Rewire Your Nervous System To Rewire Your Health

What if healing starts by teaching your body to feel safe again? 

In today's episode we dig into the practical side of stress recovery and show how quick daily signals of safety—sunlight, slow breathing, grounding, gentle movement—can flip you from fight or flight into rest and repair. 

When your nervous system settles, your immune system, sleep, digestion, and inflammation all shift in the right direction, making every other therapy more effective.

We break down the feel-good chemistry behind resilience. You’ll hear how to naturally boost dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin with simple habits like nature time, touch, massage, music, laughter, exercise, intimacy, and light exposure. These aren’t fluffy add-ons; they are actionable levers that lower cortisol, reduce pain, improve mood, and support cancer prevention by creating a biology that heals instead of defends.

Here's some of what we're covering:

• why regulation starts with the nervous system
• nature, breathwork, meditation, gentle movement as fast resets
• feel-good hormones and how to raise them daily
• overlap between exercise, touch, sunlight, and mood chemistry
• somatic release for stuck emotions
• gratitude, mindset shifts, and community for resilience
• simple, repeatable practices that compound over time

Step 1 in our 3-Part Recovery System is to calm the stress response. To help you do this, we are offering a FREE personalized flower remedy for anybody who joins our coaching program this month. Schedule a FREE strategy session to learn more!

As always, please help us spread the word by sharing, subscribing, & leaving a review. 🙏

