Toxic Stress Physiology

Nourishing Our Sanity is a reader-supported publication. To continue receiving new posts and to support all that goes into my work, allowing me more time to create articles and podcasts, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $6 a month.

There’s a specific female archetype that I want to introduce to you in the hopes of creating a better understanding of the topic I’ll be detailing throughout this article. This archetye is a composite of many women that I’ve worked with—including myself—and may also touch upon the personal experiences of some of you reading this. I want to humanize this experience and illustrate how common it actually is for women in this culture.

In walks Lucy.

Lucy is a mid-thirties woman who’s barely making it through the day, despite a long-term focus on health that’s consuming more and more of her life. She’s struggled with her health since she was a young girl and has been on pretty much every diet this culture has thrown at her, mainly in an attempt to feel better. Lucy struggled with her hormones, gut, and skin in her adolescence and was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition in her twenties. She now has three autoimmune conditions, as well as a self-diagnosis for PCOS, Chronic Fatigue syndrome (CFS), and ADHD.

After consistent experiences of feeling gaslit by her doctors, Lucy turned to functional medicine and has been reliant on extensive labs and supplements for years now. She has “eaten clean” since she was a teenager, yet no amount of clean eating or supplementation has fully moved the needle, and her energy seems to be getting progressively worse.

At first, Western diagnosis offered her some relief—at least she had some names for her experience and some medications to take. But when this proved to be a dead-end and in many ways, made things worse, she went off her medications and placed her faith in her functional doctor.

The same pattern unfolded, only with functional labs and a lot more complex explanations for her issues—adrenal fatigue, sex hormone imbalance, low thyroid, gut dysbiosis, hypoglycemia, histamine intolerance—all offering their own set of solutions in the form of supplements and specific dietary changes.

At first, these solutions felt like the answers she’d finally been waiting for! She was also extensively listened to by her doctor for the first time in years, an experience that cannot be understated for someone living with confusing and debilitating chronic symptoms.

But, a few years in, and these protocols haven’t really moved the needle for Lucy as she’d initially hoped. In fact, as a result of bigger life stressors and the constant maintenance of her health for years on end, she now feels like she’s barely getting through the day. And she’s spent thousands on supplements, doctor’s visits, and labs! Most of these investments were out-of-pocket since functional medicine often isn’t covered by basic health insurance.

Because she only sees her doctor for an hour every few months (if that), she has become her own medical researcher, often spending hours googling her various symptoms, saving social media posts about health topics, and using knowledge acquisition as a source of regulation to try and manage her worst and most confusing symptoms.

Lucy found an article online about the concept of the highly sensitive person (HSP), and it felt like a lightbulb went off for her! Feeling validated that there’s actually a term to describe how she feels all the time, she began internalizing this term and using it in the ways she explains her experience to herself and others close to her. This label and the identity it espouses gave her a feeling of connection to something bigger and a specialness that we all desire to feel in response to a perceived weakness or struggle. However, it didn’t necessarily help her understand her own physiology more deeply, and over time, it became something of another diagnosis for her—the relief wore off as it always did.

On top of the constant management of basic health metrics, she also carries around a lot of guilt and shame because of how “needy” her health issues have made her feel. Any man she dates has to factor her diet and specific protocols into their time together. She easily gets thrown off by stressors that others might merely find annoying, and she doesn’t participate in cultural norms like drinking or late-night events. This limits who she dates, makes her feel less confident in herself as a mate, and drives her toward more isolation behaviors to protect herself.

Adopting the label of a highly sensitive person, in the end, didn’t incentivize her to learn about root causes that may’ve been causing her sensitivities and low capacity and she often feels trapped in this identity, being recommended more and more content online by algorithms that have picked up on her intense focus on this topic.

What Lucy hasn’t factored into her story is her ACE score of 8 and the levels of stress she had been under early in life that contributed her her current experience of her own body, mind, and overall sense of safety in life. Lucy knew that her childhood had been rough and, like so many liberal millennials, she’d spent years in therapy discussing her childhood. She felt like she’d talked about it from every possible angle and that it was no longer an issue in her daily behaviors as it once might’ve been.

