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If you've been working on your nervous system for months and you start to feel more emotional, or start sleeping worse, or lose energy and are pulling away from people, most practitioners recognize this as a setback.
Discover 5 signs your nervous system is healing, not failing, and learn how to interpret emotional and physical changes during recovery.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Emotional flooding during nervous system work is a healing sign, not a setback.
- Energy crashes may indicate a transition to sustainable energy rather than deterioration.
- Old coping mechanisms may feel ineffective as the nervous system rewires.
- Understanding symptom patterns empowers patients to trust the healing process.
- Healing is complex and non-linear, requiring patience and professional support.
What the video covers
- Emotional flooding is a sign of healing, where suppressed emotions resurface as the nervous system recalibrates from chronic stress.
- Energy shifts from emergency, cortisol-driven output to sustainable energy, often experienced as fatigue during healing.
- Old coping strategies may stop working as the nervous system transitions, leading to discomfort and disorientation.
- Healing is non-linear and requires understanding the meaningful signals versus setbacks in nervous system regulation.
- The autonomic nervous system recalibrates below conscious control, moving from chronic high load to genuine healing.
- Recognizing these patterns helps patients feel empowered rather than uncertain about their healing journey.
- The process involves a transition zone where old neural circuits lose load before new ones take over.
- Practitioners should guide patients through this destabilizing phase to prevent abandonment of healing efforts.
- Healing trajectories vary individually, and understanding symptom patterns aids in managing expectations.
- Heart rate variability and other measurable signs can indicate nervous system adaptability and progress.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Misinterpreting Setbacks
- 00:55Healing Isn't Linear: Trusting the Process
- 02:30Understanding Body Signals and Patterns
- 02:39Sign 1: Emotional Flooding Explained
- 04:39Neurobiological Basis of Emotional Suppression
- 07:18Transition from Emergency Energy to Sustainable Energy
- 11:18Sign 3: Old Coping Strategies Losing Effectiveness
- 13:15Navigating Disorientation and Identity Shifts
- 15:02Conclusion and Practical Implications
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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But what if I told you it wasn't? From a systems perspective, these signals may be exactly what a nervous system looks like when it crosses a threshold into healing.
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I'm Dr. Kenny, IFM certified functional medicine practitioner, and I map out these kinds of re-patterning experiences in practice every week.
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You can't separate the mental, the emotional, and the physical or chemical. In this video, I'm gonna walk you through five signs that your nervous system is actually healing and what each one tells you about where you are in the
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sequence of nervous system regulation. Here's what most nervous system content out there gets right and simultaneously stops short of.
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It tells you that healing isn't linear, and by all means, that's correct. It tells you that you need to trust the process or that what you are feeling in terms of maybe negative side effects is normal.
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And there's something to that, but it leaves you in the exact same place where you started oftentimes on this nervous system healing journey, uncertain, tracking your symptoms to look for evidence about whether or not you're improving, with no way to tell the difference between a
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meaningful signal and an actual setback. That is the gap that I wanna draw some attention to and hopefully start to close with you today.
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Because in my clinical work, the moment that everything changes for a patient is not when they're just simply and superficially reassured.
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It's when they understand the pattern and the signals that are going on, whether they're doing nervous system work or physical, immune, hormone, gut systems work.
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When they can look at what's happening inside their body and say, "That's not random.
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That's a signal. I can hear it, and I know what it's telling me and what to do next."
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We're going to go through the five signs that are measurable, that have a mechanism that we can explain and measure, and that consistently appear when the autonomic nervous system, or that part of the nervous system that runs below your conscious control, so when
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you never have to think about, when it's crossing from chronic high load into a genuine recalibration and healing. This first symptom or signal tends to derail many people, especially when they first experience it.
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Sign number one is emotional flooding, and I wanna be precise about what I mean here about emotional flooding.
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We're not talking about distress. We're not talking about an emotional breakdown. What I mean is that emotions that have not been available to you, grief, anger, tenderness even, longing, begin surfacing often at moments that do not seem proportionate to the trigger that started them.
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Here's what's actually happening in your nervous system. A nervous system that's been running in chronic sympathetic activation, that high alert, survival-oriented branch of the autonomic nervous system, has a limited capacity for emotional processing.
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Think about it. You wanna run away from the tiger. You don't need to emotionally process the fact that tiger is there.
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The system, your body as an integrated whole, is using its resources to manage what it perceives as an ongoing threat.
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Emotion in that context gets deprioritized, not suppressed in a psychological sense necessarily, but suppressed in a neuro and biological or physical and chemical one.
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The bandwidth just isn't there. When the system begins to shift out of that state, that suppression slowly lifts, and what you experience is not necessarily a new problem, but rather access to emotions that have been waiting or living under the
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surface for a longer period of time. So the clinical question that surfaces for me when someone's experiencing what looks like emotional flooding isn't why is this person suddenly emotional when we've been doing all this work?
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It's more what does it mean when these emotions were not there before, and what do we do with them now?
