Focus:
Understanding that your nervous system is listening, and giving it signals of safety.
Repetition:
My nervous system is safe.
My body knows how to heal.
I am held. I am whole.
Your Nervous System Is Listening
You have been doing this work for over a year now. Sixty-seven weeks of choosing differently: reaching for the broth instead of the quick fix, getting your feet in the dirt, and learning to listen to your body instead of fighting it.
Some of you have seen shifts you were told would never come. Some of you are still waiting for that breakthrough, holding steady in faith even when progress feels painfully slow. Wherever you are, the fact that you are still here, still reading, and still showing up tells me something important about the kind of person you are.
This week I want to talk about something that may explain a layer of what you have been going through, especially if you have done so much right and certain symptoms still hang on. If your body overreacts to things that should not be a big deal, like a sound, a smell, a food that used to be fine, or a light touch that feels like too much, this week is for you. And if healing has begun but your nervous system seems to be running a few steps behind the rest of your recovery, this may be the missing piece.
Say your new repetition when you wake, before meals, and whenever the old noise rises. After sixty-seven weeks, your cells have heard a lot of truth from you. Keep going, because they are still listening.
What Is Central Sensitisation?
By now you understand that chronic illness is not one thing gone wrong; it is a whole terrain that has shifted. You have been rebuilding that terrain week by week, restoring your microbiome, nourishing your cells, removing toxins, and reclaiming your rhythms. But there is a layer we have not named directly yet. It is called central sensitisation, and for many of you it is the reason certain symptoms have lingered even as the rest of your health has improved.
In plain language, central sensitisation is when your central nervous system, your brain and spinal cord, gets stuck on high alert. Think of a smoke alarm that has become so sensitive it goes off every time you make toast. The alarm is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is warn you of danger. The problem is that after months or years of real illness, it has been reset to detect danger everywhere, all the time, even now, as the actual threats are fading.
It was first described in 1989 by researchers who found that neurons in the spinal cord can become more and more excitable after an injury. Even after the original injury heals, the nervous system can stay in this heightened state. Chemical, structural, and functional changes in the brain and spinal cord keep the volume turned up long after the threat is gone.
This is why some of you have cleaned up your diet, restored your gut, addressed your deficiencies, and still react to foods, sounds, light, or touch out of proportion to what is actually happening. It is not that the healing has not worked. It is that your nervous system has not caught up yet with the healing your body has already done. The tissues have changed, but the processing has not, yet.
This is not “all in your head.” The changes are measurable and real, with actual structural and chemical shifts. And here is why that matters so much at this stage: because the brain changed to create this state, the brain can change again to resolve it. That is the gift of neuroplasticity, the same gift our Creator wove into every fibre of our being, and you are already proving that change is possible.
Your Thoughts Are Shaping Your Body Right Now
You have already experienced this. You changed what you ate, and your body changed. You changed your sleep, and your energy changed. You spoke new words over yourself, and something shifted in how you carried your days.
Research is now confirming what wisdom traditions have always known and what you have been living out on this protocol: what you think, believe, and perceive physically changes your body. Not as a metaphor, but physically.
The Magnifying Glass Experiment
Dr. Norman Doidge, the psychiatrist and author who has done so much to bring neuroplasticity research to the public, has written about a remarkable study by G. Lorimer Moseley and his colleagues. Patients with chronic hand pain did a set of movements while looking at their hand three ways: with normal vision, through plain glasses, and through magnifying lenses that made the hand look bigger. When the hand simply looked bigger, both the pain and the actual physical swelling increased. When the lenses were flipped so the hand looked smaller, both the pain and the swelling went down.
Let that land for a moment. Nothing about the hand changed, and there was no new injury. The only thing that changed was how big the hand looked, and the body responded with measurable physical changes in both pain and swelling. The researchers called it a “top-down effect of body image on body tissues,” showing that how we perceive our body and what happens in our body is a two-way street.
You already know this. You have felt the difference between a day you woke expecting the worst and a day when a sunrise, a prayer, or a child’s laugh caught your attention before the old story could settle in. That shift is not wishful thinking; it is neuroscience. Perception is not passive; it actively shapes your physiology.
The Nocebo Effect: When Belief Becomes Biology
We have all heard of the placebo effect, when a sugar pill helps someone because they believe it will. Its darker twin, the nocebo effect, is just as powerful and much less talked about. When people are told a harmless treatment will cause side effects, they often develop those exact side effects. When people are told their pain will get worse, it measurably does. Negative expectations can even increase the spinal cord’s response to pain and undo the effects of real pain medication.
