WHAT MS TAUGHT ME ABOUT MY NERVOUS SYSTEM
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually means to care for your mental health when you’re also navigating a chronic illness like Multiple Sclerosis. I keep coming back to one truth: I didn’t fully understand my nervous system until I had to live inside its limits.
Over the past year as an ILLfluencer, I’ve shared different parts of my experience with MS. From the battles with fatigue, rest, grounding, and learning how to listen to my body. What I’m realizing is that all of it has been pointing to the same thing in different ways: how my nervous system responds, adapts, and communicates.
Even as a therapist, I understood nervous system regulation in theory. I could explain the stress response, talk about grounding techniques, and support others in finding ways to come back to themselves. However, living it in my own body has been a completely different experience. Knowledge didn’t stop me from having to slow down. Awareness didn’t erase exhaustion. Understanding didn’t prevent overwhelm.
MS has a way of making everything very loud and honest. It taught me that my nervous system is not something I can override with mindset or willpower, no matter how hard I try. My nervous system has its own language. When I ignore it it doesn’t disappear, it amplifies. Fatigue becomes heavier. Overstimulation becomes louder. My capacity becomes clearer, whether I want to see it or not.
There was a time I measured my days by how much I could push through. I leaned heavily on how productive I was and how much I could get done despite how I felt. MS shifted that relationship. It forced me to ask a different question: what does my system actually need right now?More often than not, the answer has been to rest, pause, be still, less input and more presence.
That’s where my yoga practice started to become something deeper than movement. It became a regulation practice. Breathwork became a way to slow down the internal pace of my body and to help regulate my mind. Grounding practices became ways to remind my nervous system that I am safe in this moment, even when my body is screaming at me. Not because everything is easy, but because I am supported enough to be here.
One of the biggest shifts for me has been learning that regulation isn’t a one-time thing. It’s not something you master and move on from. It’s something you return to over and over again. Especially on the days when my body feels unpredictable, when fatigue shows up or when I go into a flare without warning. On those days, I’m learning not to fight my nervous system, but to work with it. To listen earlier. To soften sooner. To stop treating rest as something I have to earn.
The way we think, feel, respond, and cope is all filtered through our nervous system. For me, MS has made that connection impossible to ignore. I’m still learning and unlearning. I’m still practicing what it means to live in partnership with my body instead of in opposition to it. Maybe that’s what healing actually looks like right now. Not fixing, not forcing, but learning how to listen and respond with care.