Is Your Nervous System Making You Sick?

In 2001 my nervous system blew a fuse. That’s the simplest way to describe it. What started as stress and poor sleep turned into three months of severe insomnia, neuropathic sensations, adrenaline surges, and eventually a depression I didn’t even want to admit was depression. I went down every rabbit hole Google had to offer back then. I had myself convinced I had everything from neurological disease to mad cow because I couldn’t sleep. When you’re exhausted and scared, the brain will believe almost anything.

What I didn’t understand at the time was fight-or-flight.

I thought I had a disease. What I actually had was a nervous system stuck in overdrive.

When the brain perceives threat, adrenaline rises. Cortisol rises. Digestion slows. Muscles tighten. Blood flow shifts. Sleep becomes lighter and fragmented. Pain perception increases. Sensations feel louder. The body is preparing to run from danger. That system is brilliant in short bursts. It saves lives.

It was never designed to run 24 hours a day.

Looking back, the clues were all there. I developed severe geographic tongue during that period. Doctors told me it was benign and not to worry about it. That drove me crazy. No one explained why it showed up at the exact same time my anxiety was sky high. The tongue is the beginning of the digestive tract. Stress changes digestion. Stress changes immune signaling. Stress changes inflammatory patterns in mucosal tissue. My body wasn’t betraying me. It was responding to adrenaline and cortisol.

The same thing happened with sleep. The concept of paradoxical insomnia changed everything for me. When I learned that people often sleep more than they think they do, and that obsessing over sleep keeps the brain aroused, something clicked. “When you think you’re not sleeping, you won’t fall asleep.” That sentence shifted the power dynamic. The more I chased sleep, the more it ran. When I stopped performing for it and started allowing it, my nervous system slowly settled.

That was cognitive behavioral therapy in action before I even realized that’s what I was doing.

Health anxiety and somatic hypervigilance are deeply connected to this same loop. Two people can feel the same sensation. One shrugs. The other spirals. The difference isn’t the body. It’s interpretation. When the brain labels a sensation as danger, the sympathetic nervous system activates. That activation amplifies the sensation. The amplified sensation confirms the fear. The loop tightens.

I had that loop in 2001.

What I have now is awareness without escalation.

There’s a difference.

I’m highly attuned to my body. I once found a benign lump in the middle of my back that even a doctor was surprised I detected. When I had diverticulitis, I didn’t ignore the fever and pain. I went straight to the ER and was admitted. When I had my first gallbladder attack, I went in and had emergency surgery. That’s not anxiety. That’s pattern recognition and decisive action.

But aging introduces a new challenge. The body produces more noise. Stiffer joints. Colder hands. Slower recovery. Mild swelling. If every small signal gets treated like a crisis, life becomes exhausting.

Recently my fingertips felt cold and slightly swollen. I had gained eight pounds over three months while taking creatine and using a lot of salt. My wife keeps the house at 62 at night and 66 during the day. I hate it. I’m freezing. Years ago at flea markets in early spring, my hands would go numb in 50-degree weather. The pieces were there. Cold environment plus vascular sensitivity plus fluid retention equals cold fingertips. When I lowered the salt and stopped the creatine, my hands improved within days. No catastrophe. Just physiology.

That’s the lesson.

Most of what people experience in midlife and beyond is physiology interacting with stress, environment, and habits. Chronic fight-or-flight plays a massive role in modern health problems. Elevated stress drives overeating. Elevated cortisol increases cravings for sugar and salt. Adrenaline cycles make alcohol and nicotine more appealing. Poor sleep worsens impulse control. It becomes a loop that feeds obesity, metabolic disease, depression, and addiction. We medicate the downstream effects but rarely teach nervous system literacy.

If people understood that stress changes digestion, immune signaling, inflammation, and sleep architecture, they might interpret symptoms differently. Instead of “What disease do I have?” the question becomes “What state is my nervous system in?”

That shift reduces fear immediately.

My oldest daughter reflects this same pattern recognition. She was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition. A dermatologist initially brushed it off and gave her a steroid cream. She knew something deeper was happening. She pushed, found the right specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, and got the disease into remission in months instead of the years most patients endure. That’s not anxiety. That’s informed persistence. Awareness paired with action.

There is a fine line between vigilance and alarm. In 2001 I crossed into alarm. Sleep deprivation magnified everything. Once I learned to calm the brain instead of chasing symptoms, the body followed.

That’s the part I’m proud of.

I talk openly about CBT and paradoxical insomnia whenever I meet someone struggling with sleep or anxiety. The idea that the mind can convince the brain to relax is empowering. The body is not fragile. It’s responsive. When the nervous system settles, digestion improves. Inflammation calms. Sleep deepens. Even a geographic tongue can fade.

Aging doesn’t mean ignoring symptoms. It means calibrating response. Fever and focal abdominal pain deserve urgency. Cold fingertips in a chilly house deserve warmth and perspective.

The fight-or-flight system isn’t the enemy. It’s a tool. The problem is living inside it. Teaching people how to downshift, how to reinterpret body signals, and how to tolerate normal fluctuations would go a long way toward addressing the chronic conditions we face as a society.

The body speaks more often as we age. Not because it’s failing, but because the margins are smaller. The goal isn’t to silence it. The goal is to listen without panic.

That’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. And it changed everything.