This is part 3 of a 4-part series on stress and the nervous system.
You have probably been asked to pick a side. Is this anxiety or is this hormonal. Is it your mental health or is it something physical. Is it in your head or is it in your body.
Every version of that question assumes there is an answer. For a lot of women there is not, because the thing they are experiencing is a circle.
Not because it is hard. Because it is built wrong.
Asking whether this is physical or psychological assumes there is a starting point. One thing that came first and caused the rest. Sometimes that is accurate. Often it is not, and the harder someone works to identify the origin, the more circular the search becomes.
Let me show you the loop, and then the question will look different.
Your body treats digestion as optional.
When your nervous system reads the environment as unsafe, it makes a set of decisions on your behalf. Blood moves toward your muscles and away from your organs. Your heart rate rises. And digestion slows down, because digestion is expensive and it is not urgent when the body believes something is about to happen.
That response is useful over minutes. It is a problem over years. Blood flow to the gut drops. Digestive enzyme output falls. Motility slows. The system that breaks food down is running at reduced capacity for as long as the threat signal continues.
And the threat signal does not require an actual emergency to be happening. A demanding job, poor sleep, an unresolved loss, or a body that is already depleted will all keep it running.
The nervous system decides whether digestion happens at all. In survival mode, the body treats it as optional.
Eating something is not the same as receiving it.
Here is the part that surprises people. Food you eat is not food your body has. There is a step in between, and that step is where the trouble happens.
Breaking food down requires stomach acid and enzymes. Absorbing what comes out of that requires a functioning gut lining. Both of those are reduced when the nervous system is running a sustained stress response.
So a woman can be eating carefully, buying good food, doing everything she has been told, and still be running low on the things her body needs. Her intake is fine. Her absorption is not. And absorption is the number that matters.
Your brain builds mood chemistry out of raw materials.
This is the link that makes the whole loop make sense, and it is rarely spelled out.
Serotonin is not something your body simply has. It gets built, from an amino acid you get from food, through a series of steps. Each of those steps needs a helper to run. Those helpers are nutrients.
Iron is one of them. The enzyme that performs the first and rate-limiting step of making serotonin requires iron to work. Low iron means that step runs slowly, no matter how much of the starting material is available.1
Vitamin B6 is another. It is required for the final step that turns the precursor into serotonin, and it is required for dopamine and for GABA, which is your brain’s main calming signal. Research has found that even mild B6 deficiency reduces the production of GABA and serotonin specifically.2
Folate and B12 are involved too, along with magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D. None of these are the chemistry itself. They are what the chemistry gets built with. Even if you are consuming them, you may not be absorbing them.
Your brain cannot build what it does not receive.
Less capacity to handle stress means more time in survival mode.
Now follow it around.
GABA is what allows your nervous system to settle after it has been activated. Serotonin is involved in mood stability and in how much a difficult thing registers as difficult. When the supply of both is reduced, the same day feels harder. The same stressor lands heavier. Recovery takes longer.
A nervous system with less capacity reads more things as threatening. Which keeps it in survival mode. Which keeps digestion suppressed. Which keeps absorption low. Which keeps the raw materials scarce.
That is the loop, and it is self-sustaining. Nothing new has to happen for it to continue. It maintains itself.
Each approach is correct. Each one hits the same ceiling.
This is the part that explains several years of frustration.
Therapy is genuinely useful, and it works on the psychological part of the loop. But it is asking a brain to do difficult work with reduced chemical capacity. It helps, and then it plateaus.
Supplements are reasonable, and they target the deficiency part of the loop. But they arrive into a gut that is not absorbing well, so a portion of them passes through unused. Something improves, not as much as it should, and the conclusion is that supplements do not work for her.
Stress management targets the nervous system part, and it is asked to do the whole job alone. But regulation runs on chemistry too, and a depleted system has less to regulate with. So it works on good days and fails on hard ones, which reads as inconsistency on her part.
Every one of those is a correct intervention aimed at a real part of the problem. Each hits a ceiling, because the rest of the loop keeps running underneath it.
You were not failing at one thing. You were working on one piece of a circle.
Several things move at once.
Supporting the nervous system is not “step one” that you finish and move past. It runs through the whole of the work, from the first appointment onward, and it gets supported from several directions at the same time.
Some of that support is direct. Mind and body practices that teach the system to come down out of threat. Sleep. Breath. The therapeutic work itself.
And some of it is indirect, which is the part almost nobody says out loud. Restoring absorption supports the nervous system. Replacing what is low supports the nervous system. Stabilizing blood sugar supports the nervous system. The gut and nutrition work is nervous system work. It is not a separate track that happens after the calming is done.
That is why the loop can be entered from more than one place. What changes between women is which part is holding the rest of it most tightly, and that is what the assessment is for.
That sequencing is the work we do at Santosha Wellness, and it is the reason holding both licenses matters. Working out which part of the loop is currently keeping the cycle stuck requires being able to assess both halves.
Not everything is nutritional. That would be its own kind of dismissal.
I want to be clear about the limits of this, because the version of this argument that goes too far causes harm.
Some anxiety and depression are primarily psychological, and they need psychological treatment. Some need medication, and medication helps enormously and is often the right call. Grief is grief. A difficult marriage is a difficult marriage. No amount of iron fixes those.
What the loop explains is why partial results are so common, and why the usual advice to pick a lane produces frustration. It is not a claim that the body explains everything. It is a claim that the two are connected, and that treating them as separate leaves work undone.
You weren’t doing it wrong. You were working on one piece of a circle.
The women who come to us have usually tried several of these things, in good faith, for a long time. They are not looking for one more approach. They are looking for someone who can see the whole shape of it.