What Lucy isn’t aware of, however, is that her early life experiences have created stress levels in her body that are both unsustainable and deeply familiar to her brain. Since the brain works on prediction, it wants our bodies to do the same thing over and over, even if what we’re doing (or the pace at which we’re doing it) isn’t sustainable in the long term. The survival brain doesn’t think about long-term—its primary focus is keeping us safe now.

What Lucy doesn’t understand is that every single health issue that she has all stems from the same place—a body that has adapted to high stress levels over time and has reallocated resources to her basic immediate survival. Her cellular energy is low, her nutritional resources are low, her storage glucose is nonexistent, and she’s been getting her baseline energy needs met by cortisol and adrenaline for years.

Her very existence has become energetically unsustainable.

So, if you're reading this, you may relate to Lucy. You may know what it feels like to wake up already exhausted, to move around in a body that seems to betray you at every turn, and to navigate a medical system that offers you labels but rarely lasting relief. You might be someone living with chronic fatigue, watching your energy reserves dwindle day by day, despite your best efforts. Or you've collected autoimmune diagnoses, each one adding another layer of complexity to your daily existence.

Maybe you've discovered you're on the autism spectrum, realizing that your nervous system processes the world differently than most people around you, and this overlaps with confusing metabolic sensitivities. (btw, as far as I’m aware, stress doesn’t cause autism, but it can exacerbate autistic symptoms and create symptoms that mimic aspects of what those on the spectrum experience.)

If you relate to Lucy, your relationship with food has likely become complicated, riddled with intolerances, restrictions, and aversions that seem to multiply over time or maybe even get better and then get worse again. One minute you can tolerate dairy again, then suddenly you have something stressful happen, and dairy is out of the question again. One minute, you seem to be doing well with carbs; the next, you get IBS from every carb you try. You might describe yourself as having low resilience, finding that what others handle with ease leaves you depleted for days.

Maybe you've gotten used to waking up feeling great one day and the next, feeling like a bus hit you, without any clear cause to point to. You've tried eliminating foods, adding supplements, adjusting hormones, and following the latest wellness trends, but something fundamental continues to feel broken in you. You get told that it’s your methylation, your brain, your liver, your gut, that it’s the MTHFR or some other gene mutation. There’s a good chance that one or even all of these things may be at play… but none of this helps you better understand the actual root cause of your issues.

The frustration isn't just physical; it's existential. Why can't you just feel normal? Why does everything feel so hard? Why can’t you just adhere to a specific protocol long-term and get the results so many folks online claim to be getting??

The reason you're not getting better might have less to do with the specific diagnoses you've collected and more to do with something far more fundamental: your stress physiology has become dysregulated at the deepest level of your existence. Your brain doesn’t feel safe, and it hasn’t felt safe in years. This is partially a neuroception issue and partially a metabolic one. If you have complex trauma from your childhood, it's likely also a relational issue, in which case creating the safety you need will absolutely require you to have healthy, safe forms of consistent intimacy in your life.

For many of us, the stress began so long ago that it’s no longer clear which came first—the neuroceptive threats or the metabolic responses. But after enough time, they form an intimate feedback loop, whereby threat detections increase energy demands, those energy demands increase stress hormones, the stress creates a cascade of blood sugar and inflammatory responses, which thereby creates a stress response… and the cycle repeats itself.

While you've been chasing symptoms and seeking fixes for individual conditions, the underlying driver of your suffering may be a nervous system that has been stuck in survival mode for far longer than it was ever designed to handle. This has immediate and downstream impacts on your physiological functions, as they adapt to a faster pace (fight or flight speeds everything up), increased loss of vital nutrients, and a reallocation of resources to meet the immediate survival needs of someone who’s under constant threat.

Everything in our physiology changes over time when our system develops these patterns and stays here. This is why, even if we increase health metrics in one area or lower symptoms in another, we may continue to struggle—the underlying patterns we’ve been running for years haven’t been shifted.

This is what toxic stress physiology is: an underlying lack of safety that may have started with a particular event, unmet need, or series of events… but has become a systemic physiological pattern driving everything else downstream, from our hormones to our digestion, our moods, libido, to how quickly we age. There’s not an area of our health that this pattern doesn’t touch.

