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...

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...

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...

If you’ve been navigating chronic health issues for a while, you already know the frustration of chasing fixes that never fully stick. You’ve tried protocols, supplements, elimination diets, functional medicine, allopathic interventions—and yet something still feels off. The energy crashes, the digestive flare-ups, the mood shifts, the sleep disturbances…they don’t follow a simple pattern. Maybe you’ve felt like your body is betraying you, or that you’re failing at health—but here’s the truth: your body isn’t broken. It’s adapting.

That’s why I approach gut health differently. I work with people who are done chasing temporary relief. People who are ready to rebuild their systems slowly, responsibly, and with integrity. People who understand that healing isn’t about eradicating microbes or forcing pathways—it’s about seeing the ecosystem and giving it what it needs to thrive.

This is where BiomeFX comes in. Think of your gut not as just a digestive tube, but as an ecosystem—a living, ...

I’ve been sitting with something that feels important to name, because I don’t think most people realize what they’ve actually been missing — or why so many of us have felt stuck, hesitant, or quietly exhausted on our healing journeys.

For a long time, I thought I was the problem. I wanted support. I sought it out. I read the books, learned the language, followed the advice. And yet, again and again, I couldn’t bring myself to fully step into the help that was offered. Something in me stayed braced. Watching. Calculating. Holding back.

It wasn’t a lack of commitment.

It wasn’t laziness.

And it wasn’t an unwillingness to do the work.

It was discernment in a body that didn’t have the capacity to tolerate one more experience of being rushed, overridden, or asked to perform wellness.

It was because the support itself didn’t feel safe enough to enter.

Most wellness and healing models assume a level of capacity that many people simply don’t have — especially after years of stress, env...