Your Body Can't Optimize What It Hasn't Stabilized Yet

If you've been doing all the things — the supplements, the protocols, the tests, the dietary changes — and still can't seem to get out of the pattern you're in, this episode is for you.

The problem isn't that you're broken or that you're not trying hard enough. It's that wellness culture keeps selling optimization to bodies that haven't stabilized yet. And when you try to optimize a system that's still in survival mode, the gates are closed. Nothing lands the way it should.

In this episode I walk through why the order matters — what's actually happening in your body when it's been in chronic threat physiology, why removing a stressor often isn't enough on its own, and what stabilization actually looks like from the inside.

We cover:

• Why your body can't absorb what it can't digest — and what that means beyond nutrition
• The holding patterns your system builds around chronic stress and why they don't just dissolve when the stressor is gone
• The difference between suppressing a symptom and actually restoring the terrain
• Why optimization culture keeps chronically ill people stuck
• What stabilization looks like in practice — and how the garden taught me more about this than any textbook

This isn't about doing less forever. It's about doing things in the right order so your body can actually receive what you're giving it.

Referenced in this episode: 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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, and welcome back to Rewilded Wellness. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. And you guys, I really have to say it again. May, gosh, May, wow. It really might be like one of the most delicious months of the year. We're we're deep in the heart of spring now. We we're like in the tail end of it, right? And the trees and the plants and everything around me is this like deep, deep, deep saturated green. And it's just like, it just feels like this long exhale, if you will. Like the whole land finally took the deepest breath. It's been holding since like December, right? We are here. We made it. And my garden is very prolific right now. I've been at it since early spring. Um, and this week I had the pleasure of doing a garden tour for a longtime friend I hadn't seen in a while. And let me tell you, having someone witness the work that I've put in and genuinely be so delighted by it is its own kind of nourishment. Sharing what you create and your vision and your passion and beauty, all of it. It's just it's deeply, deeply nourishing. And what struck me during our time together touring my garden is um me being able to reflect back, like how much work it took just to stabilize this land before I got to the point that I'm at now where things are really, really flourishing, right? Because before I started, this property was overrun. It was neglected. There were trees overgrowing that had to come down that covered in ivy, right? Like Pakassandra, um, poison ivy inside the ivy and the Pakassandra, like the soil was rocky in certain spots. Um, and there was just no real beauty or life. And I have spent a couple of years um just creating the conditions for things to thrive here. And I'm still, I'm still doing that. And I know that that's how a lot of people feel in their bodies, right? Exhausted, overrun, like something has taken over. Um, and people orbit around those kinds of questions a lot in the wellness space, like, what thing do I have? Like, what's taking over me? Is there an invader, right? What's what's what's the thing that's breaking me down? Why do I feel like this? Um, and what I keep coming back to, and what I want to talk about in another way today, is that the conditions that modern life presents us with make it genuinely hard for anyone to like thrive. And the question of what's taking over matters a lot less than the question of whether the terrain is stable enough to heal. And that brings me to something that I've been sitting with and I really want to flesh out today is this one key phrase, and I want to let it land with you. It's stabilize before you optimize. So today I want to talk about why stabilization has to come before optimization and what that means, and why getting that order wrong is one of the main reasons people are kind of stuck. Um, so in my 14 years doing this work, I've watched, there's always nuance, right? But I've watched like two kinds of extremes where of people who move through the wellness world, right? So there's like the person who's doing all the things, literally all of it. Like they're following all kinds of practitioners, they've run so many tests, they've tried to understand all the protocols or all the, you know, physiology, or all what the different tests do, and yada yada yada. Right? It's kind of to me become like the wellness version of like the keeping up with the Joneses, you know what I mean? Um and it's kind of like this constant fire hydrant of information, intervention, right? Like, whether it's every week or month, or constantly, there's like something new to add or to do when you're following this world so closely. Maybe there's something you're missing or something that might finally be the answer. And so it's like, okay, now I gotta do that too, right? But underneath all of these things that is this constant