Hans Selye, the pioneering researcher who first described the general adaptation syndrome, mapped out how our bodies respond to chronic stress in predictable stages. Initially, when faced with a stressor, our system activates the alarm reaction, flooding us with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to help us cope. If the stress is brief and we have the environment and metabolic resources to recover well, this system works beautifully. But when stress becomes chronic and we lack either a safe environment, the metabolic resources, or both, we enter what Selye called the resistance stage, where our bodies attempt to adapt to the ongoing demand by maintaining elevated stress hormone production.

Now, we can live with elevated stress hormone production for years and actually feel great. This is a big component of my personal story, but I also view it as a really common theme of being young, especially without well-regulated adults around to mimic sustainable energy regulation and healthy habits. This is why many people often feel great when they first begin fasting, why women who are prone to over-exertion can feel horrible if they slow down and skip gym days, and why workaholics suddenly get sick when they’re on vacation—the stress hormones carry them through, and then they crash at the first opportunity for real rest.

The problem emerges when we remain in this resistance stage for months or years, as so many of us modern women do now. Eventually, our adaptive capacity becomes depleted, and we crash into what Selye termed the exhaustion stage. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of women are when they come to work with me—already exhausted on multiple levels.

This exhaustion isn't just feeling tired after a long day; this is a fundamental breakdown of the body's ability to maintain homeostasis. Our adrenals become “fatigued,” in the sense that we have low cellular resources for producing the levels of stress hormones needed to manage our demands. Our immune system becomes dysregulated, reacting to more and more otherwise benign signals as a result of excess stress hormones, and our digestion suffers, which limits not only what we choose to consume but what nutrients we extract from the foods we do eat. Our sleep becomes disrupted, which compounds everything physiologically and psycho-emotionally, and our capacity to handle even minor stressors diminishes dramatically over time.

What's particularly insidious about this whole process is that chronic stress doesn't require obvious trauma or dramatic life events to cascade. It can develop from years of fad dieting, people-pleasing, overworking, unintentionally under-eating, financial pressures, insecure relationships, or simply living in a world that requires we move much faster than our nervous system can comfortably handle. If you're highly sensitive or neurodivergent, you process exponentially more information than others, which creates a constant, low-level stress response to life itself that can accumulate over time.

All of this describes me to a T. And if this sounds like your own experience, please know that you’re not alone and that there are paths forward, out of toxic stress physiology.

For those who do carry the weight of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), which I go over in more detail in this podcast and also plan to discuss more in future articles, the situation becomes more layered. Not everyone who lives with toxic stress physiology has trauma, and a core focus of my podcast and Substack is to unpack the ways that culture itself can impact our health in similar ways, even if we have an otherwise healthy upbringing.

However, a key component of my own toxic stress physiology is trauma-related, and a key focus of my professional coaching practice is to address the underlying childhood (thus, developmental) trauma that drives a lot of women’s unremitting health issues.

Unlike acute trauma from a single incident, C-PTSD develops from repeated exposure to harmful situations, often during childhood, where escape wasn't possible and agency was low. This might include emotional neglect, inconsistent care, family dysfunction, abuse, or simply growing up in an environment where you never felt truly safe to develop your own sense of identity.

C-PTSD fundamentally alters how your nervous system develops and functions. Your threat detection system often becomes hypervigilant, constantly scanning for danger even in otherwise safe situations. Your window of stress tolerance becomes narrower, meaning you're more easily overwhelmed and take longer to recover from demanding experiences, both metabolic and psycho-emotional. Your sense of self often becomes fragmented, and you may struggle with emotional regulation, relationships, and a persistent feeling of not belonging in the world as you are.

When C-PTSD underlies your physical symptoms, your body is essentially running threat-detection software 24/7, even when there's no actual danger present and even when you’re not consciously aware that you’re stressed. This constant state of hypervigilance creates the perfect storm for toxic stress physiology to take hold. Your immune system becomes confused, sometimes attacking your own tissues in autoimmune conditions. Your digestive system slowly shuts down because digestion isn't a priority when you're in survival mode. Your sleep becomes restless because your system never fully feels safe enough to enter deep restorative states.

