Leaving Mold Isn’t the Same as Recovering From It

If you’ve ever lived or worked in a water-damaged building and expected to feel better once you left… but didn’t — this episode will help you understand why.

Most conversations around mold, mycotoxins, and detox focus on one question: how do I get it out?
But the real question is: what did that exposure do to your body—and what does it actually need to recover?

In this episode, I break down what prolonged mold exposure actually does to the system:

•  nervous system dysregulation and chronic stress patterns 
•  gut dysfunction, endotoxins, and microbiome imbalance 
•  mineral depletion and what I call being “unbuffered” 
•  immune reactivity, histamine issues, and sensitivity 
•  mitochondrial downregulation and deep fatigue 

And why so many people:

•  feel worse after leaving 
•  can’t tolerate detox protocols 
•  get stuck in cycles of reactivity 

Leaving the environment is not the same as recovering from it.

Recovery is about rebuilding capacity—not forcing detox in a system that isn’t ready.

If you’re in that phase where something still feels off, this will help you make sense of what’s happening in your body.

Read the full blog here:
 Leaving Mold Isn’t the Same as Recovering From It
https://lydiajoy.mykajabi.com/blog/leaving-mold-isn-t-the-same-as-recovering-from-it

If you want support, this is the work I do inside Minerals & Microbes.

