Many people with autoimmune disease and/or related conditions are very familiar with the concept of an exercise-induced flare, even if they don’t know the term. It happens when you exercise, and then within the next 2-3 days you experience a serious bout of the symptoms that go along with your disorders. Why does this happen? Well, it starts with the fact that our bodies have an autonomic nervous system, which controls our physical responses to stimulus.

The autonomic nervous system is composed of two components. One is the ‘everyday’ system that deals with the normal stuff in life. It’s called the parasympathetic nervous system, and we use it to ‘rest and digest’. The other, the sympathetic nervous system, is the emergency system which you might have heard of as ‘fight or flight’. It gets switched on when we’re in danger and need to be ready to respond right away. It’s the sympathetic nervous system that will put you on high alert, set your heart racing, and take energy away from secondary functions like digestion and tissue healing, so that your body is completely focused on responding to the impending threat.

Now, the sympathetic nervous system evolved when we lived in caves, so that if a tiger came by, we were ready. It is only designed to operate for a short time of high intensity. This means that if your sympathetic nervous system is switched on too much of the time, it starts to have really negative effects:

• Your muscles become inflamed and sore from being tense and ready to spring into action.

• Your sugar levels get depleted as you burn up sugar too fast.

• Your digestive system isn’t prioritized by your body, so you start to experience digestive issues.

• Over time, your adrenal glands (which make the adrenaline that keeps this whole system running) become depleted, and you actually stop being able to respond quickly when you need to.

WHOA! Scary stuff!

Unfortunately for us, in modern life, there is lots of stuff that we can see as threatening. A presentation at work, a difficult conversation with someone we love, a stressful interaction with a someone we don’t - all of these can be interpreted by the mind and body as a threat, and guess what? That sympathetic nervous system kicks in. And our smart phones don’t make it any easier. Any time we hear that ‘ding’ from an app or a message, and we jump up to respond - and there goes our sympathetic nervous system again.

Now, why does this matter for our exercise?

While exercise is of course a good and necessary thing, it is a form of stress on the body. If your body can handle the stress, it gets stronger and the exercise is a net positive. But people with autoimmune disease and related conditions often don’t have bodies that can handle the stress. So what happens is, they exercise, their body can’t handle it, and the sympathetic nervous system kicks in. And because many of us already have an overactive sympathetic nervous system due to the other stresses in our life, the exercise pushes our bodies past a tipping point where we can’t hold our autoimmune conditions in check and the symptoms flare up. This is an exercise-induced flare - and it’s because of them that many autoimmune people have given up exercise entirely.

But the good news is, there is a way you can exercise WITHOUT activating your sympathetic nervous system.

If we can learn to feel safe as we exercise… and to listen to our bodies when they tell us it’s time to stop… and to not push ourselves outside the limits of ‘rest and digest’... then our bodies can continue to heal from our autoimmune diseases, even as we build strength. And over time, we can do harder and harder things - without triggering a painful response.

I’ve designed the Autoimmune Strong program for exactly that: to help you learn to exercise in a way that feels safe and builds up your body over time, rather than hurting it.