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If you’ve cut out certain foods, stopped eating at restaurants, turned down invitations, AND become hyperaware of every possible exposure that could trigger a flare, what happens when you get stuck there?
In this solo episode, Erin is introducing the health-to-isolation pipeline. Think of it as the sneaky way a healing journey can turn into a lifestyle filled with restrictions, avoidance, and isolation. She opens up about how this played out during her experience with chronic illness and how you can tell when your "healing cocoon" might be holding you back.
Erin also shares the difference between nervous system regulation and control and how to start widening your window of tolerance without pushing yourself into overwhelm.
Because the goal is for you to have a BIG, bold, vibrant life that you actually get to participate in.
P.S. Join Erin for her first-ever LIVE 5 Day Nervous System Reset, beginning November 12! For $27, you'll get 5 days of guided practices, 2 live classes with Erin, and lifetime access inside the Manifest Your Health app.
In this episode:
Social isolation, longevity, cardiovascular health, and why community really is medicine
The connection Erin makes between nature's cycles of death, rebirth, contraction, and expansion
How to find the Goldilocks zone between too little challenge and too much overwhelm
What titration means for nervous system healing, and how to practice being uncomfortable
Why expanding your capacity for uncomfortable emotions can also expand your capacity for joy, connection, adventure
Resources mentioned:
Sign up for Erin’s $27 LIVE 5 Day Nervous System Reset, beginning November 12th.
Manifest Your Health is the neuroscience-backed membership that helps you regulate your nervous system, integrate the parts of you that keep you stuck, and become the version of yourself your body can actually heal as.
Subscribe to her Substack where Erin shares the (raw & unfiltered) BTS of her own business & life – so you can steal what applies to yours. All things health, wealth, ambition & manifestation.
Want more of Erin?
Subscribe to her Substack where Erin shares the (raw & unfiltered) BTS of her own business & life – so you can steal what applies to yours. All things health, wealth, ambition & manifestation.
Organifi Supplement Powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
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LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing Powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
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If you are locked into an extreme, if you are locked into one side of the pendulum swing, if you are locked into the extreme of everybody is toxic, everything is toxic, nothing is safe, no exposures are safe, no interactions are safe, this is a place of stasis. And that is actually not what a healthy and healed nervous system looks like. looks like. With true nervous system regulation, we are able to match what's going on around us with an appropriate level of activation, and then we can recover.
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, my beautiful babies. I know that we've really been talking about the nervous system a lot here lately. We had episode 429, How Your Nervous System Influences Your Health, and then episode 432, which was last week, How to Rewire Your Way Out of Chronic Inflammation. And I just felt that there was one more part of this conversation that wanted to download in, so that's what I'm sharing with you today, and I'm calling it the Health to Isolation Pipeline. When you start your health journey, it can, over time, feel like it intensifies and amplifies, sometimes to the point where you might feel like your world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. You have to cut things out.
You might have to cut certain people out, certain exposures out. And sometimes that is part of the healing. There is a contraction period that might need to happen. And sometimes I refer to this as the healing cocoon, where you have to pull yourself inward. And that's not always a bad or negative thing. In fact, a pendulum swing can be part of the maturation process. An easy example of this is when I was exiting diet culture, after 20 years of some pretty fucked up shit, I had to pendulum swing. I moved into more anti-diet culture rhetoric.
That's what I needed to grow and to evolve. I pretty much needed the exact opposite. That was part of my healing and maturation process. Another example is where you were once, let's say, super available to everybody everywhere all the time. You might pendulum swing in the opposite direction where you start setting boundaries and maybe acting a little bit like a bitch or even cutting people out of your life. What I see pretty consistently is that most healthy people end up somewhere in the middle of the 2 extremes. So even though you might pendulum swing to one opposite end of the spectrum, eventually part of the maturation process, part of progression, part of growth, part of healing is to come back somewhere in the middle. Dogma or rigidity in wellness might serve some of us at different stages of our life.
I certainly won't deny that. I myself had to get pretty strict with certain things during different phases of my healing journey. But long-term, if we get locked into rigid dogma with our health, what we can end up seeing is regression in healing. So yeah, our worlds might feel like they're getting smaller and smaller, And also, we might actually stop healing. We might stop progressing. We might stop maturing. So today we're going to talk about why does this happen? How do we know when we're in that healing cocoon? How do we know when we've potentially been in there for a little bit too long? How do we know when we're ready to break out of that? What does the readiness level actually look like? And how then do we break out of it? If we are in fact ready to do so. But before I get into all of that, I need to invite you into my 5-day nervous system reset because it starts this Thursday, November 12th.
