The transcript can be found under the video.
One of the questions that I get asked the most often is What is the one thing that cured your POTS or made my symptoms better or maybe it'll be about my palpitations? What's the one thing that made that go away? Of course I understand why I got to ask this question, because it seems like there's so many different options and avenues so, what's that one thing that worked? Well, today's video is all about diving into that one thing in answering this, this will also reflect a little bit of what I believe about dysautonomia about autonomic dysfunction and what I've seen not just from my own case but with working with with my clients and what has helped for them.
My Starting Point
So when I was first diagnosed I was confused and overwhelmed similar to how you might be. The first two years, I think, of actually having a diagnosis I was pretty much trying to really figure out why this had happened, it was so confusing.
I was sure that if I found out exactly why it had happened and I would know the best way forward I would find maybe that kind of simpler easier just like a quick fix solution or just a solution that would just I would go right to the root cause and I would treat just the root cause and then things would get better because also there were so many options out there that to me just made sense that you know digging down to what was actually wrong I could you know fix that.
This led to a lot of different research on my end I was joining discussion forums and reading research papers and interacting with groups and asking questions and so, a lot of research and a lot of it did not necessarily do, a lot of it honestly led to kind of a dead end in the end and some of the therapies that I encountered too were very, not really within my budget they were maybe not even in the country that I was living in, it would have been very complicated to perhaps chase some of these therapies that honestly I didn't even know if they would work.
Meanwhile my symptoms were starting to get worse so at this point I was starting to add on a lot more symptoms I was starting to add on a lot more diagnoses as well, which meant my case was becoming more complex by the day which of course made sense as the body continued just going into a dysfunction.
And then I finally kind of hit a new rock bottom around this time and somewhere there I think I had an epiphany of "okay I need to look at this differently, I need to look at this from a just a big picture view and approach and let's see, at this point that's not working let's try a different avenue".
Nervous System
So the first step that made a big difference it was what I call setting the foundation by looking at the nervous system and rebalancing the nervous system. Really becoming aware of different nervous system states, how to tune into them, how to feel into them but then also how to switch out of them when necessary.
Digging even deeper there I also realized that some of these states have been there for many many years and they had been used as coping mechanisms early on and of course all of this ties into that awareness of how to how to break that cycle and what helps is being aware of, too, where some of these originate from.
This is also where you're able to get a lot more insight into what causes some of the flare-ups even though they might seem random sometimes when you actually start digging into this a little bit more you start seeing that some of the flare-ups and dips have you know specific causes specific times that your body is going into these these different nervous system states and there's a lot of different techniques and ways to go about this but that's one of the ways that you go about finding more of that stability so that there's not so much of an up and down, of course while this is happening because this takes a little bit of time with working with the nervous system, that's where it's important to take care of your body with pacing, with looking, too, just in general, at your day-to-day schedule and making sure that there is stability from the actual actions and the physical and the cognitive things you are doing.
Also that's where it's also important to work with coping with working with knowing how to react when there are symptoms in the body. There's also different ways to make the flare-up period a little bit shorter and some of it also has to do with how you react to some of these flare-ups that are occurring. So really that foundation is made up of quite a few things.
Gut-Brain Connection
Second step had to do with the gut. Now people usually have very strong opinions about this but we really cannot ignore it the gut-brain connection does link your central nervous system including your brain with the enteric nervous system in your gut. That is why it's referred to as the second brain. The enteric nervous system plays a huge role in not only your digestive health but also in your mental health the health of your nervous system.
We do know that there's various connections between the gut and the brain, there's a vagus nerve, there's neurotransmitters, there's the gut microbiome and we do know that improving the health of your gut microbiome does help with improving the health of your nervous system overall.
In my case too, changing various aspects of my diet helped me have a lot more energy I was getting the proper nutrients that my body needed which then led to me having more energy I had a lot less of those dips it was just a lot more stability and as a plus too the Mast Cell problems greatly disappeared as well.
