Episode 429: How Your Nervous System Influences Your Health
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What does your nervous system have to do with your digestion, hormones, immune system, inflammation, sleep, symptoms, and healing? And is “regulating your nervous system” just another wellness buzzword?
Your nervous system is constantly scanning your internal and external world for cues of safety or threat. And when your body keeps perceiving threats (even when you consciously know you’re safe), it can keep you stuck in inflammation, immune activation, digestive dysfunction, and chronic symptoms.
In this episode, Erin explains why nervous system regulation requires both top-down and bottom-up work. Breathwork, meditation, and yoga can be amazing tools, but if you never address the beliefs, patterns, trauma, emotional suppression, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and subconscious threat signals underneath the dysregulation, the work may only go so deep.
In this episode:
The gas pedal, brake pedal, and “optimal healing mode” nervous system states
How chronic stress activation can impact thyroid function, fertility, sex hormones, blood sugar, sleep, and the gut barrier
How subconscious beliefs, early programming, filters, and past experiences shape your nervous system
Erin’s invitation into her 5 day nervous system reset before the holiday season
Resources mentioned:
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When we are in chronic stress activation, when the nervous system perceives threat, when it rings the alarm of the amygdala, when it yells to the HPA axis, it's go time. This over time puts us in a chronic inflammatory state. And as I said before, in practice, when we're working with someone with ongoing mystery symptoms or has an actual diagnosed condition, we say that we have to go inflammation hunting because we already know that chronic unchecked inflammation. is ultimately what leads to symptoms and what leads to these conditions. Now we have to figure out what's contributing to the inflammation, and we know that nervous system dysregulation can lead to that chronic inflammation.
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.
Hello, friends. Erin Solo here today, and I am technically interrupting our endometriosis series. But if you have endometriosis or you suspect it, this episode is going to be a must-listen for you. But I would also say that it's a must-listen for anybody dealing with any type of health challenges or symptoms, or any type of chronic inflammatory condition, and basically anybody with a human body. So if that's you, listen up, because today we're going to talk about how your nervous system influences your health. Right now in the health and wellness space, we're hearing a lot of talk about nervous system regulation. Many people, patients, clients, practitioners, wellness enthusiasts alike, they know about the nervous system chronic health link, and you probably do too, but what is the nervous system exactly? What does that have to do with our health? What does it mean when your nervous system is dysregulated? How do we regulate our nervous systems? And is that even a real thing? So that is all that we'll get into today, and I really took my time preparing this episode for you guys.
This is going to be pretty comprehensive, It might be one of those episodes that you want to listen to a few times, maybe share with a friend if you have a few ahas that pop up, so you can talk through it with somebody. I always find that I process stuff best when I can talk through it with other people. But we're going to cover a lot of ground today because I really want to pull all of these concepts together for you in a way that really solidifies this and makes sense. And a quick announcement, I'm going to talk more about this at the end of the episode. So if you're interested, definitely stay tuned till then. But Next month in November, I'm going to do something that I've never done before, which is a live 5-day nervous system reset. It's going to be live in that we're all going to do it together right before the holidays. So you can have these tools as you navigate a typically stressful time of year.
And the practices in the reset will help you begin to rewire your nervous system, interrupt the cycle of your symptoms and feel safe in your body. Nothing overwhelming. It's going to be one thing a day for 5 days, just one thing, and you're going to feel like a different person on the other side of it. I'm really excited about being able to offer this. There's going to be more information in the show notes for you so you can check it out there. And now let's get into today's show. If you have any type of ongoing health struggle, you might need to heal your nervous system in order to really heal your health. And that is pretty much true no matter what condition you have, but especially, especially chronic inflammatory conditions.
And when I say chronic inflammatory conditions, I'm talking about things like, yes, endometriosis, but also MCAS, eczema, PMOS, autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, psoriasis, GI disorders like IBD, including Crohn's and colitis, metabolic dysfunction, things like insulin resistance, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, anything that has unchecked check inflammation at its root, which is like, hey, guess what? Most things, most chronic conditions. And there are, of course, many different root causes to chronic inflammatory conditions. Here at The Functional Nutritionist, we take a systems biology approach, which means we understand that all of the systems in the body are interconnected. They're talking to each other all of the time. And we are assessing for root causes to understand why the dysfunction or imbalance happened in the first place. What is the root of that imbalance? So the different root causes we would be assessing for in health conditions would be your environment. This is circadian rhythm. This is toxicant exposure.