exploration, there's still a struggle. Um, people who are still not feeling the way that they want to feel. Then the second type of person is typically also orbiting all that information, but a little bit more frozen. They've definitely read everything or follow everything or watch things or kind of stay in those circles, if you will. They, they, they know a lot intellectually, but they're kind of more in the frozen state, right? Like they their executive function is kind of like shutting down from overwhelm. And they're finding it very hard to take a step forward. Uh, maybe there's a lot of overthinking about what needs to be done, like overwhelm about where to start, because there's way too many places you could go, right? And so they usually don't, they're they're a little more opposite of the person who's doing all the things. They're they're maybe doing some things, but they're just like, I don't even know what to do. I don't even know where to start. I can't even, right? Like, so there's two very de different presentations. Of course, there's people in the middle, but I'm just explaining the two pendulum, the two ends of the pendulum that and the extremity that it could possibly be. But really, the same thing underneath is going on. It's a version of burnout, essentially, right? Um, you know, and people's nervous systems have just been kind of really running too hard for too long. Um, and so the body's dealing with this collection of chronic symptoms, and you know, we're trying to people are trying to intellectually explain it because then they think they can find the solution out of it, right? And there's this deep sense of like, what is actually wrong with me? Why is this so hard to figure out? And here's what I want to offer today the reason it's hard isn't necessarily because something is terribly wrong with you. It's because we live in a culture that skips straight to optimization and pathology, pathologizing everything, right? Like finding a solution. Um, so we we skip straight to optimization. We're not really asking the question whether the terrain of the person is stable enough to receive the optimization path, whatever it may be, a protocol or run 15 tests and try to implement from these tests, like whatever it may be, right? And maybe you guys know about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Um go look it up if you don't. But he knew this that the base of his hierarchy was safety and stability, right? They have to come before you can build anything on top of them. The body knows this, but the wellness industry keeps selling optimization to people whose nervous systems haven't had a chance to stand down in years, sometimes decades, maybe some people your whole life. And so you cannot optimize biohack, whatever you want to call it, an overwhelmed system. You have to stabilize it first. And that's what this episode is about. So I want to talk about what I'm calling the receiving problem. One of the first things that I help every client understand is this you're not a collection of parts. Okay. Okay, because you people are telling me, oh, I have this thing and that thing and da da da da, right? You and I, we are an entire whole living system. Our brain, our nervous system, our gut, our immune system, our hormones, they're not separate departments. They are all one integrated self-regulating terrain. Everything talks to everything, right? You and I, we're ecosystems. We are not machines with like replaceable parts. Okay. And this matters because when we try to understand our health by segmenting ourselves into categories: gut health over here, hormones over there, nervous system, everything everywhere these days, right? Um, we end up more overwhelmed and not less, right? And we end up chasing pieces of a picture that only makes sense when you can actually try to look at the whole thing. So when I talk about chronic health patterns, meaning like challenges that have compounded over years, sometimes decades, what I'm really talking about is a whole system that has had to reallocate its resources for a very long time. And here's what that means physiologically. When the body is under perceived threat, our body, it's an organism, right? It shifts its priorities, okay? And defense takes precedence over repair, digestion, reproduction, growth. And this is not a flaw, it's survival design. It kept our ancestors alive, even, right? It keeps us alive. The problem is when we stay in that defense, and it's like there's an major alarm system never turning off, right? And so for a lot of people I work with, that is the case, that that alarm hasn't truly turned off for years. And what that actually does to the body is that the first place it shows up, and I'll most people still don't connect to this because they they just don't understand it, is your digestion. Okay. Um, digestion is a parasympathetic function and it requires our bodies to be in receiving mode. But when the alarm is running uh in the system, right, digestion's just gonna take somewhat of a backseat. It's not gonna not do what it's like, it's not gonna stop entirely, but it's going to not have the allocation of resources directing to it primarily. And so it'll take more of a backseat, right? And so we may not be producing our digestive secretions, our juices, enzymes, hydrochloric acid, all these things. They