You’ve not been feeling like yourself for quite a while. You’re constantly tired or don’t feel rested, no matter how much sleep you get. You are struggling with your digestion, and you feel generally uncomfortable. You seem to pick up every cough and cold that’s going around, emotions feel heavier, and decisions are harder to make than usual. Life is still happening, but you just feel a bit ‘out of it’ somehow.
You don’t feel ill exactly, but something definitely isn’t right, and you can’t put your finger on what it is.
So you visit your GP hoping for answers. Maybe a blood test was done, but everything came back ‘normal’. No answers, clarity or way forward. Just the sinking feeling that this might be how things are now.
But here’s the part most people don’t expect:
This might actually be good news
Negative blood tests can feel frustrating when you just want to know what is going on, but for me, this can actually be a good thing because although your body is signalling that it’s not happy, it hasn’t yet reached the stage where dysfunction has become a diagnosable condition, which means reversing the situation may be quicker than you think.
Why doesn’t it show up in the tests if the body is struggling?
The body has multiple complex systems. All of them are monitored and regulated by the nervous system, which acts like a master control centre, keeping all the systems running at optimal function levels.
When everything operates within an optimal range, you feel well. Digestion, immunity, hormone balance, cardiac and respiratory systems are doing their thing, and you won’t notice they are there.
For a myriad of different reasons, the systems can drift away from the optimal range. When this happens, the body will work to bring levels back to optimal functioning. However, if the body continues to experience the reasons it moved away from optimal range, it won’t be able to return to levels, and the body spends more and more time away from its optimal functioning range for health and wellbeing.
The additional work that the body is doing to return to optimal levels starts to cost the body more energy as it has to put in more effort to maintain functions.
Diagnosis of a condition requires markers crossing clinical thresholds. In the early stages of this process i.e. the body getting out of balance, the levels may not meet those thresholds even though you can feel that something isn’t right.
How can an imbalance occur in the body?
Our bodies hold the memories of our life experiences and stressors – injuries, surgeries, repetitive movements, emotional shocks and chronic stress (even when we think we’re over it and have moved on) and store it in the tissues.
After a significant life event, the body has a 3–4 month recovery window. If full healing hasn’t occurred during that time, the body adopts the compensation patterns used to support the healing process. The significant event becomes an unresolved life experience within the body.
Imagine the body like a bag of bones held together by elastic bands. The nerves tell the elastic bands (muscles) what length to be, which intern effects the positions of the bones.
Long-term compensations can lead to increased muscle tension, altered structure and reduced joint space, potentially leading to wear and tear, but also creates ongoing stress on the nervous system.
How does the body affect the nervous system?
When unresolved physical or emotional restrictions are present in the tissues of the body, the tensions in the tissues transfer throughout and often affect the positioning of the skull on the top of the spine.
This compresses on and compromises the Cranial Nerves (CN), specifically the Vagus (CN10) and Accessory (CN11), that run from the brain through the holes in the base of the skull. The Vagus nerve runs to all the organs of the body (heart, lungs, oesophagus, etc), whilst the Accessory nerves control two of the main muscles of the neck and shoulder.
The effect of being compromised can include:
- Impacting on heart and breathing function. This can create feelings of anxiety in the body.
- The endocrine/hormone system produces chemicals keeping the body in a high alert state, draining energy reserves, which can contribute to fatigue syndromes.
- The oesophagus (connects throat and stomach) gets shortened, drawing the stomach up, impairing digestion and breathing function and further compressing the vagus nerve at the hiatus.
- The shoulder and neck muscles become tightened, leading to shoulder and neck pain, headaches, migraines, etc.
- Finally, a pull on the brain stem by the restriction of the vagus nerve or nerves in the hiatus is sensed by the nervous system as a threat.
When the nervous system detects a ‘threat’ it switches into fight-or-flight mode.
The body responds by tightening further in an attempt to reduce the threat by taking pressure off the affected structures, and a cycle of dysfunction begins.
You may not feel mentally ‘stressed’, but your body is living in a continuous low-grade state of alert.
The Body Gets “Stuck” in Fight or Flight
Fight-or-flight’ is the body’s short-term survival response to mobilise the body against a perceived threat.
Once a perceived threat has passed, our nervous system should drop back into a state of restoration and repair, often known as ‘rest and digest’, which is where the body’s innate healing occurs for recovery.
However, when a cycle of dysfunction is active as a result of unresolved restrictions in the body, it cannot get out of ‘fight or flight’ and find its way back into ‘rest and repair’ to heal.
Over time, this can lead to:
- poor digestion
- hormone imbalance
- exhaustion and fatigue
- low immunity
- physical pain or tension
- anxiety symptoms
- inability to relax
- difficulty managing or recovering from life stresses
- feeling disconnected or “not yourself”
In the early stages, blood tests often still look “normal” because they only measure results once these processes have advanced far enough to create measurable dysfunction.
If the process has progressed and a diagnosis or label is able to be given to the symptoms, medication may be offered (or you may be self-medicating), but it will only mask the symptoms, making them manageable. Medication will not resolve the symptoms because medication cannot treat a physical or emotional restriction within the body.
How Do I Help? New Vision Therapy
New Vision Therapy (NVT) aims to help the body back into its natural state for rest and restoration for healing by releasing the restrictions in the tissues that are affecting the nervous system.
Clients who have experienced NVT treatments have reported improvements in:
- Quality of Sleep
- Levels of Energy
- Digestion
- Feeling more emotionally balanced
- Reduction in levels of pain and discomfort
- An improved sense of self, i.e. feeling like themselves again.
Is it Possible For You To Have a Different Experience
It is possible for things to be different.
- You don’t have to accept feeling “not yourself”
- You don’t have to wait for things to get worse
- You don’t have to live in survival mode
If any of the information here resonates with you and you’d like to explore how things could be different for you, I’d love to help.
Together we can explore what’s possible for your health, your energy and your sense of self and help you get back to being the best you can be.
Message me to book a complimentary discovery call by clicking on the button below
You can also stay connected on socials:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/intobalancetherapies