Chronic Illness From Dysregulation

Your body can hurt in a way that is completely real while your tests still come back normal, and that gap is where so many women get dismissed and mislabeled and start doubting themselves. We talk about chronic pain, chronic illness, and psychosomatic symptoms without the insult that often comes with those words, and we name the real enemy: the belief that mind-body factors make suffering “not real.” 

I break down how nervous system dysregulation keeps you trapped in survival mode, with high cortisol and adrenaline shaping sleep, inflammation, gut function, headaches, fatigue, and flare ups. We connect the dots to familiar diagnoses and symptoms like migraines, fibromyalgia, IBS, POTS, and chronic back pain, and we make a key distinction: this isn’t about imagining symptoms or thinking your way out of disease. It’s about subconscious threat detection, meaning making, and the patterns of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn that once protected you but now keep your physiology on edge. 

We also get honest about why the medical system often doesn’t address this, from training gaps to time and insurance constraints, and we touch the research landscape, including the ACE study and the need for stronger trials on trauma treatment and physical health outcomes. If you’re ready for responsibility without blame and practical reframes that teach your body “the danger is over,” hit play. Subscribe, share with a friend who feels unseen, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway or question.

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Transcript

Why Chronic Illness Feels Invisible

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Akhtar.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I'm going to be talking about chronic pain, psychosomatic illnesses, chronic illnesses, and it's one of those topics that's been in the making for a long time. But here we are. Imagine waking up exhausted after eight hours of sleep. Your joints hurt, some days your stomach hurts, or you're the person that has on and off migraines and it's unpredictable when you'll be functional and when you will not. And you go to the doctors and you're getting everything checked and everything is coming back normal. And every doctor tells you that stress is not helping you. And you might be hearing from time to time that it's in your head. If this applies to you, then this podcast is for you. Because what if they were accidentally right? Accidentally but not in a way that either you or your doctor thinks they're right. And today we're going to be talking about this exact topic, chronic pain and illness from dysregulation and unhealed nervous system. Now every problem that

The Real Villain Is Misunderstanding

SPEAKER_01 1:20

has a complex system behind it has a few villains. This topic has three villains that are fighting each other. That's the medical system, the trauma, and the confusion behind your own healing journey. And while these are the three obvious villains, there is actually a bigger hidden villain, and that is the misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is if the illness is affected by your mind, it must not be real. That's the real enemy here. A psychosomatic illness is defined by a physical disease or symptom in which psychological factors play a significant role in its development. They can also play a role in exacerbation. They work through real biological pathways that affect the endocrine and immune systems. But the nuance here is that most physicians would not say psychological factors play a role as a cause of these illnesses. Rather, they're considered more of a contributing factor, one among many contributing factors, alongside your genetics, environmental exposures, lifestyle, infections, and other biological mechanisms that can be proven. Here I'm only focusing on the mind body aspect and purposefully not talking about any of the other factors that I mentioned, and I'm doing this in the spirit of simplicity and so that you have practical takeaways from this podcast that you can use. Also just to clarify, in general, the medical community distinguishes psychosomatic illness from fictitious disorders, malingering, or somatic symptom disorders, where the excessive distress or preoccupation with symptoms becomes the primary clinical issue. In psychosomatic illnesses, a medical community acknowledges that the emotional and psychological state produces genuine physiological changes. And the examples you might have heard are stress worsening your blood pressure or your blood sugar. Overall, a very under recognized sign of nervous system dysregulation, of you living in an unhealthy mental state is chronic pain and illness, meaning it's hardly ever considered that trauma is playing a role in this. And these symptoms and physiological illnesses can be anything from migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic back pain, IBS, even POTS, which is postural orthostatic tachycardic syndrome. It could be other pain syndromes like reflex sympathetic dystrophy.

