. That's what you guys are here for. So Substack is more of my space where I get to peel back the curtain and share what I'm navigating and how I'm navigating it.
It's only $8 a month, so it's not exactly a high ticket item. And when you subscribe, you get access to all my paid posts. If you're ever interested in that, you can check me out on Substack. Now, of course, when you join Manifest Your Health™ when it opens, you're going to get access to a lot of these practices, recorded practices that you can listen to and follow along with. So I don't want to poo poo things like affirmations and visualizations and positive thinking. I just want to emphasize that these experiences also have to be embodied in order for them to really, really work. Because when they're not, we're essentially asking the mind to ignore or override what the body is communicating. And that has potential to intensify the dysregulation, not settle it down, not calm it down.
Because your nervous system is like, hi, this isn't real. If you're like, I feel so calm right now and your body doesn't feel calm, your nervous system is not just going to automatically calm down because you're whispering sweet nothings to it. It doesn't really work like that. So we have get the body on board now. Recently, a few weeks back, I shared a podcast where we talked about the brain gut connection and how the vast majority of information that's being shared between the brain and the body is actually coming from the body up. So 80% of vagus nerve fibers carry bottom up information from the body into the brainstem. And I introduced this concept known as interoception, which is basically our ability to listen to cues coming from inside our body. It is our body's awareness of its own internal state.
And so these messages come up and then they go into the insula, which is the brain's primary hub for interoception. And these networks in the insula determine how to perceive your internal state. So the messages come up like the raw sensory inputs come up from the body and they go to the posterior insula and then the anterior insula integrates these raw signals with the limbic area, the emotional area of the brain and the prefrontal cognitive areas. And that's what leads to conscious feeling. So feelings that we're aware of. So the messages come up just raw sensory data, and then essentially the brain filters and determines how it's going to perceive these sensory inputs. So in that episode, I shared the example of visceral hypersensitivity. So I'll share that again.
Visceral hypersensitivity is a hallmark of ibs, and it's essentially pain or discomfort in your visceral organs. So those are the, your soft internal organs that go throughout your abdomen, your pelvis. And with visceral hypersensitivity, your threshold for pain in these organs is lower than average, lower than normal. So you will feel normal sensations that raw sensory data, that raw sensory input. And these are sensations that everybody has. But with visceral hypersensitivity, you perceive them as painful. Your brain perceives it as pain. Your brain decides, oh, this is pain.
There's a sensitivity of the signals being communicated to the brain and it's interpreted as harmful and painful. And people with IBS demonstrate specific attentional biases, particularly toward negative emotional and GI related stimulus. So there's more of an attention to the negative stimulus. And this actually is amplifies and exacerbates symptom perception. So you are perceiving regular old things happen in your body as bad, as harmful, as a threat, as negative as pain. And therefore you experience pain. Why? Because perception is motherfucking reality, remember? So like I said earlier, the brain doesn't just passively receive information, it does that. Raw sensory inputs are coming in, coming up, coming at you.
But we're perceiving a version of reality that is heavily filtered based on past beliefs, past experiences, past expectations, past traumas, past wounding. The past. And what we label as reality is just a constructed perception that our brain puts together. So with ibs, but honestly, with any type of chronic pain and a lot of chronic symptoms, the brain is perceiving these signals as pain, discomfort, a threat and a problem. So if it's the brain that is creating this perception, then we have to address this at the level of the brain. We have to address it at the level of the nervous system. We have to address it at the level of the subconscious, because the subconscious is directing the nervous system's perception too.
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A critical key thing to understand. I mentioned this earlier, but let's say it again, is that familiarity is safe to the subconscious, to the brain, to the nervous system. Unfamiliarity registers as unsafe. So until we reprogram our minds, rewire our brains and recode our bodies, it's always going to try to pull us back to the old familiar. It's always going to pull us back to what is predictable and it knows what is predictable.
Based on what has happened in the past. So we're basically every day just living out our past and then mapping it onto the future. Unless we change that, unless we interrupt that, unless we reprogram that. And before you get really frustrated with your brain and with yourself, this is actually a really sweet thing. It's a protection mechanism. The nervous system and the brain and the subconscious, they're all working together in your favor by trying to keep you safe. And this is where it can get a little tricky. Because the thing that we want to heal can also be the thing that our subconscious mind thinks is keeping us safe.
It's like we gotta keep her locked into hyper vigilance because that will keep her safe. We have to keep her on guard. We have to keep her waiting for the next threat. That is what's going to keep her safe. Our brains are always going to prioritize safety and survival over growth, regeneration and healing. So I know I'm focusing a lot on health here because this is a health show. And a lot of you come to the show to learn about your health and also manifest your health is coming up. But when something, anything that you're trying to call in, when that thing isn't manifesting, it just means that for some reason, this desire, this goal, is a threat to the subconscious.
And if it's a threat to the subconscious, the nervous system is going to pump the brakes in some way, shape or form. So we need to get the nervous system on board with your goals. That is key. So how do we do this? We first have to learn how to identify and shift your nervous system state. So you need to know when you're in a dysregulated state. And you need to have the tools to, to shift that. We have to update our nervous system's predictive pattern so it stops predicting more and more and more of what we don't want. If we're trying to change, we don't want it predicting the old familiar.
We have to be able to source baseline safety in the body. We have to bring safety to the nervous system so it won't keep putting the brakes on the new programs that we're trying to install in the subconscious mind. This is why if you've ever tried brain rewiring and subconscious reprogramming and it hasn't worked, you probably didn't do it in the right order. You have to start with the nervous system, you have to start with the body. We cannot bypass the physical body. And so many people attempt health as an either or, either we're like working on the mind or we're working on the body. And I'm here to tell you we need to do both. We have to integrate and align both.
You have to make your goals and desires feel more familiar on a body level. That's what is going to reduce the alarm system from going off. How do we do that? So familiarity is something that has to be experienced in the body. You have to experience it enough times that it no longer feels like a threat. So there is a reprogramming process that has to come online with the, the visceral sensations in your body too. And then once we do all of those things, then the top down strategies that are typically associated with manifestation actually become a lot more effective. So this is exactly what we help you do in manifest your health in a very specific order. So it's actually works, it actually lands, it actually sticks.
And I'm super, super excited to roll this out and get this in your hands. We officially open April 27, which is next week. So that's coming in hot. It is designed as a membership because reprogramming takes time. Building familiarity in your body, in your nervous system, that takes time, that takes repetition. And that might be part of the reason that if you've tried some of these tools in the past, they haven't been as you might just not have given it enough time. We have built out a very handy dandy app. So everything lives on an app and you can access all this stuff from your phone.
Can you hear the excitement in my voice? I'm so excited. I might have shared this before, but I had this reading from a shaman years ago who told me that I would be building this program out and it would become an app and it would be huge. So I'm just like really, really, really excited that this time is here, so to speak, to pull this all together. Final thoughts here. I want you to remember that manifestation is not just our ability to call things in. It's also our ability to have, hold and receive those things. And that has everything to do with nervous system safety. Does your nervous system, does your subconscious mind and your nervous system allow you to hold this? Does it feel safe having this thing? Because if not, then you can do all the magic and mindset work you want, but ultimately you're just going to have a much more challenging time actually holding on to the things that you are calling in.
So I hope that this was helpful. I hope that this was insightful. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I also hope to see you in Manifest Your Health because it's going to be a whole vibe. It is. All right. I love you guys and I'll check you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.