These patterns often get interwoven into our developing sense of self and can lead to toxic shame, which can manifest physiologically as well as psycho-emotionally and relationally. If this is an underlying factor that you suspect may be driving your patterns, I believe the key here is to understand your own unique ACE score and the adaptive patterns you developed while in survival mode as a child.

For many of us with trauma as a component, we’re more likely to internalize our physical symptoms and identify more heavily with them, thus experiencing the emotional flashbacks, triggers, and shame on our more symptomatic days. This can drive behaviors such as isolation, dissociation, and poor consumption choices, which can become a vicious cycle if we’re not able to recognize it and seek support.

Many practices can help address and change these patterns alongside healing the body, such as somatic parts work (IFS), integrating NARM principles into our self-concept, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) practices to address the cognitive distortions that arise alongside our physical symptoms. Although I’m not a psychotherapist, but a health consultant and coach, I have certifications in the first two of these approaches and often use CBT tools with myself and clients while addressing the cognitive distortions that arise during the healing process.

Other methods we can do solo that can be of support include journaling—both oral and written, breathwork and vagal toning, mirror work (which can be especially supportive for those of us with body dysmorphia related to physical illness), time in nature, somatic practices such as shaking, jumping, and dancing that also integrate our beliefs and cognition, and prioritizing daily pleasure, which has a whole host of neurosomatic healing benefits I plan to cover more in future articles.

If you have developmental trauma and chronic illness, let me offer some words of caution around adopting purely somatic therapies such as somatic experiencing (SE), without additional support. This modality (while offering embodiment tools) is best applied to shock trauma and doesn’t offer the top-down cognitive support often needed to address what comes up in therapy sessions and in between. Because C-PTSD is relational and developmental, working with it in a purely somatic format often leaves women with a lot of emotions, sensations, and thoughts that they then have to manage on their own, in between sessions. This can be very stressful for a system that is already flooded and very confusing for a mind that doesn’t know what’s happening. Instead, I recommend a combination of both, such as NARM.

I also want to offer a word of caution for those with both C-PTSD and chronic illness around adopting a sitting meditation practice, which may actually increase interoceptive stress and flood your brain with threat signals while you attempt to sit still with your eyes closed for long periods.

Although this may not be a problem for some, and there is countless evidence to back up one’s desire to start a meditation practice, it’s also important to keep in mind that a lot of us with chronic illness and/or trauma have higher threat signals to the brain coming from inside our bodies. These internal threat signals are often managed (or balanced, if you will) by an over-reliance on our ocular system and the (hopefully) less threatening external signals our eyes take in each day. This means that when we close our eyes, our brain no longer has this balance and is only taking in signals from within. For those of us with insomnia related to our health or trauma patterns, this may be a more valid point: your brain may feel less safe with your eyes closed.

If you’re habituated to fight or flight, your brain may feel less safe when you’re still for too long.

Please keep these points in mind while choosing what therapies to receive or engage in, and remember that simply because the internet or a magazine said that it’s healthy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what your unique system needs. And stay tuned for more neurosomatic deep-dives in future posts!

One of the most fundamental ways toxic stress physiology disrupts our health is through its impact on blood sugar regulation. Understanding this connection can help illuminate why you might feel shaky, anxious, or foggy between meals, why you constantly crave sugar, or why you seem to crash after eating certain foods. It may also help you recognize deeper patterns related to sleep, immunity, hair loss and aging, mood, and difficulty with body composition.

Blood sugar instability is a huge component of my personal health story: On top of having a very fast metabolism and a nervous system stuck in fight or flight due to trauma, I was never taught moderation, impulse control, or boundaries around my consumption behaviors. I was in motion so much of the time and received the early life messaging that, as long as I’m not fat, it doesn’t matter what or how much I eat. This led to a very early diet of French fries, soda, excessive candy, and behavior patterns that some might label sugar addiction.

There were red flags early in life that I only began to recognize, in retrospect, as an adult, as signs of developing hypoglycemia. But having no adults around me as a neglected child to take these flags seriously, they were missed entirely.

There were at least two separate occasions where I was admitted to the emergency room for random things unrelated to blood sugar—a sudden allergic reaction to cooking spray, an allergic reaction to cheap metal earrings, causing my ear to swell quickly to the point where my earring needed to be surgically removed—and during these visits, I had the ER doc mention that my blood sugar was dangerously low. The solution? They gave me some OJ to drink on the way out.