This is endocrine disruptor exposure. This is relationships. This is the environment in your head. How do you speak to yourself? What beliefs do you carry? This is also liver health, mitochondrial health, metabolic health, insulin signaling, blood sugar regulation. This is your nutrition.
Or lack thereof.
This is your hormone health, your thyroid physiology, your gut health, including the microbiome, but also infections. This is bile flow. So we have all of these different systems in the body, and we are assessing for them. We are leveraging signs, symptoms, like what's showing up in your actual body. But then we're also looking at labs to assess all of these systems in your body. In practice, when we're working with somebody with ongoing mystery symptoms or a diagnosed condition, we often say that we have to go in. Inflammation hunting, because like I said earlier, we know that chronic unchecked inflammation is ultimately what leads to symptoms. And hey, guess what? Nervous system regulation can be part of that inflammatory load.
Nervous system dysregulation can be part of that root cause picture. So what exactly is the nervous system? The nervous system is your body's complex communication network. It transmits signals to and from the brain and spinal cord to all parts of the body, every single cell, every single tissue, every single organ. And it's made up of 2 main parts. We have the central nervous system, which is made up of your brain and spinal cord. And then we have the peripheral nervous system, which are nerves that branch out from the central nervous system to the rest of the body. Part of the peripheral nervous system is your autonomic nervous system. This runs automatically to regulate the systems required for survival.
So think breathing, blinking, heart beating, digestion, blood pressure, immune response. None of this is consciously directed, meaning it is subconsciously regulated. You do not have to think or be consciously aware of any of these things happening. It is just happening automatically. So that's usually what I think about Or how I remember this is autonomic means automatic. And this part of the nervous system is made up of 2 branches, your sympathetic branch, which is your fight or flight, and your parasympathetic branch, which is your rest and digest. So for sure, by now you've heard of these terms before. And I want you to think about your nervous system as your personal surveillance system.
It is clocking everything all of the time. It's clocking everything that's going on in inside your body, but also outside your body in your environment. And it's using this information and these data points to decide how safe you feel. It decides how safe you feel. And that perception of safety determines everything else— your digestion, your hormone balance, inflammation, immune response, sleep, And even your emotional regulation. So your nervous system constantly scans your world and your inner environment. And it asks, am I safe right now in this moment? Am I safe? And if the answer is yes, your body can rest, digest, connect, and heal. It can be in its parasympathetic response.
This is what I call optimal healing mode, because this is the state in which your body can repair and heal itself. If the answer is no, however, it shifts into protection mode. So this might be fight, this might be flight, this might be freeze. Protection— I just want to say this— protection can also look like self-sabotage. It can look like procrastination. It can look like staying stuck. It can look like, I know that I'm supposed to be doing this, but I'm not doing this. That is because your your nervous system is in protection mode.
And I talked about this a little bit a few weeks back in episode 424, The Story Keeping You Sick. I mentioned this concept of protector parts. These are parts of us, oftentimes our inner child parts, that are trying to protect us from experiencing pain, shame, fear, rejection that we've felt some point in our life. And your nervous system registered that when you felt those experiences, the pain, shame, fear, rejection, your nervous system clocked that. And it was like, no, this is too much, this is too painful, I'm never going to let her experience this again. So what happens is that these parts essentially fragment off, and their main job is to keep you from experiencing that pain, or that lack of safety again. So they ramp up when they think they have to keep you safe. But it's basically your nervous system subconsciously perceiving a threat with growth and change.