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Transcript

Setting The Stress-Health Stage

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Grounded Root Podcast, where we are exploring the world of holistic and functional strategies to enhance healing and help you stay cancer free. I am your host and holistic cancer dietitian Dion Detraz. Now, this month we are focusing on the number one cause of disease, which is stress, in case you didn't already know that, and some surprising ways we can reduce our stress and ultimately lower this risk factor for cancer. Now, we kicked off the month a couple of weeks ago talking about the links and the research around stress and emotions and disease, specifically how it influences our immune system and obviously why that is really important when it comes to cancer, since this is our primary defense against cancer and other infections, as well as the different sources of stressors that have the biggest impact on our health, whether that's, you know, acute, chronic, acute or chronic stress versus day-to-day stressors versus even old stress from emotional wounds or traumas from the past. Last week we dove into that even deeper with integrative psychiatrist Tracy Peng. We had her on our show to talk even more about the connections between emotions and nervous system and health, and most importantly, how it's never too late to heal old emotional wounds and how that can have actually a really big impact in your recovery and your long-term health. She shared some very inspiring patient stories. So I hope you found that helpful if you listened. And then now today, in today's episode, I'm very excited because now we're getting to like the juicy what do we do part, right? So we understand the why. We maybe hopefully have identified some of our own risks or, you know, pieces to the puzzle that we're ready to address. So today we're gonna explore the tools, the strategies, the practices that you can bring in to help you calm your stress response, to help you regulate your nervous system, and ultimately to help you enhance your emotional wellness. And as we know, as we do all three of those things, we're going to influence our immune system, our sleep, our systems of cancer prevention, which is going to be very important to our recovery. So let's dive in. Now, I first want to take a second to explain the energy behind all of this because it might help you shift your perspective a little bit about like where do we start, right? Because there's a lot of things we could do. Thankfully, there's a lot of strategies and tools that help to calm stress in our bodies and regulate the nervous system. I like to think of it in terms of fields. So we have our physical body, which is where we may be presenting disease or illness or challenge. And then we also have our energetic body, which is surrounding our physical body, right? It's like our energetic field. And you could think of this in a lot of different ways, but our nervous system is directly impacting our energetic field. Our emotions, our thoughts, our mindset is impacting our energetic field. And then, of course, everything we're surrounding ourselves by, the people in particular that we're surrounding ourselves with, is influencing our energetic field. Healing really begins in the energetic field and then goes deeper into the body. And it took me many years to figure this out because we were focusing so much on the physical without really addressing the energy, the energetics. And we kept hitting a wall in people's healing. I spoke about this a little bit last week with Tracy as well. So eventually I had my aha moment and realized, oh, we need to actually do this in the other direction. We need to help shift the energy. So then all the things we bring in to support the body can work better. And it's not, it's not constantly being pulled out of balance because the energy is out of balance. I hope that makes sense to you. Now, all three areas influence your energetic field. So nervous system, emotions, mindset, thoughts. So technically, you could start at any of those areas and begin to shift your energetic field, right? Begin to calm the stress response. I think the easiest place to start is really with the nervous system. Because as we calm stress, right? Remember, we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the month. When we are in a stressed state, we are in fight or flight survival mode. Yeah, this is our sympathetic state of the nervous system. And it serves a very important purpose for the short term. But we need to be able to, a good regulated nervous system can bounce out of sympathetic once the stress passes back into parasympathetic. That's the state where we rest, we repair, we heal, right? So when I say we want to calm the stress response or we want to regulate the nervous system, it's really about that. It's about giving our bodies balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic and not just staying in fight or flight. If we just stay in survival mode, we're not healing, we're not repairing, we're not optimizing our health in survival mode. So if we start with the nervous system, this could be very quick, you know, as simple as a couple of deep breaths or going outside in the sunshine. It doesn't take hours to do, it takes minutes and it immediately shifts the nervous system. It puts us back into a parasympathetic state. So this is what I want to share with you today are what are some of these tools that you literally can access in the moment to bring yourself back into a parasympathetic state? And you could do this multiple times over the day, right? As often as you need to, depending on what's going on with your day. Now, first step is to calm the stress response. And when we do this, okay, when we bring in calming exercises, that is going to shift us back into parasympathetic. It's going to lower cortisol, and it's also going to boost our feel-good hormones. So, first let me share what are some of the activities that do this. And then I want to talk a little bit more about these feel-good hormones because these are actually really important to the overall physiology of what we're trying to shift in the body. So, what are some great ways to like immediately calm the nervous system? I already alluded to a couple, but probably my favorite one, the one we use most often in our coaching program with our clients, the one we talk about the most, the one I personally use the most is nature and getting outside in the sunshine, around trees by water. Ideally, when the weather permits, touching the ground, bare feet, bare hands, or even like full body in a body of water, right? That is known as grounding, earthing. Being in, being next to the earth's energy resets your energy. It sinks it, right? So we have this like battery, basically, that we're living on that we forget to take advantage of. And as soon as we plug in, Dean spoke to this a bit during his episode, if you remember. When we plug in, we reset the nervous system. And it can take that can happen in as quickly as 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be a long time. So nature is my number one tool. Breath work is another really good one because it only takes literally a