become more insufficient. They don't get produced the way that they should be because the signaling is not there properly. Bile flow then can be altered. Uh, the motility of the entire GI tract changes. And so it can slow down or speed up or just be completely erratic. And I want to say clearly, every time I talk about motility being altered or slowing down, it's not just, oh, but I have a bowel movement every day, so that's not a problem for me. So I doesn't mean it like people think I don't have slow dysfunctional motility, but that's a misconception. And I did do an episode on that. Um, so definitely scan through the archives if you want to deep dive. But the result is that even if you eat, sit down and you eat a meal and you're like, okay, I'm eating a really nourishing meal, right? Like you, you know that you've sourced the best that you can, you can eat that meal and it could still sit in your stomach like a rock or not move through your GI tract effectively. So therefore, it may not be broken down properly. It may not be absorbed properly. Or, you know, you may burn it up too quick or too slow. There's a lot of variables. But basically, you are consuming an input, but your system cannot actually utilize it or receive it properly. Right? Now, the same is true for minerals. We burn through them rapidly under chronic stress, all the minerals, right? Magnesium, potassium, sodium, zinc. So you can start to eat more mineral-rich foods and be like, oh wow, I'm actually eating a lot of magnesium in my diet or potassium in my diet. Um, and think, great, I'm getting my minerals. Okay. Because I've had people say this to me. And definitely do it. Like, please don't, I'm not saying don't try to eat mineral dense rich foods. Please, you must do this. However, if you're thinking you're getting what you need, check the box, bada bing, bada boom. Um, there's that's not necessarily the case. Same is true with supplementing, right? Like people are supplementing. People are like, oh my gosh, I need minerals, I need trace minerals, I need electrolytes, I need these minerals that everyone's talking about. And so a lot of people are trying to supplement intelligently. But if that alarm is still ringing, sounding, and putting the body into that defense, it's almost like kind of like you're pouring water into a leaky bucket, right? The minerals don't have a stable enough terrain to actually land properly. And so this is what I mean when I say, like, this is what I'm calling a receiving problem because you cannot absorb what you cannot digest. And I do mean that beyond nutrition, right? Like it applies to information, as I just talked about the information overwhelm, right? You can't like integrate it all. It's impossible. It's too much, right? It's the same thing with care, um, rest. Anything that you're trying to give yourself in the name of healing, if your body is in a version of threat physiology, it's kind of like different gates are closed in your system, right? Like they're not open to let more in. Like it's like you're already at a version of capacity just trying to survive. And so this is why people can do everything on the metaphorical list, right? The supplements, the foods, the biohacks, the machines, the tech all the things, the practices, the habits, right? And still not shift the way that they want. And, you know, many of the inputs are not necessarily wrong inputs. It's more that your system isn't in a state to receive what you're doing. And that's the core problem. And it it's really the one that almost nobody is addressing first. So we have to talk a little bit about being in a holding pattern and why our bodies don't just let go. So we know logically that first things first, removing stressors matters. Okay. And where we can, we should. Um, I don't think any of us can live in a perfectly stress-free life. That's not the point. But the total system burden matters and reducing it creates more room for the body to be freed up to work with, right? This is like giving back resource to ourselves. But here's where it gets a little less intuitive. Our body as an organism doesn't just respond to these perceived stressors or threats. It can literally learn them, like become like it becomes a part of you and you adapt around them. So over time, these adaptations end up becoming compensations, right? And so the body is like, okay, well, we are adaptable, but now the way that we're adapting is compensatory versus optimal, right? And those compensations end up becoming holding patterns. Basically, these are ways that our body has to organize itself around survival. And we do it for, we can do it for so long that the shape doesn't simply just dissolve when the main stressor is removed. Right. So you think about what that can look like, a specific muscular tension you've carried for years. Um, this is something I actually talk about with everyone these days. Like people are like, I have these weird places in my body that stuff happens. And they don't realize like it's a long-term pattern that their body has held. And now more problems are happening because of it, right? Um, a baseline of hypervigilance that feels like you're normal, whatever it may be. It could be people pleasing, it could be like overfunctioning. I'm an overfunctioner, I'm a recovering overfunctioner, single mom, got a lot of Virgo, Virgo