Episode 10: Nursing School Is a Hazing Process: Why Nurses Feel Inflamed, Stuck & Out of Control

If you’re a nurse who feels inflamed, exhausted, anxious, or like your body just doesn’t respond the way it used to… this episode is going to hit differently.

Because what if it didn’t start with your job?

What if it started in nursing school?

In this raw, unfiltered episode, Jessica Veloza, Nurse Practitioner and Functional Medicine Coach, breaks down the truth no one is saying out loud:

👉 Nursing school acts as a hazing process
 👉 It conditions your nervous system to live in chronic stress
 👉 And it sets the foundation for burnout, weight gain, hormonal dysfunction, and insulin resistance

Through real, lived clinical experiences — from high-pressure check-offs to ICU trauma to the everyday chaos nurses normalize — Jessica connects the dots between:

• Nervous system dysregulation
 • Cortisol and blood sugar imbalances
 • Insulin resistance and weight gain
 • Chronic inflammation and long-term disease risk

If you’ve ever thought:
 “Why can’t I lose weight anymore?”
 “Why do I feel so reactive, exhausted, or disconnected?”
 “Why does my body feel broken?”

This episode will give you the answer.

And more importantly — it will show you that nothing is wrong with you.

Your body adapted.

Now it’s time to heal.

Jessica also shares how she reversed this pattern in her own life after years of yo-yo dieting and nervous system dysfunction — and how she now helps nurses do the same through her Metabolic Recovery Method for Nurses.

✨ Plus: Learn how to access her upcoming free 3-day training and join the first beta cohort of her group program.

nurse burnout, nursing school stress, nervous system dysregulation, weight gain nurses, insulin resistance nurses, cortisol imbalance, nurse health, functional medicine for nurses, nurse fatigue, metabolic health, shift work weight gain, inflammation, nurse wellness, hormone imbalance nurses, burnout recovery nurses

