“Basically, a depleted autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system controls your “automatic” functions of your body, like your heart beating, breathing in and out, and digesting your food. It has two areas that describe “our present state”. Those areas are sympathetic and parasympathetic. Active and passive. Fight/flight and rest/digest. When we are chronically overstressed, we have been pulling from the sympathetic and can’t adapt and regulate back into parasympathetic tone. This is a ripe atmosphere for the creation of inflammation in your body.”

“Well, burnout comes from highly intense emotions running your life for too long. Some examples are guilt, shame, anger, and rage. These feelings remember their first experience whether it was an ACE (adverse childhood event), past hurt, or trauma. Daily stressors in your present life like family/financial/health breakdowns, or any kind of communication conflict (big or small) will drive anxiety to take over your life.

Whatever the reason for your stress, it is rooted in the sense of control over your environment being challenged.

When you feel like you don’t have control over a situation, it creates a dark cloud of fear over your subconscious mind and drives your emotional life, for the most part. Possession of fear kicks you into high alert, far from rational or logical thinking. Subconsciously, this sense of fear triggers the fight/flight/freeze/fawn/fixate reactions, blocking your ability to respond in a more logical, rational, or healthy way.”

“It only takes seconds to stimulate this stress response. Within hours, days, or maybe even weeks we will experience the negative effects. Signs and symptoms include exhaustion, fatigue, sleep issues, night sweats, digestive issues, body aches and pains (muscle tension, headaches, joint pain). Remember, fear is the real thief of your well-being. If not addressed in the short term, this leads to self-abandonment and disconnection in the long term.”

“Unfortunately this is when chronic illnesses tend to show up. These include diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, stroke, cancer, hypertension, and high cholesterol. For example to explain chronic muscle tension, neuromuscular sensory amnesia will occur from long term depletion of oxygen to muscle tissues. This feels something like chronic spasms and adhesions. This depletion of oxygen is a subconscious response to fear. The body tries to protect itself by drawing everything inwards, and upwards, subconsciously. Think fetal position. This is an example of the most primal response to fear. The body is drawn in and flexed tightly from your neck, back, shoulders, arms, hips, knees, and feet. But this internal positioning continues to occur even as we get out of bed and try to lead our very productive lives every day. The muscles don’t remember how to relax and unwind, hence the amnesia. This accumulates over the span of months, years, and even decades.”

“To explain what is happening, a flooding of the brain and body with stress chemicals (adrenaline and epinephrine) for a prolonged period, without any significant rest or restoration, creates sympathetic dominance. This non-stop flow ends up becoming a neurotoxin to the body, creating an environment that can’t live in peace with itself anymore. This makes sense when describing autoimmune conditions which literally is your own body attacking it’s own healthy normal tissues. Imagine 3,000 soldiers from the same brigade walking single file along a country road, without a single sign of threat from the enemy. Suddenly, the first 1,000 men in the group turn around, drop to one knee, and immediately begin firing at the other 2,000 men. Their own men! For no apparent reason. This is the catastrophic result of autoimmunity.

A nervous system that is sympathetic dominant, has poor vagal tone. The vagus nerve (a mega-long nerve travelling from C10 in your neck all the way to your organs and down your spinal cord), releases acetylcholine and is an important part of the parasympathetic nervous system. Communication from your brain to your body (efferent pathway) has only 1 “phone line” in which to communicate. Communication from your body to your brain (afferent pathway) has a whopping 9 different “phone lines” to have multiple opportunities to communicate. They say “going with your gut” or “having a gut instinct” always results in the best outcome. When chronically stressed or in a self-disconnected state, your “true self” is lacking sufficient access to the necessary “phone lines” to intuitively sense what would be for your highest good. A healthy balanced nervous system can switch effortlessly from sympathetic to parasympathetic when needed. When you allow yourself sufficient rest and repair time, and are connected to self, your body communicates (via your parasympathetic nervous system) to your brain that all is well, you are safe, and that you can trust exactly what you are discerning. Sympathetic dominance is inhibited from attaining homeostasis (balance) of the nervous system when it rarely or seldom flows into a parasympathetic state.”

“Now that’s a great question. When the amygdala (the fear center of the brain) is chronically stressed, it becomes very robust and much larger in size. The amygdala creates habitual feelings of comparing, competing, contrasting, criticizing, condemning, and complaining which stem from deep rooted fear located in our subconscious. This is what drives you to disconnect and self-abandon, and why you can’t even remember why you feel that way at times. This is the science behind frustrating self-destructive habits like addictions, driving your body too hard, projecting your hurts onto those around you, and having difficulty with intimate relationships. The subconscious mind is responsible for consistently driving 90-95% of your thoughts. When the amygdala is enlarged and fear is your baseline, life can be a daily struggle.

In contrast, The pre-frontal cortex (logical and reasoning center of brain) becomes smaller, weaker, and remains underdeveloped the longer you drive the amygdala. This is unfortunate, because the pre-frontal cortex is where you create feelings of being calm, kind, clear, compassionate, and connected. The hippocampus, (where you store long term memory), also gets smaller and smaller the longer and harder you drive the amygdala. How can you expect yourself to self-love, connect to others in a healthy way, and engage in lifestyle choices that promote functional well-being, when you are carrying with you an unhealthy internal environment (psycho-physiologically)?