loves to serve. Um, you know, I tend to be like, oh, I'll do it. I can help. Oh, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And now I'm like, hold on. I need to make sure I am not exceeding my helpfulness at the expense of myself, right? You guys feel me here. It could be some type of metabolic set point your body keeps returning to, like blood sugar or, you know, allergies, or, you know, a knee-jerk reaction your body has that's like your normal, so you just assume it's part of you, or an inflammatory default that fires every spring when the pollen arrives, or uh that gets triggered when you smell something that that like you used to have terrible reactions to. Like you can't even go down the um laundry detergent aisle in the store, or whatever. You know what I'm saying? Um even relational patterns that formed because your limbic system learned to expect a certain kind of environment. So childhood things, things that you had to like hold in your body that might have happened that were a stress to you. You've learned that, like your body learned that and it's carried on throughout your life. Um, different attentional biases that develop because your executive function adapted around survival, uh, whether we call it ADHD, ADD, whatever. And really, it's just your body, your system had to shape itself around what was in your environment, what it had to endure. And that shape doesn't just like suddenly release because a big stressor is gone. Right. Think of it like a spring held under compression for years. When you finally remove the weight, it doesn't release gently. It like could just launch or overshoot or oscillate, or maybe it rusted to hell and it doesn't move at all, right? Or it just it has to swing before it can settle. And that's hopefully a picture that makes some sense to you. And that's what the organism does after chronic threat. And I wrote and recorded a whole episode about my own experience with this. Um, you know, leaving the uh water damage home that I did, leaving mold. It's not the same thing as recovering from it. And um, you can find the link in the show notes. But the short version is this when I finally left, I was like, finally, okay. That specific environment was no longer like something my body had to like endure uh or be assaulted by, if you will. But for me, things got louder before they got quieter. I had a big symptom flare-up. My body felt like it just was like WTF. It like crashed and blew up at the same time. And I was like, what is going on? I thought getting out of the mold was gonna help. And so I was confused like, why on earth do I feel so much worse? And it's because the chronic activation had been organizing my entire system, and it was the structure my body was built around. And once I removed it, everything had to reorganize. And that It takes time. It takes resources. It takes safety signals. It's not just like, oh, I'm going to heal now. It's literally we have to rewire ourselves. And so some people stay in activation because what surfaces underneath feels unbearable. Right. You get adjusted to the circumstances. So you're like, uh, I don't want to have to make too much change because then I have to deal with things that I'm not ready to deal with, right? And when the threat finally recedes, you can have this like exhausted emotional voice come up. Why do I feel so terrible? Like I did something right for myself. How could I possibly do more? Like, you know, and that voice is real and it makes complete sense, but it's not the authority. It's a layer of a system that has been running on empty and overwhelm for a very long time. And so eventually, whether you've removed the stressors, whatever they may be, there's probably many or not, your body's going to find a way to speak. And the language your body uses is symptoms. Symptoms, whatever they may be, exhaustion, pain, brain fog, something reacting, some kind of flare-up, some type of response you get when you do a thing. Uh, your digestion could be crazy. It could do all kinds of weird things. There's so many layers. You might find yourself like literally have zero appetite. Like, I literally don't want to eat food, but I know I have to eat food, or some type of upper GI reflux, or gastrointestinal discomfort, or crazy bloating, or constipation, weird pains in places that don't make sense. Right? The body's holding things in ways you're like, I cannot explain this. Now, they're never random. They are communication. And this is where most people and most practitioners get it wrong because we're so focused on suppressing those symptoms versus stabilizing the whole system of the body, right? Okay. So I want to talk about what to actually do with symptoms because this is where I think the biggest misunderstanding lives. And when I say this, guys, please understand I'm talking about chronic symptoms. Like if you have a symptom that you don't normally have, it comes out of nowhere, and you want to give yourself some relief in a given day, it's totally understandable to do that. But what I'm talking about is people who have patterned symptoms over long periods of time, and then more symptoms usually show up. And next thing you know, they've got this like laundry list of symptoms that they're tracking. Okay. But the symptoms are not the enemy, even though they don't feel good to us. They're