Episode 11: Crisis Never Ends: How Nurses Are Expected to Regulate in a System That Never Lets Them

If you feel like your life is one never-ending crisis… this episode is going to hit deep.

Because here’s the truth no one is saying out loud:

Nurses are expected to regulate their nervous systems in environments that are fundamentally dysregulating.

In this episode, Jessica Veloza, NP breaks down the real reason you feel inflamed, exhausted, disconnected, and stuck in your body — even when you’re trying to do everything “right.”

From 12–14 hour shifts where you don’t sit, eat, or even use the bathroom… to going home to more stress, more responsibility, and zero recovery…

Your body is not failing you.

It is adapting to chronic crisis.

We dive into:

•  The “on-stage vs off-stage” reality of nursing and why it’s destroying your nervous system 
•  How chronic stress leads to cortisol dysfunction, insulin resistance, and weight gain 
•  Why traditional diets fail burnt-out nurses (and what actually works instead) 
•  The impact of the American “rat race” on your metabolism and emotional health 
•  How to build internal checks and balances so you can regulate — even when life doesn’t slow down 
•  Jessica’s personal story of losing 100 pounds after years of yo-yo dieting and nervous system dysregulation 
•  The truth about healing your relationship with food without restriction, guilt, or “starting over” 

This is not about perfection.

This is about learning how to work with your body instead of fighting it.

Inside this episode, you’ll also hear about the Metabolic Restoration Method for Nurses — a functional, root-cause approach to nervous system healing, metabolic repair, and sustainable weight loss designed specifically for burnt-out nurses.

If you’re tired of:
 feeling stuck
 feeling inflamed
 feeling out of control in your own body

This episode will give you clarity, validation, and a new way forward.