What Psychosomatic Actually Means

SPEAKER_01 3:50

It can range all the way up to heart attacks that happen because of a hyperactivated adrenal pituitary axis and high cortisol states that creates injury to the vessels and the arteries that then leads to plaques and heart attacks. I want to be clear when we talk about your mental state contributing to your physical disease, an underlying dangerous assumption here is that I'm saying that you're imagining these things and that you're making them up, which is not at all what I'm saying. Imagining these things implies that your conscious mind can take control over what you think, and then you can think your way out of these diseases. It implies control. It implies a certain sovereignty that you are lacking on your own body, therefore you have this disease. It implies that I'm accusing you of not utilizing mental health resources to help yourself out of these diagnoses. Again, all of these are dangerous assumptions and extremely harmful. So I'm explicitly mentioning them here in case you fall into this. A lot of medical providers fall into this trap and start calling women with symptoms like this as supratentorial, a very derogatory, a very demeaning term. At the same time, I am also saying that these things are the signs and symptoms of dysregulation of your nervous system, and that your nervous system is in a chronic state of hypervigilance or in a chronic state of being

Hypervigilance And The Stress Loop

SPEAKER_01 5:20

checked out that creates physical ailments. So your mind is creating them, or contributing to them at least, but not in a sense that implies conscious control. Like if you're excited about your engagement party coming up, but when the day of the party arrives you get GI problems, or the stress of an exam gives you loose bowels or abdominal pain. Reason I know that an engagement party or exams don't cause the bowel problem is because that if that was the case, everyone facing these situations will have the same symptoms. So the difference underlying only lies in how you're dealing with the situation at a subconscious level. So while the initial injury, the wounding, the trauma, the initial insult of your nervous system that might have happened to you is not in your control, how you navigate this in the future is in your control. If you become the victim of the circumstances, that then manifests in chronic pain and illnesses. If you are able to healthily take control of how you heal your mind and your body, and you learn to regulate yourself through thought based and body based practices of healing, this is in your control and that can change the outcome. I want to do whatever I can to consciously take out the insulting nature of the accusations that are made by some medical professionals and non professionals towards women who are carrying these chronic body-based diagnoses. And I also want to place responsibility towards the women and on the women who are facing these challenges. And if you got here one way or another, you are also able to get out. If you are at the doorstep of learned helplessness, then you can unlearn it as well. I want to take it from an accusation or an insult to giving you a responsibility and empowering you because a lot of these chronic diagnoses have been successfully linked to chronic nervous system dysregulation. So while it is a part of your mind that creates it, and the mind is an extremely powerful tool, when I say the mind, I mean the mind and the heart, the thought and the feeling pair, your thoughts and emotions together. Overall, basically your nervous system, including your conscious and your subconscious mind. And while this mind is the driving force behind your body's illness and the diagnosis, it is not a fault, it is a responsibility. So if you as a woman suffer from chronic migraines and we have a lot of scientific data and terms and knowledge about how that happens, vasodilation and the tryptophan medications that can be used to alleviate the symptoms and how to prevent them and how to abort them, there are full neurological subspecialties dedicated just to managing headaches. There are people who spend their entire careers helping other humans facing these types of chronic headache problems. So while there is a lot of scientific knowledge behind them, I'm going to narrow this problem down to a specific example again to make it applicable and to take out the generic language and to zoom in a little bit on the problem. If you are this woman and you're hyper vigilant about, let's say, your husband being upset with you because you spent an extra hour with your friends while your intention was to have fun and unwind, your husband thinks that you're out there neglecting your domestic responsibilities, and you come home and you go to bed stressed that your husband's going to be upset with you. This stress is going to translate into inner hypervigilance state. This is going to translate into rumination, each thought creating further stress, and this mental cycle fueling itself. Your unmanaged mind adds fuel to the fire by collecting data from the past and by creating the worst case scenario for the future. Basically, in this specific example, while we're zoomed in, if the details don't apply to you, I want you to pay attention to the message behind this example and extract from the similarities that apply to you in your life. If your mind is used to one of the four default behaviors of dysregulation like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and it does it with the perceived sense of threat, in this case the threat being your husband's upset, and the threat coming from you not wanting him to be upset, you taking responsibility for his upset, you taking ownership of his emotions, and he expecting that you change your behavior so that he doesn't feel upset anymore. This also perpetuates by you not receiving education around how his upset is not your responsibility, his emotions come from his thoughts, your fear, your upset, and your frustration comes from your own threat detection mechanisms that come from your mind and from a dysregulated nervous system. This dysregulated nervous system then creates the high internal cortisol levels and high adrenaline levels that you're living under, and that's what contributes to disease or flare-ups of the disease. In other examples, let's say you're a woman who's terrified to open text messages, a woman who can't relax on vacation, a woman who gets migraines every time ETH planning comes closer, or every time who gets fibromyalgia flare because your in-laws are visiting. Or if you're a woman whose autoimmune disease flares while you're facing difficulties of running a business, hiring and firing. The physical manifestations of this hypervigilant state combination of freeze, fight, flight, appease responses could be a migraine, could be fibromyalgia, could be IBS, could be vasovagal symptoms and syncopizing and passing out. Usually, generally speaking, fight becomes anxiety, freeze becomes fatigue, fawn becomes autoimmune self abandonment, and flight is high adrenaline activities like constantly leaving a situation. Again, these are the general manifestations and symptoms of these states. I'm not saying that any of these are directly causing diseases. These are the symptoms that are showing you how these patterns are keeping your physiology dysregulated. Because while every survival response was brilliant while it was needed, it's no longer brilliant because it's not needed in your life anymore. None of these responses were flaws. They are masterpieces of adaptation. Fight protects you, flight prepares you, freeze preserves you, fawn keeps your relationships intact, which is necessary for your survival. Your nervous system resorts to these responses because at one point in your life