simply proof that something is going on, right? It's just a communication. And it's not proof that you're broken beyond repair and you have some crazy disease, right? But whether it's like a headache or what you call it, I crashed, or I got sick for a week, or I had this crazy flare, um, or your gut just won't settle. These are messengers. And when we spend all our energy trying to silence the messenger, we can miss what's actually being said. So I first want to point out that stabilization is not suppression. These are those are completely different things. Suppression is forcing the symptom to be quiet while the underlying condition keeps running. Stabilization is creating the conditions where your body no longer needs to send that signal in the first place. Okay, so what does stabilization actually look like? Well, it starts with safety, and I don't mean thinking calm thoughts or sitting there and telling yourself to relax. I mean the kind of safety that your body, your nervous system, literally reads at a subcortical level below conscious thought. It comes from rhythm, predictability, warmth, adequate nutrition, adequate minerals, um, so that your body has the raw materials, your nervous system has the raw materials to be able to more efficiently regulate. You know, then you have more uh even more relational steadiness in your life. Maybe you're stabilizing a home in a way so it's not actively assaulting you, like finding a safe place to live, right? Um, and the thing is, is our bodies are always scanning our environments and asking this question of like, is it safe for me here in the current phase I'm in, right? So stabilization is answering yes consistently enough that that alarm starts to quiet. It also means reducing total system burden, not necessarily adding a ton more to an already overloaded system, like blasting yourself with 82 supplements because you've decided I have this, this, this thing, this thing, that thing. It's good for this thing, that thing. I read MCAS, you need these things. And then, okay, I'm gonna go take all these things because I have MCAS, so I need these things, right? Do you see what I'm saying? It's not adding a ton more to an already overloaded system. It's strategizing. It's fewer inputs, less noise, less conflicting information for the body to sort through. And this, what I'm saying, runs completely counter to what wellness culture teaches us, which is that more is better, that if you're not improving, you need to add something. But for a system already in overwhelm, adding more is often the thing that keeps the body stuck. It means what we need to do is restore resources. Okay. So we need to restore rhythm to our system, right? Circadian rhythm is a big thing now. Everyone seems to know, okay, I need to have, you know, this rhythm in my life. Like thankfully, more people are aware of like the role sunlight even plays in that. And sleep. Um, even getting the minerals in. So, in the amount of time that I've been doing this work, I've I've seen a shift in people coming in and actually know these things are important, right? Getting these raw materials the body burned through during all the years of survival mode. Yet we expect it to change overnight. And then we think, well, maybe I need to do way more. But the thing is, is you can't rebuild like that on a depleted foundation. You have to put something back before you can expect something to grow. Um, so the principle that ties all this together is when you reduce pressure in one layer, you create room everywhere else. So let's say, for example, you're asleep. I have a lot of people who don't sleep well. Almost everyone doesn't sleep well. Or they wake up three times at night and they're like, well, I can fall back asleep pretty good. But that's because they're used to it. Still, waking up three times a night is not good, right? So when you can even reduce that by one or two times, or you wake up once and you just pee and you're right back to sleep. Like the better sleep, no matter how much better for you, is going to reduce some of the vigilance in your system. And that will automatically translate over into digestion. It will automatically translate over into your ability to absorb your minerals. That will automatically improve your energy. Having better energy will improve your stress tolerance and your threshold, like for how you handle your relationships and even your inflammation levels will likely go down, right? So you see, it's not like one magic fix. It's total system burden is decreasing enough that your body can finally start to adapt into a different direction. That's stabilization, and it changes everything that comes after it. So I'm gonna go forward and say I think optimization culture is keeping people stuck and sick in a lot of ways. Okay, I'm just gonna say it. Because if stabilization is this foundational and if the order matters this much, why does almost no one lead with it? Well, because the wellness industry isn't built around stabilization, it's built around optimization. And there is a lot of money in optimization, but it's also our cultural way, you guys. So what gets sold to people in chronic health patterns is usually more, more, more, more, more tests, more supplements, more protocols, more fasting, more detoxing, more monitoring, more researching. And I want to be really