It’s not an ER doc’s priority to address what might be a chronic issue in passing, but there were plenty of times when these patterns might’ve been noticed by my GP or the psychiatrist prescribing all of my psychotropic meds at the time. I also had a common pattern early on of overeating carbs, to the point where the parents of friends I would stay with commented on how much of their processed carb snacks I ate while at their house (examples, fruit bars and croissants). This happened with at least three separate friends before the age of 14.

Because I was petite and in good shape, it was never acknowledged as anything more than annoying or humorous, with one friend’s dad even stocking their pantry with extra bars for my visits—an endearing memory of his kindness! Unfortunately, these patterns of overindulgence were tied in with internal feelings of instability that I quickly began trying to control with restriction in my early and late teens. This kicked off a near-decade-long struggle with binging on sugar as a way to try and manage my internal world; my hypoglycemic survival states.

This pattern is, unfortunately, a very common historical link amongst the women I now work with professionally.

Blood sugar, or glucose, is our body's primary fuel source, especially for our brain and nervous system. But glucose's role goes far deeper than simply providing energy. Alongside oxygen and other essential nutrients, glucose is required by our cells to produce ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the fundamental energy currency that powers every single process in our body. From the beating of our heart to the firing of neurons, from immune cell function to tissue repair, everything that happens in our body requires this cellular energy production.

When blood sugar regulation becomes disrupted, it doesn't just affect how we feel between meals—it compromises the very foundation of cellular energy production itself, creating a cascade of tissue dysfunction that can touch every system in our body. It can leave us feeling, fundamentally, unsafe.

Under normal circumstances, our body maintains blood glucose levels within a narrow range through a sophisticated regulatory system. When we eat, our blood sugar rises, prompting our pancreas to release insulin to help cells absorb the glucose for energy production throughout the entire body. Between meals, your liver releases stored glucose (glycogen) to maintain steady levels. This system works seamlessly when our stress physiology is balanced.

However, chronic stress (of any variety) fundamentally disrupts this delicate process. When our nervous system is constantly activated, our body interprets this as an ongoing emergency requiring immediate energy. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline continuously signal our liver to dump glucose into our bloodstream, preparing us for fight or flight. This creates a state of chronically elevated blood sugar, which over time leads to insulin resistance as our cells become less responsive to insulin's signals.

Not only this, but over time, this disrupts the body’s natural ability to store glucose in the liver for use in between meals and during times of stress and rest. Without these savings, we move into a chronic state of metabolic debt, whereby we are constantly pulling resources from the tissues in between meals to fuel the body’s energy demands.

One of cortisol’s main jobs is to break down our body’s tissues in times of great stress to utilize its resources. This overall process is called catabolism, the process of tissue wasting. It’s an inevitable process for aging humans and a useful backup for historical famines when external resource access was low… but it’s not an ideal process to rely upon for long-term energy needs.

When we develop hypoglycemia, whereby our blood sugar is constantly crashing without stored glucose to assist us, our body moves more and more into catabolic states, where muscle wasting becomes a key source of resources, and we’re relying heavily on cortisol’s role in this process. In this state, we lose important muscle that helps us regulate fat metabolism, we struggle to synthesize and put on muscle, and we increase inflammatory states as a result of high circulating cortisol.

The situation becomes particularly problematic when this stress response begins early in life. Children who grow up in chronically stressful environments often develop dysregulated blood sugar patterns that persist into adulthood. Their bodies learn to operate in crisis mode, never fully developing the capacity for stable glucose regulation that comes with a sense of safety and predictability. This has a cascading effect on every area of our health, mental and metabolic.

As toxic stress physiology progresses throughout our lives, our body loses its ability to store glucose effectively. This storage system requires a parasympathetic nervous system state to function properly, but when we're stuck in sympathetic activation, our body prioritizes immediate energy availability over long-term storage. (Side note: this can often show up as impulsive behaviors not just in eating, but in other areas of our lives—short-term prioritizations over long-term.)

Without adequate glycogen stores, our blood sugar becomes increasingly unstable, leading to hypoglycemic episodes that leave us feeling weak, dizzy, irritable, and desperate for quick energy. This can sum up what a lot of people refer to as “hangry.” The fact that we have a casual and even humorous term for this only illustrates how commonplace this survival state has actually become!