Intro

Promo

outro

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Hello, my beautiful nurses. Welcome back to Proactive Wellness for Nurses with Jess VNP. That's me. If you are new here, my name is Jessica Veloza. I am a RN, an APRN, nurse practitioner, nurse coach, and I focus on integrative and functional medicine. So someone who also has lived this life from the inside out, right? And today we are going to talk about something that I feel like nobody's really saying out loud, but every single nurse feels, really every single human feels. But we are talking about nurses here. Crisis is the topic. We've been talking a lot about nervous system. We will talk more about nervous system. But crisis and the fact that it never ends. And yet somehow you are expected to remain calm, be regulated. You are expected to perform, but perform at a level where someone's life literally depends on your ability to stay composed. What? It's like a constant invisible performance. I will call it the invisible performance because there is something about nursing that people outside of it will never understand. You have onstage behavior and off-stage behavior as I work, when you as a nurse, when you work as a nurse, right? So when you are at work, when you cross that doorway into that hospital, when you engage with coworkers and especially patients and family and providers, you are on stage. I don't mean that lightly. I really don't. You are managing chaos, you are managing human suffering, managing actual death, managing families, managing doctors, managing systems that don't work. And at the same time, you are expected to regulate yourself emotionally so that you can take care of everyone else. And here's here's the hard part that hits real close to home. Your needs come last. You don't pee when you need to pee, you don't eat when you're hungry, you don't sit when your body is exhausted, you might not sit, you might not have one single moment in the entire 12 to 14 hour shift where your body fully relaxes or where your butt actually hits the chair. Literally, you might not have one moment. And if you have lived that life, you know exactly what I mean. So this is not normal, okay. This is not a normal state to exist in, but it is normalized, okay. So let me say something very clearly. This is not a normal human experience, period. But it has become normalized. We have normalized chronic stress, emotional suppression, physical neglect, nervous system overload. I mean, and then we wonder why. We wonder why you can't lose weight and you feel inflamed and you feel disconnected and you feel like you don't even recognize yourself anymore. You know, this is not a willpower problem. This is a physiology problem. You will hear me say it time and time again. So next we are gonna move into the nervous system breakdown, okay? We are gonna pop, drop, and lock a deep physiology moment right up in this B, right. Because when your body lives in chronic stress, right, your nervous system shifts into survival mode. And when that happens, cortisol stays elevated. This is the same coarse and cyclic negative feedback loop or feedback loop in general that we've talked about in every single episode. Your nervous system shifts into survival mode, and then cortisol stays elevated, blood sugar becomes unstable, right? Leading to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance begins to develop. Hunger hormones are all dysregulated, discombobulated, jack-o-wackoed, and your body starts storing fat as protection. This is this is not random. This is not weakness, this is not you eat too much, you're too lazy, you're not good enough, you're broken. This is not your genetics, okay? Yeah, your genetics will make you more likely if you are predisposed. But the terrain of your body, your life, your mind, your spirit, your soul is what will dictate your reality. What you put into your mind and into your mouth and what you do with your body will dictate your reality. You can change your future. I know this to be true. If you're religious, most religions believe in not worrying and praying and being positive and wishing for the best and you know, ritually reciting things that are positive. You know, there's a lot of data behind this. This is this is not random, okay? This is adaptive biology. What you put into your mind and mouth and what you do with your body will dictate your reality, right? So what we've been doing is living in survival mode. It jacks up the cortisol, then jacks up the blood sugar, then leads to insulin resistance, and then you gain weight. This can be in a situation where you are not even eating as much as you used to. You could be eating exactly like you used to, or less, and still gaining weight. You know, it's your system, it's adaptive biology. And as we talk about in my work, like within Proactive Wellness Academy, and in everything that I do, really, metabolic dysfunction is not just about food. Okay, it's about chronic stress disrupting hormonal balance from the inside out. Because you because your body is literally trying to survive the environment that you have placed it in. Take a bite of that sandwich, take a bite of that holgy. Then guess what happens? What happens after that? You go home, right? You go home, and the crisis motherfucking continues, right? The crisis doesn't just shut off. Even if you live alone, have no kids, have no relationship, there's some damn drama in your life. There's some kind of crisis. And if you don't have anyone stirring up the pot in your life, guess what kind of crisis you probably relive. The damn crisis from all day at the hospital. So you go home, but the crisis continues, right? Here is the part that I feel like literally no one talks about enough. You leave work and the crisis does not stop. You go home, you are faced with relationships, finances, kids, emotional stress, identity struggles, exhaustion. If if any of my nurse practitioner friends are listening out there, Lordy, we thought we were getting out of the trenches. And God bless God, I'm so full of gratitude. I am in, I am in a place where I feel like I could do this work for a lot longer than I could have kept doing it after 13 years of working in the hospital as a nurse. But the charts go home with us, most of us got. If they don't, and God please protect me and help me to not be the chart take home person anymore, but good for you. I'm so so happy for you. So you're taking it home, and guess what? There is no off switch, right? There's not just like, okay, I'm gonna kill, I'm gonna turn this off. There's no recovery. There is no true parasympathetic state in your life, right? For many of us going through this cycle, your body never gets the signal that it's actually safe. So I also have to address the American lifestyle. The American lifestyle, it is adding fuel to the fire. It really is, okay? So we add that layer on top of it. The American lifestyle, the rat race, the constant stimulation, the processed food environment, right? The pressure to do more, be more, achieve more, the inundation with ads for addictive foods that cause dopamine release that