Intuitive Healing with Glenna

I get this question a lot. Everyone wants to know what is the one thing they need to do that will reverse their chronic illness, untangle their symptoms, make their fatigue go away. You want to know, I want to know. We have a deep and human desire to fix, to free ourselves from the suffering that comes with a dysregulated nervous system, or in other words, to heal.

What is nervous system dysregulation?

Our nervous system is comprised of our brain, spinal cord, and about seven trillion nerves, one thousand times more nerves than there are people on the planet. This unimaginable number of nerve endings cooperate with the brain via the spinal cord to perform an equally unimaginable number of functions. Nose itching? Nervous system. Reading this sentence? Nervous system. Warm fuzzy feeling when you think about puppies, inescapable, Garfield-levels of dread in regard to Mondays? Nervous system. Overwhelmed by the number of functions your nervous system performs? Only because of your nervous system.

In the broadest possible strokes, our nervous system keeps our other organ systems regulated and connects our inside world to the outside world. This connection is mechanical, e.g. getting out of bed in the morning, or engaging your 5 senses (touch, taste, smell, etc.), as well as emotional, like when you smell an apple pie and are transported back to your grandma’s Thanksgiving table and feel safe, or when you get a whiff of tequila and immediately recall the inside of a frat house bathroom floor and feel shame, or at least queasy.

Our nervous system is designed this way for survival. It has a whole subsystem, the sympathetic nervous system, dedicated to seeking safety and avoiding danger. It relies heavily on these mechanical-emotional associations to interpret threats in our environments and react accordingly. This system can often be too good at what it does, working when we wake, when we go to work, on our drive home, even in our sleep. Many of us, even those who don’t experience full-blown panic, are in an overactive sympathetic nervous state. This is nervous system dysregulation: tending too frequently to survival without ever counterbalancing with our parasympathetic, or rest and digest state.

If it keeps us alive, what’s the problem?

Overactive sympathetic nervous state is tied to chronic stress, panic disorder, mood disorder, depression, as well as autoimmune conditions like diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and even dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. It is certainly tied to anxiety, but here’s the thing: anxiety is not the problem.

The problem is not that our body has a sympathetic nervous system, or anxiety, or cortisol; it’s that this system never gets the chance to shut off and let our body heal itself by itself. We need our anxiety mechanism for survival, but we also need sleep and digestion, which are only neurologically possible when the sympathetic nervous system switches off and the parasympathetic engages. We need, in a word, regulation.

The one thing we need to do for regulation is…

When I first started exploring nervous system regulation, even when I started training to work with clients, had someone asked me this question (and I can’t stress this enough, I’ve gotten it a lot since), I would have sighed and explained in pedantic detail that there is no one thing. There’s breath work, there’s sunlight, there’s nutrition, there’s the circadian rhythm, there’s mineral deficiencies, there’s therapy, there’s body work, there’s incomplete stress cycles, there’s just too much for any one to work completely.

But since starting my practice, I started thinking differently. I’ve learned something much more crucial to healing than any one of those things. I’ve learned that given half a chance, your body will heal itself by itself, if you do this and only this:

Pause.

Breathe in deep.

Exhale slowly.

Picture the one thing your body needs right now.

Go back one second. Go back that one thing, that first thing, however random, insignificant, or ineffectual it might seem.

Some clients have said breathe. Some clients have said, vacation. Some clients have said, carrot sticks.

Actually, that was one client. He came to me concerned that if he kept eating ramen and spaghetti-os every day, he would one day face diseases like diabetes and the medical bills that go with them. I asked him what it would mean if he was healthy. He said he wanted to do twenty push-ups, bike without getting winded, and lift his fiancee fireman-style. I asked him if he had to do one thing right now to get health, what would it be. He said he needed to eat more carrots. A month later, he was walking a mile daily, doing push ups after work, and didn’t need as much weed to fall asleep. His body was doing that for itself, because he listened to that one thing. Your thing might be carrot sticks, or something completely different, but invariably, that is exactly where you need to start.

So one more time, it goes like this:

Pause.

Breathe.

Exhale.

One thing. Start there. Start healing.