I was 26 years old when my body failed me for the first time. ... VIEW POST
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How I Healed from Chronic Illness After a Decade
After the Tick Bite: What are your next steps?
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and this information should not be considered medical advice. This post is for informational purposes only; you should seek the advice of your own medical professional for your own situation. The weather has been beautiful the past several weeks, which means that we have been outside a great deal. Being outside is great for our health; ... VIEW POST
Tick Safety Tips for Hiking
Lyme disease is a terrifying disease, and it's reaching epidemic proportions. The stories that we see everywhere are enough to make anybody weary of spending time outdoors in the woods. I know that when I was first diagnosed, it took me a long time (years, in fact) to be comfortable going on hikes again. But with a few tick safety tips, it makes hiking fun and enjoyable again. ... VIEW POST
🌺We all have a window of tolerance, where we are essentially in our comfort zone and know what to expect, and therefore know how our body and nervous system will react.
🌺When pushed outside of our window of tolerance, that is when we experience symptoms of discomfort, whether they are anxiety, panic attacks, disassociating, etc.
🌺So what do we do? Obviously, we try to stay in our window of tolerance. This helps us to become predictable, safe, and small. However, it doesn’t stop here.
🌺Constantly staying in our window of tolerance often keeps shrinking our window so we can tolerate less and less. We end up in a prison of our own making. A tiny cell, which we cannot leave, or we will suffer the punishment of nervous system hyper arousal.
🌺What is the solution to this? At the risk of oversimplifying because I only have so much space- pushing our comfort zones. Expanding our window of tolerance. Getting comfy with being uncomfy!
🌺 Follow @stef_ganong if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
Over the last year and a half I have made a lot of changes. These habits are great and really help keep me mellowed out as I continue to regulate my nervous system and retrain my brain.
1️⃣ Journaling- whether it’s gratitude, working through things that bother me, praying, or journaling my future visualizations, I journal Every. Single. Day. This is huge in helping to rewire the brain to accept circumstances other than where you are currently sitting.
2️⃣ Focus on healthy breathing and posture- when we are stressed and living in fight/flight/freeze, our breathing is impaired. If you pay attention to your breathing, you’ll likely notice that you’re doing things like shallow chest breathing, holding your breath, breathing too quickly… on top of that, we get a rounded, hunched posture which makes it harder to breathe correctly. I love breathwork videos and Block Therapy for fixing posture and breath.
3️⃣ Spend time outdoors - nature is so grounding for our nervous system, and there’s so many beneficial aspects of it. The sunlight is wonderful for regulating our circadian rhythm, walking barefoot helps with grounding and inflammation, and the fresh air is so good for us. Being in nature just feels so calming, which is a great help for chilling the nervous system.
4️⃣ Driving and singing- singing out loud really helps with vagal nerve toning. It also sends messages of safety to your brain to let you know that you’re not in danger. I absolutely love singing while driving with windows down, hair blowing, and getting lost in a song.
5️⃣ Snuggling with animals (or people) helps increase oxytocin which makes our moods elevate. I believe that community is such an important part of our healing journey, and that we should feel touch often in order to get those feelings in.
Follow @stef_ganong if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
Do you feel your emotions? Or do you avoid them?
Most of us are in the habit of avoiding them. It’s uncomfortable to feel things that are painful, so it’s normal that we preoccupy ourselves so that we don’t feel things.
But what you don’t feel, you don’t heal from.
Healing means feeling.
We don’t like to feel uncomfortable things. Honestly, most of us are in the habit of shoving them deep down without even acknowledging them.
But when feelings and emotions are left unprocessed, they build up in the body, causing tension, illness, and dysfunction.
But here’s the thing. The best way through whatever you’re going through- it’s straight through it. Not backtracking, not going around, not pretending like it’s not happening.
Feel the grief, the pain, and the discomfort. Process it. Take your time. And then when it’s ready, let it go.
Follow my account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
Quote by @gabormatemd
Long story short- living in fear, in fight/flight/freeze, will not allow you to heal.
Why not? The body doesn’t heal in fight/flight. At that point, the goal is survival. Your subconscious thinks you’re in danger because you’re so stressed about all these things in your life.