become literally physiologically addictive, that also lead to irritability, mood instability, inflammation, which causes neuroinflammation, which can cause mental illness, gut dysbiosis. We're talking microplastics, glyphosate, all kinds of pesticides, and commercials telling you that these are the foods you should eat because they're gonna make make you enjoy your life, right? The American lifestyle. Like this environment is not designed for nervous system health, is inflammatory, overstimulating, dysregulating. And when you combine that with nursing, it becomes explosive, really. It becomes a whole ass fire. I tell people all the time, okay, most nurses and people I work with, it only takes me about five minutes to realize, you know what, we don't have to stress. Like we probably aren't dealing with some kind of random, unidentifiable problem. We probably have this same problem going on, right? So I just say you're on fire, and we've got to put that fire out. We can the other thing that I did I didn't speak of earlier with this hundred-pound weight loss is exercise. I personally went to Hotworks. I'm I'm a little out right now. I've been having a off couple of months with consistency in the gym, but I can feel it in every part of me. So that is one of my current pushes to get myself back into, and I say hot works because hotworks is an infrared sauna that you exercise inside of, if you don't know what that is. But so I tell my patients, I tell my clients that they are on fire and we start to slowly figure out a unique what is going on with them, from wake to sleep, top to bottom, back to forth, what is going on with them? So, next, what we need to try to figure out, right, is how are you supposed to regulate in this situation? The question really becomes how are nurses expected to regulate their nervous system in a world where crisis never ends, you know, and the the answer is well, you don't do it by trying harder. That's that's that's for show. That's for damn sure. You you don't do it with more discipline, which is what we've been told we're lacking, right? You're weak, you keep having to start over every Monday, you can't follow through with your plans. You promise yourself you're gonna do XYZ, gym, physical activity, self-care, yoga, journaling. There's 772,000 things that you should do to regulate your nervous system, right? But you can't regulate a burnt-out system by burning it out farther, which ha is what happens when you begin trying harder and implementing more discipline that just is not, it is not logical, right? You don't, you don't do it by sheer force. You you most certainly must not do it with guilt, shame, and fear. I strongly believe that I stopped quote unquote dieting, I don't know, five, six years ago, and I did gain a lot before I started to regulate and become back in tune with my intuitive eating patterns. But what I did was a lot of deep mental healing. So I'm not saying it's gonna take you that long because we can do the we can do that at the same time. Like we can do the deep mental healing, and the deep mental healing will lead to the nervous system healing. So oh, it's lovely. I'm very super excited about it. So if you don't do it by pressure, if you don't do it by more discipline, how do you do it? Well, you do it by building a new system within yourself. It's like we need to download a new software. You need a software update, dog. And what I believe is that the metabolic restoration method for nurses is the floppy disk to help you download that software. I truly believe that. So we need an internal checks and balances system if we are going to get out of this. What we really need is this resilient internal system of checks and balances where you become aware of your state and able to catch dysregulation early and able to bring yourself back into balance, right? Not perfectly, but consistently. Because let me be very clear, I am not perfectly regulated. I fall out of alignment all the time. I get overwhelmed, I get stressed, off track, but I have built awareness, and awareness changes everything. I have attempted to stop with the maladaptive coping mechanisms that help keep me in that nervous system frazzle, dazzle, and move into a place of awareness where I can titrate the things I need to do to regulate myself. So I guess I will talk a little bit more. You know, I did live this, I have lived this. I got up to 308 pounds. Like I said, I yo-yo dieted for years. I've gained and lost 80 plus pounds multiple times in my life. And at some point I realized this is not about food. This is about my nervous system, my identity, my internal dialogue, my relationship with myself and with food. And I really had to break up with diet culture. I had to eliminate the guilt, shame, fear, restriction. You know, I got to a place where I didn't trust myself. This is what happens is if you keep letting yourself down, you're gonna manifest failure. It's gonna self-perpetuate. And I, that on the wagon, off the wagon shit, I had to break up with it. And instead, I started listening to my body, focusing on protein, right? Stabilizing my blood sugar, and healing my emotional relationship with food. And again, I will always be transparent. I have used microdosing of GLP1 as a support tool. And it's I am not against it. I was very hesitant towards it in the beginning, but I reached a point where I had taken myself a certain distance and I was bobbing, it was like an apple bobbing up for air. And I personally started metabolic dysfunction as a very young child. So I do feel that depending on your life experience, you may have a larger gauge of how much you need to clean up in order to get to regulation. Okay. But don't let that discourage you in the sense that it feels like, oh, that means it's gonna be a long time. My point I want to drive home here is that if you don't do that work, you won't get better, okay? You will continue in this cycle. We all know those 60, 70-year-old nurses who are fat sick and nearly dead, inflamed, can't believe with the bags under their eyes that they even are able to get the fuck up out of bed and get into the hospital. Who? And guess why they have to do it? Because of the American lifestyle, right? We have not been set up for success. We have not been set up to live as human beings that are spiritual animals that need to connect with themselves, each other, God, the earth. We have not been set up like that. So I I have used microdosing of GOP1s. I am still using them about once a month, a low dose of terzepatide, 2.5 milligrams, but that is not the whole story. That's a I implemented along the way, okay? But I don't want you to see my any of my posts and go, this bitch trying to sell some nervous system shit, but she just used a GLP one. Because really the truth is too that the GLP1 helps regulate the nervous system. It calms down neuroinflammation, it calms down inflammation in the gut. It's not magic. It will not work if you don't do the work. And it will, any pound you drop off using a GLP1 will just flutter back on and bring some friends if you don't do it the right way. 66 something percent of people