Dr. Diane Mueller explains how chronic stress triggers repeated adrenaline surges that suppress immune function and can reactivate infections (she cites Lyme disease as an example). She emphasizes that the nervous system becomes 'wired' for stress and must be reprogrammed through frequent, brief practices (breath work, visualization, meditation)—quantity and consistency matter more than session length. The talk combines physiological claims, clinical observation, and practical coaching to encourage daily nervous-system 'downtime.'
Chapters
Hey everybody. Dr. Diane here in this video we're going to talk about one of the simplest things to do. But one of the things I see the most resistance doing in my client population and we're going to talk about resetting the nervous system and reprogramming the nerves. There's a lot of resistance to doing this and not because people don't see on a cognitive level the value, but it's really hard the way so much of so many of us are raised and the society we live in and we're so used to things like take a pill, feel better, right? What happens when that doesn't work? One of the things I see over and over in my clinical practice and working with people with chronic diseases of all types is the number one thing that causes people to regress, to have a resurgence of something that went away is when they get stressed, right? And so what happens with stress is stress causes the nervous system to fire out a bunch of adrenaline. Fire a bunch of adrenaline that leads to our immune system turning down. It also sometimes leads to microorganisms in our body talking to each other. So for example, we see with Lyme disease, which is very, very common, we see with Lyme disease that when people go through stress and their adrenaline kicks up, that allows the different Lyme bacteria that somebody might have in their body to actually talk to each other better. So it's helping them when they talk to each other better, they are better equipped to evade our immun system. So part of working with people to get people out of these sorts of stress responses and part of really getting the nervous system to, to get to a level where disease is not being reactivated, part of all of this is getting your nervous system reprogrammed. And it's really hard, right? This is really, it's like so simple and so hard. And it's so simple and so hard because when the nervous system is say, trained and programmed and wired to say stress react, stress react, stress react, react. And that's what it's used to. It really becomes a multi time a day process to get the nervous system to do something else, right? There's a saying by one of my favorite people in the world, Dr. Joe Dispenza, I just love his work so much. And he says nerves that fire together, wire together. And this is really important because when we do the same thing over and over again, the nerves wire together. So essentially what winds up happening is once we start, start having a stress response due to being worried about our health and trying to figure out what's going on? All normal things to do, right? None of that is abnormal, you're not doing anything wrong. All of that's a normal response. But there's a result that occurs from that. And when we start thinking about our health and we worry about and we get into these responses, we get adrenaline firing left and right and left and right and left and right. And when that happens, one of the things that, one of the problems with that is that's not sending the signals to heal. And in order to overcome that, in order to wire the nervous system differently, one of the things we want to make sure we are doing is we want to make sure that we're reminding the system over and over and over that we want it to operate in a different way. And so the more times a day you can do breath work or visualization or meditation, something to calm the nervous system and reset it. It's about quantity more than the length. So if can do it for one minute multiple times a day, that's way better than doing a 30 minute session once a week, right? We want the consistency because it's almost like reminding the brain, no, operate this way, operate this way, operate this way. Think of the brain almost like a child who is just dying to have that sweets. And every time you leave the room, they're like getting their hand in the cookie jar, right? And so we just remind them over and over again, this is not good for you, this is not good for you, this is not good for you. Then sometimes they probably sneak that cookie. But the more we can really help to remind the child that there's this connection between you eat this, you feel this way, the more they'll start to make that connection themselves in time, right? So we're doing the same thing for our nervous system, right? It's like you might fall off the train with this, but then what might happen, it sometimes happens like, oh, I don't do my nervous system work. I don't handle stress as well. That's that reminder to us to do it again and again and again. And this is easier said than done. Way easier said than done. Because a lot of this work, work is not necessarily fun for a lot of us. Like a lot of times it's like a lot more interesting to be engaged and doing things. And we're not in a society that really almost like respects and encourages downtime. But downtime for the nervous system is so, so, so essential. So really, really think about that work to get some sort of nervous system activity into your life multiple times a day, even if just one minute at a time. And it can really help, especially once you get well. It can really help with keeping you well so that your body is not negatively responding to the stressors that might come across. All right, everybody, that's it for now. See you in the next one.
