Autoimmune and Mind/Body/Energy

In June 2019 I moved to Sydney. I had reached a point that I was healing after coming out of an on-again-off roller-coaster relationship, which had not ended in the best way. I had begun to work hard from April, shedding what no longer served me and I was learning to use the word no, a scary phenomenon for a recovering people-pleaser.

I spent the majority of my first three months in Sydney either alone, or with my family. All these loner weekends were necessary for me coming into myself. I had arrived in Sydney after a year of destroying my self-worth and completely abandoning myself. Not to mention the time before that, living off a series of narratives. I had never spent time by myself learning to enjoy my own company.

I moved on a Skilled Visa. For anyone who has ever been on a 482 Visa knows it is a time of both joy and entrapment. The company will sponsor to work in Australia if your skillset is on the required listing. The world always needs auditors it turns out. I joined a professional services firm and immediately my newfound sense of self was on high alert of ‘DANGER’ ‘DANGER’. Do not get me wrong professional services firms can be a great place to meet friends and they are one of the best places to work when moving to a new city for this. But I had done that experience with London already. I had a shiny repertoire of work drink nights that brought me guilt and shame. I had just got to a healthy processing place of them and I did not want to fall down the same rabbit hole.

I avoided Friday after-work drinks like the plague at the beginning. Most Fridays there were leaving drinks which would begin at half four and involved two fridges and multiple tables of alcohol. I would get up at half four and instead sneak into the lift and head on my happy way home. Stopping off to get a takeaway. However, I decided to start giving it a chance. I went to the leaving drinks for a lovely American girl who had been on secondment. I was doing the almost impossible. Attending Friday night after-work drinks, and not drinking.

This brings me up to October 2019. The not drinking only occurred once. I want to be really careful wording the next few months because, by all means, I was happy, my point is in pattern repeating and a deregulated nervous system that was only given six months to heal. I started going to work drinks more, I also began dating someone from work. There was a lot of laughs and love, but I also began self-abandoning and people-pleasing again. I also absolutely hated the job. It was a rollercoaster in itself of late nights and overtime, followed by calm weeks. A job that matches a dysregulated nervous system is very often just going to send you even further into dysregulation. Which it did, my anxiety started coming back. But I was somehow back in the old pattern of ignoring it by going out each weekend and constantly relying on others to make me feel better. It took one month, for all of this to happen. Patterns are sneaky like that.

The boy who I was dating (who is a lovely human), had a whole bunch of red flags which I began expertly ignoring. He also kindly ignored all my red flags. We played an expert game of tag rugby where the aim became who can avoid each other’s flags the longest rather than catch them. He left in December 2019 for his own travels and I headed off with my sister and her best friend down the East Coast of Australia on a six-week trip.

When you react to stress your body releases a series of chemicals and hormones. Cortisol affectionately nicknamed the stress hormone will therefore be released more regularly. This in turn is extremely sensitive to dopamine, the neurotransmitter that provides short-term bursts of pleasure and satisfaction. Unlike its counterpart serotonin, dopamine hits are short-term and can also become addictive. Dysregulation in dopamine is often linked to addictive disorders and depression. However, even in everyday life, your body can become addicted to this dopamine hit. That short burst of time in work when your workload is stable or that moment in the relationship of red flag tag-rugby where all is calm. The brain can quickly become addicted to this high and low game. Our thoughts come from the chemical signals that pass through synaptic gaps between neurons. Therefore, living in a single thought pattern can become a habitual state of living. So even though I may have changed careers, changed environment, and changed boy, as I operated from a place of dysregulation for so long funnily enough three months downtime of reading self-help books was not enough for the body to become accustomed to a new way of living.

My body finally had enough. On New Years Day we arrived at Rainbow Beach Hostel. I had waited for a text New Year’s Eve and had never got one (rollercoaster goes down), but had received a series of texts of New Year’s day (rollercoaster goes up).

My body shut down the night of New Year’s Day. I woke up on the 2nd in the early hours of the morning feeling like my entire body was on fire. There is very little you can do at 4am in a twelve-bed dorm when your body is on fire. I thought perhaps initially there was a mosquito that was biting me, as it felt like small bumps on my legs. It all escalated very quickly when the sun broke and we realised that this was not mosquito bites. Still unsure what the hell was happening, I initially feared bed bugs, I went to the doctor when we arrived at the next town of Noosa. They gave me some strong steroids and told me if it did not go down within 3 days I should head to the hospital. It got worse. I flew back to Sydney and rocked up to A&E covered head to toe with lumps and bumps. It didn’t take long to be admitted. I think I was terrifying the rest of A&E that I was contagious.

Autoimmune is a condition in which your immune system mistakenly attacks your body. My blood vessels had attacked themselves. Perceiving they were in danger, from head to toe they attacked themselves. Stojanovich et al. (2008) note that at least 50% of autoimmune disorders have an ‘unknown trigger factor’. The questions I received were around had I taken drugs, and had I been in contact with any wild bush areas that I could have been bitten. When both of those answers were a no, the factor became unknown. I had no previous family history either of autoimmune disorders. 75%-90% of human diseases are related to activation of the stress system (Yun-Zi Liu et al, 2017), however, the pathway between stress and disease is still debated. Even Irritable Bowel Syndrome, that many now suffer with, the majority of the time the factor will be unknown, and research continues towards the link between stress and IBS.

A lot of the time with mental health we focus on the mind, and that is always a great starting point. If you are in psychological distress it needs to be spoken about. But what about those chemical changes that have occurred in our body after living in a state of stress for a prolonged time? Van der Kolk in his book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, notes that parts of the brain can evolve to monitor for danger constantly and enter the same activation state in signs of danger.

In January 2020 after I left the hospital, a week later I wandered across the road to Inspired Wild and Free a yoga studio. I was embarrassed at the time as I still had marks all over my body, but I weirdly felt drawn to it, despite never really using yoga before. I had usually been a keen exerciser but with hiit and running (I will come back to this another time). My whole body would shake from head to toe when I held any asana. My yoga teacher came over and commented to me your nervous system is so shook. That was the moment when my life really changed. I did not fully understand what she meant at the time. I had yet to even learn what the nervous system actually was. But the thought was planted, and it slowly and surely grew. Yoga became part of my life. Meditation and breathwork became my medicine. I am by no means a Yoga goddess who can take on any asana, and there are some days I struggle with meditation. But what I can do now is align my body with my mind. I can notice when I am holding stagnate energy in my body.

The point I will eventually come to is our body our mind and our energy is all connected. When I turned up in Sydney, yes I was beginning to read the self-help aisle but my body had been trained to work off cortisol and dopamine and that was the pattern it knew. I was still treating my body as the vessel to do as my mind wanted, living disconnected. Having an unknown factor for an autoimmune disease, I picture it now like a blank slate that I can draw my picture of conclusion. My story is that my body finally spoke up, and it was my body speaking up that made me learn how to integrate all three, my mind/my body/my energy. Get to know your body. Do not just treat it as a separate entity. It holds the exact same energy your mind does, it is just we often forget about treating them in conjunction. Coming out of lockdown makes me anxious at times, but it is journaling (mind), yoga (body) and meditation (energy) that I know will keep me grounded and allow for me to note any time a pattern is trying to sneak her way back in.