regain the weight if they do not alter their nutrition intake and that what they do with their physical body. So it's a piece of the puzzle, but it is not the whole story, the real, real, real transformation for me. And this is a forever, this is who I am. I haven't been on a diet or off a diet. And I, this is who I am. I have good days and bad days, but I'm in tune with my body, and I am able to intuitively make choices around food that are not driven by my dopamine cycle or my need to absolutely just be comfortable because I'm in survival mode. So, this is what we do differently inside of Proactive Wellness Academy. Proactive wellness for nurses is the biggest arm because it is my life experience. This is exactly my experience and what I've been through and what I've helped other people go through similar to my own, is exactly why I created the metabolic restoration method for nurses. So, because nurses really, we don't need another freaking diet. We don't need a restriction plan. We do not need another program that ignores reality. We do not need mother trucking P90X. We do now, if you want to, but like that's not gonna get you there. I lost weight on P90X and Beach Body and Beach Body Plan and measuring my food and blah blah blah. Guess what? As soon as I took off the pressure of extreme structure, I gained all the weight back. Okay, because I never did the deep healing. I did that time and time and time again, and I've watched patients do that time and time again before they get ready to take the leap into what we do inside of the metabolic restoration method for nurses, which is what you need, dog. You need nervous system healing, you need metabolic education, you need emotional regulation tools, and you need a sustainable lifestyle approach. Okay, what the method actually does, right, inside of this method, we guide you to, excuse me, understand your physiology, right? Start, gotta start with understanding to help get in touch with yourself so that you can recognize your patterns and then create clarity around your behaviors. We help you stabilize your nervous system and support your metabolism from really from the inside out. I mean, this is not about perfection, okay? This is about awareness and alignment. If you want to heal yourself once and for all, if you want to get down and dirty and actually win this damn rat race with yourself, you've got to, you've got to create awareness and alignment. You need to have those aha moments. My goal is to get nurses to have these aha moments that make them connect the dots. And then to, I want it to like pop open a bag of grief, guilt, and shame that we can just get rid of and learn to process and work out and air out and get rid of because that energy frequency leaves your nervous system out of whack. It just does. Period. You can't get around it. So something I want to speak a little more clearly about is the community, Proactive Wellness for Nurses, because this is not just a program. I am, I want to create a healing environment. The purpose of this community is ongoing support, right? Shared experience, accountability without shame, and really normalization of the nurse experience. I mean, you if you can touch base with people who are going through what you're going through, because not every nurse has this experience. We all know regulated nurses. We really do, right? We all know nurses who have great nutrition, physical activity, great mental health, and balance, and you know, they're few and far between. So the productive wellness for nurses. Community, the inner circle, is a place where you don't feel alone because isolation really keeps you stuck. And even if you're not isolated, but your family doesn't understand what you go through, you will not be able to break that cycle. So connection helps you heal. And right now, if you enter into my deeper programs, you will actually get lifetime access to the community. This is April 2026, but it is a paid community. And any program will offer you in the future a year-long access. But then after that, it will go on to a monthly program. But for now, I am new and I am breaking out of my bubble to create this academy, create this business, translate what the work, the work that I do with patients into my realm of coaching so that I can connect to more people all around the country, all around the world, hopefully. So if you want to enter any of my deeper programs, I say you get lifetime access at this point in time. And that will not exist forever because like the level of support, time, and energy that I am pouring into this is another job on top of my full-time jobs. Trying to build it because this is what I'm passionate about, and this is where I want to focus. So I want to be clear about your role and my role. Me, I am a nurse practitioner. I am a functional medicine practitioner. I am a coach. But inside this space, I am not operating under the constraints of any insurance companies. Hell no. I am here to guide, teach, connect the dots, and help you find your own answers because healing doesn't come from me. It comes from you understanding yourself. Healing doesn't come from multiple pharmaceuticals. Healing doesn't happen when we are in extreme fights with insurance companies. Goodness. Take away this. The truth is that the crisis will not stop. We just have to accept that we will be in crisis in some way or another at all points in our life. But that crisis will feel every time, you know, it's always the next shoe to drop, another door to open, what's under the next brick, what kind of snake is up under the next log I'm about to roll over. It will never stop. Not at work, not in life. But you can become someone who is no longer controlled by it. You really can. So I really want you to take a bite of this sandwich I've made here today. And I want you to lean into an identity shift, okay? Because you are not broken, you are not failing, you are a nurse. You are a nurse, and you have been operating in an environment that has dysregulated your system over time. And maybe you don't feel like your nursing job is so crazy dysregulated, but you've been dysregulated from your whole life, or you are dysregulated from what's going on in your personal life. So nursing just adds a huge layer to that that makes it less simple to manage and balance. So the moment that you understand this, that you're not broken, you're not feeling failing, you're literally, it's the terrain of your body inside it out. It's the oper you've been operating in this environment that has dysregulated your system over time. So once you understand that, everything changes. So if this episode hit for you, if you feel seen in this, right, then you are exactly who this work is for. You are exactly who Proactive Wellness for Nurses is. Please come join us inside Proactive Wellness Academy. Come experience the metabolic restoration method for nurses. Come, come, come build a nervous system that can actually support the life you're living, okay? As I will always say, I want you guys all to know that I love you already. I see you, and I can't wait to talk to you in the next episode.