Stay wild, stay well,
 Lydia

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. For anyone who is new here, welcome. I'm a functional nutrition practitioner and I help people who've been stuck in chronic symptoms for years rebuild their health from the root. I use hair tissue mineral analysis and the biome effects for microbiome mapping, as well as focus on nervous system restoration. And I've been building a body of work over the last 14 years, both through my client work and here on the podcast and my website. And today's episode is a podcast version of a recent blog article that I wrote. And it's one that I've been wanting to put together for a while. It's about mold, specifically what happens to the body after prolonged exposure to a water damaged building and why leaving that environment isn't the same as truly recovering. And this is a topic that I come to both as someone who has lived it firsthand and as someone who has worked with people navigating it for a really long time. And I feel like we are at this pivotal moment in our collective awareness of what mold actually does, not just in the abstract, but in the body and the nervous system and the way people feel for months or years after they've left the environment. And I've watched the conversation in this space evolve. And I want to offer an updated perspective, one that really reflects what I've observed in myself, in the people I work with. So if mold has been a part of your journey or you're still working your way through the ramifications of it, this episode is for you. Now, if you'd rather read than listen, you certainly can do that. The link is going to be in the show notes for you. Some people may want to do both. Before I get into it, just a quick note uh this podcast is listener supported, which means no ads, no paid promotions, just me talking about the things that I care about. So if you're finding value here, the things that mean the most are you sharing an episode with someone who might need it, or leaving a review on Spotify or iTunes, or dropping a comment if you're listening on Spotify or YouTube. And if you want to support the show financially, there's also an option to do that. There's a link in the show notes for that. Completely optional, always appreciated. All right. All right, so let's get into it. Where the title of the blog was Leaving Mold Isn't the Same as Recovering From It. So I personally didn't learn about the implications of living in a water damaged building, other than what my body own body was telling me all the years that I was in a water damaged building, but I didn't make the actual connection until around two, I can't remember if it was 2013 or 2014. And by that point, I had already spent most of my life in water damaged houses, starting in childhood and continuing through a series of rentals that I didn't yet have the framework to evaluate. And what finally cracked uh it open was a conversation on my old podcast, um, Vibrant Health Podcast with Jessica Espinoza back in the day. And we interviewed a friend of hers who is also an herbalist who had been diagnosed with mold illness. And as she described what she had to go through to recover, I remember feeling genuinely horrified. And also quietly recognizing something in my own life and situation. And at the time, I was living in a water damage rental. My landlord had no interest in testing or remediation. So getting out for me wasn't immediate. It took years of navigating housing while trying to support my body as best as I could in the meantime. And I'm hearing that from countless other people as well. I mean, even to the point where people are living in tents or going to different countries and all kinds of stuff. You know. But for me, when I finally did leave, I didn't land somewhere stable right away. I moved around for a while before eventually settling. So the whole process for me, from leaving that environment to genuinely landing somewhere, took closer to five years. And when I did first move out, it was 2020, global pandemic, brutal winter, exhausting move, uh, and a nervous system that had been managing chronic exposure for longer than I fully understood at the time. I thought, I thought that I would feel relief, right? My body had different ideas. I also knew the standard recommendations. I was aware of the protocols. I was unfortunately extremely sensitive, reactive to most of what I tried, unable to tolerate the things that were supposed to help. What eventually shifted things was uh consulting with someone who introduced me to the framework of, you know, rebuilding cellular charge, redox potential, voltage, all that. I've talked about that numerous times on the podcast. And thankfully, more and more people are coming to the understanding of to some degree, you know, what this means and, you know, building their circadian lifestyles, right? Um so for me at the time, that was something that I that made a ton of sense and that I could actually tolerate. So it gave me a starting point that worked with my system rather than overwhelming it. Um progress was slow and steady. It was real, and it was far less destabilizing than anything I tried before. So that experience is the foundation of everything I'm about to share, not because my particular path is the template, but because going through it slowly with a lot of trial and error taught me something specific about what the body actually needs after prolonged exposure to a water damage building. And it's not what most of the conversation in this space would suggest. Most of that conversation is organized around, like kind of, I feel like I don't know if it's totally the wrong question, but like we're asking, how do I get the mold out of my body? Right? Now that I'm out of the environment, how do I get it out of me? Right. I think a more important question is what did it do to the system, to my system? What did my exposure to the mold do to my body while I was in it? And what does my body actually need to reorganize from there? So, you know, prolonged exposure to a water damage building where there could be different types of molds and mycotoxin exposure doesn't just add something to the body. It changes how the body functions. So what am I talking about here? The language in this space is used uh loosely, right? So a lot of people will