So it keeps keeps you locked into exactly where you are. So when people talk about being dysregulated, one way this could look is that your nervous system constantly misinterprets threat. So a threat could be being chased down an alley with a knife, like real threat to survival. A threat to your nervous system could also feel like having a hard conversation, setting a boundary, saying no when you've historically always said yes, doing something different in your business if you're a I work with a lot of business owners, so this is top of mind. Sharing your opinion on Instagram. In any of these situations, you might be physically safe, but if your mind, your subconscious, and your nervous system do not perceive that safety, your body is not going to feel that safety. So mentally, you might understand, I am safe, but your nervous system and your body don't register that. So consciously, you know you are safe, but your body is constantly responding as though it's being chased by a lion.
A lion, a tiger, or a bear. Oh my. That can actually be a sign of nervous system dysregulation, where you get stuck in that nervous system response, which, yes, is a dysregulated state. Because the nervous system is designed to be flexible and responsive and adaptive. A healthy nervous system is one that can appropriately assess and respond to threats or stressful stimulus, And then can recover quickly. What I really want you guys to know is that getting stressed, getting agitated, getting revved up, or even angry is not necessarily a sign of nervous system dysregulation. And I think that's where Instagram or the TikTok version of wellness education can miss the mark. That can actually be a very healthy response depending on what's happening.
With a flexible and resilient and healthy nervous system, we We match what is going on around us with an appropriate level of activation. I kind of envision it like a thermometer or a scale or a ladder where on the one side you have that sympathetic activation, that fight or flight. It's like a gas pedal. And then on the other side, you can have a freeze or shutdown response. This is kind of like the brake where you feel withdrawn, you feel immobilized, you might feel helpless or hopeless, exhausted, numb, disconnected, withdrawn. So those are obviously two extreme, like Yeah. Revved way up or revved way down. And then in the middle, you have that optimal healing mode, you have that rest and digest where you feel a sense of safety.
So while we might get activated in response to a stressor, in response to what feels like a threat, we never want to get stuck on either the gas or the brake. It's okay to be in one of those two extremes in response to a threat or what we perceive to be a threat or a stressor. But then we want to be able to recalibrate ourselves back to that middle ground. So some signs of a dysregulated nervous system would be getting stuck in one of those 2 extremes. And it can show up as taking a really long time to calm down after a stressful situation or event. It can look like your reaction being disproportionate to the event where the emotional intensity doesn't match the situation. So you can have this big bombastic reaction, or you can retreat and completely pull into yourself. You can feel worry or fear even when things are okay.
It's like a constant feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and you might actually feel even more anxious when things seem okay because chaos feels more comfortable or more predictable. This can show up with struggles with sleep where you're waking up in the middle of the night, maybe in a panic for no reason. We can see physical reactions like digestive problems or other symptoms that will flare up after stress. And with a dysregulated nervous system state, we can also see signs of health hypervigilance, or what I've called health anxiety, where you feel like you're overanalyzing every single symptom that you have, trying to figure out what caused them. You feel anxious if you don't have a clear explanation for how you're feeling. You find yourself constantly monitoring your body for signs of something being wrong. You feel like you're always on high alert about what might trigger a flare or a reaction. You can struggle to really trust your body.
Even when things feel okay, it's hard for you to trust that. When you start to feel okay, you worry that it won't last, or again, that waiting for the other shoe to drop feeling. You might feel trapped in a loop of fear, worry, or overthinking about your health. You feel like you have to stay constantly one step ahead of your symptoms. You might struggle to feel a sense of safety unless you have total control, or you feel like you have total control over all of your external circumstances—things like. routine, food, travel, things like that. And you go out of your way to avoid certain environments, certain foods, certain situations, just in case they cause a flare. There is this hypervigilance where you're always on guard with your health, with your symptoms.
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So all of that can be signs that your nervous system might be in a dysregulated state. And now I wanna talk about what is happening on a physiological level with that nervous system dysregulation. How does this actually impact your health? How does nervous system dysregulation lead to more symptoms or lead to chronic conditions? So in order to answer that question, I have to talk about our stress response. And for my old season podcast vets who've been rocking with me here for 9 years, this is going to be a real refresher course because I've literally been talking about this for 9 years straight now. But let's take it from the top, literally the top, your brain, the top of your head, the amygdala. The amygdala is part of the limbic system, the limbic system is part of the brain. And so therefore it is part of your central nervous system. And the amygdala responds to threat.