Here’s the thing- the symptoms are supposed to be there. The body isn’t making a mistake. It is responding appropriately to the fear-based input that it’s getting. It’s preparing to run from a tiger.
The issue comes in when it lives in fight/flight/freeze because you never give it the signal that you’re safe.
Your subconscious needs to know you’re safe. In order to do that, you have to show it that you’re not living in fear of everything around you.
Once your nervous system switches into rest & digest, then the healing will begin. Not before.
Follow @stef_ganong if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
I tried everything to heal, but continued to get worse… so I finally started focusing on nervous system and subconscious work.
The more I learned, the more I began to trust my body, the more I realized it wasn’t broken. It was protecting me. It never stopped fighting for me, even when I was fighting it.
The more I trusted my body the less I feared symptoms. I knew they were just messages that I had more work to do.
The less I feared my symptoms, the less they showed up. I stopped getting flares, I started getting energy again, and my life began to feel normal.
The more I learned to work with my body, the better I felt, and the better my body worked.
Then I began noticing which situations caused symptoms. I was finally listening to my body. It told me where I needed to have conversations, set boundaries, and start standing up for myself.
It told me where I was abandoning myself in order to please others. And it told me what needed to stop, or it was going to stop it for the both of us.
I realized I was no longer a victim to my circumstances. I was no longer powerless to suffer. I could make changes. And it changed my life.
My body and mind are brilliant and strong. They know exactly what they are doing. And they need love and compassion instead of anger and frustration.
Yours works the same way, you just have to learn to speak its language. 💛
Follow @stef_ganong if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, or schedule a 1:1 session for those looking for help with a breakthrough!
Drop a 💛 if you are needing to see things shift from fear to curiosity
#brainretraining #mindbodyconnection #nervoussystemregulation
🌻My nervous system used to be so hyper vigilant that the thought of doing anything new would have sent me into a panic spiral.
🌻You see, our subconscious wants to keep us alive. Thats its only job. So once it has been shown that things are unsafe, it will cause discomfort in your body (like anxiety and panic attacks) to reinforce its stance that these things you are doing are indeed not safe. Even if it’s just going to a new grocery store. All the subconscious sees is new=danger.
🌻In order to get to the other side of this, we have to take the position of showing our subconscious that these things are safe, and that it is mistaken.
🌻I used to not be able to drive at all without having panic attacks. Then when I started driving again, I would have panic attacks at a certain bridge and would have to plan my route with extra time so I could go out of my way to avoid it.
🌻It took a lot of intentional practice of me actually making the drive over that bridge before my body calmed down and decided it wasn’t a big deal anymore. And sometimes it still tries to creep back up! But brain retraining and nervous system regulation gave me my life back.
🌻 Follow @stef_ganong if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
Audio: @hawkmotivationig
Perfectionism is a poison.
It’s a lie that lives in your subconscious that tells you that nobody will accept you as you are, and that you need to be better.
You need to try harder. You need to be different. You need to do what they expect of you. If you don’t, you’ll be rejected.
You can’t say no. It’s rude to say no. It’s not ladylike. It’s not polite. It won’t make you any friends. They won’t want to be your friend if you say no.
But you really want to say no. You’re uncomfortable. You’re tired. You’re too busy. You really can’t do it.
But you say yes, because you also need to feel loved. You need to feel approved of. You need to feel like people like you.
We all have perfectionist tendencies in some way. At some point in our lives, we developed this trait in order to protect ourselves so we wouldn’t be rejected. Being rejected is unsafe to the survival brain. And all it wants is for us to be safe.
So we abandon ourselves in order to please others because it’s terrifying to think of being unliked. Unloved. Rejected. Left out.
But what if you weren’t any of those things? What if you were just trying to fit in somewhere you don’t belong? What if there is a better space out there for you to fit into exactly as you are? Can you love yourself first and give yourself the approval that you are desiring from other people? This is the key that provides your freedom.
Follow my account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
Perfectionism is a poison.
It’s a lie that lives in your subconscious that tells you that nobody will accept you as you are, and that you need to be better.
You need to try harder. You need to be different. You need to do what they expect of you. If you don’t, you’ll be rejected.
