10 Ways to Reboot Mind-Body Health and Promote Healing
If you feel stuck in your healing journey and suffer from a complex chronic disease, please don’t give up hope. There are answers to feeling healthy again. The answer may lie in rebooting your mind-body health.
When your body gets “stuck” fighting a threat (like combating mold toxicity, Lyme Disease, or other underlying infections), you need to reboot your mind-body health to promote healing and break the cycle of illness.
The idea of “rebooting the body” to promote whole-body healing may be new to you. Your conventional doctor most likely didn’t bring this up because many of them never learned this concept in medical school. Knowing how to reboot the body’s systems wasn’t needed decades ago. But now, with the rise in complex chronic conditions, this process is becoming increasingly necessary to heal at the root cause level.
What Does it Mean to Reboot Your Mind-Body Health?
Simply put, rebooting your body means getting your cells out of cell danger response. You can read more about what occurs in many complex chronic diseases in our previous blog about Cell Danger Response here. Simply put, this is when your cell’s become “stuck” in a defensive reaction mode, and it actually causes more harm, leaving the entire body out of balance and in a disease state.
To get out of cell danger response, you need to remove what is triggering your cells and also reboot mind-body health on various levels. This means rebooting the nervous system, immune system, endocrine system, gastrointestinal system, reversing weight gain, methylation, your ability to detoxify, how you handle stress and emotions, and finding spiritual awakening.
Let’s jump into what these all look like and why it’s crucial for healing chronic diseases like Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.
1) Rebooting the Nervous System
You can turn off and reset the alarm bells that cause your cells to respond improperly by working to heal your nervous system. With chronic disease, the “threat alarm” is on all the time (often caused by mold and Lyme with its coinfections). This contributes to high levels of inflammation throughout the body.
Your electrical signals at your nerve endings can become impacted by this inflammation and mess with your nervous system, causing a “reverberating loop.” This can cause you to experience those nerve signals and feel pain even after an area heals.
Techniques to Reboot the Nervous System
Frequency Specific Microcurrent Therapy
The Low Energy Neurofeedback System
Treat Structural Imbalances with Osteopathic Cranioscral Manipulation
Visceral Manipulation or massage
Polyvagal Therapy (vagal nerve)
Acupuncture
Interference Fields
Sensory Stimulation with Sound or Music
Spent time in nature
Practice meditation
Deep abdominal breathing from the diaphragm
Repetitive prayer
Focus on a word that is soothing such as calm or peace
Play with animals or children
Practice yoga, qigong, or tai chi
2) Rebooting the Immune System
If you are dealing with an underlying issue that is triggering inflammation, your immune system will keep attempting to “fix” it without any success. This causes it to get caught in a “loop” and the immune response gets out of control, constantly sounding the alarm bells even after a trigger has been removed. If your alarm bells get stuck “on,” it's also possible you have a stealth infection or toxicity you haven’t identified yet. However rebooting the immune system is necessary in order to heal.
Techniques to Reboot the Immune System
Find the threat and treat it: Threats can be toxins like mold and heavy metal toxicities or infectious agents like parasites and chronic viral infections, which can be treated with herbs that act as natural antifungals, antibiotics, and antiparasitics, Ozone therapy, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, and immunotherapy using Transfer Factor.
Heal your gut: Since 70% of the immune system is located in the gut, optimizing gut health, like fixing leaky gut, can be a great start in rebooting the immune system so it can respond appropriately again. This prevents food proteins, toxins, and pathogens from entering the bloodstream and causing systemic reactions.
3) Rebooting the Endocrine System
Because of the widespread inflammation that occurs in chronic illnesses (from toxins, infections, parasites, etc.), this inflammation has the potential to cause hormonal imbalances. Hormones are chemical messengers that play a role in stress response, metabolism, energy, appetite, and more.
Constant inflammation can mess up your HPA axis (communication messaging center), which impacts most of your hormones like estrogen, cortisol, testosterone, and progesterone. When hormonal chaos occurs, it can interfere with your healing process. We can help test your specific hormone levels and metabolites to see which ones are out of balance and use natural techniques to get your hormones back into balance to allow your body to fully heal.
4) Rebooting the Gastrointestinal System
Your gut health is one of the most important systems to look at when healing the body. Since most diseases stem from the gut, we need to ensure your gut is in optimal functioning to prevent future illnesses and allow your body to heal. When functioning optimally, the gut is one of the first lines of defense in your immune system.
For example, if your gut isn’t working optimally, then your detox system can become backed up (like your colon), impairing toxin elimination. If you have a leaky gut, food sensitivities, dysbiosis, and/or overgrowths, these can also contribute to inflammation.
Techniques to Heal the Gut
Address parasites and dysbiosis
Identify and remove foods you are allergic/sensitive to
Improve gut motility (poop 2+ times daily)
Consume low inflammatory, organic whole foods
Balance your microbiome with the correct probiotics
Introduce binders to help carry out toxins
Cleanse the bowels to remove accumulated waste & toxins
Use enzymes and Betaine HCL to increase stomach acid
5) Reversing Weight Gain
Most times, reversing weight gain requires the rebooting of how we think of food and nutrition, but that’s not all. There are still instances when clients eat healthy, and they still gain weight. This weight resistance could be from an impaired leptin metabolism caused by toxicities or heightened inflammatory levels.