It quickly assesses the environment. And when it detects a threat or detects danger, it sends signals to the body's stress response through the HPA axis, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, and that activates the sympathetic nervous system. Remember, that is the gas pedal. It's like go time. It sets off a cascade of hormones that heads straight to the adrenal glands to stimulate the production of fight or flight hormones. epinephrine and norepinephrine, and also cortisol. So all of our stress hormones get activated with this response, and it does so on purpose to prepare the body to face challenges through this heightened awareness, through this heightened activity, by increasing energy, increasing focus, and directing all of our resources to immediate survival. So that fight or flight stress response is really geared at keeping us alive.
It increases our heart rate, it increases our blood pressure, It, uh, pumps blood to our muscles so we can either fight or we can run. It moves blood flow away from digestion. It releases stored glucose from the liver for quick fuel. It raises blood sugar levels. It widens the airways to let in more oxygen. It dilates our pupils. Like, we are ready to go. This is LFG time.
And then, under ideal circumstances, in a harmonious or regulated state, Once the stressor is removed, we've got negative feedback cycles that will turn off that HPA axis cascade since the stress response is no longer needed. So a healthy stress response, a healthy nervous system response, is one that will activate the HPA axis when needed and then turn it off when it doesn't. And that whole stress cascade, that whole response that I just talked about, is not a bad thing. It is a very natural, normal and necessary human physiological response. But the ways the body are equipped to handle that response, that stress, is very short-term. So we come in contact with a stressor, we activate that response, we handle the stressor, and then the stressor goes away and the stress response is turned off. Problems happen when we never get a chance to turn it off, when the HPA axis is constantly being activated. Our bodies are literally not designed to live like this.
They are not designed to live in that constant activated and dysregulated state. So if our nervous system is constantly perceiving some type of threat, if it's signaling to the amygdala, this is a problem, if that is activating the stress response over and over and over again, more often than not, if we are in a dysregulated state more often than not, that is what leads to chronic symptoms, chronic pain. chronic illness, ongoing digestive issues, autoimmune conditions, histamine issues, hormonal imbalance, all of it. When your body is prioritizing survival, it is not focusing on general maintenance and repair. It quite literally shunts resources away from things like thyroid function, metabolism, digestion, healthy immune response, fertility. Just think about it practically like this. If your body is using all of its resources to keep creating stress hormones, it's going to have less material to to build out sex hormones. When your stress response is chronically activated, it starts to impact other body systems.
We can also see a lot of increased inflammation like this. Short-term cortisol, very anti-inflammatory. Think about corticosteroids, they are powerful anti-inflammatory medications. But with chronic stress, that changes. We can see downstream inflammatory effects with chronic high cortisol, blood sugar issues. Cortisol and catecholamines raise raise glucose. They drive insulin resistance. That is inflammatory.
We can see sleep issues. A dysregulated system disrupts sleep. Poor sleep raises inflammatory markers. We can see increased visceral fat. Chronic cortisol favors abdominal fat storage. That fat actively produces cytokines. Our vagus nerve is associated with parasympathetic nervous system response, or that rest and digest response. Vagal activity regulates inflammatory response.
Responses by decreasing cytokine release. So we can see increased inflammation with low vagal tone. Stephen Cole out of UCLA says that chronic sympathetic activation can actually turn on inflammatory genes. Chronic sympathetic activation also increases intestinal permeability, or leaky gut, which lets LPS into circulation. That is a super inflammatory trigger. Stress can also shift the microbiome, leading to a more inflammatory gut state. Basically, all of this to say that when we are in chronic stress activation, when the nervous system perceives threat, when it rings the alarm of the amygdala, when it yells to the HPA axis, it's go time. This over time puts us in a chronic inflammatory state.
