Why Slowing Down Makes You Sick?

Have you ever noticed that you power through intense work deadlines or stressful seasons — but the moment you finally relax, you get sick?

It might happen when you go on vacation.
When you finish a big project.
Or when life finally slows down.

In this episode of Healing Beyond the Symptoms, Dr. Leah Hahn D.C., explains why this phenomenon is incredibly common — and why it’s actually a nervous system and stress physiology response, not bad timing or weak immunity.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
• Why stress hormones can temporarily suppress illness
• How chronic cortisol exposure affects immune function
• The connection between digestion, immunity, and nervous system regulation
• Why symptoms often appear when life slows down
• How unresolved stress can accumulate in the body
• Why high-performing and high-responsibility individuals experience this pattern more often
• Practical ways to regulate your nervous system before a crash happens

Timestamps:

[00:00:00] – Why You Get Sick When You Finally Relax

[00:01:05] – How Stress Hormones Affect Your Immune System

[00:02:20] – Chronic Stress, Cortisol & Silent Inflammation

[00:05:10] – Why Symptoms Appear After Stress Ends

[00:06:30] – How Your Nervous System Stores Stress

[00:08:05] – Polyvagal Theory: Fight, Freeze & Healing

[00:09:40] – Why High Achievers Crash After Stress

[00:11:20] – Daily Habits That Strengthen Your Immune System

[00:13:45] – The Nervous System Practices That Changed My Health

[00:16:00] – Micro-Resets to Prevent Stress Crashes

[00:18:50] – The Truth About Getting Sick When You Relax

If you’ve ever wondered why your body seems to “crash” after stressful seasons, this episode will help you understand the deeper biology behind it.

Your body isn’t failing.