Why The Medical System Misses This

SPEAKER_01 12:30

they worked. The tragedy is not that you learned them or that you used them. The tragedy is that your body never received the memo that the danger has ended, and you can heal from them. So under that premise, the body continues to fight battles that are no longer there. Healing is not you convincing your body that it was wrong. Healing is finally you giving your body evidence that it no longer has to survive a life that it already survived, that time is past. This is when your physiology begins to shift from protection towards repair and you go from hypervigilance towards peace. So now let's say that you're a woman who has any of these kinds of chronic illness, symptoms or diagnosis, and you go to a modern Western medical provider. While they've spent their entire life in learning about this issue and are literally experts at it, very rarely will your conversation ever go why are you taking responsibility for your husband's emotions? Why are you in a state of hypervigilance? How are you going to heal from that? Almost no one in the current Western medical profession will ask you these questions. Because we are not trained in this. So what this means is that it is safe for you to assume that your doctor is not going to know this. And I'm not saying this to throw shade at the medical profession. I admire the medical profession. I practice it every day. I wouldn't exchange my medical license for anything in the world. I am saying all of this to shed light on the fact that you have to stop being disappointed in your physicians when they don't know this correlation. Unless you are aware and you're going to a trauma informed physician who is going to have a completely different training and background. And of course these types of medical providers are very hard to come by. And it is because it doesn't help that the payment system of a physician does not incentivize them to spend time in coaching or therapy type of modalities. So even if a physician is eager to practice and join the modality of acute care medicine, preventative medicine, and somatic therapy based medicine, they cannot sustainably do so because at least in US there's no insurance provider that recognizes all these interventions and pays the doctors for her services. So if someone is passionate about combining these approaches, then they have no choice but to resort to cash pay systems, which a lot of times are not reachable by many who need these services. So I'm saying these things to prepare you mentally so you stop being surprised or angry when your PCP or your specialist that you're going to doesn't adopt this approach with you. And when you're not angry at the system, you can actually look for resources that are within your reach that will help you heal. This podcast being one of them, inshallah. So the part of the treatment of the chronic seemingly untreatable diagnosis is you taking responsibility and not continually adding insult to injury. Meaning your original trauma or hurt happened, your hypervigilant state kicked into gear to help protect you, and now you can let go of that. You can release that response system. Continuing to interpret the world through the lens of survival has now become maladaptive, and it keeps you bound to your illness because these are high adrenaline, high cortisol states that are now showing up as diseases. You do that, you participate in your healing by training your nervous system and mastering your perception of the situation so that you can perceive it in a way that is helpful to you rather than harmful, helpful to your physical health and your mental, emotional, and spiritual well being. I have been talking about