And as I said before, in practice, when we're working with someone with ongoing mystery symptoms or has an actual diagnosed condition, we say that we have to go inflammation hunting because we already know that chronic unchecked Yeah. Inflammation is ultimately what leads to symptoms and what leads to these conditions. Now, we have to figure out what's contributing to the inflammation, and we know that nervous system dysregulation can lead to that chronic inflammation, because if the nervous system keeps sending a threat signal, the immune system will keep responding to it. So the question that we keep asking in the health and wellness world is, how do we regulate our nervous system? But the better question might actually be, how do we turn off those threat signals? How do we turn off our nervous system's tendency to register things as a threat? I think that is a much more impactful and useful line of questions to ask ourselves. And I'm gonna be honest with you, it's a bit of a doozy of an answer, but if you're down, if you're down, I will attempt to unpack this here so we can really start to understand how do we achieve that nervous system regulation that we're all after. Because if it were as simple as like just track your HRV and do some deep breathing, we would probably all be regulated and symptom-free by now. It's not quite that straightforward. Nervous system regulation requires a top-down and a bottom-up approach, but most people are only focusing on the top-down.
And so what I mean by top-down are the things that we're oftentimes told to do for nervous system regulation, or stress management, certain breathing practices, or meditation, or yoga. These are things that can help to bring us into a parasympathetic state. And I love them all, and I do them all. They are amazing and effective tools because they help you to teach your body what a parasympathetic, optimal healing mode, rest and digest state actually feels like. And the more that you practice this, the more you are conditioning your to this response. That's a really, really good thing. But if that's all you're doing to regulate your nervous system, then your healing will most likely stay surface level. So we also need what I refer to as bottom-up approaches as well.
We need to address the underlying drivers of the dysregulation in order for true change, healing, and symptom resolution to take effect. Essentially, we have to ask what is causing that dysregulated state to begin with? What is causing your nervous system to perceive so many things as a threat to your safety? The real nervous system regulation work is understanding that, understanding why your brain and your body keep returning to that dysregulated state, why your body and your mind keep perceiving threat, why your nervous system continues to send those messages and create that internal sense of lack of safety. And to understand that, you have to first understand that your nervous system is shaped by your history, by your past experiences, by programs, by beliefs, by filters. And when I say programs, beliefs, and filters, I'm talking about what is living in your subconscious. The subconscious mind is programmed very early on between the ages of 0 to 7, some say up to 12. But basically, whatever was modeled to you in these formative years really creates our beliefs, our beliefs about ourselves, our belief about the world, our beliefs about our place in the world. And some programs and beliefs are incredible, and some are not. Some are really self-limiting or fear-based.
And because of how your brain creates your perception of reality, those beliefs will literally shape your reality. This is not woo-woo. We are so far past woo-woo right now, you guys. This is real. This is so for real. How your brain creates your perception of reality is based on what you currently believe. So if you have a lot of fear-based beliefs, you're going to see a lot more fear. Your nervous system is going to clock a lot more fear and lack of safety.
Hey guys, if you've been following me for a while or you've been listening to the podcast, you probably already know that when it comes to your health, there's more to the story than what you've been told. A lot of you guys are really smart. You've tried things, you've run labs, you've worked with practitioners, and you're still sitting here like, why doesn't my body feel better yet? That's actually the exact person we work with inside our one-to-one care. You are not doing anything wrong. It's just that no one has really put the full picture together for you. Inside our one-to-one functional care method, we look at everything together— your gut, your hormones, your nutrient status, your nervous system, your history. We don't see them as separate issues, but as one connected story, because it is. And then we help you actually work through that with real support, ongoing guidance, adjustments, and helping you understand what your body is doing and why. Our goal isn't to just help you feel a little bit better for a few months. It's to actually create something that lasts. We don't go for 90% better. We keep it 100%. So if you're dealing with chronic symptoms, gut issues, hormone imbalances, autoimmunity, and you feel like you've tried everything, I really do get it. And at the same time, I'll say this. I know. When we work with someone like you, it's very rare that we don't find what's missing because that's what we do. We're a team of highly skilled practitioners working on complex cases every single day. You're not doing this alone. You have ongoing support, messaging access to your practitioner, monthly appointments where we're looking at your progress, your labs, what's working and what's not, and actually adjusting those things in real time so we can find what works for your You can apply to work with us through the link in the show notes, and our team will take a look and guide you from there.