This is also where you're looking more deeply at other root causes comes in, because other than the gut, of course, there's various other hormones that can impact us certain toxins that some of us are more sensitive to than others, certain disruptions, there's oxidative stress toxic exposure, mitochondrial support all of this plays a role and it all adds up but without that first step that we discussed about, really focusing on a nervous system, all the diets in the world might not make a huge difference I mean, they might but just not a huge difference because again it's all connected as we know, the brain and the gut and that connection is bi-directional
Movement
and then last but not least when my body also felt stronger and more able to tolerate movement, I added more movement in, at this point too I was no longer so afraid of some of the symptoms, I was able to tolerate them and to look at them and just to deal with them in a completely different lens because I was no longer at that point where they were just flare-ups that were coming all the time for no one explained a reason and then working out was just adding to the flare-ups or not, it was so confusing there was just way too much chaos.
At this point, the chaos had mostly gone away, and then with working out I was able to just kind of introduce it slowly and know, okay it's now probably acting more because of this this exercise that I'm not feeling so great the next day. So it was much more of a stability by that point.
That way I was able to also move my body with a lot more joy instead of fear and as the body got stronger, over time, then of course we do know the exercise is extremely important and the symptoms, you know, did continue reducing afterwards but we also know that exercise cannot really just be tolerated so well right in the beginning mostly when there's so much dysregulation and inflammation and everything else because for some people when they're when they do exercise there is more of these symptoms afterwards, right, so of course that's why there's that need to be more careful and not just jump into some of these exercise protocols.
The Blind Men and the Elephant
So why do I tell you all this? A lot of the things I've mentioned you can find different videos on my YouTube channel that talk about all these different things.
That's why you might be wondering sometimes that my videos maybe seem like I talk about a lot of different topics. The reason for that is because oftentimes when I get asked about kind of the one thing, it makes me think you might be familiar with the parable of the six blind man and the elephant.
It's a story of a group of blind men who had never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. So each blind man goes to a different part of the elephant's body and feels a different part of the body.
So for example, one man felt the tusk and said "oh this is this is a spear". The other one felt the trunk and thought it was a snake. Another one felt the knee and thought it was a tree.
It's obviously very different descriptions all from looking at one elephant. What frustrated me the most when I was sick is that very much obviously when I went to many of the doctors, everybody's involved in their own specialty and discipline which which is understandable but then also when I was then trying to figure out what I could do it just seemed like there was a lot of different advice that was like the one diet that will cure POTS, or the one brain retraining, or the one movement protocol, or the one trauma healing method or the one functional medicine testing or the one functional neurology.
To me what it largely seemed like it was exactly as these six blind men, where they were touching different parts of the elephant so what I have found is, that all these things that I mentioned it's a bit of all of these things it's not one of them.
It's a bit of it all, and I think the worst thing you could really do is stick with just one and what breaks my heart when people get on a call with me and they'll tell me you know I've done one of these programs whichever and it seemed like it worked well for all these people and it's not working for me. It must be me that's wrong here it must be that I'm not trying hard enough. It breaks my heart to hear that because oftentimes it's just more about finding the right mix of things that really does help.
How I work with people
And every single person I've worked with has a mix of things that help them.
For example, I saw a client who had huge changes from doing some of the dietary eliminations and through working through the diet piece, others saw huge changes and big changes when they reintroduced things back into their diet, others when they were focusing more on their nervous system and even their relationship to food others were working on more of the nervous system regulation techniques, others through pacing, others through finding different ways to move their body that made sense for them.
Others through doing some of the functional neurology exercises that you could do at home, others through digging through some of the lab work for functional medicine but still it was a mix of all of these things that helped and the best part of it is that a lot of things that I've mentioned actually can be done from the comfort of your own home.
That's why, too, when I created the program that I work with on clients with, I try to really tackle and have a bit of everything because I've noticed in my own experience it's a bit of everything that helped me, it really is and it seemed very overwhelming to me to go from like program to program to program to program each tackling different parts of the elephant and I wanted to see the entire elephant.
In general, in medicine we're at this point where we're starting to look at the body as a whole in general not in some of its parts, but I think we maybe also need to do that with various healing modalities where we're looking at how these various different things they each have pretty good points, how they can come together and help us.
This framework that I mentioned in this video, I have some more videos that go through this more so there's underneath this video you'll find a link where you could find a three-day video master class that talks a lot more about these various aspects and also provides you with some exercises that again you could do from the comfort of your own home.
So I hope that this video gave you more inspiration and hope and realize the importance of really implementing a holistic plan in all kinds of ways to deal with the a problem and a condition that is so holistic and affects so many parts of the body.
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