[00:00:37] Vesna: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna. Today I'm gonna talk about when the nervous system can't switch off and what you can do. If you feel like your system is reacting to everything, like you change your breakfast and suddenly you feel off, you try a new supplement that doesn't agree with your body, you change your routine and it sends you spiraling. It's like your body can't handle things at the moment.
[00:01:00] I am gonna explain why this happens and how constant stress can rewire your brain and your immune system to see everything as a threat and how to undo all of this. I was at a seminar the other day, and we're talking about this very topic about threats, because I've seen this in myself and in my clients.
When little things set people off, when they're so reactive, when they're so sensitive to different things, like what is going on, and it's basically. the seminar that I went to was about psychoneuroimmunology, so p and i, so it's a study of you know, our psychology as it's linked to our nervous system and our immune system.
So that whole system from what's going on up here can influence our immune system. And when someone has a lot of sensitivity to their environment or to food or to stresses, it can mean that their threat detection system is in overdrive. And I wanna talk more about that. So it used to be called multiple chemical sensitivity, but that's not really an accurate term, which has changed now.
[00:02:00] because it's more than just Chemicals in our food and external environment, we can become so reactive to little stresses that you wonder what the hell is going on. Okay, so I'm gonna talk more about it. So what is this? So it's when your nervous system. Get stuck in this overdrive or get stuck in high. And so your brain and your immune system start treating everyday things as a threat, as something to, trigger a stress response about. So it could be food, it could be supplement, it could be a schedule change, where the system detects that as a threat and begins all of this change in the body.
So if you look at it this way, like you've got a smoke alarm in your house, multiple ones, right? But the one right near the kitchen, I think this one, the main one, 'cause it always goes off, but just say you've got smoke alarms in the house and they are designed to go off when there is a fire. so your nervous system is designed to be triggered for a real threat, but just like a smoke alarm can go off just when you're cooking toast, not burning it, but cooking toast.
[00:03:00] It's the same way that your nervous system reacts to very little changes in your environment. Okay? It starts a full blown response. So as I said, back in my burnout days, I. Experience this myself. So I had a lot of gut problems. I had multiple food intolerances and it didn't matter what I did. I did the gut repair. I cut out so many different foods I couldn't eat anymore, but I was still reacting to everything. And I learned back then that until we switch off the stress response, our body cannot heal.
But you know, I see it in my clients who have multiple sensitivities to food and it's also linked with very high stress if someone's running a bigger business or has has a lot of responsibilities, if it's a female breadwinner or someone who just has a lot. On their shoulders if their stressor levels are already high and then a couple of bad turn of events in life and there's some grief and other things are happening, that person can experience this very thing going on where their system can't adapt anymore to the stresses, and it starts detecting everything as a threat.
[00:04:00] And it produces a full blown stress response and an inflammatory response in the body leaving you feeling very sensitive, very tired, and very just not even like yourself. So one, you've got the immune system dialed up, so your threat signals are amplified and your responses, like I said, you can react to food, you can react to smells, you can react to environmental changes, change in temperature to emotional stresses that is all dialed up. So you are overreacting to those things.
But then you also have your immune system, which is also overreacting. So it's remembering threats and it's responding faster, and it's responding more intensely. So you get a lot of inflammation being driven in the body, and then we don't have that ability to adapt anymore. So our allostatic load, as it's called, so our body's ability to adapt via the stress response system or via the HPA axis that.
[00:05:00] Adaption is not there anymore because of the constant threats to the system, and so it dramatically drops and so then we start to feel stressed all the time. So we have a threat detection center. We have multiple points to kind of. Call a threat detection center. Right, and it's monitoring 24 7 even while you're sleeping, right? And so we're looking at, the brain is constantly monitoring, sensory, psychological and environmental input and it's trying to determine what is a danger, what is dangerous for us and what is not.
But chronic stress changes those settings, and so it goes into overprotection mode. And then the fallout is that we get inflammation in the body. you know, I just, I had a woman the other day come up to me on the beach. Um, she recognized me and she was, she's doing the program and she was saying like before she started for years, she wasn't able to wear her wedding rings, right.
[00:06:00] Her body was so. So bloated, so much fluid and through this process, and again, reducing the stress hormones, like switching off the stress response from this state of high and back into normal, you know, she had her wedding rings on. She was like, they're loose. And so she had really, a lot of that inflammation had fallen away, which was creating a lot of the fluid and a lot of the bloating, which is.
