1337: Nicole Sachs | How Your Nervous System Might Be Keeping You Sick

Mind Your Body author Nicole Sachs explains how pain is your brain’s alarm, and why facing buried feelings can reverse symptoms once thought permanent.

What We Discuss with Nicole Sachs:

• Pain is the brain’s protective alarm, not a malfunction. The brain can both create and remove pain. It generates real symptoms to force you to slow down and stop returning to environments it has flagged as unsafe.
• Symptoms are real, but the source may be misdiagnosed. Chronic pain, IBS, migraines, fatigue, and long COVID aren’t imaginary, but the nervous system — not the body part being treated — is often where the real trouble originates.
• A nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight produces physical illness. When the brain perceives constant “predators” — a hostile boss, money stress, unresolved trauma — it stays in survival mode, driving inflammation, muscle spasm, and nerve pain.
• Repressed emotion is read by the body as a threat. When difficult feelings go unseen and unfelt, the nervous system treats them as a predator — surfacing as flares, migraines, or chronic conditions long after the original event.
• You have far more power to heal than you realize. By learning the neuroscience and processing buried emotions through tools like JournalSpeak, people teach the nervous system it’s safe — and many reverse chronic symptoms once thought permanent.
• And much more…

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If you suffer from chronic pain, migraines, IBS, fatigue, long COVID, or other mystery symptoms that send you from specialist to specialist while every test comes back clean, this episode is a must-listen. When it comes to addressing the body’s distress signals, we tend to treat the alarm that’s screaming on the wall while the actual fire rages somewhere else entirely. The nervous system, it turns out, can keep sounding emergency signals long after the danger has passed, mistaking a backlog of unread emails for a saber-toothed tiger and your buried grief for a predator at the door.

Nicole Sachs, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, co-author of Mind Your Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain and Anxiety, and the creator of chronic pain tracking tool JournalSpeak, and she’s spent 25 years watching people reverse symptoms that medicine called permanent. Nicole makes a careful, science-grounded case that the pain is absolutely real — the question is whether its source is always where we’ve been told to look. She walks through how a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight produces genuine inflammation, spasm, and nerve pain, why repressed emotion gets read by the body as a threat, and how facing those feelings on the page can teach your system it’s finally safe. If you’ve ever been told you’re perfectly healthy while feeling anything but, this conversation offers a genuinely different place to look — and real reason for hope. Listen, learn, and enjoy!

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Thanks, Nicole Sachs!

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Resources from This Episode:

• Mind Your Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain and Anxiety by Nicole J. Sachs, LCSW and John Stracks, MD | Amazon
• The Cure for Chronic Pain Podcast | BreakAwake
• JournalSpeak | BreakAwake
• Nicole Sachs | BreakAwake
• Nicole Sachs | Instagram
• About Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) | CDC
• How Therapy, Not Pills, Can Nix Chronic Pain and Change the Brain | University of Colorado Boulder
• Bodily Maps of Emotions | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Overprescribed: High Cost Isn’t America’s Only Drug Problem | STAT
• Fibromyalgia: What It Is, Symptoms & Treatment | Cleveland Clinic
• What Does Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn Mean? | WebMD
• Stress Effects on the Body | American Psychological Association
• Repression as a Defense Mechanism | Simply Psychology
• What Is Central Sensitization and How Does It Relate to Pain? | Mayo Clinic Press
• Psychophysiologic Symptom Relief Therapy for Post-Acute Sequelae of Coronavirus Disease 2019 | Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes
• The Impact of Stress on Pain | The Physiological Society
• Spondylolisthesis: What Is It, Causes, Symptoms & Treatment | Cleveland Clinic
• Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno | Amazon
• The Nocebo Effect: History and Contemporary Applications | Mayo Clinic Press
• Jo Marchant | Placebos and the Science of Mind over Body | The Jordan Harbinger Show
• Placebo & Nocebo Effects | Skeptical Sunday | The Jordan Harbinger Show
• Effect of Opioid vs Nonopioid Medications on Pain-Related Function in Patients With Chronic Back Pain or Hip or Knee Osteoarthritis Pain: The SPACE Randomized Clinical Trial | JAMA
• Systematic Literature Review of Imaging Features of Spinal Degeneration in Asymptomatic Populations | American Journal of Neuroradiology
• Emotional and Physical Health Benefits of Expressive Writing | Advances in Psychiatric Treatment
• What Are Emotional Flashbacks? Plus Coping Methods | PsychCentral
• Rachel Zoffness | Managing Pain in Your Body and Brain | The Jordan Harbinger Show
• Researchers’ Novel Mind-Body Program Outperforms Other Forms of Treatment for Chronic Back Pain | Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• Re-evaluating Red Flags for Back Pain | American College of Emergency Physicians
• Putting Feelings Into Words Produces Therapeutic Effects in the Brain | UCLA Health
• Emergency Rooms Are Less Likely to Give Female Patients Pain Medication | Science
• Adverse Childhood Experience Is Associated With an Increased Risk of Reporting Chronic Pain in Adulthood: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis | European Journal of Psychotraumatology
• Comparison of Spinal Fusion and Nonoperative Treatment in Patients With Chronic Low Back Pain: Long-Term Follow-Up of Three Randomized Controlled Trials | The Spine Journal
• That Chronic Pain Is Not All in Your Head, but the Solution May Not Be in Your Body, Expert Says | CNN
• Trauma Processing: When and When Not? | Psychology Today
• The Real Power of Placebos | Harvard Health
• Nets’ Michael Porter Jr. Says Psychotherapy Played Key Role in Overcoming Early Back Injuries | Yahoo Sports