Dr. Diane Mueller explains how mold exposure and Lyme disease inflame the brain and lower your threshold for emotional reactivity, a phenomenon called "Lyme rage" or "mold rage." She recommends daily nervous-system practices like breathwork, meditation, and visualization rehearsals to re-pattern reactive responses, comparing it to learning guitar through slow, repeated practice.
Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane. Here we're going to talk about mold and emotions and Lyme and emotions. And one of the common questions that comes up in my clinical practice is how do I regulate my emotions? I know from my own journey in mold and Lyme how much emotions can become so easily dysregulated, right? We say things like Lyme rage or mold rage because the impact these scenarios have on our brain, on our neurological standpoint, and the impact that they have really on our entire body when our brain is inflamed, like which can happen with Lyman mold, it's very, very. It changes our threshold of reactivity, right? It's very difficult to keep our emotions regulated when our brain and our nervous system is already under so much stress. So a lot of the process of healing, a lot of the process as far as neurological improvement and regulating emotions, really comes down to regulating your emotions, right? That's a huge component to things. So with that being said, how do we do that? There's a lot of different ways we can work on the nervous system. So one is by doing breath work, meditation, visualization. But the biggest thing to do is to make sure that you are doing something on a daily basis. One of the things we see, whether you're doing various methods of brain exercises that are on the Internet, that you can find even in the Lyme and mold community, one of the biggest things that is across the board, most important is the regularity. And the regularity is because what happens is the brain gets so patterned in Lyme and mold to basically have these scenarios and to launch into reactivity that it can be really extremely helpful to have regular patterning of the brain to say, don't launch into reactivity, right? And it's just like any new skill, like, we can practice a skill. If we practice the guitar, if we practice that, you know, five minutes a week, are we probably going to really gain that skill? Not a lot. We might make a little headway, but we're probably not going to get very far because we haven't done enough practice, enough regularity to repattern our nervous system. And so some of this is almost. We can even almost do, like, visualization exercises, for example. We can. We can put ourselves, like after we go through a moment where it's like, wow, oh, okay. We realize this thing that can happen, right? Where it's like, maybe where we are reactive to a spouse and maybe we hyper reactive and we yelled. And even if we are totally validated in our frustration and all those things, it probably was not Good for the relationship in that moment to maybe approach with yelling. Right? So what we want to avoid is shaming ourselves and feeling guilty. Like there's already so much going on in your nervous system. Don't add that to it. It's part of the process. But then part of the re patterning is even doing visualization exercises, for example, where you put yourself in your mind in that situation and you visually practice yourself doing it different. So if you need it to bring something up that you feel validated in bringing up, and it's important for your own emotional health and well being, how could you bring that up in a way that was, say, not with rage, right? And what does that look like? And so when we do exercises like that, when we actually take time to practice what we did wrong, then, you know, with visualization, that's how we train our nervous system to do it. Right. And I'll go back to music. I am taking guitar lessons, and if I mess something up, we don't move on. It's not like we mess something up and be like, okay, well, let's just play that song faster next time and see if you get it right. No, it doesn't work that way. We go back to that point that we messed up, that I messed up. We slow the timing way down. And I do it 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times really slow. And then I speed it up and slowly in time, faster and faster. All of a sudden I'm not making that same mistake anymore, right? And so the same thing. It's like, it can be so easy to be like, okay, I did that thing, I reacted. And all of a sudden like, okay, I'll get it better next time, right? It's so easy to launch in that. But the bigger thing with that is, is like, if we launch into just like, okay, I'll get it right next time. But we don't actually practice without being in that stressful state. We don't practice what that looks like. Next time comes and the emotions are flaring and oftentimes we are right back to where we are and that cycle can continue. So the practice really is a lot of this is visualization around, like, okay, I'm in a stressful scenario, I feel invalidated. I feel like there's some sort of injustice. I feel like nobody's hearing me. I feel like nobody understands me. Whatever the feeling feeling is. And we're not invalidating your feeling, right? You have total the right. And it's very normal to feel these things, especially when you're dealing with chronic illness. But what we. So we want to be careful that we're not gaslighting ourselves when we're doing this, but we also want to realize how we're sharing and how we're showing up emotionally may impact the relationships around us. And if we want those to be healthy and we're interested in and support, supporting the health of our lives and our relationships, then we can practice. Okay. In our minds, in our visualization, in our visual cortex, in our mind, visualizing what does this look like? And really feel into it. Feel yourself almost like. Feel yourself like having the rage or having the emotions, and then feel yourself choosing different language anyway, right? And practice that and practice that and practice that. And the more you visualize that outside of those places, the more when you get into those places, you can respond. You have access to this other way of performing because you've actually practiced it. It's not like you've never done it right. You've actually done it right maybe a hundred times in your visualization exercise, right? So now you're just taking what you've practiced, and now you're applying it to real life. So I love your comments on this. Like, this is a very, very important component of healing. From Lyme, from mold, from illness, from toxins. So please, please, please leave your comments here. Let me know what questions you have, what feels supportive, what feels confusing about this, and I'll make more videos to support you guys and help you out. All right? Please subscribe to my channel. Please don't keep me a secret. Share me with your friends and family. I'll see you next time.
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