Episode 321: Neurobiology of Chronic Conditions | Manifest Your Health Series
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Erin dives into the neurobiology behind chronic conditions like Long Covid, Epstein-Barr virus, mold, and chemical sensitivities (and many more). The original infection can go away, but the brain may still correlate those symptoms with the previous infection. Previously neutral symptoms, like feeling tired or having a stomach ache, can now communicate “I am still sick” to the mind and start a cascade of immune responses in the body. Learn different tools to calm your nervous system so that you can begin to rewire your brain to recognize the ways in which your body is working.
In our Manifest Your Health™ mini series, Erin continues to offer up new ways to think about your health. You'll walk away with perspective shifts to help you view your own healing potential!
In this episode:
The difference between chronic and acute symptoms [4:36]
Bridging the gap between the physical body and the brain [26:08]
Factors that contribute to chronic conditions [29:06]
Signs of chronic sympathetic response [35:32]
Practices to calm down the nervous system [42:24]
How to shift your focus from the negativity bias of the brain to the good things happening in your body [51:03]
Resources mentioned:
Shift Your Brain to Reach Your Health Goals
Funk’tional Nutrition Collective
Your Hormone Revival™ (Only available within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Body Intentions Breakthrough (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 20% off your order with code FUNK)
Qualia Mind (get $100 off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with code FUNK)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Learn more about Manifest Your Health
Related episodes:
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into intuitive, functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school and mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. 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. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review, and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello, my friends. I'm back with another lakeside session. I'm recording into my iPhone from the lake because I don't have any of my audio equipment up here, so iPhone it is.
Erin Holt [00:01:25]:
I hope you've been enjoying the Manifest Your Health series so far. It has been an absolute joy to create for you, and I hope if you follow me on Instagram, you've been enjoying all the good stuff that I'm creating over there, too. I've really been enjoying Instagram in a way that I have not enjoyed Instagram in a long time. I just feel very lit up and very excited and inspired in a way that I haven't felt for a while. I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of the new research that I'm steeped in. The more I see and read, the more I understand that most of us are really only using about 5% of our mind and our biology's potential. So that leaves a lot more potential untapped. And that is an extremely exciting thought for me.
Erin Holt [00:02:20]:
Your body can literally make a pharmacy of chemicals. The more we understand this, the more we can use our own biology to heal. And that is my intention with this whole series, is to teach you exactly that. I want you to walk away from this series understanding that there's so much more available to you. There's so much untapped potential. And there's so many ways to unlock your own inner healer. And I just want to connect you deeper and deeper and deeper to that inner healer. Today's episode is actually going to be a re release because I wanted this particular episode about the Neurobiology of Chronic Conditions.
Erin Holt [00:03:02]:
I wanted it to exist here in the Manifest Your Health series. Last week, I shared with you that right now I am really concentrated on being the voice that I needed back when I felt sick, back when I was wondering if I would ever get better, back when I was in so much fear of my body and my health and my situation and just really struggling and wondering, will I ever feel normal again? I needed messages of hope, inspiration. And because I'm a practitioner, I also needed the science. I needed to understand the why. And so that's why I want to include this episode, the Neurobiology of Chronic Conditions, in this series, because it does get into the science nitty gritty, but it also provides a lot of hope, a lot of inspiration, and it gives you actual practices that you can do to help you. My intention with this series is for people to have it exactly when they need it. It all exists here in a neat little package for free, for anyone to access anytime, anywhere, and to share with those who need it. And I really hope that you do.
Erin Holt [00:04:19]:
I really hope that you share this with folks who can benefit from these messages. Before we get into it, before I let you at the episode, there are some key concepts that I really want you to understand. The first is that this episode is about the neurobiology of chronic conditions, not acute symptoms. All right, so this, what I'm describing here, what I'm teaching you about here, is really applies to issues that have been going on for months, if not years. It's not like you just started getting headaches or you, you know, you just started getting tummy aches. It's like this stuff has been cooking for a while. Recurring or chronic conditions or symptoms have become hardwired into the brain and into the nervous system. That's what makes them chronic.
Erin Holt [00:05:15]:
When symptoms are chronic and hardwired, the solutions are no longer only physical. But so many people chase the physical, and they wonder why they're not getting completely better. That was me for. For a long time. I kept going after the physical. I was chasing every single functional medicine, root cause, rabbit hole. I kept looking for the physical rationale, the physical reason, without realizing that I had to swim upstream.
Erin Holt [00:05:45]:
Because chronic symptoms have a mind and nervous system component. And so we must address them from a mind and nervous system perspective. So that's what a lot of today's show will get into. Another key concept to understand is that part of the problem with chronic symptoms is the significance the brain attaches to it. So the story that we tell ourselves about what our symptoms mean can reinforce the actual symptoms. This is not to say all of this is made up, or your symptoms aren't real or they're not true, or it's all in your head. It's just that once symptom pathways are hardwired in, they are in fact worsened by negative thoughts or fear based thoughts. So when we begin to create stories about what our symptoms mean, those can become memorized circuits.