You can’t say no. It’s rude to say no. It’s not ladylike. It’s not polite. It won’t make you any friends. They won’t want to be your friend if you say no.
But you really want to say no. You’re uncomfortable. You’re tired. You’re too busy. You really can’t do it.
But you say yes, because you also need to feel loved. You need to feel approved of. You need to feel like people like you.
We all have perfectionist tendencies in some way. At some point in our lives, we developed this trait in order to protect ourselves so we wouldn’t be rejected. Being rejected is unsafe to the survival brain. And all it wants is for us to be safe.
So we abandon ourselves in order to please others because it’s terrifying to think of being unliked. Unloved. Rejected. Left out.
But what if you weren’t any of those things? What if you were just trying to fit in somewhere you don’t belong? What if there is a better space out there for you to fit into exactly as you are? Can you love yourself first and give yourself the approval that you are desiring from other people? This is the key that provides your freedom.
Follow my account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
I was sick more days than not.
I had a multitude of diagnoses, ranging from autoimmune to autonomic, pathogenic to toxicity.
I had crippling anxiety and panic attacks because I felt unsafe constantly.
I was mostly bed bound because that was where my symptoms were tolerable- because it was my safe zone.
I stopped driving because I kept having panic attacks behind the wheel.
I avoided public places and social gatherings because I was too anxious.
I stopped living my life. I was just existing, in this shell of a person that I used to be.
I got tired of it. I was tired of missing out on my life. I was tired of saying “no”. I was tired of being so sad. I was tired of going to bed full of regrets.
So I decided to make a change. I wanted to embody joy, so I started being joyful, EVEN IF I didnt feel like it.
I wanted to be involved in my family’s activities, so I started saying yes, EVEN IF I felt sick.
I wanted to laugh and have fun, so I started going places and doing things, EVEN IF I was anxious.
Do you know what happened?
The symptoms slowly started disappearing, as my life came back.
So now I’m not only joyfully living again, but I’m also less symptomatic!
Follow this account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
What if we believed symptoms were messages, not things that were happening to us that we have no control over?
What if we looked inside at what may be triggering our body to need to communicate with us?
What are we doing in our lives that is not in alignment with what we should be doing? Where are we doing too much? Where have we abandoned ourselves? Where are we people pleasing?
Sometimes symptoms have to get loud because we ignore them otherwise.
Maybe our bodies need our trust instead of our criticism.
All I know is that once I learned to trust and surrender, things began to calm down. Clear up. Make sense. And I want to help you find the same peace in surrender 💛
Follow along to learn more about how to listen to what your body is saying!
🌿Maybe our bodies aren’t broken.
🌿Maybe they don’t need endless treatments and supplements and protocols.
🌿Maybe they are doing what they need to do and we are the ones interpreting it wrong.
🌿Maybe our symptoms are messages and not something to fear.
🌿Maybe we are getting in the way instead of helping it along.
🌿Maybe our bodies need our trust instead of our criticism.
🌿All I know is that once I learned to trust and surrender, things began to calm down. Clear up. Make sense. And I want to help you find the same peace in surrender 💛
🌿
👉🏼 Anyone with a history of chronic illness knows exactly what I’m talking about. We start off with scary and unexplained symptoms, and then get another spike of fear as we face life with a disease that has a name.
👉🏼We are told to eliminate gluten. Dairy. Nightshades. Do an elimination diet. Buy a new device. Take more supplements.
👉🏼We start viewing our body as broken, that we need to fix it. Our nervous system is getting the message over and over again that symptoms are a threat, gluten is a threat, dairy is a threat, nightshades are a threat. We end up with a big list of threats for our subconscious to be watching out for. Its main job is survival, after all.
👉🏼So then you subconsciously make an enemy out of what you’ve eliminated. Your system stays ramped up in search of these threats day and night. Sleep issues start, symptoms increase, so we start looking for “what else?” Add them to the threat list!
👉🏼I am not saying that these things aren’t harmful, of course they can be- I’m saying that living in fear of them is often creating more problems than they are! Every time we add something else to this list of things to fear, we amplify the hyper-vigilance and before we know it, we are living in a world of fear. Everything is dangerous. Everything is out to get us. And the symptoms just continue to amplify and evolve.
