Master NeuroImmunity: Overcome Histamine Havoc

Introduction to Nervous System and Histamine 0:00

Hello and welcome back to our Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Meg Mill. And today we're going to talk about the nervous system. And it's something you might wonder why we're talking about today. Because we're looking at histamine issues at mast cell activation and immune responses. But you know what? This is something that's very overlooked. And you're going to hear over and over again in the summit about how that can play a huge role in getting the lasting results that we're looking for.

And it's not often done. It's not looked into. Sometimes we're, you know, we're evaluating the root cause of which we need to be doing. But when you're actually having some of these overactive immune system symptoms, we need to calm down the nervous system and teach your body how to really respond appropriately. Sometimes we need to do this rewiring work to actually see the lasting results that we're looking for. So I want to just give you some background on why we're doing this and what we're doing.

So really, when you think about it, think of our nervous system as our body's command center. It regulates everything from our heartbeat to our ability to read

How the Nervous System Affects Immune Response 1:24

to the intricate work that our neurons do to communicate through these electrical and chemical signals. And our immune system, on the other hand, is our defense system. So it's our defense mechanism against diseases, identifying threats, pathogens, viruses, all the things that we've been talking about that can start to cause the immune system to go haywire. So at the heart of the nervous system and immune system relationship is the concept of neuro immuno modulation. And this term describes how the nervous system can actually modulate or influence the immune system response through various pathways.

For example, we have our autonomic nervous system, or our ANS and its sympathetic and parasympathetic branches play a critical role in this modulation. So the ANS controls our involuntary functions including those of the immune system. So let's just take a quick step back and talk about the difference between our parasympathetic and our sympathetic nervous system. So our parasympathetic nervous system is where we're going to rest and digest. That's where we should be living most of the time. We should all be spending most of our time in the parasympathetic nervous system.

That's where intended to be. So the intention for our system is to live in the parasympathetic nervous system. That helps us digest our food, that tells us we're calm or living, we're happy, and then we see a threat. We see that lion, we chase that line, we run, our blood goes to our limbs. We're we're off. We take off, our heart rate's up and we run after that lion. And we jump into that sympathetic nervous system and our adrenaline palms, our norepinephrine, and we start to get cortisol. And we're in that.

We're getting away from that lion. And then the lion goes away. We get out, we're safe. But guess what? Our body is staying in that sympathetic nervous system a lot of the time because there's really no lion anymore. There is all of these other things that are bombarding us. There's our constant To-Do list, our busy lifestyle. But there's also the invaders that we've been talking about. There's parasites, the underlying infections. There's also those chemicals. You know, in all of our evolution, all of these chemicals only came around in the last, let's say, 75 years.

Sympathetic vs Parasympathetic Stress Response 3:43

So all these new things that our body thinks is maybe an invader. So we are fighting things on a regular basis. When you think of stress, you want to think of stress as not only your mental emotional, but you can also think it is physiological. So we can have all these physiological stresses. We can have mental, emotional stresses, we can have trauma. So we need to work through all of these things actually, in order to get your body to calm down and live in that rest and digest, feel that safety so that we can stop reacting so that our immune system can stop going haywire and we can be in this place.

We need to do some different things simultaneously, which we're going to get into to actually give us back this calm place where we get some immune suppression and we stop having this overload where we're getting this Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, where we're getting excessive levels of histamine that are causing our symptoms. So I'm just going to give you a little analogy to help you understand it. So imagine your body is a well organized, fortified city, and it's designed to protect you and maintain balance, which would be called homeostasis.

We call it. So when a foreign invader we're thinking of all the time, you know, when you have the fort and you have the castle and a foreign invader such as a mold spore, such as an infection and such as that is like an enemy coming to infiltrate the city walls. So remember how when in cases they had those walls, you know, it's getting in. So this is recognized as an invader, let's say, to the city survival. And we're going to get this immediate defense and that your immune system, upon detecting the invader, your immune system is going to respond.

It's going to be activated. Similar to defense forces that would mobilize to counter an attack. And this immune response is actually tailored to eliminate the threat and restore that equilibrium. We want to be happy. We want to be healthy. We don't want these invaders to come in. And ideally, once the invaders neutralize immune system, is going to demobilize and return to the state of vigilance without aggression. However, if the city your body is already weakened by invaders, toxins stress the defense system might start to perceive the need to mount an exact trait in response to even a minor threat.

So they start to respond to minor threats as if they were that major assault. And it leads us to an overactive immune response. And this means that our mast cells, the type of white blood cells involved in allergic reactions and inflammation, are overly sensitive, and they start releasing chemicals like histamine in response to triggers that wouldn't normally have not bothered us. And we know this leads to all of our symptoms, from inflammation to fatigue to all the other things that we've been talking about rashes and bloating and migraines and hormone imbalances and hypersensitivity and all the things that we're talking about.

Breathing Exercise and Nervous System Regulation 6:32

And over time, this state of heightened alertness can become the body's new normal. And that's when we start to see this nervous system. The body's defense mechanisms have been on high alert for so long, and they've begun to overreact to everything. And that can lead to the cycle of inflammation and health issues. And this is further complicated by the fact that the resources, the nutrients, the energy we need to defeat all the defenses are being diverted to other critical functions like weakening the body further.

We need to break the cycle, and we need to reprogram the brain's response to these perceived threat, and we need to teach it to differentiate between the real and the exaggerated dangers, and therefore calm down the immune response and resort to more of an equilibrium or that homeostasis back in our body. And so many practitioners are missing this step when it comes to addressing this problem, because without it, you're still going to struggle. You can you can take the right supplement or drug, and you can find the root causes, but your body's still maybe overreacting because your body's actually at this point and gone haywire.

