Going through the ups and downs in a healing journey can really take a toll on your emotions. Dealing with mystery symptoms, different treatment plans, seeing doctors, and all of the changes a chronic illness can bring to your everyday life can be a lot for you to take on. In many cases, friendships change, because you have less energy to do the activities you love, and your finances become tighter from all the different treatments. All of these things can severely impact your head space. But how about the illness itself? What are the physical impacts and changes that it is causing? Can being chronically ill actually cause emotional damage?
My Experience
Anxiety was never something I dealt with before getting sick. Growing up, people would say they dealt with anxiety, and I never understood what that truly meant. In May 2019 my perspective changed. I was suddenly struck with hard hitting neurological symptoms. The change felt like it was overnight, which made it even scarier. I began experiencing numbness in my arms and legs, memory loss, crippling vertigo, but worst of all, intense anxiety and severe panic attacks. Throughout the day my chest would suddenly become extremely tight out of nowhere, and I would suddenly feel this immense fear and discomfort in my body like something really bad was about to happen. I soon came to realize these episodes would be deemed “anxiety attacks” and began working through holistic remedies to mitigate them.
The good news is that I learned about so many amazing tools to help get my body out of that fight or flight. Some techniques I found particularly helpful were breathwork, meditations, and even certain supplements. Did you know that there are even certain strains of beneficial bacteria that you can take in probiotic form that are helpful for your mood and mind? The gut-brain connection is real and supplementing with the right things can really help.
Sometimes There is More Going on Than Just Anxiety
Several years into healing, I felt that my anxiety and panic was under control, but I still felt this extreme negativity and doom and gloom feeling at all times that I couldn’t shake. I was doing all of the right things, but I was not improving the way I felt I should be.
My mental health took a major downfall when I moved into a new apartment in 2021. At the time, I was unaware that it was infested with toxic mold. Within just a few weeks, my immune system began struggling and I entered an incredibly negative headspace on a daily basis. I was on edge at all times and extremely negative about everything. I found very little joy in life and felt depressed on a day-to-day basis. I was lucky enough to discover mold toxicity and got my home and body tested. Once I started digging into the research, I realized that the condition I was dealing with, mold toxicity, had a direct link to my mood and overall mental health.
Mold and Your Brain
Mold toxins have been proven in studies to directly impact your mental state and have even been proven to heighten anxiety. The effects of mold toxicity can manifest differently in everyone, some people experience physical symptoms, others experience psychiatric symptoms, and many have both. Once I made the correlation between how I was feeling and the mold in my apartment, it made me feel so much better about my symptoms, and I was able to view them as separate from myself and more as something my body was experiencing. This leads me to my big tip on this topic: don’t attach yourself to your physical symptoms. You are not your symptoms. Some of these “symptoms” include:
I experienced all of these and more, and I can tell you firsthand they will go away as you detox mold and get your body back into balance. Removing yourself from the mold exposure as much as possible and addressing the physical illness of mold is most definitely important, but there is also an important piece of working to regulate your nervous system. Doing exercises to tone your vagus nerve can be extremely helpful in this. The vagus nerve is a nerve that runs from the lower part of your brain through the neck to the chest and then into the stomach; it is the longest cranial nerve in your body containing both motor and sensory functions. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, electrical impulses travel to areas of the brain and can put your body into a parasympathetic state, which is your body’s rest and digest state. This can bring a calm over the body that allows healing. Some ways to tone the vagus nerve are as follows:
Humming
Singing
Gargling
Laughter
Massaging your outer ear
Meditation
Taking deep breaths
Cold exposure
Along with addressing the vagus nerve, if you feel any of the mold symptoms I mentioned, I highly recommend adopting a daily meditation practice and/or a breathwork routine. It’s amazing how these practices can bring your body back into balance and relax your nervous system. If you feel you need deeper work done and want to go through a program, I highly recommend checking out primal trust. If you prefer to work with someone one on one to work through the mental piece of your chronic illness, I am here to help! I work with people one on one and give them the tools that helped me overcome these same symptoms. Here is the link to check out my services and to book a FREE 15 minute discovery call to learn more.
Going through a life altering illness can completely derail your mental and emotional health in so many ways. Trust me, I have been there. The stress of doctors’ visits, appointment bills, expensive supplements, losing friends, restrictions with foods and travel, limited movement, and overall, the feeling of just being alone in this is a lot to deal with. But just know you are on the right path, and you are NOT your illness. You can heal, and the symptoms you are currently experiencing are merely a ripple in the wave and a part of the greater transformation that was destined for you.
Manoli and Nicole are the co-founders of The Living Fuel, a wellness consultancy that aims to help people transform their health through a holistic lens. They have coached over 9,300 people and work with both individuals and businesses. Whether a client wants to lose weight and lower stress or tackle more serious chronic health issues, Manoli and Nicole are here to help. Check them out on www.thelivingfuel.com or @thelivingfuel on Instagram. You can schedule a 15-minute free discovery call to see if it could be a good fit for you.
if “Symptoms” labelled as if they are the caused by or are causing “mental illness”, resolve themselves when:
1) the offending agent/ root cause/source of the problem) is removed
2) the damage is healed with the appropriate intervention
IE:
a nutritional deficiency is properly addressed with the nutrients that were previously missing from the diet
the proper diagnosis is that the person was suffering from a nutritional deficiency, not a ‘mental illness’s”
Symptoms are not “disease” in and of themselves, they are the bodies warning that something is out of balance.
The Chemical Imbalance myth has been repeatedly exposed as false even by leading psychiatrists who admit it is nothing more than a convenient allegory to get people to consume toxic drugs that make them sick.
Labelling people as mental patients because they have some symptoms that are medically documented to be part and parcel of 100+ bona fide medical illness’s (thyroid, brain injury, Lyme disease, etc. ) or the side effects of over 500 street and pharmaceutical drugs, is misdiagnosis… which is dangerous.
Mold toxicity is mold toxicity – Full Stop. It is NOT a mental illness , will never be and could never be.
Please take the time to seriously consider the logic of this fact.
Sincerely and in the hope that people reading this post do not erroneously consider, label themselves or end up in the mental health system because they have mold toxicity, where they will never be properly diagnosed or treated.
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With all due respect,
if “Symptoms” labelled as if they are the caused by or are causing “mental illness”, resolve themselves when:
1) the offending agent/ root cause/source of the problem) is removed
2) the damage is healed with the appropriate intervention
IE:
a nutritional deficiency is properly addressed with the nutrients that were previously missing from the diet
the proper diagnosis is that the person was suffering from a nutritional deficiency, not a ‘mental illness’s”
Symptoms are not “disease” in and of themselves, they are the bodies warning that something is out of balance.
The Chemical Imbalance myth has been repeatedly exposed as false even by leading psychiatrists who admit it is nothing more than a convenient allegory to get people to consume toxic drugs that make them sick.
Labelling people as mental patients because they have some symptoms that are medically documented to be part and parcel of 100+ bona fide medical illness’s (thyroid, brain injury, Lyme disease, etc. ) or the side effects of over 500 street and pharmaceutical drugs, is misdiagnosis… which is dangerous.
Mold toxicity is mold toxicity – Full Stop. It is NOT a mental illness , will never be and could never be.
Please take the time to seriously consider the logic of this fact.
Sincerely and in the hope that people reading this post do not erroneously consider, label themselves or end up in the mental health system because they have mold toxicity, where they will never be properly diagnosed or treated.