👉🏼Our subconscious is convinced that our life is in danger 24/7 and we start this incredibly harmful cycle of chronic stress and fear. I am guilty of falling prey to this too, but I have learned so much from my mistakes!
👉🏼Making big changes like this WITHOUT addressing the nervous system and its fight/flight/freeze FIRST is just asking for more stress. The biggest problem is not the “thing”, it’s the nervous system seeing the “thing” as a threat.
👉🏼Follow this account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, or schedule a 1:1 with me in my bio! @stef_ganong
🌻You can’t control other people. You can’t make them like you. You can’t make them act the way you want. You can’t make them want to grow or change or heal.
🌻You can’t control the external circumstances of your life. You can’t control illnesses or injuries or symptoms. You can’t change the past and you can’t predict the future.
🌻So what can we control? Our thoughts. Our perceptions. Our growth. Our decisions. Everything else, let it go. We aren’t controlling it, and the continual attempt is keeping us in fight/flight/freeze because our subconscious feels like it’s unsafe.
🌻My urgency to heal created feelings of fear and danger to my subconscious. Which made my symptoms worse because my nervous system was overreacting to everything. Because I was telling it we weren’t safe.
🌻Has pushing for healing ever made anything happen faster? Can stressing out and doing too much heal a broken bone quicker? Why do we think we can manipulate our bodies when it comes to chronic illness?
🌻Our bodies are way smarter than we give them credit for. What if we let them do their job, stopped freaking out about every symptom, and instead decided to live life regardless of how we felt?
🌻Follow this account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, or schedule a 1:1 with me in my bio! @stef_ganong
Think of it from a prehistoric perspective. A caveman is out hunting and he runs into a tiger. His instinct (subconscious survival brain) kicks in and he runs. This is classic fight or flight, and he flees.
Any injury remains injured. Adrenaline levels increase to allow him to ignore pain. Any food in his stomach will just sit there, not digesting. His bowels will not move. All blood and energy redirects to focus on outrunning the danger.
But when he stops, what happens? His nervous system is signaled that the threat is gone. It can move into a place of safety.
Adrenaline wears off and he feels the pain. Digestion starts moving again. Redirected blood and energy return to homeostasis and healing kicks in.
What if the stressed out state of your modern world is keeping you in either fight/flight/freeze? What if the way you have learned to view your environment is constantly signaling your subconscious survival brain that you are not safe?
The notification of an email, the alert of a text message, the ringing of our phone. Driving to a job we don’t love. Listening to the kids fight yet again. Rushing because we are late to an appointment. Someone cutting us off in traffic.
All of these will trigger our survival brain if we aren’t intentionally rewiring it and sending it safety messages on the regular. How have you noticed this in your life?
Follow this account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
🌺We all have a window of tolerance, where we are essentially in our comfort zone and know what to expect, and therefore know how our body and nervous system will react.
🌺When pushed outside of our window of tolerance, that is when we experience symptoms of discomfort, whether they are anxiety, panic attacks, disassociating, etc. Or in my case, awkward behavior and oversharing.
🌺So what do we do? Obviously, we try to stay in our window of tolerance. This helps us to become predictable, safe, and small. However, it doesn’t stop here.
🌺Constantly staying in our window of tolerance often keeps shrinking our window so we can tolerate less and less. We end up in a prison of our own making. A tiny cell, which we cannot leave, or we will suffer the punishment of nervous system hyper arousal.
🌺What is the solution to this? At the risk of oversimplifying because I only have so much space- pushing our comfort zones. Expanding our window of tolerance. Getting comfy with being uncomfy!
🌺 Follow my account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
💁🏻♀️When my coach said this to me, it was mind blowing, because those of us with a history of chronic illness know that controlling all the things makes us feel safe.
💁🏻♀️The truth is, control does not mean safety. Control means manipulation and stress, but it does not mean safety. Because we can’t control everything. We can’t even control a few things. We can control us, and that’s it.
💁🏻♀️Our nervous system needs to feel safe in order to heal, and we are so used to fearing anything and everything in our environment that it rarely has an opportunity to feel safe.