Erin Holt [00:06:44]:
And talking about our symptoms can reinforce those pathways. Thinking about our symptoms can reinforce those pathways. So if you're telling yourself a stressful or fearful story about your pain or your symptoms, then you're essentially creating an opportunity for you to feel more of that. Even in the absence of inflammation, tissue destruction, disease progression, without actual physical, tangible things happening in your body, the symptoms can worsen when they're hardwired in and when we reinforce those stories, those narratives, because when you react to symptoms with fear, then it will keep you in that very same cycle, the very same symptom cycle. So part of what we do in Manifest Your Health, the program is to teach you to disrupt the story or pattern interrupt. And today it's going to help you understand why pattern interrupting is so important. Now, a lot of what we talk about in this episode today is based off of the limbic system. And so it's often referred to as limbic system retraining.
Erin Holt [00:08:00]:
There's different programs that offer this. DNRS is one of them where they teach you to rewire the limbic system of the brain. Gupta program, he refers to it as amygdala retraining. Ashok Gupta is awesome. So much of what I'm going to talk about today is, you know, really comes from a lot of the research that he's doing. Love him, love his work. I've pretty much done all the brain retraining, limbic system retraining programs like I've done a lot of them. I think they're all great.
Erin Holt [00:08:32]:
What I will share with you is that for me and for my healing and what I needed to do to heal and to put autoimmunity into remission, they were incomplete. My truth is that I could not find full healing through only one modality. So it was a piece of the puzzle, but it was just that it was a piece. It wasn't the whole healing opportunity for me personally. What I had to do and what I see with a lot, a lot of my clients is that we have to weave together many modalities. It's not just one thing that's like, oh, this unlocked the keys to the kingdom for me. It's many things, and that's exactly what we do in Manifest Your Health. It's why it took me so many years to build out Manifest Your Health.
Erin Holt [00:09:19]:
You'll hear me in this episode, actually refer to the body of work that I was building, that is Manifest Your Health. That is exactly what I was referring to, and it took me a while. I kind of alluded to it throughout the years of the podcast. A common question that I get asked about this program is, is it the same as brain rewiring? But since manifest your health is an altogether new framework, it can be considered a methodology in and of itself. We design it to optimize brain change and to rewrite neural pathways. But in my experience, like I said, brain rewiring doesn't go deep enough. It's an aspect of the program, but it's not the program in its entirety. The process of Manifest Your Health also includes understanding how the subconscious mind works and how it's programmed.
Erin Holt [00:10:08]:
Because in order to heal from chronic conditions, we have to rewrite programs. In order to rewrite programs, we have to get into the subconscious, and that often requires us to shift brainwave states. And I'm actually teaching a free workshop this Thursday all about this. So if you get on the Manifest Your Health waitlist, you'll actually get the invite to that workshop. And if you're listening to this after Thursday, August 1, still get on the waitlist because we can send you the replay of that workshop. So go to the waitlist. Get on the waitlist at manifestyourhealth.com. We also include self directed positive neuroplasticity.
Erin Holt [00:10:42]:
I've been talking about that a lot on the show here lately, so you probably have a very good understanding of what that means. We include emotional and somatic release processes as well, because here's the deal. The body expresses what the mind suppresses, whatever is unprocessed or unconscious, emotions, experiences, beliefs, that has the potential to play out through the landscape of the physical body. So this stuff can express itself through symptoms, through chronic health challenges. So we need ways to release what has been suppressed. And Manifests Your Health, gives you the tools and the practices to actually do that, we begin to understand and integrate our shame and our shadow and that's really, really, really important for healing, especially if you have anything related to autoimmunity. We use energy medicine. I give you tools on how to call back your energy to you and use your own energy for healing.
Erin Holt [00:11:47]:
Arguably one of the most important things, if not the most important thing you can do for your health. This also includes setting energy boundaries, which is huge, huge for a lot of us. We include biofield science and quantum healing techniques, including how to use your own heart resonance for healing. I know that sounds woo woo. It's not. It is absolutely not. I also give you practices for decoding symptoms. So if you listen to the episode with Cameryn, the expander episode a couple of weeks ago, she talked a lot about this.
Erin Holt [00:12:19]:
It's so huge. Symptoms are a conversation that your body is trying to have with you. Okay? So in Manifest Your Health, you're going to learn how to listen so that you can create an opportunity for change in resolution. Once we understand what the symptoms mean, we can utilize the messages that they're providing with us to make some shifts and changes in our life. And then when the body's like, oh, cool, she got the message, the symptoms tend to go away. So honestly, it's just such a comprehensive program. It's unlike anything else that you're gonna find on the market. We give you so many different tools, so no matter what is going on, you can reach into your toolbox and pull out the exact right tool for you exactly when you need it.