It’s finally catching up on the healing it postponed during survival mode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever noticed that you can power through the busiest seasons, but the minute things slow down or you start to relax, you get sick. That's not bad luck. It's your nervous system speaking. 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. You may have noticed that you get sick when you go on vacation. You crash after you turn in a big project. Symptoms show up once the stress ends. Things feel worse after you slow down. This isn't bad timing, it's biology. And it's a very real and very nervous system-based phenomenon. And it makes a lot of sense when you look at the body's physiology from a perspective of stress physiology, polyvagal theory, and network spinal principles. So we want to go into why do people get sick when things slow down? Well, during stress, the body shifts into fight or flight or survival mode, and it prioritizes keeping that physiology alive over long-term repair and healing. The nervous system is typically in a sympathetic dominant state when we're in stress mode, when we're busy, when we're multitasking, when we're managing multiple aspects of our lives. And that elevates the hormones of adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline typically dissipates quickly, but high cortisol levels will typically linger. Cortisol, when it's just a short-term response, meaning a short-term stressor, well, that has an effect of decreasing inflammation and gives the immune system a short-term surge of protection. But if the stress is more than just a stressful day or a stressful week here and there, but it becomes a chronic way of living. The organs and the tissues of the body are exposed to ongoing cortisol, this relentless stream of cortisol, and our cells can become desensitized to the cortisol that should be actually helping us. So with chronic stress or trauma that has not been healed or dealing with a consistent state of overwhelm, inflammation is no longer mitigated. Acute inflammation is like getting a paper cut or spraining your ankle, and you feel like the body is mounting this healing response. So there's swelling and redness and discomfort. But chronic inflammation is more subtle than that. It's like the cells of the body having a silent and prolonged injury, and that can eventually cause damage. Now go back to what we know about that fight or flight sympathetic response. So our blood sugars increased, our blood flow to our muscles is increased, our heart rate is increased, our rate of breathing, our rate of respiration is increased. It's depressing our immune system, depressing our GI function and reproductive function. And now that's becoming the steady and consistent response for the body. Cortisol can latch on to specific receptors on the cell membranes of every single cell of your body and trigger a chain of events. Think of how that high cortisol is increasing specific aspects of your physiology and dampening others. If we specifically go back to the immune system, remember that much of the immune system is located in the digestive tract. So if digestive function is being depressed because of that high stress physiology, then so is the health and the effectiveness of the immune system. Someone may be experiencing constipation or diarrhea or IBS and not realize that their immune system is being affected as well. Long-term elevated cortisol actually suppresses the effectiveness of the immune system by lowering the number of lymphocyte cells. Those are white blood cells that you're your infection-fighting cells. And as the lymphocyte level is lowered, we become much more susceptible to infections and viruses, the common cold, flus, all of those types of things. This can also accelerate the progression of chronic illness. So what I mean by that is that as the immune system becomes more and more dysregulated, the body can actually start to attack itself. This can lead to chronic fatigue and exhaustion, but it can also look like the autoimmune diseases that you heard of, things like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, chogrin's disease, psoriasis, fibromyalgia, inflammatory bowel disease, osteoarthritis, Crohn's disease. I even see patients deal with bouts of eczema after they've dealt with a strong, like highly stressful time period. So our key point, and I know I just went through a lot of very science-y information, but stress doesn't make you healthy. It's not making you stronger. It masks what the body doesn't have the resources to deal with at that time. The body is prioritizing survival and performance over repair. Your immune system, digestion, even your reproductive system, healing process are all getting put on hold just to deal with that stress physiology. When the stressor ends and the nervous system finally perceives safety, the cortisol drops, the parasympathetic activity increases, digestion, immunity, repair all come back online. And that's actually a good thing, but it can feel awful at first. Because now what can show up is the colds or flu-like symptoms, fatigue, headaches, digestive issues, pain or inflammation. And I often will see emotional releases as well. It's finally time I think of this as the body can deal with what it hasn't had the resources to deal with. The body isn't breaking down, it's actually catching up. Another key point is you're not falling apart when life slows down. Your body is finally releasing what it's been holding. So let's go over just the nervous system's role in this. The first thing is we often will store stress. Tension and unprocessed energy stay in the nervous system until your body feels safe. In network spinal care, we look at how the spine holds long-standing tension patterns used to cope with the trauma, with the overwhelm, with emotional patterns that are stuck, chronic stress. And these patterns limit the awareness that we actually have when we're under that high state of stress. So these patterns will actually limit your awareness while your stress is very high. And it delays the healing process. Your body doesn't heal when it's running from a lion, it waits until the lion is gone, even if that lion is just your inbox. When the system reorganizes, stored stress can actually be released. And as tension unwinds, energy that was once used for protection actually becomes available. The immune system re-engages, the body expresses what it postponed from even dealing with. And when survival mode eases, then your immune system is back online. It turns back on, often with a backlog of repair work that it actually needs to perform. Symptoms are often the body's way of completing unfinished stress cycles. If we look at this in terms of polyvagal theory, the immune system is supported when you're in the ventral vagal state or in a parasympathetic nervous system state. If you drop into dorsal vagal, remember that's that freeze state. You can feel frozen and exhausted, maybe depressed and numb. You might feel lonely. You might have feelings of depression or hopelessness, or you're in that sympathetic dominant state, that fight or flight state that we talked about, where we have anxious energy and we feel like we need to take action. Of course, you can be in hybrid states of that, meaning you have a little bit of sympathetic and a little bit of that freeze state going on. There's many different ways you can have hybrid states of that. So when you start to re-emerge from that state, when you start to move into the ventral vagal system, or you start to move into the parasympathetic system, your body can move into a state of repair and healing and cleaning up infections that were inhibiting your body from full health. And why do high-functioning people experience this even more? People who are driven, people who are caretakers, especially long-term caretakers, people who are very responsible, perfectionists, people who are strong under pressure. They're especially prone to this pattern because in order to do those things, they're often overriding their body's signaling. They're staying mobilized longer and they delay rest until their body actually forces them to. Realize that getting sick after stress isn't a sign of weakness or it's not proof that your body is broken. It's a sign of resilience. It shows you that your system is finally shifting out of overdrive and into repair mode. And this is incredibly