couple of, you know, deep, slow breaths. And you can feel that in your body, right? Your nervous system shifts. You go back into a grounded, calmer, more peaceful place. And there's a lot of different types of breath work you could explore, but just as a category, breath work is another one. Meditation is another one. And that could be, you know, whether that's guided meditation or even just your own meditation practices can shift, can calm the stress response and shift the nervous system back to a parasympathetic place. Anything that makes you feel good, right? So it doesn't have to be fancy. It could be a hot bath, it could be getting a massage, doing some gentle movement, stretching, yoga, all of that can work. We have a lot of plants that can help us too, adaptogens and nervings, and the plants work on our nervous system and allow a relaxation response. So a lot of ways. Okay, I gave you some to play with, but I want to speak a little bit about why this is so helpful. Besides moving us into the parasympathetic place and lowering cortisol, we are also releasing feel-good hormones. Specifically, we are releasing dopamine, which helps us feel pleasure and reward. We're releasing serotonin, which is known as our mood booster, right? It helps us feel joy and happiness, even in the midst of chaos or, you know, challenge. It helps us release endorphins. Endorphins release stress, endorphins reduce pain, endorphins boost our feelings of well-being. And it helps us release oxytocin, our love hormone, our the hormone that helps us feel relaxed. We just passed Valentine's Day, right? The day of love. We need more oxytocin flowing in our bodies. I remember first being exposed to oxytocin when I was breastfeeding my children and learning that while you're while the mother is breastfeeding, oxytocin levels are climbing high. And it's true, you feel like it is such a zen typically. You know, it depends on your environment. It's typically a very zen place to be when you're breastfeeding your baby, and that's because of the oxytocin. So let's talk about some activities that actually boost these hormones. So, how can we every day, you know, do activities or have practices in place that are naturally pushing these hormones up in our body? And what's really interesting here too is that when these hormones go up, of course, we feel better, right? We feel more calm, less anxious, less overwhelm, we feel more peace or happiness. We sleep better, there's less inflammation in the body, and actually we see a boost in immune activity as well. So when we feel good, we actually help our immune system work better. This is why I often refer to this as the missing piece to the plan. The piece of the puzzle that nobody is talking about is just how do we like feel good, right? How do we bring more pleasure and fun and joy and love into our life, not just because of the emotional benefit of that, because it's actually physically benefiting us, it's helping us heal and it's helping us stay healthy. So you're gonna see, you're gonna hear some overlaps here, okay? But here's just a quick list dopamine, the pleasure hormone. So obviously, sex, intimacy, orgasm is gonna boost dopamine levels. Being in nature, playing with pets, massage, exercise. Honestly, anything that makes you feel happy or makes you feel relaxed is gonna boost dopamine. Okay. Serotonin, that mood booster, the joy, the happiness hormone. Again, exercise is a good one. Massage is another one. So you're gonna hear some overlaps here, which is great because it only takes one or two activities and we can boost all four hormones. Being outside, sunshine, light. This is why in the winter, people naturally tend to have lower serotonin levels. Now, obviously, depending on where you live, but light therapy becomes really important, right? Having exposure to light, ideally, sunshine, is gonna boost serotonin. Meditation is gonna boost serotonin. Endorphins, so the hormones that help us reduce stress and pain and boost just our general feeling of well-being, again, exercise, okay? Again, sex and intimacy and orgasm. And I'm using it as a construct because, you know, when we when I say when I usually just say sex, you might think of that as like traditional with two people, but it doesn't always require a partner, okay? Like you we can make yourself orgasm and you're still gonna have those same benefits. Um, and it can also be intimacy, intimacy with a partner that is not necessarily that ends in sex. Okay. So all of those are gonna help boost those hormones. I want you to have a bandwidth here to play with. Acupuncture can boost endorphins, meditation, music, laughter. Again, we have being outside, sunshine, being in the light. Okay. These are all gonna boost endorphins and then oxytocin, that love hormone. Well, of course, again, sex and intimacy is gonna help with that. Breastfeeding if you have a baby and you're breastfeeding, but also the concept of just touch and hugging and cuddling that boosts oxytocin, right? And that doesn't have to be with a romantic partner. That could be with a friend, it could be with a child, it could be with a pet, or you could even just hug yourself, right? Just the act of hugging releases oxytocin. Massage, so get anything with touch is gonna help with oxytocin. Music again, exercise again. So you're getting a lot of themes here, right? If we're moving, if we're exercising, we're gonna boost all four of those hormones. If we're getting outside, we're getting in nature, we're getting in the sun, that's gonna boost pretty much almost all, except I guess oxytocin is with the exercise, but all the rest have a connection with nature or sunshine. Sex and intimacy and orgasms are also gonna boost all four of those. There's really just like a few, you know, few feel-good activities here that could automatically raise these hormones for you, calm your stress response, right? Regulate the nervous system. And that alone is gonna help shift the healing trajectory. Now, another piece I want to say. So that's like the first step is just addressing the nervous system. But then there's the emotions. So when I talked about that energy feedback loop, like the things that are influencing our energetic field, it's the nervous system state, but it's also the emotions that we're having and it's our mindset, our thoughts, our feelings. Now, emotions can get stuck in the body. And I talked about this quite a bit in that in our the first episode of this month. And we talked about it last week with Tracy as well. When we have difficult events happen in our life, sometimes we're just not in a place where we can really work through the challenging emotions and they can get stuck in the body. So, part of the work of opening up those energetic centers, opening up stuck emotions, getting it moving, like releasing suppressed emotions, for example. There are a lot of ways we can do this. Movement is one of the ways. So, exercise, dancing, jumping, shaking, you know, physically moving our body can help us move emotions. We can also move emotions very powerfully through crying, through laughter, through screaming. No, ideally not at someone. Okay, maybe in a pillow or something, or in the basement. Like a really intense release of