What ecological compression actually costs — and why so many high-functioning people feel more fragile than they realize

You used to bounce back.

A stressful week, a bad night's sleep, a stomach bug — they cost you, but you recovered. Your threshold was higher. Your margin was wider.

Now? Recovery takes longer than it should. A cold that used to clear in three days lingers for two weeks. A stressful season leaves you depleted for months. Foods you've eaten your whole life suddenly create bloating, brain fog, or mood shifts you can't explain.

Your sleep is lighter. You wake wired at 3am. Your appetite fades or becomes erratic. Supplements that used to help now feel like too much. You're reactive to environments, chemicals, other people's stress in ways you never were before.

You're still functioning — maybe even high-performing — but it's costing you more than it used to. And you can feel how much less margin you're operating on.

This isn't in your head. And it's not just str...

Lately I’ve been hearing the same words:

Porous.
Reactive.
Overwhelmed.
Like there’s no container.

Most people assume this is emotional. Energetic. Psychological.

But what if it’s biological?

In this episode of the Rewilded Wellness Podcast, I’m talking about boundaries in the body — not metaphorically, but mechanistically.

Your gut lining.
Your mucosa.
Your immune tolerance.
Your histamine load.
Your mineral patterns.
Your microbial ecology.
Your motility and drainage.

These are not abstract concepts. They are the systems that determine:

What gets in.
What stays out.
What moves.
What stagnates.
What triggers alarm.

When those systems are compromised, the experience isn’t just digestive. It can look like anxiety, reactivity, immune flares, skin issues, overwhelm, or feeling like you absorb everything around you.

In this episode, I walk through:

• Why permeability changes how you experience stress

• How histamine and immune signaling affect regulation

• Why minerals influence conta

  ...

A terrain-first explanation for ecological compression

You feel tight all the time.

Not just physically tight, though that too. Your fascia won't soften. Your shoulders live somewhere near your ears. Your middle back has been locked up for so long you've stopped noticing it.

You're tired but wired. You don't sleep as deeply as you used to. You don't recover the way you used to.

Foods you used to tolerate fine now create bloating, brain fog, or a mood shift you can't quite explain. You've become sensitive to chemicals, to environments, to other people's stress. Sometimes it feels like you're allergic to life.

You're functioning. Maybe even high-performing. But something feels off in a way that's hard to name. Like you're operating with less margin than you should have.

And you've probably tried a lot. You eat clean. You take your supplements. You've done the elimination diets, the gut cleanses, the protocols. You've seen practitioners. You've read the books, listened to the p...

There’s something shifting right now — and most people feel it in their bodies before they can explain it.

Less tolerance for vague answers.
More irritation with one-size-fits-all advice.
A nervous system that won’t settle when something feels off.
A growing refusal to override internal signals just because an expert says you should.

This isn’t random. It’s not personal failure. And it’s not just cultural.

We are moving out of an era that trained us to endure, tolerate, and endlessly process — and into one that demands agency, clarity, and embodied decision-making.

For years, many of us learned how to stay open and aware. We learned about trauma. We learned about nervous systems. We learned that force doesn’t heal.

But what we weren’t taught was containment.

Sensitivity without structure becomes exhaustion.
Awareness without pacing becomes paralysis.
Insight without integration keeps the nervous system activated instead of settled.

In health and wellness, this looked like staying ...

Most people come to my work, Minerals & Microbes, when they're at an impasse.
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If you’d rather listen than read, this conversation is also available on the Rewilded Wellness Podcast (Season 2, Episode 31) — you can tune in on:

Apple Podcasts — HERE
Spotify — HERE
YouTube — HERE
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They’ve exhausted many other approaches: diet changes, practitioners, lab tests, protocols. Maybe years of it. And while some things helped, the approach has been wildly incoherent. They’ve been reacting to symptoms as they arise and chasing causes, but nothing has actually rebuilt the body in a way that feels stable or sustainable.

If you’re here, you’ve probably already tried a lot.

I know this because I’ve watched people arrive having been run through the same few loops the functional health world keeps people cycling through.

