The Perfect Storm: When Your Nerves & Immune System Collide (Episode 4)
Once the lightning starts, the thunder will follow. Inflammation and stress are twin storms that feed each other, and once they lock in, they create a cycle that’s incredibly hard to break. This is where your nervous system and immune system stop being separate entities and become one chaotic, self-perpetuating loop.
Today, we are diving into the third force of the perfect storm: Thunder and Lightning – the neuro-immune feedback loop.
Hi everyone, Dr. Kara Wada here! As a quadruple board-certified allergist/immunologist and lifestyle medicine physician, I’ve dedicated over 15 years to helping people with complex immune conditions. As someone living with Sjogren's Disease, I deeply understand the journey of living with a body that often feels like a complex puzzle.
Let’s catch up. In Episode 1, we introduced the four forces that create this perfect storm of chronic inflammation. In Episode 2, we explored the breached levee (barrier breakdown). Episode 3 covered the shifting winds (microbial imbalance). Today, we’re adding the third force: the neuro-immune feedback loop.
Your Nervous & Immune Systems are Not Separate
Here's a crucial understanding: your nervous system and your immune system are in constant communication. Their shared role is to keep your body safe and protected. If one receives danger signals, it quickly informs the other. When one becomes dysregulated, it pulls the other along with it. For those dealing with chronic stress, poor sleep, and past trauma on top of physical symptoms, this feedback loop can keep us stuck.
Let me explain this relationship:
Your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS): This system constantly regulates your immune response. It has two main branches:
Sympathetic (Fight or Flight): Releases stress hormones like cortisol (mother nature's prednisone) and adrenaline (mother nature's EpiPen).
Parasympathetic (Rest and Digest): The vagus nerve is a main player here, known for its anti-inflammatory effects in a healthy state.
The Imbalance: In a healthy state, these two branches are balanced. But chronic stress tips that balance. When sympathetic drive dominates, cortisol patterns get dysregulated, inflammatory cytokines increase, immune cells shift towards pro-inflammatory states, your gut barrier weakens (hello, breached levee again!), your sleep gets disrupted, and your microbiome shifts (hey, shifting winds!).
This isn't theoretical. Extensive research shows people with chronic stress, PTSD, and adverse childhood events have higher rates of autoimmune and other chronic inflammatory diseases later in life.
How Inflammation Causes Brain Fog & Mood Changes
The reverse is equally powerful: when your immune system is activated and releasing inflammatory cytokines (like IL-6, TNF-alpha, IL-1 beta), these don't stay localized. They can cross the blood-brain barrier and enter your central nervous system, triggering neuroinflammatory changes. This inflammation in your nervous system can:
Affect neuronal function.
Cause brain fog, fatigue, mood changes (anxiety, depression).
Increase pain sensitivity.
Lead to that constant "on edge" feeling ("get off my lawn!").
This neuroinflammation tells your nervous system to stay on high alert, which then tells your immune system to keep firing. You're locked in a vicious cycle where thunder feeds lightning, and lightning feeds thunder! This is why brain fog, insomnia, feeling "tired but wired," anxiety, and depression are so common alongside inflammatory conditions.
The Mast Cell Connection: A Critical Link
One specific cell type sits at the intersection of the nervous and immune systems: the mast cell. These immune cells are known for their role in allergic reactions (releasing histamine and other inflammatory mediators). But here's what's truly fascinating: mast cells are found throughout your body, often touching or very close to small fiber nerves.
They are directly activated by stress hormones, inflammatory cytokines, and nerve signals. When mast cells become overactive (as in Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, or MCAS), they create a cascading inflammatory response affecting multiple systems (flushing, hives, digestive issues, anxiety, brain fog, fatigue, pain). Stress activates mast cells, and mast cell mediators increase anxiety and nervous system reactivity – another feedback loop! If you feel reactive to everything (foods, smells, stress, emotions), mast cell involvement might be part of your picture. Stabilizing mast cells often requires both immune and nervous system approaches.
The Impact of Trauma & The Polyvagal Theory
We need to talk about something crucial that often gets missed in doctor's appointments: the role of chronic stress and trauma in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. If you've been through prolonged periods of high stress (years of caregiving, high achievement, eldest daughter syndrome, trauma of any kind), your nervous system has been shaped by those experiences. Research is clear: adverse childhood experiences, chronic stress, and trauma are associated with higher rates of chronic inflammatory diseases later in life.
This isn't about blame. It's about understanding that your nervous system adaptations – how you learned to survive – can contribute to immune dysregulation. The Polyvagal Theory helps explain this, describing three nervous system states:
Ventral Vagal: Safe and social (calm, connected, able to rest and digest).
Sympathetic: Fight or flight (mobilized, on alert, ready for action).
Dorsal Vagal: Shutdown (immobilized, disconnected, overwhelmed).
If you've experienced chronic stress or trauma, you can get stuck in sympathetic overdrive or dorsal shutdown, making it incredibly hard to land in that ventral vagal state of safety. When your nervous system doesn't feel safe, your immune system struggles to feel safe and relax. This is why nervous system regulation isn't optional for immune system healing. You can eat all the right foods, take all the right supplements, and heal your gut, but if you're still stuck in threat mode, that storm will keep spinning.
REBEL: How to Regulate Your Nervous System
This brings us to the third "R" of the Immune Confident Framework: Rebel. We must actively rebel against these old cycles by learning to regulate our nervous system and recalibrate our immune response. What does this look like in practice?
Vagus Nerve Activation: Strengthen vagal tone (our primary parasympathetic pathway with anti-inflammatory effects) through deep, slow breathing (exhaling longer than inhaling), humming, singing, gargling, and cold exposure (splashing cold water on your face, cold showers – though cold plunges might not be worth it for women!). These are physiological interventions that shift your nervous system state.
Somatic Practices: Trauma and stress are stored in the body. Somatic practices (trauma-sensitive yoga, gentle movement, dancing, shaking, expressive movement, tapping, bodywork like massage/craniosacral therapy) help discharge stored nervous system activation and complete interrupted stress response cycles.
Sleep Hygiene: Prioritize consistent sleep and wake times, a dark/cool bedroom, limiting screen time before bed, managing blood sugar to prevent night awakenings, and addressing sleep disorders like sleep apnea.
Mindfulness: Meditation, body scans, and spending time in nature help improve your capacity to shift your state when you notice dysregulation.
Therapeutic Support: For trauma histories, working with a trauma-informed therapist (EMDR, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing) can be transformative. Ketamine and other psychedelics are also being studied for their role.
I know what you're thinking: "I don't have time for this!" But here's the truth: if you don't make time to regulate your nervous system, your body will force you to stop in other ways – with fatigue, crashes, and flares. Small, consistent practices are more powerful than you think. Start where you are!
The Final Force: Coming Up in Part 5
This neuro-immune chaos is exhausting, demanding massive energy from your cells. Eventually, your body just can't keep up. Your mitochondria, your cellular power plants, start to break down. You hit a wall of crushing fatigue that no amount of rest seems to fix. This is the fourth and final force: the stalled pressure system. And that's exactly what we're covering in the next episode.
Before you go, I want to ask: What helps calm your system when everything feels like it's firing at once? Is there a practice, a person, a place that helps you feel safer in your body? Share it in the comments – your answer might be exactly what someone else needs to hear!