Intro

Promo

outro

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Hello, my beautiful nurses. It's Jess VNP with Proactive Wellness Academy. Welcome back. This episode, it's gonna be different, okay? And I'm gonna need you to stay with me because I'm going to say something that might feel pretty intense. But you know what? I know that you've already lived this, and your body is going to immediately recognize it as true. Nursing school is a hazing process. Not dramatic, not exaggerated, physiological. And I'm not just saying that to be edgy or extreme. I'm saying that because when you actually understand what hazing is, it is repeated exposure to stress, right? Pressure, discomfort, unpredictability, evaluation, until you adapt. Not until you thrive, okay, until you adapt. And that right there is where everything begins. I will never forget orientation. I want you to think about yours, okay? Because mine is burned into my body. Sitting there, I was sitting there excited, all proud, thinking, this is the beginning of something meaningful, right? Something real. The beginning of me being a successful human being. And then I hear things like if you have a husband, warn him that divorce rates are high in nursing school. And if you have kids, they are no longer your priority. This program comes first. Truly, literally. The person that stood up there, you know, there were professors up there and a nurse I actually worked with for a long time on the cardiac floor, and they sat there and just fear-mongered us. They basically told us that if you can't make nursing school your number one priority, you might as well quit right now. They literally said that. This program comes first. You know, and you heard a little, like a little laugh truffle its way through the room. But guess what was not laughing? Your frickin' nervous system was not laughing. Your nervous system heard like you are about to enter an environment where your needs do not matter. Your nervous system heard you will have to override yourself to succeed. And from a functional medicine perspective, that moment matters because your nervous system only cares about one thing. Am I safe? And when the answer becomes no, repeatedly, your physiology begins to shift. And this is where my story starts, because I can now look back and clearly see that this was one of the roots of my nervous system dysfunction. This is one of the earliest imprints that led me down the path of yo-yo dieting. And I mean that feeling of being unsafe, okay? I dealt with food addiction that was taught to me by my parents. I watched my parents' yo-yo diet, but when I analyze all the way back, as far as I can remember, the route of seeking comfort from food comes from a generalized feeling of not being safe. That's me. But a lot of people experience this for the very first time in nursing school. Maybe, maybe at this orientation, you know? I yo-yo'd, but once I got into nursing school, it it definitely created this gaining and losing cycle. I had already been on that train, right? I have gained and lost 80 plus time pounds more than once. Eventually I reached over 300 pounds. And not because I didn't know what to do, because it was because my body was living in a chronic stress-adapted state, right? And then nursing school freaking trained me for that, right? It hazed me into being being prepared for accepting a state of not being safe. Because it wasn't just orientation, right? It was insulin checkoffs and skills validations and being watched, you know, being corrected constantly, trying to not be humiliated and or being publicly humiliated in in front of your clinical group, you know, or your class. And I have to I have to say this because I know it's going to hit for you, right? Cloudy, clear, or clear, cloudy. If if that doesn't activate something in your body, you know, insulin checkoffs. Ugh I don't, I don't know what will activate something in your body if you've been to nursing school and that wasn't part of your experience. That's right. There is like a universal nursing trauma code. And that's wild. What's wild what's wild is how many of my most uncomfortable, vivid, almost traumatic memories revolve around insulin, actually. And that's super ironic because my entire life's work now revolves around insulin resistance and helping people overcome that by healing their nervous system, right? And I don't think that's a coincidence. Because, you know, what was happening in those moments during nursing school wasn't just learning, it was imprinting. It was it was my nervous system learning that mistakes are dangerous, performance equals safety, pressure is normal, right? And that because that because of needing to be a good nurse, and this is what you're going to experience in the hospital, this becomes your baseline, right? It becomes, for many, it it becomes your identity, actually. And that is the beginning of the problem. Because nursing school doesn't just teach you how to be a nurse, it teaches your body how to live in stress. So that when you walk into the hospital, you don't, you know, immediately quit. You've already been conditioned, you've been hazed to accept that this coworker might snap at you, that this doctor might call you stupid. You never know. You know, so there were a couple of things happened to me during nursing school that I just can't, you know, get past. And anyhow, I'm not going to go into details. What I want to phase into is talking about the fact that these repeated hits, they add up to real damage. Because really, here's the truth nursing school prepares you for what's coming next, right? For the repeated, layered, compounding nervous system hits. And that's what happens in the hospital. And I am not going to sugarcoat this, okay? You have to go through that hazing process so that you can bend over and take it without lube the way that you are expected to as a nurse. And I mean that. I really mean that. If anyone