Is Your Stress Switch Stuck?
Why Your Body’s Stress Response is Stuck—and the Surprising Science to Set it Free
The Unseen Enemy: How Stress is Silently Shaping Your Life
Imagine your body as a high-tech satellite, scanning the universe of your life for signs of danger. Every challenge you face—whether it’s a tough deadline, an argument, or just the daily grind—gets registered as a signal. Your body’s mission? Decode these signals and respond to keep you safe, balanced, and healthy.
But what happens when those signals never stop? When danger feels like it’s always lurking, your body can’t distinguish between minor inconveniences and life-threatening emergencies. This is when stress, the unseen enemy, begins to sabotage your health in ways you might not even realize.
The Two Roads of Stress: Eustress vs. Distress
Stress isn’t inherently bad. The right kind of stress—what scientists call eustress—can actually make you stronger. This is the stress that pushes you out of your comfort zone to grow, like lifting weights that are heavy enough to build muscle but not so heavy that they cause injury. Eustress propels you toward your goals, boosts your metabolism, and enhances your resilience.
But there’s another road stress can take—one that leads to chronic distress. This is the stress that lingers, festers, and eventually overwhelms your system. Imagine being on the African savannah, spotting a lion in the distance. If you escape to safety, your body adapts and becomes stronger for the next encounter. But if you’re stuck on that savannah, always looking over your shoulder, never able to fully relax, your body enters survival mode. This is where the real damage begins.
When Stress Becomes Distress: The Metabolism’s Downward Spiral
In survival mode, your metabolism shifts gears. Instead of using stress to build strength and resilience, your body starts to break down. It’s as if your internal satellite is stuck in a loop, constantly broadcasting signals of danger without the ability to reset. This constant state of alert exhausts your energy reserves, disrupts your hormones, damages your nervous system, and can even lead to chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders.
Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and PTSD shows us that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—your body’s central stress response system—can get stuck in overdrive or shut down entirely when exposed to relentless stress. When this happens, your body is no longer a finely-tuned satellite but a ship lost in a storm, unable to find its way back to calm waters.
The Hidden Impact: Striving, Struggle, and Shock
When your body is stuck in survival mode, it moves through three stages: striving, struggle, and shock.
Striving Mode: This is where you’re running on the treadmill of life, constantly pushing yourself without making real progress. It’s the endless hustle that leaves you feeling drained but never fulfilled. Picture the Type A businessperson who’s addicted to the grind, always chasing the next goal but never feeling satisfied.
Struggle Mode: Here, stress has taken a deeper hold. You feel trapped, like you’re caught in a web with no way out. You’re overwhelmed, anxious, and starting to lose hope. This might look like someone who’s constantly worried, suffering from anxiety attacks, fragmented sleep, and physical symptoms that signal deeper dysfunction.
Shock Mode: This is the final stage, where stress overwhelms your system entirely. Your body freezes, unable to respond. You might feel numb, detached, or completely burned out. This is where chronic unrelenting stress or a severe traumatic event pushes the body into a state of shock, leading to disease and dysfunction.
The danger is that your metabolism can get stuck in any of these states. And once stuck, it’s hard to break free. But here’s the good news: It’s not impossible.
Rewiring Your Stress Response: The Next Level Human Approach
So how do you reset your internal satellite? How do you shift from survival mode back to thriving mode? The answer lies in understanding that your metabolism is far more than just a calorie-burning machine—it’s a complex, stress-sensing system designed to keep you alive and well. But here’s the kicker: most of the methods you’ve been told will help—like diet changes, exercise, supplements, and even advanced gut protocols—are like trying to change a tire with a pencil. They don’t even begin to address the root cause of your stuck stress response.
The Inadequacy of Conventional Approaches
When it comes to managing stress and its impact on your metabolism, many doctors, including functional medicine practitioners, focus on surface-level interventions. They’ll recommend gut protocols, adaptogens, dietary changes, and exercise routines—all of which can be beneficial to a degree. However, these approaches don’t touch the real problem: the stories, beliefs, and emotional patterns that have wired your stress response into a chronic state of distress.
Think of your stress response as a deeply ingrained habit—a set of neural pathways in your brain that have been reinforced over time. These pathways are like well-worn trails in the woods; the more you walk them, the deeper they get, and the harder they are to change. Conventional treatments focus on symptoms—like the foliage on those trails—trimming it back without ever addressing the deep ruts beneath.
Why Gut Protocols and Supplements Fall Short
Gut protocols, dietary adjustments, and supplements are often prescribed to regulate stress by balancing hormones, reducing inflammation, or improving gut health. But these are like using a band-aid for a bullet wound. They may provide temporary relief, but they don’t address the underlying issue: the Misguided Unconscious Decisions (MUD) that have programmed your nervous system to respond to life as if it’s under constant threat.
These interventions might make you feel better momentarily, but they don’t rewire the emotional system or rewrite the stories that keep you stuck in survival mode. It’s like trying to install a new operating system on a computer without first wiping the hard drive clean of the old, corrupted software.
The Real Solution: Rewrite, Rewire, and Retrain
The real solution involves a three-step process: rewriting the underlying stories, rewiring the emotional holding patterns, and retraining the nervous system.
Rewrite the Underlying Stories: At the core of your stress response are the unconscious stories and beliefs formed during moments of struggle, usually when you lacked the maturity, tools, or wisdom to cope effectively. These stories, which may have served you once, are now outdated and keep you stuck in a loop of chronic stress. To truly heal, you need to identify and rewrite these narratives, turning them from disempowering to empowering.
Rewire the Emotional Holding Patterns: These stories are not just mental; they are deeply emotional, tied to your body’s physical responses. Techniques like Breath Enhanced Emotional Processing (BEEP) allow you to engage with and rewire these patterns by safely processing the emotions that are tethered to these stories. This rewiring is crucial because your nervous system will continue to react as if the old stories are true until it’s given a new pattern to follow.
Retrain the Nervous System: This is where most approaches fail. Gut protocols, supplements, and even advanced medical interventions don’t retrain your nervous system—they only try to manage its symptoms. Real transformation happens when you actively retrain your nervous system through practices that integrate physical, emotional, and mental aspects. This involves consistent work with tools like mindfulness, meditation, and BEEP, which can create new, healthier neural pathways and responses to stress.
The Path Forward: From Surviving to Thriving
Understanding that stress is not just about what’s happening around you but about how your body has been conditioned to respond is the key to unlocking real, lasting change. By focusing on rewriting the stories, rewiring the emotional patterns, and retraining your nervous system, you can break free from survival mode and start living a life where stress is a tool for growth, not destruction.
Remember, using supplements and protocols without addressing the deeper issues is like trying to change your tire with a pencil. It’s the completely wrong tool for the job. The power to change lies in your ability to rewrite, rewire, and retrain—and that’s where true healing begins. 🌟
Ready to Rewire Your Stress Response?
If you’re ready to take the next step in transforming how your body handles stress, I invite you to access the BEEP (Breath Enhanced Emotional Processing) program here. This powerful tool is designed to help you rewire those deep emotional patterns that keep you stuck.
For those looking to dive deeper into this work and truly elevate their lives, consider joining the Next Level Human Coaching program. Our coaches are here to guide you through the process of rewriting your stories, retraining your nervous system, and stepping into your full potential. Learn more and start your journey here.
To your next level,
Dr. Jade Teta
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