If what happens that was gone. Right. And for other people, they get pain, they get fatigue, they get poor digestion, they get food intolerances, and they get hormonal issues like perimenopausal challenges or PMS challenges or anything to do with the hormones. The other one, the other fallout is the, impacts our mental wellbeing.
So we get anxiety spikes, we get brain fog, we get low tolerance to change, and so we get stressed out by anything changing in our schedule. But then we have the emotional fallout, so we feel irritable, we feel on edge. So I'll have clients say to me, it's like, I just feel like I'm, I could just tip over at any point. Like I just, I feel like I just can't handle anything more on my plate.
[00:07:00] And it's really those words, it's that feeling on edge or feeling like you're constantly under attack, like things are just coming at you. Now with that said, there is a lot that you can do because we can dial down that stress response system. We can turn down the volume in our brain to those threats, so it's not overreacting and therefore having. The fallout, like the downstream effects. And the way that we do this is that we send safety signals to the brain, I think it's important.
I wanna say now to preface that this won't be your life going forward. This is just a period in time where because you're in overdrive, you really need to reset. And so you're really putting yourself into a very safe, dull environment for a very short period of time in order to switch off the nervous system response, to switch you outta that high mode. So I had a client recently and I said to her, look, I could see what was going on. I said, look what you need right now, and it's really important that you do this, is that you take yourself away somewhere that you've been before. I said, go to a hotel wherever it was the last time you were, and you felt really good.
[00:08:00] You felt. you are relaxer. You are comfortable there, right? And best you can. Don't do too much work. She had to take a laptop with her, but I said, you're gonna sleep a lot, you're gonna get a lot of, a lot of sunlight, and you're going to do a lot of walking, but you're going to rest. And so for her being in a place that she had been previously, she was very safe in that environment. Her nervous system switched off and she felt, felt dramatically different when she got back. Right. She was there for a week, um, less than, and she felt dramatically different with what she could handle because the nervous system was able to adapt to stresses again. Okay. It was out of the high mode and back into normal mode.
The threat detection center had. Tone down, and therefore she wasn't producing all that inflammation, right? It wasn't spiking her anxiety in her cortisol anymore, and her system could do what it does best, which is regulate itself back to homeostasis. But there are other things that you can do is do predictable routines that keep you safe.
[00:09:00] And so this is only for a period, short period of time. You're not gonna be very social, you're not gonna be ticking your big goals right now. Okay? But again, it's a period of time to reset and it's really, really important because the longer we stay in this. The more amplified this overprotection mode becomes and the more downstream effects that you will have.
Okay, so this period of reset, which I don't think anyone's gonna argue, if you're in this place, you're not gonna argue on it. You want to feel better, right? You know that you are at a point where this could go either way, right? So predictable routines, safe routines, boring routines, right? Don't make big changes to your diet and lifestyle when it comes to dietary.
Work with what you know, you can have, stick to the same foods, repeat the menu for a couple of weeks. It's totally okay, but stick to what works and repeat that. Okay? So you want to make sure that there's, there's none of those things that you already know as a threat, but then you wanna make sure that you take yourself, if you need, be into a new environment where you can just completely decompress.
[00:10:00] That's really important. The other thing is to release expectations, okay? Because if you've got a lot on your plate, it feels very hard for you to be able to take this time. But it's so important because you cannot continue going on this way. Okay? So, like I said, you're not gonna achieve big goals.
You're not gonna keep up with your responsibilities either. You're gonna have to take that time in order to reset and recover. You could also incorporate stress regulating practices like deep breathing, walking along the beach, barefoot, grounding, those types of things. Meditation are really important.
Everything that you can do, but what I would really recommend is taking yourself out of your current environment to a place that feels safe. And it doesn't have to be long term, but even a short term, because the switch in the environment, which I did a podcast on this just before the switch in your environment can have tremendous effects on your brain and your nervous system, but you want to make sure that the environment feels safe for you.
[00:11:00] So I would recommend somewhere that you've been before that you know feels good for you, that you can relax there, and that your system can really decompress. I'd love to hear comments.
I mean, this isn't something, like I said, we are not going to avoid life if we're going through this. What we wanna do is reset the system so we can go live a bigger life, tick those big goals and do big things. But right now, your body's unable to cope with any of those things. And if this is you, I'd love to hear your comments below and let me know what resonated.