The right strategy for losing weight will differ from person to person. Some people require full body detoxification from toxins using binders, while others may benefit from a specific diet, fasting practices, or eliminating certain food groups.
Some people thrive from a keto diet, while others benefit from paleo. It all depends on how your body metabolizes certain nutrients. Functional lab testing can help us determine the best diet for you. The best diets are bio-individualized.
However, all patients can benefit from avoiding excess sugars, inflammatory oils, artificial sweeteners, flavors, and preservatives. Instead, an anti-inflammatory diet with high phytonutrients, omegas, fiber, and essential fatty acids, will aid your body in healing.
6) Rebooting Methylation
Methylation plays a role in detoxification, DNA repair, converting serotonin to melatonin, creating energy, and more. If you want to heal your body, methylation needs to be operating efficiently. However, when cells are in cell danger response mode, or you have a genetic mutation in genes like MTHFR, methylation is put on hold or diminished. This makes you feel exhausted from doing simple household chores and experience brain fog, insomnia, and pain.
When the timing is right, folate, methylated B12, or 5-MTHF can help encourage methylation. We have to be careful here because for some highly sensitive patients, these supplements can be too much too soon and worsen symptoms if there are other dysfunctions that need to be addressed first.
7) Rebooting Your Ability To Detox
Naturally supporting your detox and drainage pathways is necessary to promote healing. Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-and-done thing. Encouraging your detox and drainage pathways to work optimally is a lifestyle. If any of your drainage pathways become stagnant, it has the potential to contribute to illness.
Techniques to Detox:
Having 2-3 bowel movements per day
Replenishing vitamins and minerals needed for phases of detoxification
Support your liver, bile ducts, kidneys and gallbladder with herbs and supplements like TUDCA
Staying hydrated: Drink at least 84 oz of water every day
Sweating by working out, using a sauna, sitting in the sun, or getting in a hot bath with Epsom salts: this helps remove toxins from your body.
Exercising: get your lymphatic and circulatory systems moving
Sleep: this is when your body does the most healing
8) Rebooting How You Handle Stress
When you are stressed, your body can become stuck in a state of fight or flight, causing your sympathetic nervous system to turn on, inhibiting bodily functions that are needed for healing.
I know how stressful living with a chronic illness can be. I went through it myself. But I’ve found that understanding what was occurring in my body on a cellular level helped me see that there was hope because answers are out there.
Also, having a support system during this healing journey can help you calm down and know that you will be okay. This is why having a health coach who went through this struggle personally can give you the caring and understanding support you need.
You also can use adaptogen herbs and medicinal mushrooms, like ashwagandha, holy basil, reishi mushroom, and others. These help the body and mind respond to stressors with more resilience.
9) Rebooting How You Handle Emotions
How you process emotions can either promote healing or inhibit it. Because let’s be honest, this journey can be emotional, to say the least. The emotions that arise while dealing with a mysterious illness and the responses of loved ones, not believing your symptoms, can be incredibly emotional. Painful emotional energy can become trapped in the body and wreak havoc on our well-being and ability to give and receive love from others. Emotional pain that is lodged in the body can lead to physical pain and illness, affecting things like your sensitivities, sleep, and digestion.
However, there are emotional release techniques that can help you understand why you feel a certain way, what your triggers are, and how to process them in a healthy way so they no longer affect your physical health. This can help relieve stress and also help you create new behaviors that can help in your healing.
Emotional Release techniques include:
Emotional Release Technique
Reiki
Guided meditations
Hypnosis
Ketamine
Working with a therapist
Sharing with someone who understands
Processing grief
10) Rebooting Your Spiritual Awakening
After years of suffering, it can be helpful to connect to a higher power or God, helping you to embrace a new perspective on healing and life, and why you are going through this. Some people turn to a religion, and others turn to spirituality, whatever that may look like to you. Whether praying to Jesus or God, or saying affirmations to the universe, this can help you develop a healing mindset and discover a new sense of being and your purpose. A large part of my own healing journey was learning to surrender my life to Jesus and allow divine healing to occur.
Overcome Your Chronic Symptoms & Heal Holistically
Are you looking to get to the root cause of your symptoms? We can help you.
We use holistic approaches and functional medicine lab testing to investigate what is triggering your chronic symptoms so you can address them at their source and start to feel better faster. Our health coaches are masters at guiding the healing of multiple root causes in a personalized order that gets you wellness results that last. We also help you maintain good health and minimize your disease risks.
by sarah southerton
Certified Integrative Health Practitioner (IHP2) & Functional Medicine Health Coach
I specialize in helping people heal chronic illnesses and achieve optimal health. After my own battle with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS), Lyme disease, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and Post Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), I was thrust into the world of alternative medicine, herbal healing, and low-tox/low-stress living. I have since restored my health and no longer suffer with debilitating symptoms and I’m passionate about help other people who are suffering, so they can feel better a lot faster than I did.
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