clear, I'm not against any of those things at all. I am not in the right context. What I am against is selling optimization to a person in a nervous system pattern that's totally unstable and they haven't built that stability yet. Because every one of the inputs, when layered onto a system still running a threat response, can become another stressor. Uh, just like another thing the body has to process and respond to, or maybe even a seemingly demand to a system that's already totally at capacity. If you think about a phone that won't charge, right, that battery is draining faster than it fills. You plug it in, but the screen is bright, every app's running, Bluetooth, GPS pinging, the charge barely moves. The problem isn't necessarily the charger sometimes, right? The problem could be there's way too much draining the reserve. Like there's may too many apps running at once. Like, and the fix isn't necessarily a faster charger. It could be closing the apps, deleting some stuff on your phone, right? That maybe that's not the best analogy, but you get the point, right? Because that's what supplementing and protocoling into a threatened nervous system really looks like. I just made that word up, protocoling. I think it's good. We should, we should keep that word. You keep you keep plugging things in, but you know, your system can't receive the charge because it's too busy running all these background processes. Um and I think that it's important to say this too, because like the body doesn't always distinguish between like say something seemingly therapeutic. Like, I'll be extreme here for a second. Like, someone recently asked me about fasting. They wanted to do this whole fasting thing. And I was like, uh, right. Um, so we could try to do like a 72-hour therapeutic fast, and someone can logically explain why it could be really good. Um, but your body may not distinguish between that and starvation, right? Like it reads deprivation as deprivation. It doesn't know you chose this. If your nervous system hasn't stabilized and your digestion isn't good and all these things, right? That protocol or that fast, however well logically explained to you, or well-intentioned, becomes another threat signal. Okay, so people doing all these things, all this kind of optimization healing work, if you will, they're they're not failing because they're non-compliant or like they're genuinely like totally malfunctioning human. It's it's a misdirect. It's it's they're being misguided, right? You're being directed to optimize a system that hasn't yet received enough consistent safety signals to come out of defense mode. And so we end up right back where we started. You can't absorb what you can't digest. When you're in a threat state, there's all kinds of places in your body that it's almost like the gates are closed, right? Nope, gates closed, shut down. We are defending. The barricades are up, right? The castle walls are up, the archers are out, the the gate is being defended for life. Do you see what I'm saying? So no amount of like whatever version of optimization you are trying to do will reach it. Okay, so that's where the order matters, where you need to stabilize first. And once you stabilize one layer, you got to stabilize more, right? So I want to tell you a story because I feel like stories help. And I'm talking about my garden and what stabilization actually looks like. Because the to me, I learned this more in real time from soil, from land. So when I talk about stabilization, I'm not speaking theoretically. I'm speaking from what my life, my experience, my hands have taught me, especially over the last few years of building something real out of a neglected piece of land. Now, my friend, when she visited, she told me she's trying to grow some things too. So, like this year, she's like, all right, all right, all right. I really want to try to grow some things I've never grown before because my family wants to eat them. And it, you know, it'd be nice to be able to grow some of my own food. So she's like, lettuce, for example. I picked this one and she's all excited. But then reading the seed packet label, trying to follow the instructions, felt like emotionally catastrophic, like, right? Like, okay, I'm gonna put the seed in the ground. Is it gonna work? Okay, I did it exactly the amount of inches in the spot. Like, is it gonna germinate? Is it gonna work? Right. Like, and if it does, well, can I actually repeatedly do it or can I do it with something, right? Like you go into this whole like story, right? And I completely understand that because I I totally get it. I mean, I did that too. Um, and you know, I began with herbs and pots like years and years and years ago. I was growing my own herbs and some things, but it wasn't like a whole full-fledged trying to grow my food, right? Um, and I learned like in phases, and I was like, oh, I can do this. It's not as hard as I thought. And then I added something else, and then something else, and those things stayed steady and stable. And maybe they threw me a curveball here and there. I had to learn, right? Each thing I learned became the foundation for the next thing. Each small success built my capacity to take on more. There's no way I could have managed what I'm building now in year one. I should show you guys a video of my garden at some point. I didn't