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So I want to give some real-world examples to anchor this in. There are certain beliefs that I see in people with chronic illness or chronic symptoms. And one of those main beliefs is that there is something wrong with me, there is something inherently wrong with me. And maybe there is some sidecar beliefs with that of, I was not chosen, I was abandoned, I was forgotten about. But it comes back to because there is something wrong with me, there's these shame-based beliefs that were formed based on what happened to you. You can learn that I am too much. You can learn that I am not enough. I have referenced this quote from one of my favorite poets, Nayyirah Waheed, countless times, but it feels important to bring up again.
What about this theory? The fear of not being enough and the fear of being too much are exactly the same fear: the fear of being You, if you do not feel safe to be you, you do not feel safe. Period. Hard stop. So you will try to externally orient those feelings of safety. You try to find it outside of yourself. You might feel responsible for how other people feel. You might feel like you can never disappoint anybody. You can never let anybody down.
So this keeps you over-functioning. This keeps you in perfectionism. This keeps you in people pleasing, where you're trying to essentially justify your existence. By overdoing and overgiving, you might silence your voice. You might not say no. You might go into some self-betrayal, going dark on yourself, going dark on your own needs as a way to feel belonging, connection, love, and safety. So this is what I mean where we go outside of ourselves to feel safety because we do not feel that we are enough. We do not feel good enough.
We feel like there's something inherently wrong with us, and if we do not feel safe to be us. us to just be who we are, we do not feel safe. So that is going to keep the nervous system on guard, that is going to keep the nervous system constantly scanning for evidence of where we're not enough, or where we're too much, or where we are wrong, where other people might see areas where we are wrong or underperforming. And then we will do anything to escape that feeling, or to attempt to escape that feeling, to try to bring some semblance of safety into our bodies. There's this quote that I'm sure you've heard before: the body expresses what the mind suppresses. This is such an underdiscussed contributor to stress, to nervous system dysregulation, to HPA activation. But if we have a history of unexpressed emotions, if we have a history of unexpressed feelings, of unexpressed needs, if we've turned off those needs as a way to feel safe, the body eventually showcases evidence of this. And you guys, this is why I'm really, really, really not a huge fan of the term stress management, or being told to manage your stress.
I do feel like in the world of functional medicine, that's where sometimes this conversation nets out. If you're working with a practitioner, they might acknowledge, hey, nervous system health matters here, make sure you manage your stress. And that's where it kind of nets out. But, like, literally trying to manage all of this is a primary driver of nervous system dysregulation. Trying to keep a lid on all of this stuff is actually quite stressful. It's that insidious stress. It's that subconscious stress. We think we're doing everything right.
So we're not even aware that this is a stressor. But the body knows. The body always knows.
I mentioned protector parts earlier in IFS, or Internal Family Systems. Some of these protector parts are called managers. They are essentially trying to manage and keep a lid on all of this so you don't have to experience it again. So I don't think that trying to manage your stress is a very effective or useful tool when we are trying to regulate our nervous system. Trust me when I tell you that your nervous system is already trying to manage quite It really does not need to be given one more thing to do, one more thing to manage. It's like at max capacity right now. Okay. And then finally, I would be remiss here to not mention how history of trauma, high ACE scores can really increase the likelihood of chronic illness.
I mean, this is very, very, very well established in the research. What happens is that unresolved trauma, and I always like to say unresolved, because just because you've had traumatic experiences, just because you have had something happened to you in the past does not automatically mean you're going to get sick in the future. This is stuff that we have repressed, suppressed, shoved down— things, experiences, feelings that have had no healthy outlet. Okay, so that's what I mean by unresolved trauma. But that can lead to a dysregulated limbic system where there's an amplification of the brain's alarm system. The amygdala is a essentially overactive. It's like flagging and tagging everything as a stressor of like problem, problem, problem, problem. So negative thoughts, fears, reactivity, and worries are more likely to occur over time.
