Subtle But Strong: The Power of Gentle Nervous System Care

Resources:
Book a wellness consultation with Dr. Leah Hahn D.C. at Body In Balance Wellness Center, Golden CO → https://www.bodyinbalancechiropractic.com/

Gentle Is Powerful: How Light Touch Rewires Your Nervous System

Our culture glorifies intensity: “no pain, no gain” workouts, crash diets, aggressive treatments. But what if the nervous system doesn’t respond to force? What if it responds to safety?

In this episode of Healing Beyond the Symptoms, Dr. Leah Hahn D.C., explores why gentle nervous system care creates deeper transformation than forceful methods. She shares her own story of burnout from high-intensity living and reveals how light, specific touch helped her body reset into true healing.

You’ll hear patient stories, clinical insights, and practical takeaways on how gentleness bypasses resistance, signals safety, and allows the nervous system to reorganize long-held patterns of stress and trauma.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why forceful approaches often backfire in healing
  
  
• How chronic stress and unresolved trauma create “armor” in the body
  
  
• Why gentle touch communicates safety to the nervous system
  
  
• The link between posture, stress patterns, and emotional states
  
  
• How micro-practices like breathwork, tech-free time, and gentle movement rewire safety
  
  
• Why Network Spinal care helps create lasting physical, emotional, and biochemical change

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Healing Beyond the Symptoms

00:34 The Culture of Intensity and Its Impact

01:40 The Power of Gentle Touch

02:17 Understanding the Nervous System's Response

03:18 The Role of Stress and Trauma

05:07 Analyzing and Addressing Posture and Tension

11:39 Practical Techniques for Gentle Healing

14:36 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Subtle does not mean weak. Sometimes the lightest input creates the most profound transformation.

Transcript

0:00

You've been told that healing takes intensity, harder workouts, stricter diets, more discipline. But what if the real key to rewiring your body isn't force? It's gentle touch. Welcome to Healing Beyond the Symptoms, the podcast that helps people discover the root causes of their health struggles, and take back control with science strategy and self-awareness. I'm Dr. Leah Hahn, a chiropractor and functional wellness doctor who believes that true healing starts beneath the surface. So let's dive in. Our culture glorifies intensity. No pain, no gain workouts, crash diets, aggressive treatments. I live this lifestyle for many years.