I am beyond excited to offer this to all of you guys. The practices in this reset will help you begin to rewire your nervous system, interrupt the cycle of your symptoms, and feel safe in your body. Finally, And there's nothing overwhelming that we're gonna do. It's literally one thing a day for 5 days in a row, and you will feel like a different person on the other side of it. So if you wanna change your relationship to your symptoms, instead of feeling like you're just constantly managing them as a full-time job, if you are ready to feel safe in your body again, these 5 days are specifically designed for you. And everything's gonna be recorded, so if you can't make it live, Don't panic. You're also going to get lifetime access to it, and it's all for only $27.
So this challenge, this reset, is going to live inside the Manifest Your Health app. If you're not familiar with all of the tools that we have here at The Functional Nutritionist, we have our very own app that houses my neuroscience-backed brain-body healing program called Manifest Your Health. This is the program that helped me and many others put chronic conditions into remission. So the app is where you will be able to find And the reset, it's all linked up in the show notes for you. Listen, if you're a Manifest Your Health member, don't worry, you're gonna get it for free. And if you're not a member, you can purchase it for $27. We start this Thursday, and I would love to see you there, and your nervous system would love to see you there as well. Okay, now for today, the health to isolation pipeline.
A few months back, episode 407, I recorded an episode that I called The 5 Stages of And I'm going to outline the first two stages for you here. The first stage is symptoms and seeking. So this is when you might have a lot of unexplained symptoms. You are seeking answers. You are searching for why you feel this way and what you can do about it. And then some people shift into the second stage, which I call labels. So either you've been labeled or diagnosed with something through a doctor, a practitioner, or through learning from the online wellness space. Maybe you've labeled yourself based on a set of symptoms and what you've learned.
So this might look like SIBO, or histamine issue, or SIRS, or mold illness, or autoimmunity. And this is the stage where someone can go from being health curious into health anxious, and this can happen really fast. This is the stage that I see people get trapped in because we feel like we have to do so many things in order to keep ourselves Safe, so many things to prevent a symptom flare-up, so many things to just feel baseline normal, that our world starts to get smaller and smaller and smaller, and we get more isolated within our world. So this is what I mean by the health to isolation pipeline, and this is what it might look like in real life. You stop eating out. You restrict your foods to the point where it's really hard to eat out with other people. You might shop at one specific store, or you might only have one restaurant that feels safe to you. You control your environment.
If there's a Glade plug-in when you walk into a house, you literally have to leave. P.S., that's a real-world example from my life. when I was struggling and my world was really small. If someone comes into your house and they're wearing perfume, you have to ask them to leave. Another real-world example from yours truly. Maybe you don't travel or you don't travel nearly as much as you used to. This was another big one for me. It was the change of schedule, the lack of familiarity, the lack of control over food, the exposure to certain toxicants.
And again, especially for me, synthetic fragrances, it was all Too much for my system to handle. I would get terrible anxiety around trips, often to the point where I would have to cancel the trip. And if I did go, I used to get super sick and not be able to enjoy the experience. So you might stay home more, you might socialize less, you might stop dating, you make less plans with friends, you commit to less things because you never know how you're going to feel. So making plans feels really risky. You might cancel plans. You might get known for canceling plans, so then you stop getting invited places. People might not understand what's going on with you.
There's a reason a lot of chronic conditions are called invisible illnesses, and maybe you're tired of trying to explain it, or you don't know how to explain it, or you don't want to sound weak or overly sensitive, so you shoulder the burden alone. And that can feel really isolating and really lonely. You might start setting boundaries where once you are really available to people, you do that pendulum swing in the opposite direction and you have to start saying no all of the time. And then slowly, without realizing that it's even happening, your world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And here's why that is actually not Great for your health long term. If you stay here long term, there is a tremendous amount of research that tells us isolation is not synonymous with health. Lacking social connection increases the risk of premature death by 26 to 29%. This is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Loneliness. Raises the risk of coronary heart disease by 29% and stroke by 32%. Loneliness and isolation increases stress. This is a little bit more anecdotal, but I will share this with you here in case it lands and resonates. But I have found for myself that the times I feel the most stressed, where I'm consciously aware of feeling stressed, are not necessarily the times that there's a lot on my plate. But more so the times that I feel isolated and alone with what's on my plate. So I feel like I have to carry a burden by myself that nobody understands. That is actually what increases stress in my system.