A recent study found that nocebo effects were stronger and longer-lasting than placebo effects, lasting at least a week. The researchers tied this to a “better safe than sorry” design: our nervous systems are wired to take threats more seriously than reassurance.
Think about what that means for you right now. You have done enormous work to heal. But if you are still scrolling through worst-case stories, reading forums full of people who never got better, and bracing every morning for symptoms to return, all of that lands in a nervous system wired to weigh the negative more heavily. That is not a character flaw; it is biology, and now that you know it, you can work with it.
What This Means at This Stage of Your Healing
I want to be careful here, because I have seen this information used against people with chronic illness. I am not saying your illness was caused by negative thinking. I am not saying you can think your way out of Lyme disease, mast cell activation, or autoimmunity. I am saying your thoughts are a powerful tool in your healing.
Your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, and environment are all inputs to your nervous system, and when it is already sensitised, those inputs matter more than ever. You have already changed so many of your inputs: your food, your rhythm, and the soil your life is planted in. Now it is time to tend to the most intimate input of all, the story you tell yourself about who you are and where this is going.
Just as fear, isolation, and threat turn up the pain signal, safety, community, nourishment, and reverence can quiet it. You have been building these things, and now we name why they work.
This is not new-age thinking. It is neuroscience confirming what our ancestors practised and what the Church has always known: we are not brains on a stick; we are embodied souls. Our bodies respond to beauty, truth, love, awe, and belonging, because they were made to.
Your Ancestral Medicine Cabinet for a Sensitised Nervous System
You already know most of these practices, because you have been living them. This week I want you to see them through a new lens, not just as good habits, but as specific inputs for a nervous system learning to come down from high alert. When you understand why they work, they become even more powerful, because you are speaking directly to the part of your brain that has been stuck on “danger.”
Nourishment: Nutrients In, Toxins Out
Your microbiome is in a very different place than it was sixty-seven weeks ago, but a sensitised nervous system is almost always still a hungry one. The brain and spinal cord use a lot of energy, and repairing neural pathways takes dense, steady nutrition. This is not the week to slack on your broth, organ meats, pastured eggs, and clean animal fats; they are building blocks for the rewiring happening right now.
Keep choosing foods low in anti-nutrients, the oxalates, lectins, and phytates that can still burden a healing body. That does not mean perfection; it means continuing to put first the foods that give the most nutrition at the least cost, and you know what those are by now. And keep choosing food from living soil when you can. You can feel the difference now, even if you could not before, and that sensitivity is not a curse; it is your body waking up.
Light and Daily Rhythm
If morning sunlight is already part of your rhythm, do not underestimate what it is doing. Light reaching your eyes in the first hour after waking sets your circadian clock and starts a hormonal cascade that directly calms the stress response. For a sensitised nervous system, it is one of the most important things you do all day, and it is free and takes minutes. If you have let it slip, come back to it this week.
Pay attention to the other end of the day too: dim your home after sunset, cut back on evening screens, and let your body get the signal that it is safe to rest. A sensitised nervous system that never gets a clear “the day is done” signal stays on alert, so give it permission to stand down.
Grounding
You know what it feels like to stand barefoot on the earth and feel that quiet settling. For a nervous system still learning to come down from high alert, grounding is one of the gentlest and most direct signals of safety there is. The earth carries a mild negative charge, and direct contact has been observed to lower inflammation markers, improve sleep, and calm the autonomic nervous system. Five minutes is enough. You already know the spot, so go stand in it.
Sound as Medicine
Your nervous system responds to what it hears, and you have probably noticed how some sounds set you on edge while others bring you back to yourself. That is your nervous system reading the environment for safety. Moving water, birdsong, and wind through the trees are ancient signals of safety, and baroque music, with its mathematical proportions, supports focus and calm. For a sensitised system, these are not luxuries; they are medicine.
And then there is Gregorian chant. For those of us in the Faith, the chants of the Church are prayer set to melody, handed down through centuries, and they carry a reverence that seems to reach deep into the body. I have seen people whose nervous systems were in complete overdrive begin to soften within minutes of listening. If you have not explored it yet, this is your week. There is a reason the monks chanted throughout the day; it was a rhythm of healing, ordering the inner life toward God.
Microbes as Medicine
You have been rebuilding your microbiome for over a year, and it shows. But the gut-brain connection runs both ways. A sensitised nervous system can disrupt digestion, gut movement, and microbial balance from the top down, just as a disordered gut can sensitise the nervous system from the bottom up. That is why we keep going with fermented foods, meat stock, colostrum, and well-prepared traditional foods, even when you think you should be “done.” You are not maintaining; you are going deeper. Every cup of broth tells your nervous system that the famine is over.