What Research Shows And What’s Missing

SPEAKER_01 16:35

this correlation this whole time about your perception, your internal environment of high cortisol and then manifestation of disease. This is a correlation, but what makes this association difficult to prove is that it is not a causation. Correlations themselves are impossible to prove factually. There are very well designed experiments out there that take psychosomatic issues into account, especially in the field of PNEI, psychoneuroendoimmunology. There is an ACE study that I frequently reference in my work, which is adverse childhood experiences. This was conducted by CDC and Kaiser Permanente in late 1990s. This study reveals a powerful cumulative correlation between childhood trauma and adult chronic illness. It provides insight into mental health struggles and premature death, but this study or any subsequent commentary of this omits to mention the role of your nervous system in the healing process. There's minimal to no way of proving that healing your nervous system reduces your intensity or frequency of migraines. But if we studied a thousand women and noted the modalities they use to heal themselves and created a correlation between nervous system healing and improvement of migraine outcomes, there's no money to be made from that study. There's no pharmacological benefit where you can write the idea of this study up, submit it to the government or a private entity who will give you money to pursue this research. Because how is it going to help them make money? It's not. So in modern medicine, the things that get funded and the research that gets done is around what has the promise of turning around and being able to be profitable, depending on the results of the study. So then the question becomes why don't psychosomatic practitioners, mind body healers, start to fund these types of studies? And there are people who are doing that, but the barrier here is that the result is subjective. It depends on a woman's report of telling a scientist through a form or a questionnaire that she's feeling better. There's no lab proven marker that you can follow to prove to the scientific community that the woman is objectively feeling better. So this barrier in the availability of good data is from the lack of objectively measurable data that current scientific community relies heavily on. Subjective interpretations of improvement of disease are not given as much weight as objective data that can be proven and replicated. The correlation literature that I already described like the A study that correlates childhood trauma to poor health outcomes, this type of literature is much stronger than the treatment outcome literature. A big gap is the lack of large randomized controlled trials with hard physical health endpoints after trauma treatment. We still need studies asking whether effective trauma treatment reduces incident of diabetes, recurrent cardiovascular events, autoimmune flare frequency, migraine days, inflammatory disease progression, or all cause mortality. These types of studies are still mostly observational data. So all of this information feeds back to my original point around when you as a woman go to seek help for this type of a diagnosis, you're afraid to be labeled crazy, you're afraid to be labeled emotional volatile, and this fear is legitimate because a lot of times there's judgment behind the mask of caregiving. And I also want to remind you that there are also very empathic providers out there, the ones that understand this correlation and provide you complete compassion. So if you're somebody who is looking to take more responsibility towards your healing and empowerment, don't come to it through guilt or shame,

Relearning Safety And Closing Prayer

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because that's going to make the original problem worse. What is your responsibility in this whole situation is your mind's meaning making. What might have counted as a threat in the past is no longer a threat. Your husband's upset is not a threat. Your boss's comment is not a threat. Your friend's delayed text is not a sign of abandonment. Your children's defiant behavior is not a threat to your parenting. Learning that and internalizing that and living your life with peace and joy, that is the outcome we want, inshallah. This elevates your internal frequency, that upgrades your overall operating system that takes you out of chronic dysregulation, which means that it ultimately helps you with your migraines, your autoimmune flare ups, or things like that. All this time your body became exceptionally good at surviving, surviving a world that it believed is dangerous. Now it is your responsibility to teach it that not everything is dangerous. Firing an incompetent employee is not dangerous. Your husband's emotions are not dangerous. Your attempt to discipline your child towards maintaining their salah is not dangerous. The ability to teach your mind, your heart and your nervous system that not every disagreement is abandonment and not every criticism is rejection, this ability is what takes you out of the high cortisol state. This is what provides the beneficial outcome. If your body became exceptionally good at surviving the life you lived, now your job is to become exceptionally good at living the life Allah has placed in front of you today. With that I pray to Allah, O Allah, heal what physically ails me. Teach my heart what is truly safe, quiet my nervous system, and replace my fear with trust in you. Help me release what no longer protects me. Strengthen me to take responsibility without blame and let every step towards healing bring me closer to you. Amin Yarabul Amin. Please keep me in your da'as. I will talk to you guys next time.