be like, okay, mold, mycotoxins, mold illness, right? And a lot of times those things are getting used interchangeably for shorthand, right? They're not all the same thing. So there is some distinction that needs to be understood, right? So mold itself is a fungus, right? Mold spores, the reproductive particles it releases into the air are everywhere, indoors, outdoors, and most of the time our bodies can handle them without incident. The presence of mold spores alone is not the whole problem. What makes a water-damaged building a different category of exposure is what happens when certain mold species are given the right conditions to colonize building materials over time, and then they produce mycotoxins. So mycotoxins are toxic chemical compounds, they're not living organisms, they're produced by specific mold species as secondary metabolites. Not all molds produce them. Uh, the species that tend to thrive in water-damaged indoor environments are stechyboderis, aspergillus, and penicillum. Uh, I don't know how to say the chathomium. Anyways, there's others, um, but those are the ones that frequently do. And mycotoxins behave very differently from spores. They're an order of magnitude smaller. They attach to dust particles and recirculate through HVAC systems. They can survive HEPA filtration and they persist on surfaces long after the mold colony itself is gone. So you can remediate visible mold and still have significant mycotoxin contamination. There's a third factor that rarely gets discussed, and that's microbial volatile organic compounds or MVOCs. And these are gases released by actively growing mold colonies, and they're responsible for that, you know, characteristic musty smell, which I always lived in forever, like decades. Um, of course, it only came up seasonally, right? Uh, when the humidity was higher. And their health effects are less studied than mycotoxins, but they're a real component of the indoor air environment in water-damaged buildings and can contribute to chemical sensitivity and respiratory irritation. And beyond all of that, a water-damaged building also harbors, you know, bacteria, bacterial endotoxins, and acetomycetes. I never know how to say these words, you guys, all of which contribute to our inflammatory burden. So it's not one thing causing harm, it's the entire indoor environment operating as a system. So, one little quick thing. I don't use the term mold illness in my work because I'm not trying to diagnose that. I know some people maybe have gone and got that uh Sears diagnosis, the chronic inflammatory response syndrome, um, which is, you know, more of a specific clinical framework with its own diagnostic criteria. I'm just describing here the physiological impact of prolonged exposure to a water damage building, a pattern I've you know experienced personally and observed consistently. So that's the lens I'm writing from, not like a diagnosis, okay? Um, if you have one, great, you you know. Um, but this is still applicable to people who don't have that diagnosis and they have the body symptoms to prove it from living in, you know, water damage. So unfortunately, you know, there is something harmful about modern built water damage buildings. Um, you know, I've had this conversation where people sometimes wonder, well, why do I need to worry about indoor mold when all, you know, mold exists everywhere in nature, right? Like that's a fair question. Um, you know, I don't want anyone walking away from this thinking they can never be around mold again because that's an exhausting, unnecessary way to live. The difference really is amplification and concentration, right? Outdoors, mold exists in a vast, more well-ventilated environment. Indoors, particularly in a building where moisture has compromised the structure, you get chronic, concentrated, recirculating exposure to species that often don't dominate outdoor environments. Building materials are drywall with paper facing, wood framing, ceiling tiles, carpet padding, pipe insulation, you know, these all provide exactly the cellulose-rich moisture-retaining substrate that toxin-producing mold spores need to thrive. So, like a slow leak behind a wall, a basement that never fully dried after flooding, you know, a plumbing drip inside a cavity that nobody noticed, right? These can create conditions where mold colonizes deeply, invisibly, and continuously. So the result is that the air inside a water-damaged building is not just air with some mold in it, it's a chronic low-level multi-compound exposure that the body is managing every single day you're in it. And that sustained burden is what drives the physiological changes I want to walk through next. Okay, so, you know, we want to talk about like, well, what does prolonged exposure actually do to the body? And, you know, this is the section I want to read carefully because it's where the standard narrative, you were exposed, you accumulated toxins, now remove them, kind of breaks down. Because what's really happening is more complex than that. And understanding is what changes how you approach recovery. Obviously, we have to talk about the nervous system first because you're in a sustained sympathetic dominance pattern, right? Because prolonged exposure drives the autonomic nervous system toward chronic sympathetic activation, right? Your brain's threat detection circuitry, particularly the limbic system, essentially learns that the environment is dangerous and so it stays on guard, right? So your sensory sensitivity increases. And maybe like the smells that didn't used to register become more overwhelming. That was the case for me. Um, and then because of that, environments literally feel unsafe before you've consciously assessed uh the fact that they are, right? You know, your your reactions like happen way faster than your your thought, right? And this isn't anxiety in the psychological sense, it's neurological reorganization in response to a genuine sustained threat signaling. Um, I am well aware of that one. Um, and then uh leaving the building doesn't switch this off, right? Because that pattern has basically been encoded so it continues to persist, right? Um, we can kind of call this like a a lot of people feel like they have a version of like almost PTSD, if you will, uh, about mold. Once they, once they