Erin Holt [00:13:02]:
And that's why 100% of people that go through this program say they have a very clear framework to follow anytime they're anxious or in a fear spiral about their health. 100% of participants say they have more tools to work through what is keeping them stuck. And 100% of participants have a more positive outlook on their health, which is so important, especially once you understand some of the principles that I'm gonna teach in today's episode. So head to manifestyourhealth.com to get on the waitlist. You'll save over $200 on early bird pricing when we open up on August 5. And for today, for today, if you want the science, this is the science. I'm giving it to you. But you can also just skip towards the end of the episode where I'm giving you practices and tools to use.
Erin Holt [00:13:51]:
If you're like, I don't need the science. I just want the resources. We've got you. It's toward the end of the episode. Now, just two notes, because this is a re release, and I mentioned a couple of things that are from the past. I referenced an episode that I recorded with Rachel on understanding long Covid. So if you want to listen to that, travel back to episode 239. That is the long Covid episode. But today's.
Erin Holt [00:14:18]:
Today's entire show. It can be used for any chronic condition, not just long Covid. So I do want you to know that also, I mentioned Your Hormone Revival. We were in an open launch period for Your Hormone Revival, so you'll hear me mention it a couple of times. That program is still available through the collective. But I also want you to know that we do include, include a lot of the parasympathetic support in Manifest Your Health. So just know that. And it was just, again, really special for me to re listen to this episode because I mentioned building a new body of work.
Erin Holt [00:14:47]:
And that new body of work is Manifest Your Health. So I really, really hope you join us in August. Okay, here's the episode.
Erin Holt [00:17:00]:
All right, friends, we are back, and today we're going to talk about the neurobiology of chronic conditions. So last episode, I had my lead practitioner, Rachel Mistry, on, and we talked all about long Covid and kind of gave a head nod to this idea that with long Covid or really any long haulers or chronic conditions, our immune system may be overreacting to the original infection. In other words, our brain is telling our immune system to fight fight, even though the original infection is perhaps gone. I also mentioned that in these scenarios, limbic brain retraining can be an effective tool. And so we're going to unpack what all this means and how to do it on today's show. And I'm giggling to myself because I know I'm not supposed to break the fourth wall, but I'm doing it because I am attempting to record this as a video. And, gosh, is it awkward? Is it ever? I have been podcasting for over five years, so you would think I'd be a natural. I do so much video stuff for work, and this is not natural, so bear with me if you're listening.
Erin Holt [00:18:13]:
It doesn't make a lick of difference to you. If this video makes it out into the world. God love you. Thanks for riding with me. We'll work it out eventually. And I'm also saying this because I have a lot of business owners and practitioners who listen to the show who are like, what do you do when you're afraid to try something new? I'm like, you just do it. You do it. You do it afraid. You do it scared, babe, sometimes you just got to do it afraid.
Erin Holt [00:18:40]:
Anyway, what I ask of you before we carry on with this conversation is that you have the emotional and cognitive maturity to self filter here. Is this the appropriate conversation for you based on where you're at in your healing journey? And for some people, this conversation might feel like a healing self. It just might feel so good. It might feel so nourishing. It might feel like exactly what you need. And for others, it might feel triggering or destabilizing or even like a little gaslighty. And if that's the case, it might mean that it's not right for you right now. And that's okay.
Erin Holt [00:19:25]:
That's perfectly, perfectly fine. What we're not going to do here is steal the kickball. What we're not going to do here is say, well, this doesn't apply to me. This isn't right for me, therefore, it shouldn't exist. Everybody is coming to the show at different levels of their healing journey and it's really a goal of mine to meet people where they're at. Okay? So we want to make space for the folks who, who need this conversation. There's a lot of them out there. I've been one of them in the past.
Erin Holt [00:19:53]:
If you are dealing with a chronic, ongoing issue, whether that's long Covid, long haulers, autoimmunity or otherwise, it is normal to feel angry. It is normal to feel upset. It's normal to feel scared of or left behind or out of sorts or as one of my mentors, Jessica Flanagan, says, like God forgot about you. Those feelings are real. Those feelings are valid. And I am not attempting to disallow you those feelings. We're not trying to bypass those feelings. We want to sit with them.
Erin Holt [00:20:29]:
We want to feel them.
Erin Holt [00:20:31]:
Turning toward this type of suffering, turning toward these feelings, turning toward this discomfort is one of the most compassionate acts you can do for yourself. But what I've found is that it can be hard to recover and heal if we don't have a way to move through them and be on them. So we want to allow ourselves the compassion to turn towards them without fixating, getting hyper fixated or stuck. For true healing to happen, we have to navigate through them. And last week I talked about long Covid, long haulers. And today this conversation applies. But it also extends beyond just those two things. It can extend to any chronic illness.
Erin Holt [00:21:21]:
If you are new here and you're unfamiliar with my history, eight years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and I really leveraged functional medicine to help heal my physical body. But beyond that, there was a lot of other things that I had to do with my thoughts and my beliefs, and I had to personally detach from the storyline that something is always wrong with my body, something's always wrong with me, something's always wrong with my health, and I had to open up my lens to seeing things a new way. And this is part of how I did that, this conversation. So my hope and my intention is that this provides some healing strategies that maybe have not been presented to you before and that's helpful for you. So with COVID things were extremely sensationalized. I mean, for good reason. It was, it was unprecedented times, right? And there was a tremendous amount of fear. There was fear about getting sick.
