the mental aspect of toxic mold illness.

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Today I wanted to talk about the mental aspect of toxic mold illness. Toxic Mold Illness is essentially a genetic disease and the phenomenon of epigenetics. Childhood trauma or ancestral trauma can cause a myriad of issues in this illness. However, when it comes to mold illness, your genes play a big part. Trauma can cause certain SNPs (genetics) to have errors or not function properly in your brain and make certain people more susceptible to toxic mold. (I have provided a link to explain SNPs) https://www.23andme.com/en-ca/gen101/snps/ This is why if you live in a house or work somewhere that has mold you may find you get sick and other people don’t.

Toxic mold causes dysbiosis in the gut which in turn can cause a lot of disruption with your neurotransmitters as these are created in your gut and moved to your brain via the vagus nerve. So when it comes to recovering from Toxic Mold Illness, there’s a large struggle. Hippocrates (The Father of Modern Medicine) has said in the past that all disease begins in the gut. It is hard to heal from any disease if you have gut dysbiosis, leaky gut, or other gut issues. 

It’s extremely hard to deal with the stressors that come along with trying to heal from Toxic Mold Illness when your neurotransmitters and your hormones aren’t functioning properly. It tends to cause major fatigue, and a crazy mood rollercoaster. It can be sometimes hard to sleep too. As we all know, we get one night of bad sleep it’s hard to recover the next day and everything just feels off.

When it comes to dealing with the stress of trying to heal from toxic mold, it’s important that we find a practitioner who is well-informed about toxic mold. Also, finding support groups online or perhaps in your community can be extremely helpful for your mental health.

For the past few months since finding out that mold is the reason for many of my health symptoms, I have been physically detoxing the mold from my system with a number of protocols prescribed by my naturopathic doctor. However, I find the hardest part is the mental struggle of finding out after all these years that the symptoms that I’ve been experiencing and had no answers for have been due to the toxic mold buildup in my system. I have been on somewhat of a spiritual journey in the sense of coming to terms with being ill, my body being overburdened right now, and understanding that I am not going to get well overnight. 

So I have started meditating in the mornings, which has helped balance my nervous system throughout the day. The nice weather has finally started to arrive here in Ontario, making it a lot easier to get outside to walk, stretch, and soak in some sunshine, which sometimes seems like the best medicine both physically and mentally. I am looking forward to getting out in my garden, and planting seedlings in my vegetable garden. But because of the chronic fatigue that I feel, sometimes it’s hard to muster up the energy to even think about digging in the dirt which is very frustrating to me.

In a future post, I will go over the testing I did that revealed the mold buildup in my body, the protocols that I’ve been doing and why, so that you can understand what imbalances and symptoms have been caused by the mold in my body. A lot of this I have talked about today ties into a previous post here if you’d like to re-read it: How Trauma Can Affect Your Ability To Overcome Mold Toxicity and Most Chronic Illness

So I will leave you with this thought, stress is a funny thing, and there’s more than just one type of stress. The chronic stress from unresolved childhood trauma has also left me with an unhealthy gut which opened the door to mold setting in and wreaking havoc. I have been in therapy for the past year and a bit working through my childhood trauma. I am hopeful that I will soon have worked through all that, which in turn will help my body heal from the Toxic Mold Illness.

The small stressors that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis can have a big impact if we don’t find ways to quickly recover from those small stressors. Being in a parasympathetic (calm) state is extremely important for rest and recovery. If we are constantly in a sympathetic or reactionary state where our bodies feel a constant threat, it dramatically slows our healing process. There are a lot of things that we can all do to reduce our reactions to daily stressors. We all have coping strategies that sometimes are healthy and sometimes not so healthy. For me, one of the most beneficial coping skills I find is simply breathing. There are many resources online and apps to teach and guide you though all kinds of breathing exercises that almost instantly calm your nervous system.

So let’s all remember that recovering from illness is never an easy journey, it takes small movements forward and small healthy choices each day, but the hard work is always worth it in the end so...let’s just breathe.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me. Especially if you’d like to learn more about the kind of breathing practices I have incorporated into my life.

As always, take care of yourself and talk to you soon!

With love,

Melissa