Immunity x Your Nervous System

This isn’t your typical seasonal immune support post. All of that has been said before by many. We want to get you to think about your immune system from a different perspective — through the lens of your nervous system, and how a dysregulated nervous system and stressful state can interfere with how effectively we prevent or fight infection. It’s a far less talked about concept, but it gets to the root of how the machinery of our immune system engages.

The most effective way to fight infections is to prevent them altogether. That involves supporting the entirety of your immune system — if we can support our nervous systems, we’re more likely to prevent illness, or at the very least, more effectively fight infection if it happens.

Stress creates the SAME inflammatory reaction on the nervous system as a typical infection or autoimmune reaction. The same inflammatory signals, called cytokines, are released in response to stress as they are during an infection. This leads to symptoms like fatigue, “sickness” behaviour, anxiety, agitation, hostility — all of which mimic the immune response during infection.

ALSO, stress creates a situation where there’s LESS Interleukin 10 being produced. IL-10 is one of the cytokines released during immune signalling, and it’s responsible for balancing the inflammatory response. So, we WANT IL-10 released appropriately or else we lose control over the inflammatory response and the immune system gets thrown way out of whack. Stress lights your nervous system on fire, which triggers an unbalanced immune response.

The state of your nervous system directly impacts how your immune system responds, even without an actual infection present. Imagine if our nervous systems were dysregulated AND we’re exposed to infection — that’s layers of impact.

Imagine how much more resilient our immune systems would be when faced with a potential infection if it was regulated and stress was managed.

No body system can be separated from the nervous system — and no body system can function optimally when the nervous system is dysregulated. So take the vitamin D3 and C, but consider supporting the root of the system this season.