healthy. But in order to avoid being in that state of dysregulation, you need to get ahead of it with consistent care, routines, and allowing nervous system regulation to be a part of your routine and happening on a regular basis. The goal is to help your body regulate in real time so you don't always crash when you start the process of slowing down or relaxing. My immune system has always been my weakness. I spent most of my junior high, senior high, college, chiropractic school years, just about every break that we had, I would be sick for the first week of it. I would get flus, colds, respiratory infections, all kinds of viruses that my body was having to clean up. So part of the reason that I finally realized that was because I would push. Over time, I started to give my body very specific levels of support. So I want to list some of those things, but realize that this was a process over time. So even if you're starting with a few of these things, it can make a difference. I started to do infrared sauna for healing on a weekly basis. Every quarter, I would do a detox to help my body clear up inflammation. I cleaned up my diet. I took out gluten and dairy, and I'm not saying everybody needs to do that, but it made a huge difference for helping my immune system stay in a better place. I also had to cut way back on sugar. So that was something I had grown up with, was my family. My mom was a loved to bake and there would always be lots of sweet things around. That didn't really help my immune system at all. So I needed to cut way back on that. I moved to instead of doing my heavier workouts like weight lifting and cardio, those more intense workouts, I moved them to every other day instead of doing them every day. That allowed my nervous system more time to actually go again into healing and repair mode and lowered my cortisol levels over time. I fine-tuned my supplementation. So I use things like magnesium glycinate to support the nervous system, omega-3 fatty acids. I use an immune support product called Vital Nutrients Immune Support. Love that because it supports stress physiology as well as the immune system. I use a type of vitamin C called magnesium assorbate, vitamins A, D, E, K, and I love Thieves essential oil. Please realize I'm not making recommendations for you, but you should speak to your wellness care provider. These supports are the things that really worked for me. I do a lot to reduce my histamine levels. Years ago, I figured out the correlation between high histamine, cortisol, and estrogen. So I decreased my consumption of high histamine foods. So you can find all kinds of lists of those on the internet. But between that and working on all these stress management tools, I noticed an improvement in my immune system and my digestion. Well, these supports are all very helpful. Taking consistent care of my nervous system and learning how to nurture myself through healthy habits has made all the difference. I use network spinal on a weekly basis, consistent breath work, meditation. I take way more breaks than I used to. I use mind-body check-ins. I actually rest and I'm learning to rest even more. That was all the missing piece that helped all of my other tools actually work more effectively. That level of resilience and adaptability that I eventually built in the in the nervous system. I want to give you an insider, kind of a pro tip is using something called a PEMF mat. I love that mat and I use the one by higher dose. It's pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. It's actually a mat that is that you lay on that, or you can sit on it as well. They make some that you can sit on that actually aids your longevity and recovery. I lay on it ideally for about 20 minutes a day. I use my Insight Timer Meditation ab and breath work at that time, and it's incredibly calming to the nervous system. If you have a super sensitive nervous system like I do, I can only do it on level one for about 20 minutes, but it creates this beautiful, peaceful feeling that is just incredibly healing to the nervous system. It's a beautiful reset that you can use throughout the day. Remember that pushing harder and doing more to be more, help more, whatever it may be, isn't necessarily going to support your healing process. If you're going to show up for other people in the way that you really want to, learning to take care of yourself, learning the power of rest and integrating changes and healing and allowing your nervous system to move into healing mode is an incredibly important tool. So, what can you do about this? I first want you to notice the pattern. Acknowledge that my body tends to get sick whenever I relax. Acknowledgement and awareness is the first step. Then I want you to add micro resets during stressful seasons or just into your everyday life. Instead of waiting until vacation to actually exhale, I'd like you instead to think of giving your body mini pauses throughout the day. The three deep breaths that I've mentioned, set a timer, do it every single hour of the day. A walk, gentle stretching, guided meditation, yoga. Or maybe you have a lot of fight or flight energy that you need to get rid of and dissipate. I've often told my clients that they need to step into a private area and shake their body and shake their limbs. It's a way to actually dissipate that nervous, uh, sympathetic fight or flight energy from the body, just like a wild animal would shake after a stressful encounter. Doing that can completely reset your nervous system. So you can set a timer for a minute, go into a private area, let your arms and legs shake, and you'll feel so much better and you can re-enter the world again. Rest without guilt, incredibly important. Think of hydrating and nourishing your body. Gentle movement and breath. Support regulation. So think of body-based care, network spinal is an absolutely amazing tool for reorganizing the nervous system. Avoid rushing back into stress too quickly. So if there's ways to kind of integrate back into the day, sometimes for me, it's a short break, it's a short pause, and then I slowly re-enter normal life again. But trying to push through often prolongs the healing process. So in the big picture, true healing doesn't happen in survival mode. Stress can keep you functional, but being in safety and creating safety in your nervous system more often actually allows you to heal. When symptoms start to show up during rest, it's a sign that the nervous system trusts that it finally can. And I want you to support your nervous system. Again, just the things we've talked about, practices like meditation, restorative movement, breath work will help regulate in the moment. Use alarms or timers to help remind you to take nervous system breaks. And remember that layering your support is key. This shouldn't be just a one-time event every day. It should be different practices you use throughout the day to help reset your body, reset your nervous system, and increase your adaptability. Network spinal care can help your body release stored stress, old traumas, and help them release gradually in a healing and safe state. So you're not delaying your healing process until you crash. We have a crucial reframe. And that is you didn't get sick because you relaxed, you relaxed enough to finally get sick. Your nervous system waited until it sensed safety before it could shift into a state of repair. You didn't get sick when life slows down because you're weak. It's because your body is finally allowed to heal. Survival mode delays repair, regulation allows for ongoing healing. And supporting your nervous system helps you stay resilient during stress, not just after. Thanks for joining me today on healing beyond the symptoms. If you've ever wondered why you always seem to crash the second life gives you a break, remember your body isn't failing you. It's doing exactly what it knows how to do. The key is learning how to support it sooner and on a regular basis. You can start that journey today by booking a consultation at BodyInbalance Chiropractic.com. And for daily reminders and tools, follow me on Instagram at Body Imbalance Wellness Center. And until next time, breathe deep, give your body small amounts of safety, and let healing happen in real time, not just after the crash. 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 BodyinBalanceCarepractic.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.