Erin Holt [00:22:18]:
There was fear about getting Covid. And then there was fear about getting long haulers. There was fear about getting vaccinated. There was fear about not getting vaccinated. There was fear about what this means for the economy, what this means for humanity. A lot of fear. Episode 161 of the podcast, I talked about how fear affects the brain and the body, and that's a really good episode to go back to. Ultimately, what I discussed is how being in a perpetual fear state creates physiological shifts that do, in fact, impact the immune system.
Erin Holt [00:22:51]:
Because we can either be in fear or in healing mode, our body really doesn't do both at once. It's if we're in a fear state, we are taking the resources that could go into healing and pushing them into being in that active fight or flight response. So today is really going to unpack some concepts, one of which is neuroplasticity, which basically means that the brain is flexible and rewirable. There's also this idea of bioplasticity, which takes it even beyond the brain. It's beyond just the neuroplasticity. The nervous system is not the only system in the body that has a remarkable capacity to change. When the nervous system changes, the whole body changes. It's not just nerves, it's not just neurons.
Erin Holt [00:23:38]:
It's the immune system. It's the digestive system, it's the hormonal system. Our endocrine system. And the brain and the body are never static. They are always in the process of becoming and changing. And this thought, I have it written down in a lot of different places in caps, because this is a very healing thought for me as I navigated my health journey, is understanding that this is not a set point. My brain is flexible, it's malleable. It can change. My body.
Erin Holt [00:24:10]:
Same deal. My health, same deal. The body's always changing. It's not static, it's not a set it and forget it. And so we want to really leverage this to our advantage. As I say, we want to use our own biology to heal. We want to use our understanding of the brain and our new understanding of the body so that we can be the architects of our own healing experience. And before we move any further into this conversation, we have to distinguish the gaslighting -
Erin Holt [00:24:45]:
It's all in your head. Nothing is wrong with you - from what we're talking about here, because they're two separate things. And I've talked a lot about the medical gaslighting that many, many, many people experience. Where you go to your doctors, you're, like, dragging limbs. You know, you've got, like, dark circles under your eyes, hair's falling out in clumps, and you're being told, hey, your labs look normal. There's nothing wrong here, nothing to see here. This is not that. This conversation is saying, things are happening in your head.
Erin Holt [00:25:14]:
Things are happening at the level of the brain. Yes, but what happening? What is happening at the level of the brain perpetuates real physiological symptoms. The symptoms in your body are real. I'm not telling you otherwise. I'm not saying it's made up. I'm not saying it's fake. I'm not calling you a hypochondriac. I'm saying what's happening at the level of the brain does impact and influence the physical body.
Erin Holt [00:25:38]:
But if we're taking a root cause resolution approach, which is what we do here on the show, we also have to factor in what's happening at the level of the brain, and we have to address it from that angle as well. And if you are here because you are dealing with long Covid, I just want to say, go back to last episode, because we address the ways to approach that from the physical body level, really looking at symptom level. And so this conversation is in addition to that. Right. We're not trying to bypass what's happening on the physical body. Now, it's been my experience that a lot of the mindset work or the neural rewiring work or the limbic system retraining work can sometimes bypass what is happening at the physical body. And I think that this can be harmful. So we want to find a way where we can bridge the two.
Erin Holt [00:26:31]:
And that's why today's episode is building on top of last week's episode. So our brain is a meaning making machine. It interprets what's going on around us. The world around us is a certain way, and then the brain interprets that to create an internal map. Whatever we see is a representation of how our minds view the world, how our minds view our health, how our minds view our body. But the brain is not always super accurate. It's very efficient. It's fast, man, it's fast.
Erin Holt [00:27:11]:
But it's not always super accurate. It can make mistakes. It can make misinterpretations. It can misperceive. It can misinterpret its perception of the world around us. And in doing so, that can impact our health and our well being. The brain's top dog priority is survival. It's to keep you alive.
Erin Holt [00:27:34]:
It's not necessarily well being. It's not necessarily like, hey, are they like thriving? Are they like living their best? It's like, are they alive? We're going to keep this MF'er alive. And we have this negativity bias in our brain. And I love the work of Doctor Rick Hansen as it relates to this. Our brain has, it's basically like very attuned to the negative. This is designed to help us survive. We have to pay attention to what's wrong. Our brain has a propensity to kind of latch on to the things that are wrong.
Erin Holt [00:28:09]:
And it's because, like, if we miss something positive, not really a big deal, if we miss something negative, like yikes, that could potentially impact our survival. Right? So we're really attuned to threats to our survival. We're really attuned to the negative stuff. Doctor Rick Hanson says the brain is like Velcro for negative experience, but Teflon for positive ones. And so in order to kind of bring ourselves back to balance, we actually have to lean into the more positive stuff. And we'll get into that in a lot more detail a little later on in today's show. But with long Covid, with long haulers with chronic mystery syndromes, with chronic autoimmune type symptoms, in a lot of cases, our immune system is overreacting to the original infection. So this is the misinterpretation of the brain.