have the skills, I didn't have the knowledge, I didn't have the lived, learned experience, I didn't have the systems, I didn't even have the physical stamina for it. I would have been completely overwhelmed, and I probably, I don't know if I would have quit. I don't know if I would have quit. I might have been tempted to quit. Basically, what I'm saying is the capacity had to be built in sequence, layer by layer, season by season. And that's exactly what our bodies need, right? Like, you don't force a plant to do what you think it should do on the timeline you've decided it should do it. You learn what conditions it actually thrives in, and you either create those conditions or you put it inside those conditions, right? You work with the nature of it instead of against it. You definitely don't scream at a struggling plant to try harder either, right? Like you don't, you don't dump like a massive load of fertilizer on depleted, compacted soil and expect it to just bam, all right, you're gonna produce everything I need now. That's not how living systems work. Too much input, too fast, overwhelms the ecology. So I want to say that slow integration is not a weakness. It's not. It's how things actually take root. I think about a like the forest after a fire, right? A burned forest doesn't just jump straight back to a canopy, it goes through succession. Right? Pioneer species come in first, the ones that can handle raw, exposed, depleted conditions. They stabilize the soil, then the shrubs come back, then the understory plants, then eventually the canopy returns. Each stage creates the conditions that allow the next stage to happen. You cannot simply skip straight to the canopy. The canopy is only possible because of everything that came before it. That's stabilization. And it's not technically linear or fast, but it is directional. And it is inevitable when the conditions are right. So the plant doesn't sit there and try harder to grow. When the conditions are right, growth is what it does automatically, because that's what living systems do when they're not spending all their resources on defense. And your body is the same. Stabilization in the body looks like gradually increasing your capacity to tolerate variation without crashing, right? Like a bad night doesn't derail your whole week. A stressful day doesn't trigger like a full flare. It looks like restoring digestive function. So what you eat actually gets absorbed, or the food that you thought you were like allergic to or is a bad food for you actually isn't. You actually can tolerate it. It looks like reestablishing rhythm into your life, rhythm around your sleep, rhythm around what you eat, when you eat, how you eat, how you move, when you allow rest.

unknown 41:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Because our nervous systems really need predictability so it can so they can stop running that alarm all the time. Okay. And it does look like reducing the conflicting inputs that you receive, like whether you're choosing to go out and read them all, at some point you're you're gonna be like, oh my God, I've hit an overwhelm point. I can't read anymore. It's just too much, right? Um, so your system isn't constantly trying to sort through noise. That's a choice. We can choose to like only take in enough good information before we put it down and like have to learn to integrate what's right for us. Okay, so I'm certainly not suggesting doing nothing. Because like some people hear this as like, you're telling me to just do nothing. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. That's a very hyper-vigilant nervous system response, by the way. So if that's you, like just know, like your body's not ready to stand down and and and relax. It's like, I gotta do something, I gotta do something, I gotta do something. Okay. We're not doing nothing. Um, and we're not giving up on helping ourselves, our system, our body, our healing, right? We're not giving up. I'm not suggesting that either. We're we're building appropriate adaptive capacity that begins to make everything else possible. And I can say this from my own experience. I have not been trying to optimize for many, many years. I've been stabilizing in every way from like that time of leaving the mold. Like I had to stabilize my living situation. I had to stabilize my finances, I had to stabilize my, you know, like how my kids were, like things about my kids, my daily rhythms, my sense of what I could trust in myself and in even the people around me, uh, my garden, my capacity to show up for my work without running on empty. And, you know, it, I'm not gonna lie, it can feel slow and it can feel boring. It's not always exciting. It's not dopamine, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, right? Um, and there were stretches that felt more like holding steady than like. Progress. Okay. But when you can do it long enough, creativity will start to come back. Your vision for your future orientation will come back. Your desire to build, to expand, to imagine what's next. Because a lot of people come to me telling me they've stopped doing things that they loved. And they're, they're like, there's all kinds of feelings wrapped around. Like, I don't work out as much anymore. I don't have as much sex with my partner as I used to. I don't do this hobby that I love. I