Workouts at 5: 0:45

30 AM long, intense workdays, low carb diets that were strict, but the nervous system doesn't respond to force. It responds to safety. My sensitive system responded to intense workouts and high stress with adrenal fatigue. Hours of laying in bed at night with worry and anxiety, difficulty going back to sleep, and it also left me with a wired and tired feeling kind of jittery and anxious throughout most of the day. Every day I work with patients that are on this journey of recovering their nervous system health, and it's a process, but you can heal and transform. I was able to enter into healing mode with network spinal listening to my body and implementing activities to regulate my nervous system throughout the day. And again, I was able to enter into healing mode and you can too. Here's an example from one of our patients. One patient told me, I've had adjustments before that felt harsh, but I never felt calm. After with gentle touch, I actually could feel my body let go. You seem to find these specific points that just made the tension melt. It's amazing again, what gentle touch can do. Gentle input bypasses resistance, and that's really important because it invites your nervous system to shift instead of forcing it. When I feel forced to do anything, and maybe it's just my personality, but I resist, and the nervous system is very similar. Why does gentle touch work so effectively to heal the nervous system? I can tell you as someone who's delivered this gentle touch type of chiropractic care for over 20 years, that when I'm analyzing the spine just on a clinical level, I can feel so much more when I use gentle touch. The lighter I press the more information I get from the tissues of the spine. In order to feel the connective tissue, the tone of the vertebrae and the spinal structures, the tension in the muscles, the lighter I touch, the more I can feel. If I press too hard, I actually miss valuable information, but it's more than just a clinical level. It's what gentle touch communicates to the nervous system. Gentle touch allows the nervous system to move into a state of safety. I view it as if we are safe, we can grow, we can learn, we can take in new information. The nervous system needs to feel safe before it can release tension, gentle touch signals safety in a way that force actually cannot. If you've been living with chronic stress or high anxiety or overwhelm, your body doesn't feel safe. Remember that your body views chronic stress in the same way that it views trauma. If you've been living with the emotions of anxiety and stress and overwhelm and fear, your body does not feel safe. If you have unresolved traumas, whether they're small traumas or big traumas, if your body has not integrated that information, that overwhelmed your nervous system at the time of the trauma, your body doesn't feel safe. It's fascinating to me that the body responds the same way to chronic stress and overwhelm as it does to that unresolved trauma. It's the same physiological response. So how is that lack of safety experienced? It can look like your system feeling off a constant sense of unease. You can feel unwell, just a general sense of lack of wellbeing. It can look like disconnection between your mind and your body. You could be living in your thoughts versus experiencing the signs and the signals that your body is trying to tell you. It could look like emotional dysregulation. It could look like a lack of healing power within your system. Maybe you had an injury that you thought would take you a few days to recover from, but instead it took you weeks or months and you told yourself, well, I'm just getting older. Well, let's take that out of our mentality. We're not just getting older. Maybe our body isn't recovering because of chronic stress. Maybe we don't have the. Power in our system, the healing power in our system that we should, because our system is so committed to maintaining that chronic stress physiology. So we need to look at this in a little bit different way. Stress creates holding patterns in our posture and our breath and our muscle tone. As a nervous system-based chiropractor, we can feel this, we can see it, we can sense it, we can sense it in your system through testing, but we can also see it and feel it when we gently touch your spine. Every time a client of mine walks into the room, I'm watching their posture. I'm looking at how they're breathing. I'm looking at the kind of tension that they're holding in their jaw. These are all valuable signals that tell me so much about what's been happening throughout their day and how their body's been processing that level of tension and stress. When we go through a process of analyzing the spine, we determine what type of patterning your system has used to handle trauma and stress. Please know that this is not a psychic ability. It doesn't tell us what kind of trauma you've been through. That's your decision of what type of information you wanna share with us and what you don't, and that's okay. We can determine how your system has handled the trauma. What posture did you assume to handle the severe overwhelm that your nervous system went through at that time? Did that posturing do one of many things? Did it disconnect your thoughts from your emotions? Did that posturing put your body in a chronic state of fear and overwhelm? Did that posturing create unresolved rage or anger that needs to find a safe way to be expressed? Did it tuck your coccyx under your pelvis in a way that creates a victim mentality in your system? Did it create a level of simmering resentment that cannot find peace or a sense of wellbeing? Almost a sense that things will always be this way. Realize that these postures I discussed emotional tone that accompanies them. If I were to communicate with your spine through harsh forces and go into twisting or cracking or popping, I wouldn't be allowing the brain to reorganize this information or find the wisdom, that energy, or the healing associated with it. We have to be in a state of safety to be able to find that wisdom. Specific gentle contacts. Contacts to the spine that are made at the right place at the right time. Based on that analysis, allow your body to reorganize on a physical and an emotional level, even on a biochemical level that allows your perspective to shift and when the body experiences that level of safety. It has access to information that can allow our mind body to function in a new way, allowing energy to flow freely through your nervous system for healing and growth and transformation. Those specific gentle touches help the body to recognize and reorganize the patterns of trauma so that energy flows much more freely for healing. You might be asking why that is. Well, the simplest way that I can answer it is when you take pressure off the nervous system and you allow it to re-pattern itself. Literally, you are allowing different nerve pathways to be utilized so the body isn't utilizing the pathway that it, it basically went into with overwhelming trauma. It's finding