Some show up with 15+ bottles of supplements, taken ...

We’re living in a time where people have access to more health information than ever — and yet feel less clarity, confidence, and trust in their bodies than ever before.

That contradiction is not accidental.

In modern wellness culture, science has quietly shifted roles. What was meant to be a tool for exploration has started acting like authority — and when that happens, the body often gets lost in the process.

This episode continues a conversation I’ve been unfolding over the last few weeks. First, we talked about the shadow side of wellness culture: over-treatment, information overload, and the loss of containment. Then we looked at how oversimplified wellness narratives backfire in real bodies. Here, I’m pulling on the next thread underneath all of it: study obsession — and how it disconnects people from their own biology.

This isn’t an anti-science conversation.
It’s about misuse.

Studies were never designed to replace lived experience. They isolate variables on purpose. They r...

Let's sit with something that might be uncomfortable for a minute.

What if the thing you call anxiety isn't a mental disorder at all? What if depression isn't a serotonin deficiency? What if the reason you can't seem to regulate your emotions has absolutely nothing to do with your childhood trauma or your resilience or your meditation practice and everything to do with the fact that your internal ecosystem has shifted into survival mode?

Stay with me.

Because here's what nobody wants to say out loud: we've been calling environmental poisoning "mental illness" for decades.

Your nervous system isn't overreacting. It's responding perfectly to a toxic internal and external environment that you didn't even know existed.

The Lie We've All Been Sold

You know what's genius about the mental health industrial complex? They convinced an entire generation that the problem is in their head. Chemical imbalance. Genetic predisposition. Negative thought patterns. Trauma responses.

And yes, envi...

When Health Information Stops Being Nourishing

We are living in an Information Age where wellness advice is everywhere — constant, confident, and often oversimplified. What looks like education is frequently something else entirely: processed information that sounds scientific but lacks context, discernment, and respect for how real bodies actually function.

People ask me all the time to “review” posts they see online or confirm whether a claim they encountered on Instagram is true. I don’t fact-check the internet. What I do care about is helping people develop their own filter — because when you don’t have one, your nervous system becomes the filter. And that’s how overwhelm, second-guessing, and loss of bodily trust take root.

In this episode, I walk through a specific example of how misinformation spreads so easily in modern wellness culture. I use a real Instagram carousel as a case study — not to attack a person or question their intent — but to show how quickly something ca...

As we step into 2026, I want to name something that’s been building beneath the wellness space for a long time — and has now reached a tipping point.

Listen to the full episode:

• Spotify 

• Apple Podcasts 

• YouTube

We’re living inside a wellness culture that has become excessive, incoherent, and fundamentally disconnected from how bodies actually heal.

This didn’t start with wellness.
It’s cultural.

Modern life trained us to distrust our bodies long before most people ever questioned pharmaceuticals. So when many turned toward “wellness,” they unknowingly carried the same mindset into a different marketplace: more inputs, more tracking, more interventions, more pressure to fix, optimize, and override.

Different language.
Same paradigm.

What I see again and again isn’t a lack of effort. It’s incoherence.

People are flooding their systems with information, stacking protocols, cherry-picking ideas, and trying to heal from inside the same urgency and hyper-vigilan...

Healing Happens in Order — Safety Comes First

If you’ve been trying to heal — doing all the tests, chasing protocols, supplementing diligently — and yet feel stuck, reactive, or like nothing is working, you’re not imagining it. Your body is responding exactly as it should: with survival, not repair. The missing piece? Safety.

Most healing approaches assume: “Do the right thing hard enough, and the body will follow.” But biology doesn’t work that way. Healing unfolds in an order dictated by the nervous system — by safety — not by protocol intensity.

Here’s how it really happens:

1. Safety First

Before you detox, supplement, or chase labs, the nervous system has to feel secure.

This isn’t just a feeling — it’s biological. When the peripheral nervous system is flooded from chronic stress, too many interventions, or trying to “do everything at once,” the body shifts into hypervigilance. Digestion stalls, absorption falters, blood sugar swings, and even “good” interventions feel like a...