Five Ways to Calm an Overactive Immune System

How does one optimize the immune system? One of my viewers Olga recently asked about the fact that she has been in pain for more than 30 years and none of the medication seems to be working and her specific question was well how can we optimize the immune system. Ultimately in conditions like this, in histories like this where pain has been long-standing and it isn’t responding to medication, we are now aware that what we are probably looking at is a typical description of nociplastic pain.

Meaning that this is pain where the nervous system has become sensitized, is almost plastic. It’s adapted to become much more hypersensitive and overprotective. One of the big triggers for the nervous system becoming this way is actually because the immune system is also getting sensitized and it triggers the nervous system.

So optimizing the immune system, calming down the immune system becomes then a very critical part of the treatment for those kinds of pain. And how do you optimize the immune system? Well it’s simple to say but it is actually quite difficult to do and it requires consistency and effort which is why it’s often challenging to do. Now the way that people have gone about successfully doing it is when they have had that peer support, when they have had that bit of coaching and support to do it maybe in a group or at least to have family members or someone has a guide or a coach to help them through the difficult parts.

What are the elements of a good optimized immune system? Well we have now found that sleep is a very critical point. The other thing is stress management techniques. The third is microbiome and nutritional strategies.

The fourth is a movement-based technique and finally some kind of a relaxation or mind-body technique. All of these in its own way has an ability to calm or change the immune system because ultimately within the immune system there are a number of these immune cells especially in the brain and these are called microglia but these immune cells have got surveillance receptors on them and what these receptors are doing out looking out for any threat anything that the immune system considers as a threat. Now that threat can be an external threat like an injury or can be any other form of emotional threat as well and it can be an internal threat which could be coming from the immune system around the gut or it can come from threats that have happened in the distant past.

So you can see why the five strategies that I highlighted are all going to help optimizing the immune system. Optimizing for sleep allows for the threat responses especially the chemicals that drive the threat to be washed out when you have a good night’s sleep. Having a good nutritional strategy reduces the internal threat.

Having a good movement or a relaxation-based strategy allows for mobilization and using up of those chemicals through muscle movement and that reduces the threat. Having a good stress management or a mind-body technique allows for feeling of safety. Psychological safety and actually physical safety is also going to reduce the threat response.

So you can see how optimizing the immune system would mean paying attention to the five critical factors. Once again these are having a good set of stress management strategies, optimizing for sleep as well as nutrition strategies, movement-based techniques and finally a mind-body approach.

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