When stress hormones remain elevated for extended periods, they signal our body to convert muscle protein and other tissues into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis - a specific form of catabolism. Again, this is why people with chronic stress often experience higher degrees of muscle wasting, bone density loss, and general physical deterioration despite potentially eating adequately—their body is literally eating itself to stay alive!

This catabolic process creates a vicious cycle, where our body breaks down lean tissue to fuel our stress response, and our metabolism slows, making it even harder to maintain stable blood sugar. Our adrenals become exhausted from constantly producing stress hormones while simultaneously burning through the basic resources (mainly minerals) that these stress hormones are built out of in the first place. Yet our body continues to demand this response because it never receives the signal that it's safe to relax.

Meanwhile, our digestive system suffers because blood flow and resources are diverted away from digestion toward immediate survival needs, driving down the absorption of the crucial nutrients needed for stress regulation. This changes the pH of our digestive tract over time, lowering stomach acid, and also increases the chances of conditions such as IBS and various food intolerances (issues that often drive our dietary restrictions and low dietary intake even more!)

When our glucose drops, our brain perceives this as a life-threatening emergency, triggering intense anxiety, panic, and emotional reactivity. You might find yourself becoming inexplicably angry, confused, or tearful, only to feel completely different after eating something. This isn't a character flaw; it's your brain responding to what it perceives as starvation.

Over time, this dysregulated blood sugar pattern wears away at our overall physiology in profound ways. Our immune system becomes compromised because it requires stable glucose to function properly and because immune cells are managing higher levels of inflammatory compounds. Our sleep suffers because blood sugar drops during the night, requiring that cortisol break down our muscles for glucose, thus waking us up in the process. (This was me for years, btw!)

Our cognitive function may decline because our brain can't maintain the steady fuel supply it needs for optimal performance, let alone working memory and mood stability. Even our hormonal system may become disrupted, as many hormones require stable glucose levels for proper synthesis, function, and excretion.

This is why addressing blood sugar stability is often a crucial first step in healing toxic stress physiology. When we can provide our nervous system with steady, reliable fuel, we remove one major source of stress signals, allowing our body to begin shifting out of chronic survival mode, out of this metabolic debt state, and into a state of safety where true healing finally becomes possible.

This is also why low-carb diets, or potentially any diet that drives us into severe caloric restriction, can exacerbate all of our issues, even if we may feel some minor relief from our symptoms in the short term. Fad diets do more harm to the women I work with than any individual food ever could!

Understanding our experience through the lens of toxic stress physiology can transform our relationship with our health challenges. Instead of feeling like a broken person who needs fixing, we can begin to see ourselves as someone whose system has been overwhelmed and needs support to feel safe again. This shift from desperation to understanding, from helplessness to agency, creates the foundation for genuine healing that addresses root causes rather than just endlessly managing our symptoms… and it also sets us up with more agency over how we feel about our own symptoms when they arise!

Our body isn't our enemy, and nothing it’s creating for us is an accident; it's been trying to protect us the only way it knows how.

Understanding toxic stress physiology as the underlying driver of our symptoms can be profoundly liberating because of how deeply connected to our human sense of safety this framework lies. Instead of seeing ourselves as a collection of broken parts that need individual fixing, we begin to recognize that our body is actually responding, quite logically, to a nervous system that has been overwhelmed for far too long.

Downstream of this nervous system is literally every single system and function in our bodies that relies upon a stable and consistent flow of energy to work at all.

Our chronic fatigue isn't a mysterious disease; it's our body's attempt to force us to slow down and conserve energy when cellular resources are low. Our autoimmune conditions aren't random attacks on our bodies; they're signs that our immune system has become dysregulated by chronic stress states. Our food intolerances aren't evidence that we're fundamentally broken and forever dietarily limited; they're symptoms of a digestive system that has been compromised by years of operating in survival mode.