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If you're feeling more than you have in years when you start some of this nervous system regulation work, that's not a sign that you're getting worse.
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It may be a sign that your system is getting more sensitive and it's getting more real. Sign number two affects your energy systems, and this is a shift that most people describe as crashing.
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And this is one where the interpretive frame matters a lot here, too. Think about the difference between a backup energy generator and being plugged into a stable electrical grid, if you will.
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A generator runs loudly and quickly and hot energy that is available. It produces a functional output, but it's burning emergency fuel, and it has a ceiling, a capacity ceiling.
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Connecting it to the grid feels quieter, less immediately powerful, maybe more stable. The output looks lower at first, but the source is sustainable in a way that the generator never was.
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A nervous system in chronic high activation mode is running on stress hormones, primarily cortisol, but also its downstream related hormones.
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And it does this to maintain what feels like a normal functional capacity. People in this state often describe feeling like they can push through anything.
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They have adapted to a very high baseline of internal demand, and that feels stable until it doesn't.
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Maybe it even feels like a part of who they are and their identity at its core. When your autonomic nervous system begins to recalibrate, that cortisol-driven output starts to come down.
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The first experience is often a transition into a state of fatigue, whether body or mind, and not the fatigue of necessarily getting sicker.
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It's the fatigue of emergency fuel running lower as the system begins connecting to the main sustainable power grid.
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If your energy has dropped while you're actively doing this kind of nervous system regulation work, that distinction matters.
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You may not be crashing, you may be transitioning, and that's a signal to look out for.
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The third sign is often subtler. The coping strategies, the relational patterns, the ways of moving through the world that have kept you functional, they start to feel hollow or like they stop working altogether the way that they used to. And I wanna be careful here
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too, because this entire process can feel destabilizing, and it's important to work with a practitioner if you're doing deep nervous system regulation or trauma work.
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Chronically dysregulated nervous systems are, in one important sense, highly adapted. They've essentially built a set of behavioral and neurological and chemical strategies that maintain enough functional stability to get you through just about anything.
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Those strategies are real and they work, but they're calibrated to a high-load lived experience baseline, and that requires a certain level of internal arousal to function.
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They are built for the generator, not the grid as well. So when the baseline begins to shift, those same strategies stop fitting, the ones that you used to use for coping and self-soothing, because the terrain that they were built on begins shifting.
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And this is a point where many people start abandoning their journey and their process because oftentimes we see signals of discomfort as those that we need to make go away immediately or run away from.
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The old patterns stop working and the new ones aren't fully installed yet. It's a very interesting and uncomfortable gray area.
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It genuinely feels oftentimes like nothing is working as well. But from a systems-based chemistry-oriented standpoint, that is not a failure.
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That is the zone of transition, if you will. The old circuitry that's losing its load before the new circuitry kicks in and takes over.
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What I often see clinically is that patients going through this phase in the journey describe themselves as not being able to recognize themselves.
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That disorientation can be incredibly uncomfortable, and it does have this kind
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It's actually information. It means that the system is no longer confined to the old patterns.
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Sign number four is when we start to cross into the somatic or body-oriented territory, and where most content leaves the viewer with a list of things to accept about the possibility of doing nervous system regulation healing, rather than a frame that helps make sense of why these things occur
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For this one, I wanna use the analogy of an earthquake. Think about the landscape that's actually happening.
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At the surface level, of course, there is destruction, right? And this is part of what the dying of the old self feels like and looks like in many ways.
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But what's occurring in this process of an earthquake at those fault lines is the lines are settling into a new and more stable geological or earth formation.
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You can think of this as your neurological foundation. The disruption itself is not evidence of the structure underneath that is failing.
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The disruption is definitely the mechanism of that reorganization that's happening. So things like sleep changes, digestive shifts, menstrual cycle disruptions, appetite fluctuations, these are not separate chemical experiences that need their own explanation.
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When they appear simultaneously or alongside this kind of nervous system work, they are just manifestations of the nervous system in the grand scheme of things, and your old compensatory and regulatory patterns dissolving away as this new baseline capacity begins to establish itself, just like the
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new plate formation in an earthquake. These body systems are deeply ingrained with the autonomic nervous system that we talked about, the one that's not under conscious control.
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They do not reorganize independently of one another either. When we think of symptoms or body functions as just expressions of your larger nervous system, that concept starts to make a lot more sense, and symptoms stop looking completely separate.
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In fact, research on traumatic stress and the circadian rhythm system found that sleep disruption, hormonal dysregulation, and this autonomic nervous system instability are not random side effects of this kind of work.
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They are deeply interconnected signals to your system's core regulatory architecture when it comes to doing any kind of work that reorganizes this deeply connected network.
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And by the way, if you're one who likes to look at the research, I've put together for today a free research summary that's in the pinned comment and the description below.
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It goes into the sources that I used for this particular video and breaks down what it might mean practically for your situation as well.
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So check that out. There's also a term in the research literature for what accumulates in a dysregulated nervous system over time, and we call it stress colloquially in our society.
