What Your Nervous System Stores That No Blood Test Can Find

Johanna is sharing a conversation from the Everyday Wellness podcast — Cynthia Thurlow sitting down with Dr. Julia Haffner, a European-trained medical doctor who spent years watching patients come in with real, debilitating symptoms that no test could find. Dr. Haffner explains where stress actually lives in the body, what fascia has to do with how we feel in perimenopause, and why your labs can be completely normal while you feel completely terrible.

🤩 Everyday Wellness Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/everyday-wellness-midlife-hormones-menopause-and/id1435214303?i=1000769782831

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Swing through the ease with legging. Mid life's golden honey or nobody's falls. Got the fire side where I'm not shine. This is a time. Women all in midlife. Just do a case do the changes. When the heart's strong is hot and coming sing along.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hello my friends, and welcome back to Not Your Mother's Midlife. I am your host, Joanna, and today we are talking about something that I think is going to make a lot of sense to a lot of you, especially if you've ever sat across from a doctor being told your labs look just fine and driven home feeling like you just imagine the whole thing. I'm sharing a conversation from the Everyday Wellness podcast, Cynthia Thurlow, sitting down with Dr. Julia Hafner. Dr. Hafner is a European-trained medical doctor who's worked across internal medicine, geriatrics, family practice, chronic pain, aesthetic medicine, and across all of those fields, she kept seeing the same thing. Women coming in with real symptoms, real suffering, and tests that showed nothing. The pattern is what sent her in a different direction. And the conversation she has with Cynthia is one of the more interesting ones I've come across on the subject of where stress actually lives in the body and what that has to do with how we feel in perimenopause. And menopause. The first thing she talks about is the connection between postpartum and perimenopause, which is something I hadn't heard framed quite this way before. Both involve a significant drop in estrogen, and a lot of the symptoms that show up in each, the anxiety, the sleep disruption, the feeling of being somehow not yourself, are driven by the same underlying hormonal shift. Women who had a hard postpartum experience may find perimenopause particularly familiar. Not in a comforting way necessarily, but in a way that at least makes sense. Then she gets into fascia. Not facial, fascia for F-A-S-C-I-A. Most of us know fascia as the connective tissue that holds everything together in the body, the stuff surgeons have to cut through. But Dr. Hafner describes it as something more than that. She calls it a sensory organ. And she explains that fascia doesn't just sit there passively, it responds to our experiences. Stress, emotional overwhelm, physical trauma, unprocessed grief. Over time, that can create patterns of tension that sit in the tissue and stay there. She's not talking metaphorically, she means this literally. The body stores what the mind has not finished processing. And when you've spent years managing high stress, like a career, a household, other people's needs, maybe some losses along the way, that accumulates somewhere. And Dr. Hafner says it accumulates in the fascia. Is it fascia or fascia? I'm probably saying it wrong, but I'm just gonna keep saying fascia. Forgive me. This is also why she pushes back on the idea that trauma only means war or abuse. Trauma, the way she uses it, is anything that nervous system didn't have the capacity to fully move through at the time. That covers a lot of territory for most women. The estrogen connection matters here too. I feel like you're gonna take a shot every time I say estrogen throughout from the when I started this podcast up until now. We take a shot. The estrogen connection matters here too. Estrogen has a buffering effect on the stress response. When it's present in good supply, it helps regulate how reactive we are to relationships, to environmental pressures, to the small daily things that might not have bothered us 10 years ago. As estrogen declines in perimenopause, that buffer goes with it. Women often describe becoming more sensitive, more easily overwhelmed, quicker to feel the impact of things. And Dr. Hefner says that's not a personality change, it's the nervous system operating with less hormonal cushioning than it used to have. She also covers adrenal health, which becomes particularly relevant when you've been running on cortisol for years and then hit perimenopause on top of it. The adrenals are already working harder than they should be, and the ovaries start stepping back. There's not a lot of reserve left, which is one reason perimenopause can feel so much heavier than the sum of its parts. Onto lifestyle. Her approach is gentler than what a lot of women have been told. She talks about the value of lower intensity movement during this period, and we've talked about that in my previous episodes too. Not because you should stop challenging yourself, but because high intensity exercise raises cortisol. And if your cortisol is already dysregulated, that's not helpful. The nervous system needs support, not more loading onto it. She also talks about social media and scrolling, which she describes as a source of low-grade constant stress on the body. I think we can all agree. Not the dramatic kind of stress, the kind that accumulates quietly without you registering it. And then she introduces something she calls the energetic facelift, which is her own approach based on meridian points in the face, that she says works on the emotional and physical simultaneously. She also has a free app for tracking menopause symptoms, which you can find in the show notes on the episode. What I took from this conversation is the framing more than anything else. Your labs being normal does not mean your body isn't struggling. Your nervous system can be dysregulated in ways that don't show up on a blood panel. And the load that you've been carrying for years, the stress, the unprocessed stuff, the years are putting everyone first, that lives somewhere in the body, knowing that at least is a good place to start. I'll look um the full episode of Everyday Wellness in the show notes. And I'd just like to say thank you for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend, share it on your social media. It might actually help somebody else who needs to hear this, and it definitely will help me grow my followers. Subscribe to this podcast and also go over and subscribe to my YouTube channel because there's lots of fun videos over there. It's a little bit different than what we talk about here. And leave me a five-star review that really will help me, and I really do appreciate it. And until next week, I'm Joanna, and this is Not Your Mother's Midlife. Bye bye.