💁🏻♀️So we turn to control instead of focusing on calming the nervous system. We think “if I can just eliminate this food/chemical/etc., I’ll be safe” and that’s not going to work. Because the issue isn’t that “thing”, the issue is the hyper-vigilance keeping the nervous system in fight/flight/freeze.
💁🏻♀️The subconscious mind needs to feel safe, and in order to give it safety, we need to learn to trust ourselves. To trust our bodies. To stop fighting against the messages (symptoms) that they are giving us. To trust that maybe our bodies really do know what they are doing, and that we are the ones making a mess of things with our brains. Control and trust do not exist together. So this means letting go of the control that we never had anyways, and learning to surrender.
The subconscious wants to keep you alive, period.
Survival is the one and only goal of the subconscious mind. It doesn’t care about what you want, it cares about what you need.
So many of us who have struggled with chronic illness have ended up with food sensitivities.
Often times, we have to limit a lot of what we are eating in order to remain comfortable. So what do I mean when I say the food isn’t the issue?
So when you start having chronic symptoms, your nervous system is in fight/flight/freeze and your subconscious perceives that you are in danger. It is going to carefully catalog things in your environment in an attempt to identify the “threat”.
Maybe you are eating a sandwich when you are fired from your job. The subconscious just knows the extreme stress you are feeling = danger. It does not understand the exact cause.
So the bread = danger. Maybe the location of the work building also = danger. The rain outside = danger. You end up with multiple triggers now that make your nervous system feel unsafe because it reminds your subconscious of the extreme stress you felt when getting fired.
So while eliminating the foods that cause symptoms can help temporarily, who wants to live with such a restricted diet? Addressing the subconscious beliefs and changing them removes the “threat”, which allows you to eat the foods again.
I no longer have food sensitivities. I had Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and I no longer have histamine responses to ANYTHING. This is how powerful our nervous system is.
Now of course nutrition plays a role. We shouldn’t be eating primarily things that can’t support our body. However, finding your balance is the key.
Follow my account if you want to learn more about calming the nervous system, rewiring the subconscious, and healing chronic illness!
🌻My nervous system used to be so hyper vigilant that the thought of doing anything new would have sent me into a panic spiral.
🌻You see, our subconscious wants to keep us alive. Thats its only job. So once it has been shown that things are unsafe, it will cause discomfort in your body (like anxiety and panic attacks) to reinforce its stance that these things you are doing are indeed not safe. Even if it’s just going to a new grocery store. All the subconscious sees is new=danger.
🌻In order to get to the other side of this, we have to take the position of showing our subconscious that these things are safe, and that it is mistaken.
🌻I used to not be able to drive at all without having panic attacks. Then when I started driving again, I would have panic attacks at a certain bridge and would have to plan my route with extra time so I could go out of my way to avoid it.
🌻It took a lot of intentional practice of me actually making the drive over that bridge before my body calmed down and decided it wasn’t a big deal anymore. And sometimes it still tries to creep back up! But brain retraining and nervous system regulation gave me my life back.
🌻 Follow my account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness, and book a 1:1 session for help with a breakthrough!
I tried everything to heal, but continued to get worse… so I finally started focusing on nervous system and subconscious work.
The more I learned, the more I began to trust my body, the more I realized it wasn’t broken. It was protecting me. It never stopped fighting for me, even when I was fighting it.
The more I trusted my body the less I feared symptoms. I knew they were just messages that I had more work to do.
The less I feared my symptoms, the less they showed up. I stopped getting flares, I started getting energy again, and my life began to feel normal.
The more I learned to work with my body, the better I felt, and the better my body worked.
I shed all of the diagnoses because I no longer wanted to be identified by them.
I no longer have the symptoms of all the labels that doctors and practitioners put on me. I was no longer a victim to my circumstances. I was no longer powerless to suffer.
My body and mind are brilliant and strong. They know exactly what they are doing. And they need love and compassion instead of anger and frustration.
Yours works the same way, you just have to learn to speak its language. 💛
Follow this account if you want to continue to get nervous system balancing tips for healing chronic illness! I also offer 1:1 sessions for those looking for help with a breakthrough!