don't, you know, all these things, right? Um, but when we stabilize our personal inner terrain and our environment around us that we live within, we begin to reallocate energy away from pure survival. And that is the whole point. And that's what I'm continuing to grow towards myself in my body, in my life, in my garden, creating conditions or being in the right conditions, not demanding or commanding change outside of that. So here's what I want you to take from this episode. There are stages to this, there are layers of threat physiology and danger response. And you don't have to be in extreme reactivity to still be in one of them. A lot of people are moving through their days feeling like something is off, feeling like it's harder than it should be to feel good. But they're not connecting that to where their nervous system actually is. Maybe they're just trying to push through and wondering why things aren't landing the way they hoped. The thing is, you can't skip straight to optimization. You have to work through the layers. You have to let things come back online. You have to let the cells open up again, stabilize the terrain, repair the gut, reduce pressure in all kinds of places. Again, restore conditions. Capacity expands from there. And this is how I work with people. I'm not looking at a lab result, handing someone a protocol. You know, I'm actually watching how their body responds over time and letting it lead. And then taking the principles, the things that we understand about minerals and the microbiome and the nervous system, and making them work for the specific person in front of me. And sometimes that means not doing anything the lab recommends right away. At least not in the way that it's typically recommended, right? Because in the mineral balancing world, a lot of people are researching and they're like, okay, there's all these protocols and approaches to these certain versions of the lab, and you're supposed to do this for that marker and this for that ratio, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I'm I'm like, let's set all that down for a minute. Because a person who has been in a chronic long-term pattern, they can't just like often receive that level of input yet. Think about the seed packet again. The instructions on the back are a starting point. But once you understand your specific soil, your sun exposure, what else is growing nearby, this the spacing, for example, becomes a suggestion, not a rule. Like you develop a relationship with your land and your the plants are trying to grow, and it tells you what it needs. And the body is the same way. You develop a relationship with your body over time, and it will show you what it can handle and what it's ready for next. And so as we learn to acknowledge the adaptations and compensations we've all built up and work with where our body is instead of where we think it should be, it begins to stabilize on its own. And from that stability, it begins to optimize on its own. And you may find you need far fewer things than wellness culture told you that you needed. Okay. I mean, healing is real work, but the conditions that we all have created allow our body to do more of the work itself when we create the right ones. So if there's one thing that I want you to carry out of this episode, it's this. Like you're not necessarily the problem. It's your physiology saying, hey, this approach isn't aligned with me. And so the question isn't like, okay, well, now what? What else should I add? Or what other tests should I run? Right. Like the question is, okay, let's let's let's declutter. What is like one layer of pressure I could reduce this week? Not everything, just one thing. Right? I don't know what that is for you. For me, having like a social interaction that's very nourishing, like I did with my friend, was amazing. Like it does a lot for you for the body to have like a connection like that. Maybe it's something simple like that. Seriously, you have a better day that day because your nervous system is like very nourished, right? Um, or maybe something you could remove, like spiraling on the internet, trying to logic your way through understanding your body, right? Like that could be overwhelming you way more than you realize. So, anyways, start there, let that land, see what opens up. And if you don't know where to start, and if you are overwhelmed by everything out there, maybe you're not taking action, or maybe you've exhausted yourself trying all the things, or you've run all the tests and don't know what to do with them. Um, you know, or you just can't seem to get out of the patterns you've been in. This is the work that I do inside my minerals and microbes program. I walk beside you for four months to help you stabilize. So you can learn more at the link in the show notes. And as of this recording, it's May, uh, today's May 30th. And I do have a couple of spots for new folks who want to get started in June. All right. As always, I appreciate you guys for being here. The best way that you can support this podcast is by leaving me a review, sharing it with someone who needs it, or hitting the text link at the top of the show notes and telling me what this episode spoke to you about. It helps me reach more people. The feedback helps me stay with it. I appreciate you guys. Until next time, stay wild and stay well.