Erin Holt [00:29:06]:
The brain is just misinterpreting its inputs. There are certain factors that can contribute to chronic conditions. Genetic susceptibility is one of them. And I hate to put too much emphasis on this because we know that our genes are not a determinant for health. I think it's less than 2% of health conditions are like, absolutely genetic. It's epigenetics, it's the lifestyle factors, the way that we live our life. It's the choices that we make. It's the external environment that sits on top of the genes that can kind of turn on or off gene expression. But this is a factor.
Erin Holt [00:29:44]:
There are certain polymorphisms that can impact the intensity of an inflammatory response, illness severity, duration of infections. Another one is acute or chronic stress. And this can be psychological stress. This can be emotional stress. This can be physical stress. Like you're running your body into the ground like you're up at 04:00 a.m. you're hitting a hard workout, you're under fueling your body, you're in a lot of stress, you're running and running and running and running. This is basically what I've been talking about for the past five and a half years and on the podcast.
Erin Holt [00:30:16]:
I'm not going to get too much into it in this episode, but go back to other ones because I will unpack that in way more detail than you care to have. So we've got the predisposing factor, genetic susceptibility, we've got acute or chronic stress, and then we have a trigger. And this could be a viral trigger like Covid, this could be a bacterial trigger, or it could be some type of other trigger like mold sometimes can kick this off. And so it's really the combination of these things that can create a conditioning effect. So we refer to them as chronic condition. A condition is a learned stimulus. It's a learned stimulus in response if you think back to like Pavlog's dog style. Right? So with chronic conditions, the brain is learning something new.
Erin Holt [00:31:07]:
What was previously an innocent or a neutral stimulus in the body or a neutral symptom in the body can now create ongoing immune responses with more physical symptoms. So the original infection or trigger, again like Covid-19, Epstein Barr virus, Lyme, mold, the chemical sensitivity the original infection or trigger did actually create symptoms in the body. And now when those brain experiences any symptoms like that, it interprets it well, geez, if these symptoms showed up with the original infection and those symptoms are still here, they're still kicking around, they're still scooting around my body, then it must mean that the original infection or the original trigger is still there. And so these symptoms now represent ongoing evidence to your brain that the infection is still present. And it reinforces the idea I am unwell. And then it sets off the cascade of thoughts and beliefs, I am unwell. But it also communicates with the immune system. There's a problem here and we need to fight.
Erin Holt [00:32:18]:
So it's actually the symptoms in the body that becomes the new stimulus. It's not the original infection that's telling the immune system fight, fight. It's the symptoms in the body. Every time you have a symptom, even if that symptom used to be neutral in your body, like a tummy ache or, you know, like congestion or feeling tired, something that like might have happened before that you didn't really think too much of, now when it happens, it's telling the brain, I am still sick. The infection is still here. We have to fight it off. And the learning, the conditioning seems to happen in two parts of the brain, the amygdala and the insula. And this is really designed to protect us from dangers.
Erin Holt [00:33:01]:
We've known that the amygdala has been involved in trauma and PTSD for a long time, but now we're seeing that the amygdala is actually involved in an immune response as well. And so it's these two parts of the brain combined that can be involved in over triggering the hyper defense response. And then this hyper defense response can go on to cause physical symptoms. So the amygdala, we've talked about it on the show before, it's the fear center of the brain, is, like, the best, most basic way to describe it. It identifies danger. Is this incoming input relevant for our survival? Should I be afraid? Is this bad? It's designed to keep you alive, right? We need it.
Erin Holt [00:33:45]:
It's important. And it also processes emotional reactions, especially fear and anxiety. So that's kind of why I gave a head nod to fear and how fear impacts the body, because if we're locked into fear, it's very easy for this cascade to kick off. So the amygdala also puts fear and learning together. The kind of, like, classic example is, you touch a hot stove, you burn yourself. Ouch. Chances are you're not going to touch that hot stove again. It creates a response pattern to any trigger, and then the insula takes in all incoming sensory data and stimulus from the body, and it processes that information, and it assesses the information coming in to create the
Erin Holt [00:34:33]:
appropriate autonomic response, the appropriate nervous system response. So it supposed to trigger the right response in the nervous system, and then we know how intimately connected the immune system is with the nervous system. So it impacts the immune system as well. And what's interesting, there's a study done where they gave rats sweet water with an immunosuppressant, and they did this a few times over, and then they gave the rats sweet water without the immunosuppressant. And what they found was that the immune system decreased just with the sweet water. And they found that this was happening at the level of the amygdala in the insula. Okay, so both of these are involved in our sympathetic response, our parasympathetic response, but also our immune responses. And this, like I said,
Erin Holt [00:35:26]:
can be what's happening from a brain level down in terms of over triggering that hyper response. So we get the chronic sympathetic arousal. So that's your fight or flight response, right? This is just like, kicked off. It's happening, which leads to chronic stimulation of the immune system. And with this, we can see HPA axis dysfunction. I know I'm throwing out kind of a lot of, like, high level terminology at you. This is kind of a high level episode, but we will link out to other episodes of this podcast that unpack some of this terminology in case you're like, what is she talking about? HPA what? So all of this combined can create more oxidative stress in the body as well. Okay, so it's like stress on top of stress on top of stress on top of stress.