leave. You know, I've talked to countless people who are like, you know, I feel like I want to tear down the walls of my house because I'm afraid there's mold lurking somewhere, right? Like it's really intense. Um and that, but that's because we're there's this neuroinflammation as well, right? The brain and ends up being under this inflammatory load because mycotoxins enter the body primarily through inhalation, right? And the olfactory neurons through which they enter connect directly to the brain. So once mycotoxins cross the blood-brain barrier, they activate the microglia and astrocytes, which are the brain's resident immune cells. And these cells release pro-inflammatory cytokines, which damage neurons and disrupt neurotransmitter signaling. And the result is really measurable. You end up having like, we call it can call it mold brain. A lot of people say that almost as like a kind of joke, but it's like this impaired frontal lobe function, cognitive deficits comparable uh in profile to mild traumatic brain injury, even. And then there's this like impaired emotional regulation and a nervous system that's simultaneously exhausted and hyperreactive. So it's like this wired but tired experience with emotional fragility and the feeling of being overstimulated by normal sensory input. And these are just like the downstream effects of that chronic microglial activation. It's not a personality trait or a psychological weakness, it's just this long-term neuroinflammation, right? I am very familiar with this. I know what this feels like. Oh man, it's it's no joke. So to me, this is why reading a 12-step protocol in this state doesn't feel like a solution. It feels like more evidence of how much trouble and chaos you're really in. Um, then we have to talk about the immune system, right? Because it's like more reactive and feels more stuck. And that's because mycotoxin exposure drives mast cell activation and sustains this like histamine signaling, right? We have these inflammatory cascades, right? You've maybe heard about it, TNF alpha, IL1 beta, IL1, IL6, right? Interleukin 6. And there's others, of course. I don't want to get into that too much, but basically these stay chronically activated, right? So then the immune system, it's not malfunctioning, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do in a perceived threat environment, even after you leave the mold, right? And that's because we get locked into that mode, right? So then the result is like this we have chemical reactivity, we have uh unpredictable flares, we have food sensitivity. And basically your whole system is in is increasingly responding to even neutral stimuli as if they're dangerous. And what many people experience is like this constellation of seemingly unrelated sensitivities, but it's often this like single underlying mechanism expressing itself across multiple systems simultaneously. So immune dysregulation at this level is not primarily a detox problem, it's a regulatory one. So then we can get into the gut barrier and the microbiome disruption. So mycotoxins directly damage the intestinal epithelium, which increases that permeability. Um, and then even beneficial microbial species can decline, and then opportunistic ones can fill the space. I've talked about uh all the layers of the gut in my terrain map series on the blog. If you want to go check that out, I've also recorded a lot of them too. And then we have the endotoxin load from these gram negative bacteria uh starts to increase, right? So then you're adding another inflammatory input on top of this mycotoxin burden. And this shows up clinically. It's like food reactions, bloating, unpredictable digestion, uh, you know, kind of like brain chemistry stuff, mood, sleep, like things that affect you there. And the gut-brain axis, um, you know, this this means this also feeds directly back into your nervous system, feeling we'll use the word dysregulated because that's what everyone's familiar with. And then also neuroinflammation. So, you know, a permeable gut is it's not an isolated problem. It really amplifies everything else happening in the system. So then gut integrity underpins the entire recovery process and it really can't be skipped. Then, if we get into mineral depletion and redistribution, this is pretty underappreciated, in my opinion, um because not everyone's looking at this, but chronic physiological stress depletes your minerals, right? We can go to magnesium first. It does it through multiple pathways. You know, you have increased urinary excretion. Um, then you also have an increased demand from a constantly activated nervous system, but then you also have impaired absorption through a compromised gut. Okay, and then of course the sodium and potassium follow that, and that affects your fluid balance, your nervous system stability. Then we have all our trace minerals. We've got molybdenum, manganese, zinc. These are all required cofactors for detoxification enzymes in phase one and phase two liver pathways, and they often become depleted or rearranged as well. So the irony is significant, right? The system most people try to support through more of like an I'm gonna say the word aggressive because sometimes this can be feel so freaking aggressive in the body is like I need to do a mold detox, right? Um, if you've ever read them and seen what they are, there's like a list, it's a mile long, right? Of things you gotta do. So to me, it feels a bit much, right, in a system that has been very compromised by the exposure in all these ways, right? So you're basically attempting to detox the body with a low threshold or an empty toolkit, right? Like your minerals are deranged and low, your your microbes likely are lacking, and there's gut barrier, like so there's this whole big uh, you know, imbalance, right? And so supporting the body's ability to run its own detox pathways through mineral repletion, uh, informed by testing, not guesswork, is it becomes foundational, right? It's like you really need to build back in the order of what the body is showing. Then we have mitochondrial downregulation. Everyone's talking about mitochondria right now. It's like, I don't think we've ever talked about mitochondria more than we are these days, right? So mycotoxins impair electron transport chain function and increase