When Your Nervous System Has Been Stuck in Survival Mode
Understanding fatigue, brain fog, insomnia, dysautonomia, and HPA axis dysregulation through a trauma-informed lens.
A therapist’s personal story of chronic illness, nervous system dysregulation, and healing.
If you've found your way here, there's a good chance you've spent a lot of time feeling like your body is working against you. Exhausted in a way sleep doesn't fix. Brain fog so thick it's hard to form a sentence, let alone do your job. A nervous system that seems stuck on high alert even when life on paper looks fine. I know that experience — not from a textbook, but from the inside.
WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO ME
For several years, I was someone who could barely function. I was dealing with debilitating fatigue, insomnia that felt almost cruel in its persistence, and brain fog that made it genuinely hard to think clearly enough to see clients. My weight kept creeping up no matter what I did, and every time I tried to address it, I'd trigger a cascade of symptoms that made things worse.
But the thing that alarmed me most — and that no one could explain — was the hot flashes. I was in my early 30s. My labs were normal. My doctors had nothing for me. And yet I was waking up drenched in sweat, cycling through temperature dysregulation throughout the day, dealing with cycles that had become completely unpredictable. For years. It felt like my body was going through something no one around me had language for, and I was supposed to just keep going.
Normal labs don't mean nothing is wrong. They often mean the problem is upstream — in the systems that regulate everything else. Eventually I did get some answers. A celiac diagnosis helped explain why my gut and immune system had been in such a state of chronic alarm. I had food reactivity that seemed to come out of nowhere — things I'd eaten for years suddenly causing problems. But even with that piece in place, something bigger was clearly at play. Because the hot flashes, the insomnia, the weight, the fatigue — those aren't celiac symptoms. They're HPA axis symptoms.
WHAT THE HPA AXIS HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF IT
The HPA axis — the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis — is your body's central stress-response system. It governs cortisol, regulates your sleep-wake cycle, influences your reproductive hormones, modulates your immune response, and plays a direct role in metabolism. When it's dysregulated, the effects are system-wide. You don't just feel stressed. You feel broken.
Hot flashes in a woman in her 30s with normal hormone panels? Often HPA axis dysregulation. Weight that won't budge no matter how carefully you eat? HPA axis. Insomnia where you wake between 2 and 4 a.m. wired and exhausted at the same time? HPA axis. Fatigue that coffee doesn't touch? HPA axis. And when you layer chronic illness — POTS, dysautonomia, MCAS, chronic fatigue syndrome, mold illness — on top of a nervous system already stuck in survival mode, the whole picture compounds.
I'm a therapist with about ten years of experience. My training is in trauma — EMDR, IFS, somatic work, Polyvagal Theory — and for years I watched those frameworks transform my clients' lives. What I didn't fully appreciate until I lived through my own health unraveling was how directly the same principles apply to chronic illness. The nervous system doesn't distinguish between emotional trauma and physical threat. A body that has been in alarm long enough will show up in your hormones, your gut, your sleep, your weight, your ability to regulate your immune response. It shows up everywhere.
WHAT ACTUALLY HELPED
The path back involved bringing together what I already knew — nervous system regulation, trauma-informed approaches, somatic work — with a much more intentional way of physically caring for myself. Nutrition that actually supported my system instead of stressing it further. Consistent, gentle movement. Learning to track what my body was telling me and take it seriously. And doing the deeper work of getting my nervous system out of a state of chronic threat response.
Not a protocol. Not a quick fix. A slow, honest reckoning with what my system actually needed — and giving it that, consistently, over time.
I'm writing about this because I know how isolating it is to be in the thick of conditions like POTS, dysautonomia, MCAS, HPA axis dysfunction, chronic fatigue, or mold illness — to see specialist after specialist who treats each symptom in isolation, to be told your labs look fine, to feel like you're somehow failing at being a person.
You're not failing. Your nervous system learned to survive. That's adaptive. And it can learn something different.
That's the work I do now as a coach at Nervous System Reset. I bring together what I know clinically about trauma and nervous system regulation with what I've learned personally about healing a body that had been in chronic alarm. These conditions are real, they're complex, and anyone promising a fast fix isn't being honest with you. What I offer is a grounded, research-informed approach — one that takes your whole system seriously, not just the symptom on your chart.
If any of this resonates — if you're living with dysautonomia, MCAS, POTS, HPA axis dysregulation, chronic fatigue, or the layered, exhausting reality that often comes with these conditions — I'd genuinely love to connect.
Future posts here will go deeper into the science and the practice: what HPA axis dysregulation actually looks like, what nervous system regulation means in real life, how to support your body when it's been in survival mode. Subscribe so you don't miss them.