Somatic and Limbic Work
Because central sensitisation lives in the nervous system, we need tools that speak its language. You may already be doing bilateral tapping from Week Sixty Four, breathwork, or other body-based practices. Somatic practices gently bring you back into the felt sense of safety in your own body, reaching the brainstem and limbic system where these old patterns are stored, places talk therapy alone often cannot reach.
Simple things carry enormous power here: noticing where in your body you feel calm right now, placing a hand on your chest, and breathing slowly with a longer exhale than inhale. Limbic retraining works the same way, gently rewiring the brain’s threat detection by giving it new signals of safety over and over. You have been doing this for sixty-seven weeks, even without a name for it, and now you have one.
Community and Belonging
Isolation is one of the strongest amplifiers of a sensitised nervous system, and you already know this deep down. The weeks you reached out, showed up, or had someone show up for you were better weeks. Not because the symptoms disappeared, but because your nervous system got one of the most powerful safety signals there is: “I am not alone.”
If you are homebound, or leaving the house still feels like too much some days, that is okay. Community can start with one voice on the phone or one person who shows up. And for those of us who are mothers at home with little ones, you are not isolated even when it feels that way. You are doing some of the most important nervous system work in the world: co-regulating with your children, creating rhythms of safety, and passing on the ancient gift of human presence.
The Biggest Medicine: Reverence
I say it often and I will keep saying it: the biggest medicine is reverence. Reverence for the God who made your body so intricately that simply looking at your hand through a different lens changes your physiology. Reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who knew without brain scans that song heals, sunlight heals, broth heals, and community heals. Reverence for your own suffering, which has not been meaningless and which can become, as the Saints have always taught us, a participation in something redemptive.
St. Augustine wrote that disease and wounds are not things in themselves but the absence of health, that the flesh itself is good, and healing is the restoring of what was always meant to be. That is what you have been doing for sixty-seven weeks. You are not adding something foreign. You are remembering what the body already knows, removing what does not belong, and restoring what does.
St. Paul asks, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). If your body is a temple, then caring for it, nourishing it, resting it, protecting it from toxins, and bathing it in beauty and truth, is not vanity. It is worship, an act of reverence for the One who dwells within.
And here is the part that undoes me every time: the same nervous system that can be shaped by fear can be shaped by awe. The same brain that amplifies threat in the presence of danger can quiet in the presence of the sacred. Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary, the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours, and the stillness of a church at dawn are not just devotions. For a body in central sensitisation, they are medicine, signals of safety, beauty, transcendence, and love that speak to the deepest and oldest parts of your nervous system. You have felt this, so trust what you have felt.
You Are Not Starting Over; You Are Going Deeper
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in every paragraph, wondering why some symptoms have hung on despite all your work, please hear me: you are not back at square one. Central sensitisation is not a new problem. It is an old one, and you have been chipping away at it since the very first week without knowing its name. Every time you chose safety over fear, nourishment over scarcity, rhythm over chaos, and connection over isolation, you were already doing this work.
Now you have the words for it. Now you understand that your brain is plastic and changing right now as you read this. The only question is what you keep feeding it, and after sixty-seven weeks, you already know the answer.
You do not have to add more or spend money you do not have. Some of the most powerful things for a sensitised nervous system are free: sunlight, sleep, prayer, bare feet on the earth, a cup of broth, a song, a deep breath, and the company of someone who loves you. This is the mass remembering. This is what it means to learn to be human again, not by adding more complexity to our already full lives, but by gently and reverently returning to the basics our ancestors never left.
Your body is listening to everything: your thoughts, your environment, your food, your relationships, and your prayers. You have been giving it good things to hear for sixty-seven weeks, so keep going.
My nervous system is safe. My body knows how to heal. I am held. I am whole.
References and Further Reading
Moseley GL, Parsons TJ, Spence C. “Visual distortion of a limb modulates the pain and swelling evoked by movement.” Current Biology, 2008.
Doidge N. The Brain That Changes Itself (2007) and The Brain’s Way of Healing (2015). Penguin.
Volcheck MM, et al. “Central sensitisation, chronic pain, and other symptoms: Better understanding, better management.” Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 2023.
Mancini F, et al. “Visual Distortion of Body Size Modulates Pain Perception.” Psychological Science, 2011.
“Nocebo effects are stronger and more persistent than placebo effects in healthy individuals.” eLife, 2025.