When healing chronic illness, you need softness to nurture your nervous system. If you’re constantly stressed about what’s going to help you heal, it can be harder for the methods you try to help, because your nervous system is too stressed out for them to take effect.
Your body is like a finely tuned instrument, and your nervous system is the conductor. It orchestrates every response, from flight or fight to rest and digest. When dealing with chronic illness, your nervous system can get stuck in overdrive, intensifying symptoms and interfering with recovery.
Addressing stress with softness will allow us to face our uncomfortable feelings and thoughts in a kind and friendly space. It allows us to regulate our nervous system and strengthen our foundation for healing our chronic illness.
Once we address our nervous system and establish our foundation, we can then take the steps to deal with our chronic illness and work toward the results you’ve been looking for.
What is Softness in Relation to Stress?
Softness is allowing our breath to come in, allowing the ground to support us, and giving ourselves a welcoming and understanding space to receive and experience our uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.
Softness in stress requires us to release our tension. It requires us to let go of the idea of knowing “all the answers” to whatever may come. It’s understanding that we don’t need to figure it all out.
You’re able to use your somatic practices to “soften” yourself, to release what is bothering you, release tension, and rely are the support of the earth and breath.
As you feel safe and reassured, you stay open – you stay soft. While you’re “soft” you’re able to let the good in. You are listening.
Essentially, softness in relation to stress means that we are welcoming and ready to deal with our stress rather than carry it with us. This softness is what helps regulate, heal, and nurture our nervous system.
Chronic Illness and Your Nervous System
Nervous system dysregulation affects your entire body, including your immune, endocrine, and digestive systems. Over a long period, that strain can play a part in chronic health problems, alongside many other factors.
Some of the health problems that often go hand in hand with long-term stress and dysregulation are
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Food sensitivities
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Allergies
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Gut issues
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Chronic pain
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Insomnia
Long-term stress has also been linked with conditions such as IBS, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, though each of these has many causes, including genetics, and needs medical diagnosis and treatment. Conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and ME/CFS have their own medical causes, even though stress can make the symptoms harder to live with.
Dysregulation of your nervous system can be brought on by:
#1. Trauma
Both physical and emotional trauma can lead to nervous system dysregulation. Trauma commonly happens due to events within your life. This can include events like accidents, abuse, surgeries, and being a witness to a distressing event – whether intentionally or unintentionally.
#2. Genetics
You can be predisposed to a dysregulated nervous system thanks to your genetics. Mainly, certain genes can make people more likely to experience stress and anxiety, both of which can quickly lead to dysregulation.
#3. Lifestyle
Lack of physical activity, poor sleep, and even a poor diet can disrupt and cause dysregulation in your nervous system. The same can be said for using certain stimulants like caffeine and alcohol or taking certain medications. These can overstimulate your nervous system and cause dysregulation.
#4. Chronic Stress
One of the most common causes of a dysregulated nervous system is chronic stress. Chronic stress is when your body is constantly exposed to stress and your nervous system remains in a state of high alert or fear (think fight, flight, or fawn). As your body remains in this state, your nervous system is dysregulated.
#5. Other Common Causes
There are plenty of causes beyond these four that can cause a dysregulated nervous system. For example, you may have underlying diseases or illnesses contributing to your dysregulation. Or you may have other, specific experiences like ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) that have led to your nervous system dysregulation.
How Do You Nurture Your Nervous System?
Nurturing your nervous system is a good place to begin working on your chronic illness, but what does that mean? To nurture your nervous system, you need to regulate it. To regulate it, we have to address what’s causing the dysregulation.
There are many methods that you can use to regulate your nervous system, but I recommend starting in situations where you can recognize your stress response.
For example, you can teach your body how to get out of the fight-flight-or-freeze response. You can also learn how to use specific practices to address anxiety surrounding common situations or areas of your life, like using brain training techniques for health anxiety.
One technique or practice is not likely to be your “one-in-all” cure or treatment. Healing and regulating your nervous system is a journey, and like all journeys, you can start however small or simple you would like.
However you start your journey, you’ll begin to notice the benefits of nurturing your nervous system:
The Results of Prioritizing Your Nervous System
Prioritizing your nervous system can bring benefits beyond your chronic illness and pain. A calmer nervous system is less likely to get in the way of recovery, and many people notice mental and physical relief they didn’t expect.
Let’s dive into some of the benefits and results you can expect from prioritizing your nervous system:
The Foundation of Wellness
Think of your nervous system as the foundation of a strong house. If it’s shaky, the whole structure wobbles. For your body, your nervous system is your foundation. By calming your nervous system, you’re creating a stable platform for any physical treatments to work more effectively and prevent your house from “shaking.”
Your nervous system plays a huge role in your health and well-being. It’s involved in activities such as breathing, sleeping, thinking, reading, remembering, and feeling. It’s also intimately intertwined with many other systems in your body – which can have negative effects when dysregulated, but also positive impacts when regulated.
Enhancing Resilience
A regulated nervous system enhances your body’s resilience. It promotes balance, which is crucial in navigating the ups and downs of chronic illness. When your nervous system is in harmony, you’re better equipped to weather the storm.
Resilience is what allows your body to remain in a healthy range of stress (and lack thereof) and bounce back when you do experience stress. It’s what prevents the over and under reaction from your nervous system.
Empowers Your Mind-Body Connection
Healing goes beyond your body; it’s a mind-body dance. Nurturing your nervous system strengthens this connection, allowing your mind and body to collaborate in your journey toward wellness.
As you continue to work on regulating your nervous system, you’ll begin to notice the lasting effects of each of the three main benefits. You’ll notice how it impacts your healing and how a regulated nervous system can even change how you experience your day – or even how you approach your daily life.
Using Holistic Therapy in Healing Chronic Illness
Many chronic conditions are treated with a focus on managing symptoms, and medical care still matters for diagnosing and treating disease. Being told you’ll simply have to live with symptoms can leave you feeling hopeless, you begin to fear your symptoms, and the cycle of increasing pain continues.
Alongside that care, you can also work on what keeps pain switched on. When the nervous system is part of what’s driving pain, working with it can reduce pain for many people, and for some it resolves.
We work to retrain the brain so it sends fewer danger signals to the body. The symptoms people bring to this work include joint pain, muscle pain, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches, and gut sensitivities, to name a few.
Healing chronic illness and pain can lead you down a path of self-medicating and hopelessness when guidance isn’t in place. It’s incredibly difficult and frustrating to experience, and that feeling makes us desperate and exhausted.
The Therapeutic Approach to Relief
When you’re ready to treat the pain, we work with you to understand and change the root cause of your pain. We’ll talk about what is really happening in your brain and body that is causing this reaction to happen – and how it relates to your nervous system.
Then, we are going to focus on retraining your brain and helping you get relief. Our holistic approach is designed to do more than manage, we’re focused on reducing your pain as much as we can so that you can start doing the things you love once again.
If you’re ready to start healing, apply for private chronic pain coaching, and we’ll talk about what progress could look like for you.