And please keep in mind that traumatic stress is not just childhood trauma. Traumatic stress is any experience of helplessness, powerlessness, chronic overwhelm without a chance to recover. It's too much, too fast without the appropriate resources. And so I will oftentimes put chronic illness in the category of traumatic stress, medical gaslighting, not being believed, not having the resources or the answers or the support to help you. There can be legitimate fears. Is this my forever? There's an unpredictability of symptoms, the not knowing what's going to trigger symptoms, fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fears about your symptoms, all of that diminishes feelings of safety and ramps up your nervous system response. You stay on guard, you are looking out for danger, being on the lookout for danger becomes your normal state. So this leads to a more hypervigilant nervous system where it's constantly scanning both outside and inside your body, looking for and expecting problems, looking for and expecting danger, looking for and expecting threat.
And when you're looking for something and you're expecting to find it, more often than not, you will. So all of these things can keep your nervous system in a dysregulated state. And remember, remember, our bodies are literally not designed to live in a dysregulated state. So the more this is happening, the more likely you are to see dysfunction in the body. symptoms, unchecked inflammation, immune dysregulation, and yes, chronic conditions that I listed at the very start of this episode. But I don't want this to sound depressing. Do not despair, because the beauty of the brain is that it's plastic. The brain can restore and rewire itself.
And if the brain can do that, then of course the patterns of the nervous system can do that as well. The body can do that as well. This includes your symptoms patterns. That's the good news. And I deliver that good news to you as someone who has done it myself and witnessed others do it the same. So I know that it is possible. I have seen it time and time again. So how do we do it? Well, the first thing is that you can't rewire your brain if your body is in a state of panic and dysregulation.
So truly starting with those top-down practices can really be quite useful here. Doing practices that can bring your body into more of a parasympathetic state, being able to read the cues of your body, When you are in a dysregulated state, so you have the ability to recalibrate that. But we don't stop there. And this is what most people misunderstand about nervous system regulation. We need the bottom-up approaches. We need to be able to go deeper than just saying, my nervous system is dysregulated, so I need to do some breathing practices and monitor my HRV to regulate it, because that will not touch all of the things that I just discussed. It's not necessarily addressing the true roots. So we also need to understand our root driver beliefs.
What are the beliefs that we are carrying around about ourselves? We need to begin to understand how our past is informing our present, and maybe even creating our future. We have to get familiar with those inner parts and pieces of us that have splintered off, that have fragmented off because of things that have happened to us in the past. We need practices and tools to integrate all of these pieces and parts into the whole. Healing is to make whole again. We need to process, clear, release, repattern. Your body needs to communicate with your brain that the threat is no longer being perceived so that the nervous system can actually calm down, so that the alarm bells can calm down, so that the inflammation can calm down so that the immune dysregulation can calm down so that your symptoms can calm down. So that's why I want to invite you into my 5-day nervous system reset this month so we can begin to do this together. Because what if the secret to putting your symptoms into remission wasn't another protocol or practitioner or supplement? What if it was going within? What if you held the keys to your own healing inside of you? Because here's the secret, you guys, you actually do.
So if you suspect your nervous system is playing a role in your symptoms, but you're not totally sure what to do about it, how to shift that, where to begin, this reset is going to be for you. If you suspect that healing is more than just physical, but you don't know how to approach it differently, if you want to change your relationship to your symptoms, not just manage them, if you're ready to feel safe in your body, again, this reset is for you. The practices in the reset will help you begin to rewire your nervous system to interrupt the cycle of your symptoms and to finally feel safe in your body. And like I said, we're not doing anything overwhelming. This is one thing a day for 5 days. Anybody can do it. Trust me, anybody can do this. And you will start to feel like a different person on the other side of these 5 days.
So we're doing this together next month in November. You can check out more details in the show notes. If you're a Manifest Your Health member and you're listening to this, you will of course receive this reset for free because it's going to live inside of our app. But anybody can purchase this for less than $30 a month. We're keeping it really, really, really affordable because I want as many people to have access to this reset as possible so we can begin to rewire your nervous system together. We can begin to rewire your body toward health, the health that you actually deserve, and that I know is so possible for you. So check it out, and you can register in the show notes. And we will be back next week continuing our endometriosis series.
Love you guys.
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.