oxidative stress, right? So the mitochondria respond by down-regulating energy output. And this is a protective mechanism to limit further damage. So this is why the fatigue that follows prolonged exposure is so profound and so qualitatively different from ordinary tiredness. It's because the system has throttled its own energy production. And that is not something that you override with like stimulatory things or pushing through with like willpower. It's something you have to earn back by systematically reducing the burden on the system and rebuilding the conditions for normal mitochondrial function. So energy production really needs to be restored before the deeper healing can be truly sustained. And now, why does why are some people hit so much harder than others, seemingly, right? Like one of the most disorienting and isolating aspects of recovering from a water damaged building is that often not everyone in the same space is equally affected, right? A partner, a roommate, a family member seems, seems, seems completely fine while someone else might be struggling profoundly. Now, a lot of times it's, you know, we have to think about like, is someone in the house more than another person? Like maybe someone leaves every day and they aren't exposed to it every day, like one person. Like there's a lot of layers to this. But so this is real. It's not imagined. A lot of people feel uh, I've I've talked to so many people who are like, okay, my family members don't believe me, right? Um, but there's a biological explanation for it, right? There is a specific set of gene variants in the HLADR system, part of the immune system antigen presentation like machinery, if you will, and it affects how efficiently the body identifies and eliminates mycotoxins. So in people with certain HLADR haplotypes, the immune system mounts a response to mycotoxins, but can't resolve it. And so the toxins aren't cleared, and instead they accumulate, and the immune system stays in a state of chronic unresolved activation. Um, there's estimates that suggest roughly 25% of the population carries these variants, though, you know, some researchers believe the true number may be higher. So that's just something we know and we still maybe don't know yet. So the person in the household who seems unaffected is not the proof the building isn't harmful. They're likely among the majority whose immune systems can tag and clear mycotoxins more efficiently. Um, and the person who is suffering is not necessarily, you know, weaker or more anxious or less resilient. They might be, they might be, their body may be a little bit more burned out than another person. Like I said, they could be living in the house more, spending more time in it, um, or they could just have a genetic variant that makes their immune system less equipped to handle this specific category of toxin. And so the same sustained exposure that's manageable for one person is genuinely destabilizing for another. Now, beyond the HLA genetics, there's individual detoxification capacity. This plays a significant role. Uh, phase one and phase two liver detox pathways, which rely on cytochrome P450 enzymes, glutathione, various mineral cofactors. They vary in efficiency from person to person based on their genetic polymorphism. So, you know, someone with greater reduction in function in these pathways is going to accumulate mycotoxins more readily, clear them more slowly, regardless of their HLA type. So, you know, overall immune status, uh total toxic burden, nutritional status, prior exposures across a lifetime all factor in as well. So the point is not that this is hopelessly complex. The point is that the variation in response between people in the same building is not a mystery. It's just biology. And it's not a permanent sentence. It's just information about where support is needed. Now, why leaving isn't the same as recovering? Okay, so here's the thing that changed for me. And now, and that I now think is kind of the most important thing to understand about recovering from a water damage building. When your body has been in a survival-adapted state for months and months and months, or years, in some cases decades. For me, it was decades. Removing the trigger does not reverse the adaptation your body acquired, right? Because the nervous system will still be in high alert for some time because the brain is still inflamed, the immune system is still reactive, the gut is still compromised, right? Minerals are still depleted or rearranged, and you know, your mitochondria are still throttled, right? So now the external input is gone, which means the internal dysregulation becomes more visible, not less. Because the system was organized around managing a continuous external stressor, and then without it, the imbalance has nowhere to hide. So this is why people say, Well, I left, I did everything right, uh, I'm doing all the things. Like, why do I feel worse? Maybe there's still mold here in this new plate. Like, then they become hyper-vigilant about testing the house for mold, right? Um, you know, and it's totally understandable, right? Like if your brain chemistry is that way, right? Um, here's the thing: you're still in the adapted state that the building created. So that leads me to get to this whole detox protocols and why sequence matters more than like the standardized protocols or intensity. And I want to be direct about this because I think it matters, and I I don't think it's getting said plainly. Like the standard toolkit that circulates in this space, like there's so there's the list is so long, but there's like binders and you know, zeolite and activated charcoal, cholesteroline is a more extreme one, um, saunas, salt baths, lymphatic support, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All those things can make some sense, right? Um, and I don't think they are wrong in principle. And I think that some of these tools, used appropriately and in the right order, can be genuinely useful. I'm not here to dismiss them entirely. However, applying them intensively, generically, and all at once, which is what most people is what most protocols are effectively asking people to do, even if it, even if it's in phases, right? It's often a serious mismatch for most people actually are when they find them. And that mismatch