“Well, a dysregulated hormonal system is an emotionally dysfunctional being. Your hormonal system consists of the HPA axis (hypothalamus/pituitary/adrenal). When your adrenals, located above each kidney, become habitually overstimulated, they become enlarged and eventually over fatigued. The adrenals produce hormones and balance metabolism and sugars. They regulate blood pressure and your immune system. When you experience chronic stress over a period, what normally is an every 3 second burst of hormones (think plastic $2 water gun), turns into a crime scene of a constant onslaught of hormones (think massive AK47 gone wild) that eventually shuts down from lack of ammunition.”

“ It comes when highly intense emotions run your life for too long. I am speaking of depleting emotions like frustration, resentment, anxiety, hopelessness, rejection, irritation, and despair. When these emotions have overtaken your internal landscape, they damage your nervous system. These same emotions were first conceived from past hurts and traumas that shape your perception of life today. Triggers in daily life now are spun out of control when your childhood narrative or your past dictate how you see the world. Common triggers poke you as rejection, abandonment, criticism, etc. Your subconscious is desperately trying to protect you, but with a pattern of thinking and feeling that was ingrained in your brain from some of your most traumatic memories”.

It takes minutes to stimulate this stress response. Your physiology changes instantaneously and will always respond according to your emotions. The two go hand in hand. You can’t experience an emotion without your body feeling it too. The same rule applies whether it is a depleting or renewing emotion. Signs and symptoms include increased blood sugar, the “shakes” between meals leading to sugar cravings, fatigue, low energy (think hypothyroid), irritability, anxiety, sleep issues (wired and tired), impaired learning, low blood pressure, dizziness upon standing, decreased skin regeneration, and lack of interest.”

“The effects can be quite devastating. Month, years, or even decades of a dysregulated hormonal system can be catastrophic on the body.. It’s a wonder you end up feeling “haggard” and “feeling older than your years”. The saying, “that traumatic experience took 10 years off her life” has some truth to it. Accelerated aging (apoptosis) takes place due to shortened telomeres, making you prone to inflammation. Chronic stress then has a cascading effect on many parts of the body.

Increased brain cell death leads to impaired memory, decreased muscle mass (sarcopenia) leads to increased body fat in abdominal area (aromatase), increased fatty deposits in face and upper back, but actually causes fat loss to increase in arms and legs. Decreased bone density leads to osteopenia/osteoporosis, decreased skin regeneration leads to pink/purple stretch marks, and decreased cell renewal in the skin overall (think less moisture, less elasticity, less tolerance to sun exposure, and more wrinkles). Decreased hydrochloric acid in stomach leads to digestive issues where stomach is unable to break down food properly. Eventually the lack of HCL acid in gut causes a break down in the gut wall causing leaky gut (think IBS/IBD, SIBO, ulcers, stomach cramps, bloating). Sleep issues are rampant from low cortisol (not waking up refreshed/low energy throughout day) and high cortisol (can’t fall asleep/ wake up in middle of night and can’t fall back asleep). Other signs and symptoms include low stress tolerance to even the slightest stress, diabetes, hot flashes/night sweats, inhibition of sex hormones causing lowered libido, increased risk of infection due to immune suppression, and depression. More severe long-term symptoms include Cushing’s syndrome (high cortisol) or Addison’s syndrome (low cortisol).”

Well, to put it in a nutshell, a chronically stressed/dysregulated hormonal system has too much cortisol “the stress hormone”, and not enough DHEA “the vitality hormone” to begin with. At full shut down, both the cortisol and DHEA will be low. It all starts with your 5 senses (sight/sound/smell/taste/touch) where one/several of them downloaded something familiar that translated into making you feel uneasy or anxious. What has taken place, is that same sensation (something you just smelt, heard, felt, tasted, saw, read) recalled a similar memory of a familiar experience that had a painful impact on you. Your peace is gone, your muscles are tight, you can feel your heart pounding, but you don’t know why. These past events can be stored after experiencing many micro-traumas over several years, or after just a single horrible experience.

“The brain will never cease to fascinate me. Time does not exist with memories. What is so twisted, is that even horrific or tragic memories are stored as familiar, even comfortable in your nervous system. Dysfunctional people/situations are actually normal “comfortable” to your nervous system. To survive dysfunction, you learned to disconnect from yourself and self-abandon. It is how you survived your childhood or recent abusive/toxic relationship. Dysfunction can bring a sense of security, even when it was filled with chaos, confusion, anxiety, panic, or depression. It’s why you have been drawn to the same toxicity you grew up around or lived amongst for years. It’s why you allow self-destructive behaviors and habits into your life. It explains the ultimate paradox, when healthy relationships or environments make you feel intolerable unrest and anxiety. Healthy and positive environments rattle your nervous system and register as “unfamiliar”. This is why you have been driven to self-sabotage good relationships and seemingly healthy situations all throughout life. It is a tragedy, but it is based on hard science.”