We know that in the Blue Zones, longevity is linked more to social eating than specific foods. Community is medicine. At the IFM conference that I attended earlier this year, a bell hooks quote was shared: Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion. So a sense of belonging matters. So when our quest for healing leaves us feeling alone, we have to look at that. Humans are communal creatures. Our hearts need other hearts.
Our souls need other souls. On a less esoteric level, when you're isolated, your microbiome gets isolated. Listen, your microbiome in your gut needs exposure to be healthy. Your food gets isolated. Your food needs to be diverse and varied to feed your microbiome. To support liver function, to support ATP production, energy production in your system. Your nervous system also gets isolated. And the longer that we stay here in this cocoon, in this isolation period, the more the window of perceived safety closes.
That means that there are less and less signals. situations in which you feel safe. So over time, this isolation can actually compound. And we're gonna talk about, at the end of the show, how to widen and expand that window of tolerance, because that's what so many people are inevitably looking for. We talk a lot about nervous system regulation. I think a lot of people are actually looking for nervous system expansion. They want to have the capacity to do more, to live the life they used to be able to live before they got sick. But let's talk about why this happens.
I think this is so important for us to understand. I myself am a questioner, so I really like to know the whys behind things. And I think because that is the way I am, that is the way that I teach, and that tends to be the type of person that I attract here to this podcast.
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So let's talk about why this happens. Your nervous system is trying to do everything it can do to keep you safe, and some of those things that I just listed out might have actually mitigated symptoms for you. They might be mitigating symptoms for you right now. So, let's say limiting your diet, limiting your exposures, learning how to say no to more and more things, pulling back on travel, pulling back on social activities. Those things, those new habits, those new behaviors, those new patterns, might have actually helped you feel better.
So we stay here because it feels really, really safe. This is the space and the place in which we healed. So our nervous systems learn to attach feelings of safety to this place, to this healing cocoon. We might create a story here where if I step out of this cocoon, I will no longer be healthy. I will lose my health. I will flare up. My symptoms will flare up. I will no longer be well or safe, to the point where it can feel really risky to step out and to leave it.
Remember, we discussed last week how a history of trauma leads to an amplification of the brain's alarm systems, where the nervous system is actually conditioned to overprotect. And I shared with you that I often consider navigating chronic illness as traumatic stress. It is the unpredictability of symptoms. It is the not knowing what is going to trigger your symptoms. It is the medical gaslighting, the not being believed, the not having the resources or the answers or the support to actually help you. It's a legitimate fear of like, is this mine forever? Will I feel like this forever? With all of this, your nervous system learns to stay on guard. So being on the lookout for danger becomes your nervous system's default Go-to state. So knowing and understanding all of this, doesn't it just make good sense that your nervous system wants to keep your world small? Because then there's less potential threat for it to have to mitigate and manage.
So I tell you this because when we understand how our brain and our nervous systems actually work, it allows us to have more compassion for ourselves. No healing arises from feelings of shame. I'm going to say that again. No healing arises from you feeling ashamed about yourself, about your health, about your body, about what you have to do to feel safe. You cannot heal if you are constantly warring against yourself. Healing arises out of compassion. It is literally anti-inflammatory. Self-compassion is literally anti-inflammatory.
So have compassion for yourself. This is what your nervous system is doing to try to keep you safe. It loves you that much that it wants you to be safe. And I want you to recall and remember what we talked about in the last couple of nervous system episodes. The nervous system determines how safe you feel, not necessarily how safe you actually are. And the nervous system can misinterpret messages, especially if there's been a history of chronic traumatic stress. Especially if there's been a history of chronic symptoms, it might misinterpret signals of safety. So this is where we have to ask ourselves, Is our cocoon actually keeping us regulated and safe? Because a lot of us will tell ourselves that story, and it's why we get stuck here.
It's why we get locked into the cocoon, because you start to build evidence that if I leave the cocoon, I am no longer safe. If I leave the cocoon, my nervous system cannot— Stay regulated. But what I have to tell you is that if you are locked into an extreme, if you are locked into one side of the pendulum swing, if you are locked into the extreme of everybody is toxic, everything is toxic, nothing is safe, no exposures are safe, no interactions are safe, this is a place of stasis. And that is actually not what a healthy and healed nervous system looks like. A healthy and healed nervous system is not static. A healthy and healed nervous system is flexible. It's resilient. It can move up and down with ease.
