Helping people understand their health problems

I’ve been circling a thought lately that won’t let go of me, and the more I sit with it, the more obvious it feels.

Maybe the real story behind the rise in autoimmune disease isn’t just better diagnosis, bad luck, or broken bodies. Maybe it’s that we’ve slowly stripped away the very practices that once protected us from living too close to our biological edge.

Almost every major religion, across cultures and continents, requires some version of rest, fasting, silence, or reflection. A day set aside. A season of restraint. A rhythm of stopping. Long before anyone knew what cortisol or cytokines were, human beings seemed to understand something simple and profound: without intentional pauses, the body and mind drift into trouble.

I don’t think those practices were accidental. I think they were survival tools.

Modern life doesn’t pause. It hums. Constantly. Notifications, deadlines, expectations, screens, noise, artificial light, constant food availability, constant comparison. None of it is catastrophic by itself. But together, they create a state where the nervous system is never fully off-duty. Not panicked, just perpetually alert.

That matters more than we like to admit.

The nervous system and immune system are not separate departments. They’re partners. When the nervous system stays in low-grade “threat mode” long enough, the immune system loses some of its finesse. Responses get louder. Regulation gets sloppier. Thresholds get crossed quietly.

That’s when things begin to show up.

Autoimmune diseases rarely appear in the middle of the storm. They tend to emerge after prolonged strain, once the body finally has room to react. I’ve seen this pattern in my own life in much simpler ways. I’d push through an intense retail season or a major inspection at work, everything would go well, and then—after the pressure lifted—I’d get sick. A cold. A crash. The outcome was successful, but the physiological bill still came due.

Success doesn’t erase strain. It just delays the payment.

Ancient traditions seemed to understand this. They built recovery into the calendar, not as a luxury, but as a requirement. Fasting wasn’t about punishment. It was about metabolic rest. Prayer and meditation weren’t about empty ritual. They were about narrowing attention and calming the nervous system. A Sabbath wasn’t optional self-care. It was enforced stillness.

In modern terms, those practices reduce background threat signaling. They restore parasympathetic tone. They give the immune system space to regulate itself instead of constantly reacting.

We’ve largely abandoned that structure. We eat all day. We sleep poorly. We fill silence with noise. We treat rest as laziness and stillness as inefficiency. And then we wonder why bodies start misfiring.

This doesn’t mean stress “causes” autoimmune disease. That’s too simple. Genetics still matter. Biology still matters. Medicine still matters. But timing matters too. Context matters. The body’s margin for error matters.

Genetics load the gun. Modern life keeps a finger resting on the trigger.

What makes this especially interesting is that science is now circling back to ideas humans lived by thousands of years ago. We talk about nervous-system regulation. About intermittent fasting. About circadian rhythm. About stress reduction. About CBT not as mind-over-matter, but as a way to lower chronic threat signals so the body can do what it already knows how to do.

In other words, we’re rediscovering ancient wisdom with modern language.

None of this diminishes medicine. In fact, it highlights how powerful good medicine really is—especially when disease is caught early and treated well. But medicine works best when the background environment isn’t constantly sabotaging regulation.

I don’t think humans are suddenly weaker.

I think we’re living in a way that leaves too little room for recovery, and our immune systems are responding exactly as they’re designed to when pushed beyond sustainable limits.

Maybe those old practices weren’t about holiness at all.

Maybe they were about biology.

And maybe the rise in autoimmune disease isn’t a mystery so much as a reminder: ancient hardware still needs ancient maintenance, no matter how modern the world becomes.

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