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But the total body burden of stress actually has a name in physiology and in chemistry, and it's what researchers call allostatic load.
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Think of it as the running tab of your body, and it's been keeping it based on all the different inputs that activate stress chemistry.
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And what surprises many people is we're not just talking about emotionally perceived stress, which we have a tendency in our society to step away as much as possible, but rather things that activate stress chemistry more broadly.
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And it's important to note that the evidence does not support a single predictable healing trajectory for every person.
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How each individual person responds to their cumulative burden of stress varies substantially, and it's based on their lived experiences.
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It's shaped by our perceptions, by our coping resources, and by our individual lived history, from financial factors to religious factors, geopolitical factors, and beyond.
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So comparing your timeline or your set of tools to someone else's or what you've been told to expect along this healing journey is really not a useful metric, and I stand by that.
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It may actually be working against you when we start to add that hidden stressor of comparison The fifth and final sign that I want to spend a moment on as well gets us into the objective data realm, and it reframes the entire goal of nervous system work in a
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way that most people have not been given, and it's really easy to clue into as well.
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Many people tracking their recovery use journaling and other symptom-type-oriented tools to help document their progress, consciously or not.
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One that truly helps to bring this into the objective data world is heart rate variability.
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When we talk about the autonomic nervous system and doing any kind of deeper healing work here, this is one of the best objective measures for getting a gauge in this area heart rate variability is the variation of time between your heartbeats.
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A higher heart rate variability is considered more healthy or protective. It means that the heart rate moves more fluidly to demand, and it recovers more fluidly when that demand passes ultimately.
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Where a more rigid or lower heart rate variability shows that the system is not calm or fluid or adaptable.
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It's a stuck one when it comes to talking about fight or flight chemistry. And studies that are tracking HRV after significant trauma or autonomic nervous system disruption found that reduced variability is associated with poorer health outcomes across the board.
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While improving your variability or increasing the HRV, your system's capacity tends to move and adapt more efficiently.
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In other words, the goal is not stillness and steadiness when we talk about heart rate variability.
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It's having range and fluidity. And here's another concept that really helps to hammer this idea home of nervous system regulation and the ups and downs of healing.
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You've probably experienced at some point what is called the "letdown effect" in your life, where you finish a high-stakes chapter in life… it could be a big exam or finals or perhaps a presentation at your job.
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And the moment it ends, you get sick. Many times this happens to people when they go on vacation.
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Your body held a lot together under the pressure, and that was with the support of stress chemistry ultimately.
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But the moment the external or environmental pressure dropped, that protection released. The immune system, the nervous system, the hormonal architecture, they are all integrated in one big system.
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And the chemistry that keeps everything functional under that stress chemistry load changes when the load fades away as well.
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This used to happen to me all the time after finishing an exam or a final season, and this is not unusual.
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And this is not an unusual experience. It has a name, and many people going through genuine nervous system recovery describe a version of the same thing happening.
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Not maybe a dramatic collapse, although it can happen, but a period that feels counterintuitively harder than when they were living in the more high-stress chemistry mode in their lives.
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The familiar patterns and that protective part of stress chemistry stops anchoring them and their immune system and their hormones.
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And the practitioner that they're working with, if they don't have the right frame, tells them to go back to managing symptoms rather than doing the deeper trauma work.
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And I'm curious, have you ever had a moment like this where you stopped doing something that was hard or challenging or nervous system work, for instance, and then you felt worse than you did going into it?
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Drop that in the comments below. I think it'll help people see their story in your own.
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I've definitely experienced it myself. Here's why understanding these signals of nervous system regulation work really matter.
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It's not necessarily what signals come up for you because they are highly variable and very deeply individual and personal, but rather what do you do with those signals that matters.
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Because one person who interprets the emotional flooding or perhaps the sleep regression as something that's gone wrong may immediately reach for a suppression, a medication, a supplement, or a reason to stop doing the work altogether.
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Whereas somebody who understands that these signals may come up, you might have different tools and different levels of understanding to know what to do with those signals And if what we've covered today resonates with you and you appreciate this
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particular mental emotional conversation in the functional medicine space and you'd like my eyes on your specific case, the next step is to watch the free training that prepares you to book a health mystery map call, and it gives you
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a clearer picture of whether what I do and my biopsychosocial systems approach fits where you are in your healing journey and if this autonomic nervous system and stress chemistry conversation has kind of piqued your interest, the next question becomes what's actually driving
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the load, this allostatic load or body burden of stress in the first place? Because sometimes the answer is not obvious.
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It can be hidden. And this video over here goes over my 12 hidden stressors that most of us just don't think about as a normal part of life.
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Check that one out if you're curious. I'm Dr. Kenny, Root Cause Health Detective. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
Topics:nervous system healingemotional floodingfunctional medicineautonomic nervous systemnervous system regulationenergy transitioncoping strategieschronic stress recoveryheart rate variabilityhealing journey