can cause harm. So here's the physiological reason. You cannot move toxins effectively through a system that lacks the cellular energy, the mineral cofactors, the gut integrity to process them. So, like, almost like forcing a mobilization in a depleted system often means that toxins get stirred up without being properly cleared. Um, even if you're using binders, right? Like, are you how's your motion? There's so many layers. But a lot of times people end up having this experience where it creates more reactivity, more inflammation, more symptoms. Right. And sometimes we're calling these Herzheimer reactions or detox crises. Um and, you know, sometimes that could be true, but a lot of times it's not necessarily true, um, and not a sign that the protocol is actually working. Right. Because if you if you look at the physiology of a person and ask the right questions, you'll know like there's this is actually not working properly for you, right? And it can be just a sign that the system isn't ready. Okay, so we're like trying to fit the person into the protocol instead of the protocol fitting the person. Do you see what I'm saying? So many of these tools have real constraints that um generic protocols don't account for, right? Like activated activated charcoal. Um, you know, you don't want to be on these binders long term because they can remove um minerals, even, right? Um, so Epsom salt baths, great, awesome idea, but they do rely on sulfate absorption. And in some cases, people have a, you know, kind of a sulfur bottleneck. I talked about that in an episode. Oh, I think it's just a blog post. I don't know if I did an episode on it. Right. So, you know, someone who has sulfur processing challenges, they may react poorly even to something that seems super benign and super helpful, right? And then there's of course the whole sauna protocols, right? We have to kind of figure out like, how does the sauna work for me in my body, right? Because it can be genuinely depleting for someone whose adrenal and mitochondrial functions already compromised. So the way you approach that has to be titrated or maybe pause until you can handle it better. Then there's like, you know, fiber supplementation, right, to support elimination. It sounds sensible. Um, but you know, the right fibers matter, right? Because if the ones that are being recommended are poorly tolerated in a gut that's already inflamed and reactive, Houston, we have a problem, right? Of course, then methylation support is often mentioned, right? It's a common add-on, and it's not universally appropriate always, right? So that depends on what people are recommending, can drive significant reactions in people whose methylation is already struggling because they're in a version of cell danger response that, you know, trying to like fix all the methylation pathways all at once with a ton of stuff isn't the answer either, right? So the problem isn't the individual tools. They all have their logic as to why they're being recommended. But the problem is the assumption that everyone is starting from the same place, right? And the expectation that a depleted, reactive, inflamed system should be able to tolerate an intensive protocol immediately after leaving a building that depleted, inflamed, and dysregulated it, right? To me, recovery isn't about forcing something out of the body. It's about rebuilding a system that has the capacity to process what's already there. And that sequence matters more than most people are told. And this is the piece we're not talking about enough about what protocols do to an already really inflamed brain and system. Um I haven't seen a whole lot of people talking about it anywhere. And it's really one of the most important things I've observed personally for me and in my work with other people. So a lot of people find these protocols at their worst, right? The nervous system's overwhelmed, the brain's inflamed and running at reduced capacity, that frontal lobe function is impaired, emotional regulation is compromised, the threat detection circuits are really hyperactivated, and they are exhausted. They may be scared and they may not be believed by people around them who don't understand why someone who just left a water damaged building is still struggling months later. In that state, neuroinflammation actively impairs cognitive and emotional processing. So reading a 12-step detox protocol does not feel like a roadmap. It feels like evidence of how serious things are, and then the inability to follow it or the reaction to trying becomes another failure on top of everything else. The protocol that was like supposed to help becomes a new source of fear and overwhelm. And this is not a willpower problem. This is not a psychological limitation. It's what happens when you hand an intensive physiological intervention to a nervous system that is already in alarm mode with a brain that's already struggling to process information and regulate its responses. The intensity of the protocol is itself a mismatch for the state of the system it's trying to help. And this matters enormously for how we think about recovery. And it's why I consistently find that a gentler, more patient, more sequenced approach produces better outcomes than any aggressive protocol, regardless of how well-designed that protocol is on paper. So, what recovery actually looks like? Building capacity first. This is the frame that I work from. It's this it's prolonged exposure to a water damaged building does not contaminate the body. It reorganizes it. And the body has to intelligently adapt to that in real time to survive an environment that was asking way too much of it. So, to me, recovery is the process of helping the body reorganize again back toward a state it can actually sustain. And that reframe has real practical implications and it changes what you prioritize and what you sequence and what you are willing to be patient with. Um, because before anything else, the basics of elimination need to be working, right? The bowels need to be moving regularly and effectively. Uh, because no detox pathway functions well when the primary elimination route is slow. I know this sounds simple and it's often overlooked in favor of more sophisticated interventions. And it's not glamorous. It's just basic foundational operation