This framework fundamentally shifts how we relate to our experience and can be a Come To Jesus moment for us around how we care for and relate to our unique female bodies. Instead of feeling like a victim of mysterious illnesses (an easy state to fall into, I know), we can begin to see our symptoms as information about what our nervous system needs to feel safe again. This understanding creates potential space for self-compassion rather than constant self-criticism, AND it also requires that we prioritize real change in our lives instead of expecting another dietary protocol alone (after the dozens before that didn’t work) to change things for us.

Taking this perspective seriously may also reduce the desperate search for the next diagnosis, the next lab test, the next supplement protocol, or even the next coach that will finally fix all your long-term problems. It becomes clear that none of these things alone will save you from the required connection you must create with your own body’s needs for safety and thus, energy.

Applying this framework will not help us if we’re still seeking a diagnosis or a quick fix without being able to find agency in our own daily choices. It’s a process we all have to move into at our own pace… and sometimes we may want to heal, but we’re not ready to make a radical change to our pace in life or to take our energy needs more seriously.

Nourishing Our Sanity is a reader-supported publication. To continue receiving new posts and to support all that goes into my work, allowing me more time to create articles and podcasts, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $6 a month.

Now, let me briefly introduce you to the approach to health and nutrition that I take in my own personal and professional work. I plan to dedicate a full article—likely more than one— to this topic, so although I’ll keep this section brief, it bears mentioning here.

Bioenergetics offers a compelling framework for understanding and addressing toxic stress physiology because it recognizes that healing must happen at the cellular level and that most chronic illnesses are the result of chronic cellular stress. This approach, rooted in the work of researchers like Ray Peat, focuses on optimizing cellular energy production rather than simply managing symptoms or suppressing disease processes.

Amongst the broad array of topics Ray focuses on, I’ve found him to be particularly relevant to my work due to his focus on female sex hormone research. He’s also dedicated a lot of his research and writing toward the connection between stress, learned helplessness, cellular intelligence, and the harmful effects of largely misrepresented substances—namely serotonin and estrogen. All of which you can read about on his website and in his various interviews, articles, and books.

All of these topics tie in with my own personal struggles in life—with hormones, mood, skin, cognition, energy, and behavior— resulting from the myriad downstream symptoms experienced due to stress. Many of these issues are profoundly misrepresented and thus misunderstood by the general public and the many women desperately seeking answers for why their bodies aren’t healing.

From a bioenergetics perspective, toxic stress physiology fundamentally disrupts our cells' ability to produce energy efficiently. When our system is constantly in survival mode, our cells shift from efficient aerobic energy production to less efficient anaerobic processes. This shift creates a cascade of metabolic dysfunction that manifests as the very symptoms we've been struggling with: fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues, temperature dysregulation, premature aging, and compromised immune function.

The bioenergetics approach recognizes that our cells need specific conditions to produce energy optimally: adequate glucose, proper thyroid hormone function, sufficient carbon dioxide production to get oxygen into the cells, and protection from excessive stress hormones and inflammatory compounds. When these conditions are met, your cells can shift back into efficient energy production, which supports every aspect of your health and gives your nervous system the resources it needs to move out of chronic survival mode.

This framework allows us to approach our healing from a place of nourishment rather than restriction. Instead of constantly eliminating foods and activities that might be "bad" for us, we can focus on providing our cells with what they need to thrive. Even if we do need to pare down and become more discerning about our consumption and lifestyle choices, this shift in focus can make the healing process itself feel far less stressful and reductive.

From this framework, the healing process usually includes eating regular meals with adequate carbohydrates to support stable blood sugar, ensuring adequate protein for tissue repair, optimizing thyroid function to support energy metabolism, prioritizing daily sun exposure as a vital medicine in itself, and creating lifestyle conditions that promote parasympathetic nervous system activation (pleasure, recreation, connection, and creativity).

The bioenergetics approach also emphasizes the importance of moving slowly and listening to our body's feedback system. If we’ve been habitually ignoring it for years and drowning out vital signals with excessive noise, this may take some time and commitment at first.

Rather than pushing through symptoms or forcing our body to adapt to aggressive interventions, we learn to work with our system's current capacity and gradually expand it as our cellular energy production improves. This creates a foundation of safety and trust between us and our body, which is essential for healing toxic stress physiology and changing the ways our brains respond to life.