any of those activities can move emotions. Also, a lot of different somatic therapies can be helpful here. Tapping is one that can also be helpful. Energy work, whether that's acupuncture, Reiki, osteopathy. We use a lot of different modalities like this inside of our coaching program. And actually, next week we're gonna have another special guest who's gonna come and talk about her own cancer journey, but also how her work or her experience rather with energy work was a big piece to her healing plan, so much so that she decided to become a Reiki practitioner as well as a sound practitioner. And then, and now she offers that to other people. So you're gonna learn more about that next week. Flower remedies is another one. So I talked about plant allies like adaptogens and nervings to help calm the stress response, to help calm the nervous system. But flower remedies are very interesting if you're not familiar with them already, because they actually work deeper in a more energetic way. And they're really working to restore emotional balance and emotional harmony. So without you really needing to do the therapy per se. And it doesn't mean you might not need both. You know, it's not necessarily a magic cure, but it can begin to shift those deeply rooted emotions without you really doing anything. It's just you taking the remedy. And this is one that we use often in our practice because it can be really helpful. Clients will often report how surprised they are at like the shifts it's making in their emotions and in their energy just by taking these little drops. And if you're curious, so to learn more, I'll come back to this in a second. But you know, being here on this podcast, we do offer support. We offer a coaching program to guide people through what we talk about on this podcast. And actually, in the spirit of the theme for this month of the nervous system, we are offering a free personalized flower remedy for anybody who joins our coaching program this month. So just to tell you how much I believe in it, it is like a free gift to all of our clients this month. So that is another one you could explore. Now, the last piece to the puzzle, okay? So we calmed the stress response, right? We boosted our feel-good hormones. We're starting to move emotions in whatever way is resonating with you most. You don't have to do everything I'm outlining. These are just to give you ideas, right? Even if you just did one or two things, that's fabulous. The final step is to help enhance emotional wellness, to enhance mindset, right? To shift our thoughts, our feelings, even our words, how we're speaking. So something I teach inside of our coaching program is what I call the emotional wellness scale. And it's a visual tool that actually shows you how the different emotions you have, how that ranks on a scale of low vibratory to very high vibratory. And when we're thinking about, you know, the vibration of healing, that is a very high vibratory state. So, what are the emotions that will help you hold that energy? Things like love and gratitude and empowerment, okay, joy, those are the things that are going to have the highest resonance. The lowest resonance is gonna be anger and fear and guilt. Okay, some of those suppressed emotions we were talking about before are gonna keep us in this very low vibratory state, which is not gonna help enhance it help us heal, right? Or stay healthy. So if we're aiming up here for this high vibratory emotion like love and joy and gratitude, having more fun, having more pleasure, right? Like these are all gonna help us move into that category. Having a gratitude practice, that's another one we use a lot with clients, can be very helpful in shifting your emotions. Having support, you know, not feeling alone, being in community, that is also gonna make a huge impact. So, in summary, I think there's a few overlaps here, right? Some practices or some tools that are gonna touch on all of the pieces we talked about today, on helping to calm the stress response, shift the nervous system into a parasympathetic state, move emotions, right? Enhance our emotional wellness, enhance our energetic vibe, if you will. Feeling loved, feeling supported, that is one of them that's gonna touch on all of the areas we've talked about, right? Doing things that bring you joy, that bring you pleasure is another one that's gonna touch on all of it. Exercise is gonna touch on all of those things. Being outside, being in nature, being in sunshine is going to touch on all of those things. And then, of course, you can dive deeper, right? And you can bring in very specific tools and strategies and test them out and see how they work for you. Some of them we shared today. Next week, Lauren's gonna share her story and we're gonna talk a little bit more about Reiki and sound healing. So other tools that you could bring in. But what's most important for you to hear, I hope, is that it doesn't take a lot of work, right? It does, it's not like you have to do an hour of meditation every day for this to work. You could, if that's your inclination, but literally you could just go for 10 minutes outside in the sunshine or next to a tree, and you're gonna get the same benefit. Okay, or similar benefit. Now, I also hope that really the take-home point here is that this is a very important piece to the healing plan. It is just as important as your treatment, it is just as important as your diet, as your lifestyle, as your supplements you're taking, right? Your fasting plan. It is just as important as all of those things. And maybe even more so because, like I said in the very beginning, it could shift how those other things are working in your body. The more we calm and expand our nervous system capacity, right? The more we actually have a container where we can do all these other things that are gonna help us heal and stay healthy. This is why inside of our coaching program, we start by calming the stress response. Now, it doesn't mean that you're also not getting, you know, food suggestions or tips to like get rid of the side effects you're experiencing right now. But equally like important at the first week is we need to help you calm the stress response. What's like the first easy thing we can bring in that's gonna start to shift that for you? It's gonna make a huge difference, not only in how you feel and how you're sleeping, but also in your recovery. I hope that's helpful. I hope you got a few ideas that you can start implementing today. I'd love to hear if you want to share what of those suggestions you're excited to bring in more of, or maybe even just like a little reminder of, oh yeah, I forgot that was so good for me. I'm excited to bring that back in again. And remember, if you are enjoying the content that we're covering here at the Ground Root Podcast, I would be so appreciative if you could help us spread the word by sharing, subscribing, leaving a review. We really appreciate your support and helping this information get into the ears of as many people as possible. I wish you such a beautiful day, a calm and peaceful day, at least with like moments, right? Moments of calm and peace. And I look forward to connecting with you again on next week's episode. Bye for now.