Erin Holt [00:36:19]:
It has this cascade of effects in the body known as symptoms. So you can see fatigue, you can see exhaustion, muscle pain, cognition issues like brain fog, memory issues, sleep issues, post exertional malaise, IB's type symptoms, just like GI, digestive wonkiness. And all of that can also contribute to the illness cycle or different illness cycle. So we can see adrenal fatigue, we can see mitochondrial dysfunction, latent virus activation. So viruses that have been, like, just like, scooting around your body, no big deal, in this chronic sympathetic activation, they can come up and be like, hey, remember me? Allergies, ongoing sensitivities, chemical sensitivities, food sensitivities, and then all of this is going to feed back into the symptoms. So it becomes this loop, and all of the symptoms are leading back to the hyper stimulated, hypersensitive brain. The brain that's actively scanning for the wrong thing, scanning for the negative thing, continues to find it. And so the symptoms, which, again, may have been sort of nondescript, non sensationalized in your body before now become, now tell the brain, like, yo, something's really wrong here.
Erin Holt [00:37:44]:
Like, really, really wrong, right? And all of this, like, magnification, goes back up to the brain.
Erin Holt [00:39:41]:
So the brain recognizes this as the conditioned or learned stimulus, and it tells the brain, like, we're in a danger zone. Like, we're in it. I'm laughing because have you guys seen Glennon Doyle highway to the danger zone? She thought the lyrics were I went to the danger zone. And now every single time I think about that song, I like laugh because it actually sounds like it's so funny. Anyway, moving on. So the brain is like, alert, alert, alert, danger zone. We're still in the middle of a infection here.
Erin Holt [00:40:17]:
People like, let's go. We have to restimulate the entire immune cascade. And then what happens when you re stimulate the entire immune cascade? It creates symptoms. Those symptoms double back to the brain. And then you spin me right round, baby, right round. It's like it's a loop. It is a loop de loop. And so what's happening here is that a hypersensitive brain is responding to a previous, previously neutral stimulus, and it's responding by being like, battle ready, by telling the immune system, we gotta fight this thing.
Erin Holt [00:41:01]:
And so we know what happens if you're constantly on high alert, you're constantly battle ready. You're constantly on the defense. The immune system is continuing to overstimulate itself unnecessarily. It uses up a lot of the body's resources. We can see pretty dramatic immune dysregulation if this keeps happening over and over and over again. And since all of those resources are being prioritized for defense instead of ongoing well being or healing in repair. This is creating more downstream symptoms and side effects. This is a pretty big conversation, and there's a lot of emerging research.
Erin Holt [00:41:43]:
There's a lot of theories around this. So I'm presenting it in the best way possible, trying to present it in the most streamlined way possible. But trust that I've got a lot more with this came from. And so if this is something that people are interested in, I am more than happy to unpack this in a lot more detail. Instead of spending more time kind of explaining what's going on, I'm going to transition into what do we do? If you're like, oh my gosh, this, I think it's me, it me, then what do we do about it? So there's really three main phases or three main areas of focus in order to retrain the brain away from this loop. Okay. And again, about. We're not talking about a body up approach.
Erin Holt [00:42:31]:
We did that last episode. We're talking about a brain down approach for this. You have to kind of discern where do you need help and which one is most appropriate for you. They can be done together, by the way. So the first thing is we have to start with nervous system down regulation. Right. That's why I have an entire. This stuff is a big deal.
Erin Holt [00:42:50]:
It's a big deal. We have to find a way to switch our body out of this active sympathetic fight or flight high activation response into a more parasympathetic response. This is usually a practice. We have to practice it for it to work. That's why I have an entire program dedicated to this. It's called Your Hormone Revival. And we start pretty darn soon. And I was going to save this for the end, but I'm going to make the announcement now.
Erin Holt [00:43:20]:
Haven't announced it anywhere else. So you're getting the first scoops. This will be the last live Your Hormone Revival program that we run. I'll get into the whys in a future episode, but it's not because people are not getting results, and it is certainly not because people aren't signing up for it. We have sold out every single round since its inception. It's just time to do some other things. So this is the last live round we'll run.
