When I talk to people who have chronic health issues as well as sensitivities, they want to know whether dealing with their sensitivities should be a priority. I understand the confusion, because so often our attention is on much more pressing symptoms and conditions.

They may be having digestive issues, nutrient deficiencies, problems with detoxification, immune dysfunction, thyroid problems, autoimmunity, infertility, cancer, or any number of health problems. And sensitivities don't really rate as their biggest issue.

And, yet, in many cases it is. That's because people with multiple sensitivities are stuck in a stress response that is slowing their recovery and in some cases stopping it altogether.

Why is that? When your body is in an extended stress response all restorative functions of the body are put on hold. All of them. This is by design, because for our ancestors stressors were short-lived and often life-threatening so it was adaptive to sacrifice all bodily maintenance to escape the lion and live.

In our modern lives however, stressors are much more prevalent and longstanding. And if you have multiple sensitivities, by definition you have a daily subconscious source of stress that is interfering with your ability to heal. 

What kind of interference? Well, literally everything you need to be well: digestion, nutrient uptake, energy production, immune function, fluid balance, detoxification and elimination, hormonal balance, neurotransmitter production, wound healing, and more. 

So, eliminating your sensitivities can be the key to accelerating your recovery.

How do I know this? Because it happened to me. 

As a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) I had applied everything I knew about functional nutrition to myself: hydration, nutrient dense whole foods diet, handfuls of supplements. And yet I was very underweight, prone to irritable bowel, had an extremely low threshold for stress, memory issues, irregular sleep, and a dysregulated immune system. I was doing everything right--exercise, diet, supplements, probiotics, meditation--and could not understand why my health was still so poor.

Visits to functional medicine practitioners (and expensive lab tests) found root causes: adrenal fatigue, high mold counts, high heavy metal counts, chronic Lyme. My gut microbiome was extremely unbalanced, IgG testing showed that I was becoming sensitive to everything in my very limited diet, and cortisol levels were low.

However, I didn't follow up on their recommendations for treatment because my intuition told me that these “root causes” were evidence of something deeper. A common root cause underlying these root causes, if you will.

Of course, I was aware that I had multiple sensitivities to foods, chemicals, environmental irritants, medications, bee stings, and even silicone, and that more cropped up with every passing year, but I didn't see a connection with my health problems. I thought that taking precautions to avoid the many things I was sensitive to was essential for my health.

Around that time, as luck would have it, I was working with a large client base of people with sensitivities and they pushed me to learn about sensitivity elimination techniques. My training was based on avoidance, like most functional practitioners, but my some of clients were not satisfied with avoidance. At the time I thought they just lacked discipline. But I listened.

In order to satisfy them, I learned and tested many, many allergy and sensitivity elimination techniques and found that the best ones worked with the brain.

Imagine my surprise as my various health issues evaporated as I retrained my brain to tolerate the things I had become sensitive to. This happened very quickly and without doing anything else--after years of trying everything!

Now I'm just healthy. I eat whatever I want, and I don't take any supplements, vitamins or medications. 

Doesn't that sound nice? Do you remember when being healthy was easy? When you didn't have to think about health, you just had it? Well, that's how it is for me now.

As Nutritional Therapy Practitioners, we are taught that the body has an innate ability to heal itself. This is true. But what I learned through this experience is that it cannot do so in the face of a perpetual stress response, which is what happens when you are sensitive to everyday things like food, the air you breathe, and the environment you live in.

If there is one thing I want you to understand from all this, it's that being stuck in a stress response is a non-starter to healing. And resolving your sensitivities could be the first step to accelerating the healing process.

Learn More

• To hear more about my story and my work with Sensitivites, listen to episode 38 of the Flourish with Neural Retraining podcast: MAP for Sensitivities.
• Learn more about the  MAP for Sensitivities Program, and watch the explanatory video: How Does Retraining the Brain Resolve Sensitivities?
• Learn more about the MAP Method of advanced neural retraining.
• Listen to a podcast episode with  my client, Geri, and hear about her experience with the Program: Episode 57: MAP for Food and Chemical Sensitivities.