It doesn't stay stuck in one place when something happens, or when you get triggered, or when you have an exposure. You actually, with a healthy nervous system, have the ability to move into and out of activation or agitation with ease. You can have an exposure to a trigger, and then you can bring yourself back to baseline. With true nervous system regulation, we are able to match what's going on around us with an appropriate level of activation, and then we can recover. So a healthy nervous system is not no activation, no exposures, no agitation ever. True regulation is an inside job. It doesn't require the world to organize itself around us, and it doesn't require us to shut out the outside world in order to be regulated. If you outsource your feelings of safety externally, that is actually control more than it is regulation.
Regulation, control over your environment, control over your food, control over potential triggers, control over exposures, control over people even sometimes. And I think this misinterpretation can happen when we start to go down the rabbit hole of nervous system regulation in nervous system health, especially in relation to chronic health challenges. We can misinterpret control for regulation, but true nervous system mastery means that you can be in the presence of some of these external triggers and still be able to source safety in your body. So true regulation, again, it's not a static state. It's not being calm all the time. It's not the absence of emotional activation. It's not being in control all the time. It's not never feeling uncomfortable.
It's not never feeling challenged. It's not avoiding all conflict potential. True regulation is the ability to adapt and be fluid and respond to our environment. We can be one with the world and respond accordingly. It's the ability to Stay aware and connected to yourself during times of activation. It's being able to settle yourself down and return to homeostasis after a stress exposure. It allows us to contract and to expand. A healthy, balanced, regulated, healed nervous system allows us to contract And expand.
When we go through a period of healing, whether that's physical, mental, emotional, energetic, all of the above, we might feel like we have to pull in and unplug from everything else so that we can plug back into ourselves. So it can oftentimes be a contraction period. Healing, in the beginning stages of it, can look like contraction. And I wanna name that because this is not wrong. You are not doing healing wrong if you've ended up in a contraction period, in a healing cocoon. If your world has temporarily gotten smaller, that can actually be really good and powerful, especially if you have a history of not getting your needs met or bleeding out in service of everyone else around you. If you have a history of people pleasing, of over-functioning, all the stuff that we talk about on the regular here, sometimes in order for us to heal, we have to divest our energy from everybody and everything else and plug it back into ourselves. I used to have this conversation all the time with clients when we would go over their Dutch test.
If we saw that their cortisol was low, or maybe their DHEA was low, they were in a depleted state, I would create a plan for them. And I would let them know, hey, this is gonna make you feel better. You're gonna start getting your energy back, and you have to promise me that you are not going to take that surplus of energy, that overflow of energy, and plug it right back into everything else and start caretaking, using that surplus of energy to start caretaking everything else in your life. You have to take any of that surplus and put it back into you. Our bodies require a surplus of energy, literally a surplus of ATP, in order to regenerate and to heal. So if we are pulling you out of depleted state, any of that extra stuff goes back into you. Otherwise, we are going to recreate this same exact pattern, the same exact situation. So I had to have this conversation all of the time.
So hear me, hear me when I say I am a big advocate of you. Plugging back into you, you caretaking you, you putting energy back into you. Again, sometimes, oftentimes, the healing journey necessitates that we contract. But this is the whole point of today's show: energetically, we are not designed to be in a contraction period forever. That is not synonymous with health, with vitality, With vibrancy, with thriving, with a healthy nervous system. Pulling in and staying pulled in forever is not synonymous with true health. Listen, we are of nature, period, hard stop. And the more we disconnect from that, the more our bodies, our cycles, our rhythms are disconnected from nature's cycles, from the ebbs and the flows, the seasons, the changes, the rhythm, from sunlight, from soil, from the earth itself.
The more we're disconnected from all of that, the further and further and further away from true health we get. That, I believe, is one of the chief and primary reasons that chronic health challenges, including mental and emotional health, are so on the rise, because we've completely disconnected from nature. And this might seem like a weird tangent, but it's not, because nature is never in isolation. Nature thrives in systems. Just like you. And everything in nature is made new again. Everything. The earth composts, it transmutes.
There's alchemy everywhere. Death and rebirth cycles. Everything is made new again, even you. The lining of your gut regenerates. Your body makes new red blood cells. Your liver cells regenerate. Your skin sheds and replaces itself. Everything in the body is made new again.
We are of nature. And hey, guess what? Nature has continuous death and rebirth cycles. It's fall here in New England. We are seeing the leaves fall from the trees, and then eventually the trees will bloom again. So I say all of this for you to understand that contraction and expansion is part of the dance of being alive, being fully alive. And the issue is that we have pathologized contraction. Anytime we go into contraction, anytime we go into seasons of rest, we feel like it's wrong. We have a lot of conditioning.