new ways to operate. We're gonna go into that information at a much deeper level, and I'll be researching or going over the research from Candace Pert PhD, a neurobiologist, that is gonna give you so much more understanding of why that process looks the way that it does. Physical, emotional and chemical stressors create interference within the nervous system. Physical things can be like accidents and slips and falls, sleeping in the wrong position or falling asleep watching tv. Chemical stress can be from eating excess sugar, eating foods that create inflammation within your body, being exposed to chemicals, maybe from household cleaning products or even self-care products. It could be living in a highly polluted area, even driving in traffic with exhaust fumes. And the biggest cause of interference that I consistently see with our patients is emotional stress. How trauma, family stress, relationship stress, work stress, the stress of continual caregiving, how these highly charged emotional stressors affect people, their body, and specifically their nervous system. Think of your nervous system like a highway. Interference to the flow of information for optimal function. Interference causes your immune system to be taxed and you don't heal inflammation as efficiently. Gentle touch and here is the key in the right place At the right time clears the traffic jams, so signals between the brain and body can flow again. When I say in the right time and at the right place, I mean depending on the specific patterning that your body is using or overutilizing, when those contacts are made at the right place in the right time, the tension can dissipate. It can move, and the body can start to function in a healthier way. We've said it before, but realize that force creates resistance. The body guards it, braces, it pushes back, especially in a body that is dealt with trauma and is highly stressed and is coping with overwhelm or fear. Gentle care works with the body, not against it. It's honoring of what the current state of the body is. Only when that state is honored can it move into a healthier, more adaptable state. That's why many patients will say it felt subtle, but the changes were profound. I call our practice members after their first network sessions to see how their body responded. Just this past week, I was talking to a man in his early thirties that had dealt with consuming stress and tension that was stored in his lower back. With his first session. He said it was subtle, but he could sense that where I was touching his lower spine and neck were important areas to the overall picture. He left not expecting much, and by the end of the evening noticed that the tension was moving. There was so much more freedom in his spine, and the ability to take a deep breath and have a peaceful mind was enhanced dramatically. Gentle adjustments are not our weakness. They are our superpower. As practical ways to really enhance and experience the power of gentleness, I want you to try gentle self touch practices. And what I mean by that is really using your breath. We've talked about this many times before. Breathing in through your nose. Out through your mouth, but actually putting your hands on your chest. Or you can put your, your hands on your upper abdomen, but breathe into those areas in through the nose, out through the mouth, but have your body actually sense the safety that your hands create. There's so much power in the force of gentle touch. So if you're not driving, so please be safe here. I want you to actually put your hands on your chest right over your sternum, and I want you to take a deep breath with me in through the nose and out through the mouth now and then I want you to bring your hands to right below your sternum in the upper part of your abdomen. Again, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. So take one of those breaths now. Lastly, I'm gonna actually, this time have you put your hands right over your belly button and again, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. That was a simple practice that was most likely under a minute. That can make such a difference in calming your nervous system. There's so much power again in you just putting your hands on your body and breathing into it. You're telling your nervous system you are safe. You can even use that affirmation while you're breathing. I am safe. The next thing I want you to think about this week is reframing movement. Instead of only pushing through high intensity exercise, add restorative movement like stretching or walking or gentle yoga. I love my weightlifting workouts, but in order to honor my nervous system, I try to do a gentle workout in between the high intensity weight workouts. So I might do one of those weight workouts, but the next day I incorporate. A walk, and then I might do a next day, I might do the weights, and then the next day I do yoga. So I balance it throughout the week so it's not just all high intensity this week. I'd also like you to choose two one hour blocks in the week where you could be phone free. I know that's a lot to think about, but let your nervous system take a break. Notice how your body feels at the end of that one hour block of time. You might start to do it more and more depending on how it makes you feel. And the last thing I just wanna encourage you to do is to seek nervous system focused care network. Spinal uses light gentle contacts along the spine to help your nervous system reorganize tension and move into healing. It's not about fixing you, it's about creating the conditions your body needs to do what it was designed to do, which is heal. Our tactical takeaways for this week is that healing doesn't require force. It requires safety. Gentle touch can rewire the nervous system by signaling safety, releasing stored stress, and restoring communication in the body. Subtle does not mean weak. Sometimes the lightest input creates the most lasting change. Thanks for listening to Healing Beyond the Symptoms. If you've ever wondered how something so gentle could create such powerful change, this is your invitation to experience it. My free resource at body and balance chiropractic.com or book a consultation with us to explore how gentle nervous system care can support you. And be sure to follow me on Instagram at Body and Balance Wellness Center for daily insights. Until next time, breathe deep, soften your body and remember, dental care creates profound change. Thanks again for joining me today on Healing Beyond the symptoms. If you've been curious about network spinal or if you've tried everything else and still feel stuck, I want you to know this. Your body is not broken. It's patterned, and those patterns can change. If you're ready to experience how gentle care can lead to profound transformation. I'd love to invite you to book a wellness consultation at body and balance chiropractic.com. Together we'll look at what your body needs to finally release, reset, and thrive. Until next time, breathe deep. Trust your body and remember. Gentle can be powerful.