From Daycare to Ozempic to Chronic Disease by way of Autonomic Dysfunction

A little understood or addressed root cause driving much chronic disease and preventing lasting deep healing

Most modern chronic disease is “multifactorial”, not just at a physical level, but with major mental, emotional and social contributors.

In our experience people with serious chronic disease often easily improve by 90-95% within months with sustained dietary changes, personalized detox and treatment protocols and other lifestyle measures like getting better sleep, 20 minutes a day of breathwork, etc.

Many are satisfied with this level of improvement, but the last 5-10% of complete resolution is where people find they can most completely normalize their maintenance phase, meaning they are not only free of symptoms, but can reintroduce most foods that were previously triggers, and they are more resilient to stressors.

It’s also expected that this deeper healing that leads to full resolution will prevent progression of the disease and other diseases of aging developing later, and lead to fuller, healthier, longer lives. It’s also at this stage that people unlock personal progress and find deeper meaning in their lives.

To get there and resolve the last bits of lingering illness in a robust way usually requires working on deeper thought patterns, harmful beliefs, negative emotional responses, and social conflicts, e.g. with spouses, children and/or parents.

What these have in common is that they all create deep sources of profound stress on the nervous system and create autonomic dysfunction, or an imbalance in the ying yang of sympathetic vs parasympathetic tone. This imbalance then suffuses every organ and affects every cell, either directly via nerve fibers or indirectly via blood borne hormones.

A major source of nervous system dysfunction can be traced back to the first 3 years of life when babies can’t regulate their own nervous systems and depend on their mothers to do it for them.

Babies in daycare have measurably higher salivary cortisol levels, a marker of stress and they have been shown to suffer more from anxiety and depression as they hit their teens.

Socially they are more likely to develop dysfunctional patterns of interaction with their loved ones, including their future spouses. This stems from how they learned to deal with the stress of what they perceived as abandonment as children - either withdrawing emotionally from their mothers, or becoming very clingy and trying to prevent them from leaving them every day, or cycling between those extremes with no fixed coping mechanism.

Basically the first 3 years of life are when someone develops a deep sense that the world is a safe place, or they don’t.

Similarly with breastfeeding, babies either learn that there is more to human nourishment than just filling up their stomachs, or they don’t.

I was in daycare for a year or two and I don’t blame my mother, it’s not an insurmountable problem to correct the dysfunction it may cause, but it can be a huge problem if you aren’t even aware of it to begin with.

I know people who can’t seem to have a healthy relationship with another person and they don’t understand why.

Simply knowing a problem is possible is important in monitoring for it or coming up with mitigation strategies. And understanding the possible cause of an established problem is the first step in solving it.

Since we aren’t widgets that all respond exactly the same way to early life stressors, some of us won’t be as negatively affected by daycare or lack of breastfeeding as others. And some of us may not have such deep psycho-social roots to our chronic conditions, but for the most part every patient we see has something stemming from a deeper level that is involved in their chronic disease process.

The disease is like a message from deep within inviting a person to address long ignored ways of thinking, feeling, and being with themselves and others.

Many problems spontaneously resolve when chronic nervous system imbalances are addressed.

For example many people nowadays inhale their food as if they’re starving, which may come from trying to fill an emotional emptiness with food. Speed eating leads to satiety hormones not being triggered as well. including Nature’s own version of Ozempic made in our own gut.

Just forcing yourself to slow down can eventually lead to a new habit of eating slowly and naturally losing excess weight, but what’s more important is to reassure our nervous system and retrain ourselves to fix the deeper drivers of the anxiety manifesting as a need to rush things.