Erin Holt [00:43:51]:
So if you want to join, I'd strongly recommend it. You can go to thefunktionalnutritionist.com/yhr. And so with this program, we build in a tremendous amount of nervous system support because yes, we're focused on hormone balance in this program, but in order for our hormones to be balanced hey, guess what? We have to swim upstream and talk to the brain. And the brain has to down regulate and deescalate itself for anything in the body to work efficiently. So, ways to support your nervous system can look like deep breathing, relaxation, meditation, EFT, breath work, vagus nerve practices. There's a tremendous amount of ways to do it, which is why we give you lots of different opportunities to try different things to see what works for you. You know, what I enjoyed may not be what you enjoy. That's cool.
Erin Holt [00:44:49]:
Different strokes, different folks. So we want to make sure that we give you lots of access to different avenues to explore. But essentially, when the brain is more calm, it's more neuroplastic, it's more rewirable. So, if the goal is to take the brain's attention away from negative, negative, negative, you know, look at the baby, look at the baby, scan for the bad thing. scan for the bad thing, all the time, then in order to do that, in order to change the brain, we have to calm the brain down so it can be more adaptable, so it can be more rewirable. Okay, so, the amygdala, your fear center, remember, operates faster than your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is all about, like, higher level learning, high level thinking, impulse control, rational thinking, focus, and it takes, like, 200 milliseconds for the amygdala to compute based on our past memories, because remember, it learns patterns, whereas the prefrontal cortex takes, like, three to 5 seconds.
Erin Holt [00:45:55]:
So it's a bit more slower, and it takes more time to make more of a judicious decision about what's happening. So when the amygdala is, like, on high alert and, like, looking and scanning for all the wrong things and finding them via symptoms, we begin to overgeneralize, over generalize fearful memories, which can lead to generalized anxiety about our symptoms, about our health. So we really need to do practices to get us more in that parasympathetic state so that we can calm the brain down. And when you're jacked up in a chronic fight or flight state, there's real brain changes that are happening with this chronic stress. So with these elevated stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine, it's changing the hippocampus. It's, like, actually shrinking it down, which is. The hippocampus is essential for learning and for memory. It's impacting the frontal lobe, which is, like, our CEO, it's our higher level thinking.
Erin Holt [00:46:57]:
It's our impulse control. It's rational thinking. So if stress is impacting these two things, it can be a lot harder to make good decisions. And on top of that, the amygdala, remember, the fear center, operates way faster than the prefrontal cortex, and it will take milliseconds for the amygdala to sense a threat, whereas it takes a few more seconds for the prefrontal cortex to kind of come online and make a more judicial decision. So the whole nervous system, brain immune symptom loops, can really overwhelm the prefrontal cortex, and it can use up the brain's resources. So we're not able to release enough feel good chemicals like serotonin and dopamine. And so this can leave us in this, like, perpetual overwhelm state. And so when we're trying to rewire the brain, we really need the prefrontal cortex to come online and tell the body that it's not in danger.
Erin Holt [00:48:00]:
Again, it's that more judicial response. It's like, given all the information, let's pump the brakes. Given all the information, do I need to freak out right now? And so brain retraining really does require that the prefrontal cortex come online. We have to cognitively understand what is happening so that we can make the conscious choice to pattern interrupt what is subconsciously happening. I talked about this concept in episode 222, Creating Sacred Space for Healing and Transformation. I went on a whole riff, why it's so important to understand our bodies and why, with Your Hormone Revival, why I spend so much time teaching you about your body. It's because of this. If, like, we can understand what's going on, it becomes easier to make the conscious choice to do what we need to do.
Erin Holt [00:48:53]:
And so pattern interruption becomes one of those things. So we can use the prefrontal cortex as a way to restrain some of the unconscious brain patterns that are keeping us stuck in a loop. But again, in order to do that, we have to practice the tools that allow the brain to calm down. I'll say that again. We have to practice the tools that allow the brain to calm down. This stuff doesn't just happen on its own. They take practice. And when we do this, we essentially build and increase our capacity so we can become more flexible, more adaptable.
Erin Holt [00:49:37]:
We build in more resourcing, more framework to increase the capacity to withstand challenges. So not everything is like a five alarm fire, right? We can kind of push or stretch the set point or the threshold for what triggers that stress cascade in the brain. And so this is a really, really, really big part, kind of calming down the nervous system is the most critical first step in all of this, and then we get into the retraining. We have to set the stage to retrain through nervous system down regulation, and then we actually have to do the retraining. And so this is really what Body Intentions Breakthrough is all about. My course, it really dedicated to retraining the brain. I also do this in one on one sessions. And very exciting news through my studies at Stanford.
Erin Holt [00:50:27]:
I am also currently creating a new framework that will be rolled out. My goal is before 2024, so sometime this year, but it's, again, we have to understand that the brain's just doing its job. The brain is wired to look out for what's wrong. It needs to look out for what's not working, what's dangerous. And so we have that predisposition of our brains to, like, fixate on the negative. Does anyone feel called out right now? I sure as shit do. But we need to practice and deliberately pay attention to and look for the goodness. We have to cultivate the recognition of goodness because the brain is not doing it on its own.