order, right? Um, and from there, the priority is like building what I think of as cellular capacity, right? The baseline energetic and regulatory state that allows every other process to work. So this means strategic mineral repletion informed by testing rather than guesswork, starting with the minerals that most directly support nervous system stability and detoxification, enzyme function, right? It means supporting the body's own ability to produce antioxidants, glutathione, for instance, through the right nutritional inputs rather than high-dose supplementing it or throwing a ton of knack at you, right? Like in a system that may not be ready to use it. You can take all the glutathione in the world, right? And it may help some, but it's it's not your own body restoring that function, right? It's it's basically a crutch. So it also means addressing your gut barrier integrity, right? And what what the microbial balance is now in your gut, like as a prerequisite for everything that follows, not as an afterthought. And then, of course, the nervous system needs support that matches its actual state, right? Um, figuring out, okay, well, where am I at in that my where is my nervous system hanging out right now? Right? Because we know there are phases. We know there are phases and there's different phases of cell danger as well. So that you're not overstimulating or suppressing, but like really just finding that gentle place where, you know, consistent input gradually allows the body to come down from a chronic high alert. And sometimes this takes longer than most people want. You know, it also works in a way that aggressive intervention usually doesn't because you're working with the system's own regulatory capacity rather than trying to override it. You try to override it, and sometimes you circle right back and, you know, feel like crap again. Um, so the detox support has a place in this process. I'm not saying it doesn't, um, but it has to be paced to where the body is at, right? And sometimes the place where the deeper detox support that everyone's suggesting is later after the system has the capacity to process what gets mobilized. And it's not always at the beginning when the system's most depleted and reactive, right? I, you know, I want to say recovery from a water damaged building is not linear. I don't think it's fast either. And it's definitely not one spot size fits all, right? Because there's so many layers, right? We all have our own genetic layer, whatever that may be. Uh, we all are at a different physiological place. We all have different environmental factors that determine how, you know, how we were affected. And it was, it's like different for everyone, right? Because there's all these other variables that I haven't even talked about in here, right? So the support that everyone needs could be very different. Um, so what I've seen work consistently is a patient-sequenced capacity-first approach that treats the body as a system that needs to reorganize, like not like a container to be emptied, if you will, right? Like, purge me of these toxins. Hurry up. They don't belong here. Get them out. You know? Oh man. I mean, we just want to feel free, right? Like in our bodies. It's it's a reasonable thing to want to feel, but it's not necessarily how it works. And I want to have like a final note on fear, and I want to end here because I think it matters, right? Because this space can become a very fear-driven place. Fear of buildings, fear of possessions, fear of every environment that might have water damage, fear of eating the wrong foods, fear of reacting to every supplement. And we have to understand where that fear comes from, right? It's literally becomes our biology, right? The sensitivity that develops after prolonged exposure is real. And the experiences that generate it are real. But I want to be clear mold is everywhere. Or it's unfortunately a normal part of the natural environment and it's gonna be a part of modern buildings, right? And even if you just like walk through a forest or eat certain foods, or, you know, none none of these are genuinely threats. It's just that the immune dysregulation and nervous system reactivity that develop during exposure, um you know, isn't ready to be able to fully resolve it, right? Um so I also feel like, you know, whatever factors, maybe it's genetic factors, maybe it's your mutation. Maybe it's a longer history, whatever it may be, like even if these things made you susceptible, I don't think they condemn people to a life of avoidance and vigilance where we have to be in constant threat detection and fear mode, right? Because what made the water damage building harmful was not just mold in the abstract. It was the specific conditions, chronic moisture, building materials that amplified growth of toxin-producing species, poor ventilation, sustained daily exposure over a long period of time. That is a specific identifiable situation, right? And recovery is possible and it takes patience, you know, it takes really good support and a framework that actually matches the biology of what happened. And that is what I try to offer in my work. And it's what I wish someone had handed me when I was sitting in a new place, having just left, feeling worse than ever and terrified I would never feel better. So if you're in this phase out of the environment, but still not feeling like yourself, that this is exactly the kind of work that I do with clients. We look at your mineral patterns, your gut ecology, your nervous system together, and rebuild in a way that your body can actually tolerate and integrate. And a lot of people think it feels slow, right? But it's more specific and it holds, right? So if you want support with that, you can learn more about working with me. The links are in my show notes below. Uh, minerals and microbes is my flagship program. Um, so check that out. See what you think. Uh, I I onboard a few clients a month at this point until I'm completely full. I'll go on a wait list. Um, so yeah, check that out. And if you have any specific questions about it, you're welcome to email me. And I hope that you found this episode helpful. I hope this shed some light for some folks. And that is all for this episode. Until next time, thank you so much for tuning in. Stay wild and stay well.