This process cannot be forced into a time-frame that we feel it SHOULD move at—and it often requires the development of character traits we may need to work on (humility, patience, trust, surrender). This is actually one aspect of bioenergetics that I feel most inspired by—the requirement it places upon us to develop personal agency over every area of our lives. We don't just improve our cellular health, we’re compelled to improve the way we think, relate to each other, spend our time, and the overall quality of our short time on the planet.

I think that many of us, deep down, feel intuitively called toward the bioenergetic framework of health, sensing that it speaks to a lot of what we’ve experienced for so long, yet without clear answers. However, that intuitive thread is easily lost when the requirements to heal involve a new way of being and a radical commitment to overall safety that we may not be ready for.

While blood sugar dysregulation is foundational, toxic stress physiology manifests in predictable patterns that I see repeatedly in my coaching practice. These aren't separate, unrelated conditions—they're interconnected expressions of a nervous system and cellular metabolism that have been pushed beyond their adaptive capacity. I believe that understanding these patterns can help us better recognize the underlying thread connecting what might seem like disparate health issues.

The most common presentations include:

• Mast cell activation syndrome/histamine “intolerance”, where our immune system's sentinel cells become hyperreactive to normal stimuli, creating widespread inflammation and allergic-type reactions. This is, essentially, when toxic stress has gone on long enough that our bodies have formed an intolerance to stress itself, and this shows up along a spectrum of metabolic, immune, and nervous system symptoms that may seem completely unrelated on the surface. Both I and many of my clients share these patterns, and there is A LOT to be said and addressed to improve our overall health when this is going on.

• Hypothyroidism emerges as our metabolism downregulates to conserve energy in the face of chronic stress, leading to the constellation of symptoms we associate with low thyroid function. We'll often see overall low metabolic health characterized by low body temperature, poor circulation, and difficulty maintaining stable energy throughout the day. This metabolic suppression goes hand-in-hand with diminished stress tolerance—our capacity to handle even minor challenges becomes severely compromised. Perhaps most significantly, our rest capacity becomes impaired, meaning we lose the ability to truly recover and restore, even when we have opportunities for rest. This has been a lifelong struggle for me, and it often shows up in my clients, regardless of what their serum thyroid panels say.

• Chronic inflammatory states become the norm as our immune system remains activated, creating the perfect environment for everything from autoimmune conditions to sex hormone imbalances to mood disorders like depression and anxiety. Each of these patterns represents your body's attempt to adapt to an environment it perceives as perpetually unsafe, and each will be explored in depth in future articles as we build a comprehensive understanding of how toxic stress physiology touches every aspect of our health.

All three of these presentations overlap, feed into each other, and often co-exist within those of us to whom this applies. If you have chronically low thyroid, for instance, and overall low metabolic rate, you’re more likely to also have low blood sugar, immune hyperactivity, and higher inflammatory states throughout the month. These states may exist all month long, but likely show up most acutely during times of hormonal transitions, such as ovulation and menstruation, as well as during temperature and light transitions, such as at night and during the winter. These states all lower our overall resiliency, make transitions feel more expensive, and tend to bring our body’s key regulatory systems to their knees.

As you can imagine, understanding our experience through the lens of toxic stress physiology and bioenergetics has the power to transform our relationship with our health and with deeper aspects of our lives we may not’ve previously viewed as related to our health. Although I covered a lot of what can and often does go wrong in this article, I want to emphasize here the power of HOPE within these frameworks.

I believe that hope is one of the greatest gifts these frameworks have offered me and many of my clients, as a result of the radical nature of the approach itself to expose and tie together root causes that aren’t being addressed fully elsewhere.

Of course, I’d be lying if I said that the road to improvements wasn’t also a road that demands we look honestly at ourselves and our lives, but the results of this honesty is often that we know what we need and what we feel at a level much deeper than the average modern woman. The agency to be found in this self-knowledge cannot be placed into words, but it has the power to change everything for you.

Your body isn't your enemy; it's been trying to protect you your entire life in the only way it knows how. Now you can learn to support it in finding a new way forward.

Stay tuned for more future articles with action steps, solutions, and all of the many things I’ve tried over the years!

Nourishing Our Sanity is a reader-supported publication. To continue receiving new posts and to support all that goes into my work, allowing me more time to create articles and podcasts, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $6 a month.