We run a lot of programs that tell us, no, no, no, do not you dare slow down. And so sometimes the body gives us an invitation. Illness becomes an invitation to give ourselves a chance to actually do this, to actually contract, to actually take rest, to actually care for and repair ourselves. So again, I want to reiterate that the contraction is not the problem. It can be a very natural and even helpful process to desire to pull our world in, to make it smaller, to reduce our exposures, to allow our energy to just focus on us and our healing. So once again, offer yourself compassion for this. You are not doing it wrong if you are here. But, and, also, cocoons aren't meant to stay in forever.
Eventually, the butterfly must emerge. There gets to a point where we might be holding ourselves back in our cocoon, thinking it is our only safe place. But what the next level of our healing actually needs— Is freedom. Is expanding out. So how do you know when you are ready for that? How long you stay in contraction really depends. It depends on the person, it depends on the circumstances, the different factors. Honestly, I feel like I was in mine for a few years, and in hindsight, that was probably a little bit too long, but I didn't know what I didn't know. And once I learned new tools, I used them.
I was ready for them. Joseph Campbell talks about the hero's journey, and he says, you've been thinking one way, now you have to think a different way. I was ready to think a different way. I was ready to see things in a different way. That was an exciting prospect for me. That's how I knew I was ready.
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 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 are 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. 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 body. 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.
I reference this quote from clinical social worker Astrid Schmidt often. She says, if it makes you feel hopeful, expansive, accepted, alive, and like there's room for growth, go with it. But if it makes you feel inhibited, limited, Stuck. This is me forever and I will never change. This is my life sentence. Then don't go with it.
There's more. So my cocoon, my safe space, my healing space started to feel inhibiting to me. It started to feel limiting. I felt stuck. I felt small. Not just my world was getting smaller, but I was getting smaller. I had stayed in the contraction period for too long. And I had gotten to the point where I just didn't want any more limitations on me, any more restrictions or rules.
The rules at first helped me feel really safe and really secure, but eventually they made me feel like my world was too limited. And I got to a point where I'm like, I don't wanna live like this anymore. And there can be such a beauty in that moment, in that desperation, because you're so open to possibility. It's kind of like, fuck it, I'll try anything. There's beauty in that moment. I recently heard Kelly Brogan describe readiness as a sense of relief as you move toward change. And I really think I have to agree with that. Rather than the typical resistance and fear that we feel when we're thinking about something new, there's this sense of relief.
When you think about heading into the unknown. There might even be a sense of excitement where you're willing to change your perspective on who you are and what life you get to live. That's when you're ready to go on your own hero's journey, so to speak. So if you're feeling any of this that I'm describing, if you've been in a cocoon, if you've been in a healing process, if you've been in a contraction period, but you're feeling A big yes when I describe what readiness could look like. If you feel that sense of relief or even that sense of excitement knowing that there might be another way, even if you don't know what that looks like, if you are excited about the prospect, then what next, right? That's the next obvious question. What next? How do I start coming out of this cocoon? How do I start to emerge? So my advice to you, if you are here, is do not jump into the deep end of the pool right away. I'm definitely mixing my metaphors a little bit, but hopefully you're tracking with me and you know what I mean. Don't go all the way.
This is a titration process. The nervous system needs to learn a new baseline, not be shoved into the opposite extreme of where you are right now. It needs to learn how to— Regulate when exposed to things that would have elicited threat signals. And P.S., this is what we're doing in my 5-Day Nervous System Reset. So if you haven't joined yet, I want you to pause this podcast and go sign up. The link is in the show notes. Do it now so you don't forget, because if any of what I'm saying here today is tracking with you, you need this. That's why I'm making it only $27.
So it is super fucking accessible to those that need it, which honestly, you guys, is probably a good majority of the people. that listen to the show. So get on it. Okay, back to titration. While we need our nervous systems to learn to be with— okay with being a little uncomfortable, you absolutely do not want to push or force yourself way past your capacity. There's really a sweet spot. It's like the right amount of challenge creates growth. When there's too little stress, you're going to stay in your cocoon.