here is not a nurse or doesn't relate to what I'm saying, I need you to know that this is so true and it's so many people's experiences. Because if you walked into the hospital without that conditioning, you would be out in a week. You would have quit immediately. No one else, I don't know any but uh anyone else in a different profession that tolerates the level of abuse and neglect and strain that we go through as nurses in the house. All nerd all nurses, right? But in the hospital, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Because what we experience in the hospital is not normal life. It's not normal human. We're not supposed to go through this as a being. It is, it's the patient, you know, like yelling at you because you didn't bring them juice while you were literally running a code blue next door, you know. It's it's doing a wound dressing change and having that patient tell you, you know, I know you like to hurt people. You're a masochist. I know that you like to hurt people. It's it's a hit, dude. It's like, it's like, well, like in the ICU, right? I had this patient, a very young, anoxic brain injury patient. I mean, she had a hypertensive crisis. She was actually up on a med surge floor. She had a hypertensive crisis that led to a seizure. She was laying face down in the bed. She was quite large, and she ended up with an anoxic brain injury. And, you know, they brought her down. I will never forget this woman. Her eyes were bulging out of her head so much that her sclera like burst and were leaking and draining. And her blood pressure at times was like 240 over 160, like literally. And I'm talking on an art line, like a good, well-maintained art line. So I just the family wanted to keep her alive. Of course, she was young, she had a young kid, she just got engaged or married, like she it was young, it was 30-something. It was not cool, it was not okay. But we kept doing CT scans and dragging out the inevitable weeks of prolonging what we all knew what was gonna happen, and no meaningful brain activity on the CT scan, right? And I was just standing there expected to function as a normal human being with my other patients and with this family, and then going back, you know, back and forth. I actually went back in on my day off because I was gonna bring donuts to the family because, like, you know, I'm a human, right? And she had actually passed in the night. You know, maybe it was good for them because they didn't have to make that choice. Maybe they didn't have to go, okay, we're gonna withdraw care because they couldn't get there as a family, and I get that. And she died that night, right? And I and I came in and I had this box of donuts, and the waiting room was empty, whereas they had been there for like three weeks, at least two weeks. It was empty. It was devastating to me. Not that she died, the whole situation was devastating. It wasn't that she, but it was like I thought that one last hura, we were actually gonna talk to hospice and like we were gonna withdraw care the next day, but she died in the night. So, you know, it was probably God. But well, what I'm just supposed to continue, or like, you know, another young woman I had that just went in for a tubal ligation and ended up with a nicked bladder. She became eurosceptic and had peritonitis, also in her 30s, died, you know. And how about the chaos side of nursing? You know, finding crack pipes in your patient's bed, walking in on a patient's literally smoking shit. I had this one patient that we saw, somebody saw him hit a glass pipe. So we're searching the room. He's butt naked. Granted, this same patient, we caught him having hole-on-hole, naked ass bone-in sex with his girlfriend in the ICU. Caught walked in. Anyways, he's butt-ass naked. We're searching the room, we're searching his clothes, we're searching his bags. Girl, he had that baggie of Flocca or Molly, whatever it was, stuck up under his ball sack, hanging there, hanging on. We had to call the cops, the cops tested like 30 different things to figure out that it was Flocca or Molly. I can't remember, but yo, ball drugs, like drugs found tuck under his testicles, you know, walking in on patients having sex, like this is not normal because it's freaking not. But as a nurse, this all becomes normal, right? And that is exactly the problem, because every single one of those moments is a nervous system hit, and they don't resolve. They never get resolved if you're you're on the run, right? They just stack up. You get busy, you experience some crazy shit, you take it home. Maybe you vent it out to your partner or a loved one or a friend or someone. Maybe you don't, right? And so the these nervous system hits, they just continue stacking and stacking. And at the same time, right, you're less likely to be eating properly. You're less likely, you're probably not sleeping properly. You're probably destroying your circadian rhythm, you know, running on cortisol and caffeine. So now I want you to zoom out for a second and think about what is happening physiologically here, right? Chronic stress has led to cortisol dysregulation. And then that cortisol dysregulation leads to blood sugar instability. And blood sugar instability leads to insulin elevation. And chronic insulin elevation then leads to insulin resistance, right? We've talked about this in previous episodes, and you know about this, but to really drive it home, like the reality of this, right? And insulin resistance, insulin resistance is not just weight gain, okay? It is prediabetes, it is type 2 diabetes, it is inflammation, it is hormonal dysfunction, it is cardiovascular disease. And when you say, like, I feel inflamed, or I just can't lose weight no matter what I do, excuse me, I feel exhausted. Like, that is not random. That is a direct result of the life you have lived in this profession. It is a direct result of the lifestyle that nursing has forced you to subject yourself