About Hyperstimulation And Recovery

Video Transcript

About Hyperstimulation And Recovery

One of the most important things I learned during my recovery was understanding hyperstimulation. You know, back then I was struggling with anxiety symptoms 24x7 and I had a ton of them. And whenever I went to the doctor, the doctor would say, you know, it's just stress. Go home and relax. So I'd go home and relax. I mean, I was relieved that it was just stress.

But I go home and relax and then, you know, Monday morning would show up and I'd still be symptomatic. And I go through the whole week and I'd be symptom after symptom after symptom. And I'm thinking, I'm not anxious. Why do I have all these symptoms? So I go back to the doctor and he look at my results and say, you know what?

You know, it's just stress. You need to go home and relax a bit and don't go away. Don't worry about it. And of course, I felt relieved again, but my symptoms never went away. And I would, you know, work out in my relaxation, you know, do things that stay away from stress. Day after day, I was still symptomatic.

And I thought, man, if I could only get rid of these symptoms, that's where my stress is coming from. So anyways, I go back to the doctor, same same routine. And this went on for years and I just struggled and struggle and I thought, well, surely he's missed something. I can't be dealing with symptoms like this all the time.

So when Bart Jessop, who was a psychologist who came to Regina, where I was living and I met with him, he explained to me that when the body becomes chronically stressed, it takes a lot longer than most people think to get rid of that stress and symptoms. And so he said, go and relax. Don't worry about your symptoms, and we'll see how it goes.

So I went home and relaxed, you know, And again, another week went by and I'm still symptomatic like crazy. So I'd say, Bart, you know what's going on? It's positive. He said, No, you just go home and keep doing it. So I go home. This went on for about a month where I wasn't experiencing any relief at all.

And so I met with the one time to say, you know, this is ridiculous. I'm doing all this relaxation and I'm still symptomatic. He said, "Let's do this. We're going to put a stake in the ground from 90 days from now. I don't want you to think about symptoms. Just go home and do your relaxation, you know, de-stress as much as you can, and then we'll see how things are going by."

90 days. And I thought 90 days has three months. And anyway, so I went home and I worked at it for her, you know, diligently. And I was diligent with my recovery strategies. I worked at it daily every every day I do to deep relaxation techniques, reduce my stress, try to get as much sleep as I could. I was faithful and I didn't trigger my anxiety.

So I thought I was doing a really good job. But, you know, two and a half months in, still no symptom break. It was like the symptoms hadn't budged at all. And I was getting frustrated, but I thought, okay, I'm going to give it two more weeks anyways. By about three days before my meeting, on the 90 day meeting, I noticed my symptoms have subsided just a little bit.

I thought, well, this is different things have eased off a bit. And so when I met with Bart and we talked about this, this is your body's just now starting to relax, starting to gear down. If you keep working at it, your body will eventually get there. And of course, that set me on the course to look into a hyperstimulation, nervous system dysregulation, homeostatic dysregulation.

And that's when I figured it out. Well, you know, when the body becomes hyper stimulated, the nervous system gets impacted the most, and the nervous system is made up of specialized cells called neurons. And they have an electrochemical property which is different than the rest of the cells in the body. And because of that makeup, they take a lot longer to repair and recover the normal body cells.

So if you go break leg or something or other, a bone, you know, you've got 8 to 12 weeks of recovery. But when you get your nervous system hyper stimulated, you've got months and months and months and months of recovery work to do before your body's going to reward you with a reduction in symptoms. So when I learned about hyper stimulation of how long it takes to recover, that really made a difference.

And so I worked at my recovery daily and diligently. I was really good at it. And in about a year I noticed a vast reduction in symptoms. I wasn't symptom free after that one year, but I noticed enough reduction to know that this was going to work, which helped me get the rest of the way, which is about another year.

So working in Hyperstimulation made a big difference in my recovery. So if you're dealing with chronic anxiety symptoms, I encourage you to work on your stress reduction and be patient as you reduce your symptoms. If you stay at it and not trigger yourself with more anxiety because of your symptoms, which is common. If you work out and stay diligent with your recovery efforts, your body will reward you when it recovers from hyperstimulation and your symptoms subside.