Erin Holt [00:51:12]:
Like, we actually have to put some, like, intention behind it. We have to be willing to see things with fresh eyes. That's what I started the show with. Like, in order for me to heal, I had to be willing to look at my body with a new set of eyes, with, like, a new lens, with a new filter. I had to, and you have to, practice seeing the good in your body, even if you think your body is against you. It is a practice, and we have to learn tools to pattern interrupt when we find ourselves fixating on the negative. So first we have to be aware of when we're fixating on the negative, and then we have to pattern interrupt, basically, like, telling your brain you're in a loop.
Erin Holt [00:51:52]:
You got to get out. So we have to train our brain away from the loop that it's getting stuck in. Again, I will remind you that the brain is like velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive one. And so we have to consciously tilt ourselves toward the positive. And this is not just positive thinking, like Pollyanna. Right. It's actively trying to create a new set point for how the brain perceives our bodies. It's often referred to as self directed neuroplasticity.
Erin Holt [00:52:25]:
And I would even expand that to, say, self directed bioplasticity. We can use our minds to change our brains, to change our bodies. I mean, this is the stuff that I like. I live for this. It's so exciting to me. And not just because I've seen tremendous results in my own body and in my client's body, but I think it's just fascinating. These human bodies are so fascinating. But again, it's something that we have to actively opt into.
Erin Holt [00:52:54]:
We have to bring our attention and our intention to this. And if we bring attention and intention, Rick Hanson says that we can turbocharge new neural connections. But this takes time. This, this work takes time. It is a practice just like with, with anything else you do that you want to get stronger at, you have to dedicate time to that. And so I always like to be really honest about that. And then the final aspect here is reengaging or engaging with elevated emotions. Elevated emotions is a term that I got from Joe Dispenza.
Erin Holt [00:53:29]:
I believe that's the first place I heard it anyway. And so this refers to things like joy, gratitude, elation, compassion, self compassion, compassion directed inward. And it's feeling into the feelings that you want to feel. Like if your goals came true, if your health goals came true, how would you feel? And can you feel those feelings? Now? This is actually a Joe Dispenza quote. If we can feel the feelings before the experience happens, we aren't looking for something we want because we feel like it's already happened. Now, here's the rub. Here's the rub with feeling joy. You might have a hard time experiencing it.
Erin Holt [00:54:13]:
And so I would, I would ask yourself that, do you feel like you're somebody who has a hard time feeling or experiencing joy? And then the follow up question I would have for you is, do you consider yourself to be hypervigilant? Because a lot of what we talked about today is a hypervigilant brain. Hyper vigilance is like defense mode, right? We can be hyper vigilant with our food, with our bodies, with our health, with our symptoms. In my experience, working with clients, the people that are the most hyper vigilant also struggle the most with feeling joy. And here's exactly why. When we're experiencing joy, we are open, we are receptive, we are expansive. When we're in hypervigilance, we're closed off. We're bracing for impact. So going from this being closed off to this open and receptive and expansive might feel like too big of a leap for your nervous system.
Erin Holt [00:55:06]:
It might not actually feel safe. So what we can begin to do is attune to joy moment by moment, this becomes the practice. So, an example here I go out for a walk, and I was seeing the sun kind of come through the trees, and it was like that low afternoon light, you know, like the beautiful sunlight. And it was coming through the trees, and it was like, the way it was all happening was just like perfection. Perfect, chef's kiss, perfection. So I stopped and I took a moment to feel the joy of the experience in my body. Like, I am so lucky to be alive in this moment, to be able to receive this, to be able to witness this.
Erin Holt [00:55:46]:
In that moment, it was safe to do that. In that moment, it was safe to feel and experience joy inside my body. So I let myself receive that feeling. So if you're somebody who's like, well, it's all fine and great to say, I want to be more compassionate, and I want to feel more joy. I want to feel more compassion.
Erin Holt [00:56:05]:
How?
Erin Holt [00:56:06]:
How do I do that? It's this. It's these micro moments where we attune to joy moment by moment. And it can allow us to stretch our capacity to feel and to hold joy. And in doing so, we are retraining the brain away from that hypervigilant state. So we let spend less time in that hyper vigilant state. It becomes less of a default setting. And so that's one of the ways that we can actively change the brain away from where it wants to go and kind of pull it back to the positive. And so I think that that's been a lot.
Erin Holt [00:56:44]:
I'm going to leave you with that. These are all of the things that we will practice in Your Hormone Revival together. You have three months to do this. It's a three month program. You also get hormone lab testing. You get blood work done. So we're looking at the physical body. You got a one on one appointment with Rachel.
Erin Holt [00:57:04]:
You get an individualized protocol. So we're kind of hitting you from both angles. We've got the physical body, but then we're going talk a lot about this, reprogramming the nervous system and the stress response so that you can move yourself away from this hyper vigilant state. We also have weekly Sunday sessions that is all about loving up on your nervous system. And a lot of people say that that's their favorite part of the whole program. So I hope that this was helpful, and I would love to see you in our final live round of Your Hormone Revival, and I will check you all next week.
Erin Holt [00:57:43]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