to. Okay. And you are not crazy. You are not, you know, broken. I am here to bring some validations because this is where I really want you to understand that this is not just a you thing. There are nurses all over the world talking about this, okay? You can look at platforms like Katie Kleber or Kleber, it's the Fresh RN podcast and blog. Like she talks openly about the emotional toll of nursing, imposter syndrome, you know, the pressure of performance in clinical environments. My girl I used to work with, the whole life nurse, you know, she's got this nurse wellness community that focuses on burnout, nervous system overwhelm, and the emotional weight nurses carry. I mean, nurse Blake, dog, y'all know who Nurse Blake is. And while comedic, he still highlights real trauma patterns in the nursing culture. He really does. And even if you go like on Reddit and you just search something like nurse trauma or nursing school anxiety, or why am I so burned out as a nurse? You will find story after story of nurses saying, I don't feel like myself anymore. I'm anxious all the time. I gained weight and I can't lose it. And you know what? Nobody is connecting the dots. Nobody is saying, B, this is your nervous system. This is your metabolism and it is your physiology. Because that's the gap. That is the gap between patients and providers, right? That is the gap between you having a problem and you finding a resolution because I want to talk about why this even matters, right? And why this is not just me venting. This is about helping you come to an understanding. I want to help you understand why your body is this way. And I want to I want to help you understand why you feel the way you feel. And most importantly, I want to help you understand how to actually fix it. Okay, because the medical system is not built to fix this. How could it be? How could it be? How could a system that pushes high carb diabetic diets demonstrate, you know, improvement in insulin resistance? You know, I will never forget that I got in trouble one time because I made a Facebook post in a wellness group about the meals that were being delivered to my diabetic patients, the diabetic diets specifically. Because that month a diabetic awareness magazine came out, like at the at the hospital, and they suggested if you're diabetic, make healthy choices like peas, corn, beans, and fruit. I just couldn't help but think like, how are those the shits that you chose? Like the highest carbohydrate, highest insulin resistance, highest starch, highest fructose foods that will lead to diabetes themselves if that was all you ate, especially with genetic modification and how we have more sugars and fructoses, and it's just how could a system that talks like that prioritize healing from a root cause standpoint, right? It's not built for that. It's not built for that. It just it can't. And that's why I built what I built, because I lived this. I experienced this exact cascade. It was nervous system dysfunction, which led to cortisol dysregulation, which led to blood sugar instability, right? And then there's the insulin resistance and the weight gain. And guess what? I figured out how to reverse it, right? And now I help other nurses do the same. Through my metabolic recovery method for nurses, you know, it's not a diet, it is a full system. It helps you bring nervous system regulation to the forefront of your focus in order to get to the root cause of why you can't lose weight or why you can't keep it off if you can lose it. It helps guide you to metabolic healing, hormonal balance, and emotional processing, really. We are about to launch the first beta cohort because I cannot keep doing this one-on-one forever. And I want to help more of you, right? So I'm almost done building a 12-week immersive program. We have the private inner circle community that's just small now, but will be the funnel to create a community around this where we're doing this together, right? And it is a space where nurses can actually heal like together. I'm also creating free resources coming up soon with a free three-day training. And, you know, I want to provide education that gives you a real understanding because I want you to have that moment where it clicks. I want you to have that aha moment where you go, Mother Trucker, this B is right. I've tried everything. It's not about calories in, calories out, it's not about willpower. And I want to bring this information to you. And yes, I am building my business. And yes, I am stepping outside of the medical system as much as I can. And yes, I do not want my life to be controlled by insurance companies. This is why I'm stepping outside. I could never bill for helping coach you how to heal your nervous system and metabolic system and how to apply that to your life actually in real time over 12 weeks or longer. You remain in the community. Yes, those things are true. Yes, I'm doing this for myself. I'm doing this because I have this extreme passion. That's built around my rage against the machine that is the pharmaceutical companies and the keep you sick system. Yes, these are true. But more than anything, I want you to feel better, right? I want you to learn that it's not your fault and that there's actually a physiological dysfunction that we need to get to the root cause of. Yeah, I mean, listen, if this hit today, like if this clicked with you, if you feel seen, good. Because this is where it starts. You know, I really, really mean this when I say, right now, I already love you. I do. I love you already. Whether you work with me or whether you just keep listening, whether you find someone else that can help guide you, or you do the chat GPT Dr. Google process yourself. I'm happy for that. Do whatever you have to do. But take a fine moment here to consider whether or not this is true for you, right? Again, I love you already, and I can't wait to see you in the next episode. Have a wonderful day.