We're not going to see any change. But when there's too much, our nervous system goes into protection So it's a little bit of a Goldilocks scenario, and where your right amount of challenge is, is gonna be really dependent on you. And so I can't tell you what that looks like. You really have to discover that for yourself. In Manifest Your Health, I teach you how to learn the language of your nervous system so you're able to notice when you're in a stretch zone, which is like healthy challenge that leads to growth, but then also catch yourself when you're tipping into Overwhelm or activation or freeze, because that is a sign of too much too fast. And when you catch yourself there, you want to have the ability to titrate down your exposure without going into immediate hardcore contraction, because that's only going to reinforce the old patterns and the old beliefs of, oh my God, I have to stay here. Oh my God, it's so scary out there. Oh my God, my nervous system and my immune system can't handle that.
So We really wanna find this balance, and there's different ways to do this. A lot of it is self-awareness. I do offer titration practices in Manifest Your Health where you are essentially practicing being in a slightly uncomfortable sensation and then bringing yourself back to safety. So you practice this dance. I also consider breathwork a titration practice. So the style of breathwork that I teach, I consider that to be a titration practice. So any of you that have done breathwork with me, you kind of get what I'm Yeah. And this is what I'm talking about.
I am including breathwork as the last day of our nervous system reset for this exact reason. So when you are breathing, you get to experience big sensations. Again, this is a very specific style of breathwork. This is not just like deep breathing. So you experience big sensations in the body, you experience big emotions, and while you're breathing, you are teaching your body and your nervous system I can experience these big sensations and I am safe. And that is what allows for big breakthroughs and big changes to happen. This is what allows your nervous system to release what it's been holding onto, release that constant bracing, that constant protection mode, and allow you to open up to experience new things because you are in training your nervous system to see, oh, I can I can be here and I can still be safe. And so when we practice things in this way, things do begin to shift.
They do begin to change and rearrange. You notice yourself healing and expanding, being able to do and handle more than you once did. When you are able to oscillate and move between the different experiences in your body, in your nervous system with more fluidity, it allows you to— Allows your capacity to expand. Your window of tolerance can expand. Literally, like, what you're able to tolerate can expand. This is physically. I actually just found a picture of myself from 2018, and I was on the top of a mountain. My husband and I had went on this big hike, and the night before, I had a full-blown panic attack because I was so worried that my body was not going to be able to physically handle that, because in the past, it I thought it was gonna send me into a total symptom flare, a total crash, and it didn't.
The only way that I taught my body though, that that was possible, was through doing it, was through action, was through actually practicing something new and showing my nervous system like, you got this, you can do this. You can do the same thing with chemical exposures and other toxicants and other foods. Your window of tolerance can widen for that emotionally. You're able to hold feelings and hold more sensation in your body. It makes me think of a Brené Brown quote that I've been quoting for like a decade. She says, there's no such thing as selective emotional numbing. There is a full spectrum of human emotions, and when we numb the dark, we numb the light. So if you wanna feel the joy and the light and the expansion, you have to feel safe enough to also feel the anger and the grief and the despair.
When we close ourselves off to new experiences, new sensation in service of our healing or our health, we may inadvertently close ourselves off to some of the really good stuff, the stuff that makes life worth living. I said this earlier, I'm going to say it again. Everyone wants to talk about nervous system regulation, And while some people might be seeking that sense of calm, that sense of a regulated system, I think even more people are actually looking for nervous system expansion, where we want to have the capacity for more. We want to be able to experience more, more life. Any Summer House fans out there, you'll get my Carl Radke reference. More life. Because probably, if I had to guess, Your end goal isn't to spend the rest of your life doing nervous system exercises just to feel safe. The goal is to actually live a big, bold, audacious, vibrant life, either returning to the life that you used to have before you got sick or creating something even better.
When I learned how to actually rewire my nervous system this way, It is what allowed my whole life to expand. So now I can make plans without worrying about how I'm going to feel that day. If I do happen to have a sensation or a symptom in my body, because hello, I have a human body, that's going to happen. I don't spiral into fear. I don't spiral into a fear-based story. It doesn't come with a sidecar of panic or anxiety, and I have energy and capacity. in mental space for the things that I actually love to do. The stuff that I do now, like on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, the rate that I can move at, what I can do and create and have capacity for, it would have fucking leveled me years ago.
I wanna be really clear about this, and this is all nervous system work that has gotten me to the point where I can tolerate more, not pushing myself past my capacity, but stretching my capacity. Stretching my ability to tolerate more, more life. Anyway, I'm sharing all of this here with you today because I want you to know and to believe that this is available to you too. And this is exactly what we do in Manifest Your Health. So if you want a system that walks you through this, I got you. And if you want a little teaser, if you want a little taste, That's what we're doing in our 5-day nervous system reset starting on Thursday, and I would love to see you guys there. I love you, 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. Bye.