And so we need to rebuild your neuroplasticity and this refers to the brain's ability to change and adapt as the result of an experience. We need to rewire different parts of your nervous system at the same time. So we need to actually work on it in tandem. Maybe some people work on the parasympathetic nervous system, maybe some people like we talked the the vagal nerve rewiring thoughts, limbic system. But we need to do them all together. So we need to do this multi-pronged approach. That's when I see the success, when we're doing all of the things at the same time.

So it's almost like buckets. We're doing the root cause, we're doing the stabilization and we're doing the nervous system work. And inside the nervous system work, we're actually pronged again, and we're working on bringing our body back from the parasympathetic. We're working on vagal nerves. We're working on the limbic system. We're working on trauma and somatic things actually also. So we're working on these different things together in order to get everything calm down. And so actually, let's just take a little break and just I want you to kind of feel this right now.

And we're going to just do a deep breath. And I want to actually have you do the deep breath in order to just check your response.

Vagus Nerve and Gut-Brain Connection 8:51

So I want you to sit here and just take a breath and just get yourself in a complex if you if you can, if you're if you're watching on a, on a place, you can sit down. If you're not like listening to what you're driving, you might need to do this later. So we're going to take the deep breath and we're going to I want you to breathe in through your belly. I want you to bring it up through your chest and then I want you to exit. So I want you to pull it up, bring it to your belly, bring it to your chest, and then exhale slowly and think of it like a circle.

So pulling it up and then slowly exhaling in I want to do it three times with you. And then I want you to see what you feel like. And I'm going to tell you why. So we're going to inhale. And now exhale. Now I want you to see that you feel your body calm down. So when I do it I can I can feel that relaxation. It actually makes me, you know, I'm on camera, I'm talking to you. And I'm probably more in that parasympathetic nervous system right now because I'm presenting. But when I did that, I could actually feel my body relaxing.

So I wondered, can you and I'm asking if you can. That's great. So you have a tool, right now that you can use and you can go back to your breath if you can't, don't worry about it, because that's what you need to learn. We need to build muscle memory here. We need to actually be able to work on some of these, on some of these training, and do it in times when we're not nervous, we're not in that sympathetic nervous system so that we can actually build that we call like muscle memory to be able to have your body realize, oh, this is what I do.

Oh, I can use my breath. I can actually calm down. So once we do some of that practice work and we have specific exercises we put in in a very short amount of time in the day, it's not something

Limbic System, Trauma, and Neuroplasticity 10:51

that is going to take a ton of time. We actually start to change some of that body response, and it's really amazing to start to see that difference. We also want to work on vagal nerve signaling. So your vagus nerve goes from the the back of the brainstem down to your gut. It's connecting your gut and your brain. It's like a superhighway between your gut and your brain. And we've talked so much about how the gut is pivotal in this. And it's very important to, you know, in our vagus nerve, interaction with the gut in the brain is very important for our sleep, for our mood, for calming and 90% of our immune system actually is in our enteric nervous system, in the gut.

We have to really think about the vagus nerve, about the gut brain connection. It also affects motility, sort of affect things like constipation, which we need to open our drainage pathways in order to be able to get some of the detoxification done eventually that we that we want to do. So it's very important to look at that too, with that gut brain connection. And actually there's also some devices that can help here. And I will put those in our summit resources. That's megmill.com/summit. And there's some coupons and discount codes even that you can some recommended products and that you can look at.

And then we have the limbic system and the limbic system as part of the brain that controls our fear and emotion. And it's always sending messages. So we need it influences our decision making, our reasoning, our impulse control. So some of the parts of that system are amygdala. Our amygdala is involved in processing emotions such as fear, anger and pleasure. And it helps us determine what memories are stored and where they're stored in the brains. The hippocampus is essential for learning and memory and converting short term into long term memory.

We have our thalamus, which is a relay station, directing sensory signals to the appropriate areas of the cortex. We have our hypothalamus, which regulates a variety of bodily functions, including our hunger, thirst, sleep and sexual response. And it also controls our endocrine system. There's purpose in each one of these things, and we need to work on retraining those parts of our brains in order to calm down our body and our immune. And when I'm working with people, like I said, we work on all of these simultaneously, and we do also some somatic and trauma work, and we're bringing it all together while we're working on the protocols to identify the root cause.

And I'm going to tell you, this is when I see the most significant transformations, when we can work on the nervous system while we're doing the other things, we can make huge changes. I don't want you to discount the importance of this. Dr. Joe Dispenza is doing some great research to show the real, true healing powers neuroplasticity.

Closing Thoughts and Summit Resources 13:35

And it's it's great to see some of the things that people are experiencing through that work. I want you to just take that. I don't want you to discount this as part of your healing journey. It's really an important piece. So lean into the practitioners you here on the summit, how they approach it. I'm actually going to do a class after the summit to teach you some of the ways that we work on this, so be sure to add info@megmill.com to your Safe email list and I'll be in touch with you. You can also find me at megmill.com and our summit resources are at megmill.com/summit.

I'm going to link some programs you can do. I'm gonna link some products. And I would love to support you in any way that I can. I'm really passionate about this and I know it's a journey. Sometimes we do feel like, okay, I'm stuck or I'm going slowly and just remember, it's a marathon. It's not a race. And each piece of this puzzle is another step, even if it's a very small. I want you to have this information and feel that you are getting some of these puzzle pieces put into place, and you may not see the effects of these puzzle pieces right now, but they're there and eventually it just all clicks into place.

I actually said one time when I was working with someone, she said to me, it's like we're doing the slide, one of the sliding puzzles, and we're moving all these pieces around and it just clicked. And it it's true. And it's amazing to see these transformations. So that's what I want for you. And if you want more information on how to get permanent access to the summit interviews, you can email support@drtalks.com and that team will help you get it all sorted out. So until next time, take care.