Episode 12: Why Nurses Feel Inflamed, Exhausted & Stuck: The Hidden Immune–Gut–Thyroid Connection

If you’re a nurse who feels constantly exhausted, inflamed, getting sick all the time, or watching your body change in ways you don’t recognize… this episode is going to hit differently.

Because this isn’t just “burnout.”

This is immune system dysfunction driven by chronic stress, shift work, and nervous system dysregulation.

In this powerful and deeply educational episode of Proactive Wellness for Nurses, Jessica Veloza, APRN breaks down the real physiology behind why nurses are developing:

• Autoimmune thyroid conditions like Hashimoto’s
 • Chronic fatigue and low energy that doesn’t improve with rest
 • Increased infections and weakened immunity
 • Depression, anxiety, and emotional instability
 • Stubborn weight gain and metabolic resistance

You’ll learn how chronic cortisol elevation and circadian rhythm disruption directly impact your immune system — and why your body is not “failing you”… it’s adapting to an environment it was never designed to survive.

Jessica walks you through the gut-immune connection, including how a large portion of your immune system is housed in the intestinal lining, and how stress disrupts the microbiome — leading to inflammation, immune dysregulation, and metabolic dysfunction.

She also touches on the powerful role of the gut in serotonin production, and how this directly ties into mood, cravings, and emotional eating patterns.

This episode connects the dots between:

• Nervous system dysregulation
 • Gut health and microbiome imbalance
 • Immune dysfunction and autoimmunity
 • Hormonal disruption and thyroid health
 • Weight gain and metabolic resistance

This is the root-cause conversation that most healthcare providers are not having — but every nurse needs to hear.

Because when your nervous system is dysregulated, your immune system cannot function properly.

And when your immune system is dysregulated… everything else starts to fall apart.

If you’re ready to stop blaming yourself and start understanding your body at a deeper level — this episode is your turning point.

✨ Want to go deeper?

This episode is just the beginning.

Inside my framework, we focus on helping nurses repair the damage caused by chronic stress, inflammation, and metabolic dysfunction — using a root-cause, physiology-based approach.

My work is built specifically for nurses because your body is not like the general population — and your healing shouldn’t be either.

👉 Learn more about my approach to metabolic healing and inflammation here: 

email jessicanp@proactivewellness.net

Intro

outro

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Hello, my beautiful nurses, and welcome back to Proactive Wellness for Nurses with just VNP. That's me. I am Jessica Veloza, nurse, nurse practitioner, functional medicine practitioner, nurse coach, and really I'm just someone who is not interested in giving nurses more like surface level bullshit wellness advice that completely ignores what the profession you are in actually does to the human body. Because today we are talking about something that I think far too many nurses are living inside of without a language for it, right? Like they're living that life, but they don't really know how to put words on it. And that is this. What if you don't just like feel tired? What if you do not just feel burned out? What if your immune system, your gut, your nervous system, your mood, your thyroid, and your metabolism have all been getting pushed out of alignment for years by the very structure of the life you've been told to tolerate? Right? What if? What if it's not just that you're tired, but all this stuff is jacked up? And what if the reason that you feel inflamed and exhausted, puffy, depressed, brain foggy, you know, maybe heavier than you used to be, or like your body does not quite recover the way it used to? Guess what? Dog, it's not because you're lazy. It's not because you're weak. It's not because you're getting older or aging badly or just not trying hard enough is one of the biggest culprits. I want to throw in the trash for you right now. If you break up with anything from this episode, break up with, oh, I'm just not enough. I'm not trying hard enough. I need to push harder. Because what if your system is responding exactly the way a human body responds when it is exposed to chronic stress, when it is exposed to circadian disruption and sleep deprivation, blood sugar chaos, you know, inflammatory food environments and repeated, repeated nervous system overload. Because nurses are told to normalize things that are not normal. Okay? You are told that it is normal to work all night under fluorescent lights or to work 12, 14, 16-hour shifts without breathing fresh air or sunlight hitting your skin. You're told that it's normal to eat garbage at weird hours, you know. It's normal to eat nutty buddies at the nurse station at 3 a.m. You're told, you're told it's normal to be hyper l hyper-vigilant, you know? You're not just there and working for 12 hours or more. You are in a state of hyper-vigilance. It's normal for you as a nurse to see suffering and death, people being aggressive, just general chaos, alarms, body fluids, you know, grief. It's normal for you to be flung into the middle of many people's fam family dysfunctions, you know? And then you just you just drive home and somehow become a soft, regulated, emotionally available person. Dog, that is not normal. That is actually a biological assault. And over time, it adds up. It really does. Shift work and circadian disruption are associated with altered immune responses, as well as sleep loss, inflammation, and real higher risk for metabolic disease. This includes insulin resistance, and this includes type 2 diabetes. If you are pre-diabetic, if your family is prediabetic or diabetic and you want to turn that boat around, dog, listen in. The CDC also notes that night and rotating shift workers literally have a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. And we've talked about this in previous episodes. A major piece of this is because circadian disruption affects cortisol, but it also affects melatonin, insulin, sleep in general, and your eating patterns. So today I want to walk you through the chain, like not the fluffy version, the real version, the chain of events that is rolling out if you feel these exhausted, burnt out, sleep-deprived. You know, the version, I want to go into the version where stress is what dysregulates the nervous system, not you're just weak and you need to try harder, and some middle-aged white guy is telling you, you just need to eat less and move more. Because I'm the doctor and I had 15 minutes of nutrition in school. So I know better than you do, and you're fat and you're lazy. No, I want to talk about the version where we identify the fact that stress dysregulates the nervous system. Okay. The dysregulated nervous system then in turn disrupts the gut, the gut microbiome. Ding ding ding. Let's talk about a hot topic. The disrupted gut alters immune signaling. Okay, and then the altered immune signaling increases inflammatory burden, right? The inflammatory burden can worsen than thyroid autoimmunity risks and symptoms in people who are susceptible. So your your labs might be normal, but this might be jacking up your thyroid. And when the thyroid, immune system, mood, chemistry, sleep, and blood sugar all start working together, weight gain and difficulty maintaining weight becomes a completely predictable downstream outcome. Okay, this is the chain. This is the chain of events. I need nurses to understand it because if you do not understand the chain, you will continue blaming yourself for symptoms that are actually the consequences of cumulative physiologic wear and tear. So let's start with the immune system. One of the things that functional medicine gets right, even when people get a little weird with it sometimes, is the idea that the body is a connected ecosystem. You know, we are not parts siloed. We are parts of a whole machine, a connected ecosystem, right? And one of the biggest lies conventional symptom chasing care has told us is the idea that these are all separate problems, right? As if your fatigue is one issue and your thyroid is another issue, your depression is a separate issue, your bloating is another issue, your weight gain is another issue, your recurrent infections are another issue, you know, sinusitis, chronic sinusitis, UTIs, earaches, headaches, your constipation is a whole nother issue too, you know, and your insomnia, just a whole nother issue. They are all uniquely individualized issues, right? That's what conventional medicine attempts to tell us with it, the way it focuses on symptom management and band-aid medicine is bullshit. No, and a lot of times those are not separate problems. A lot of times, those are multiple branches of the same tree, okay? And one of the biggest roots sits in the gut immune nervous system connection because the GI tract, well, it's often described in literature as the body's largest immune organ. Have you ever heard that? I mean, reviews, systematic reviews note that roughly 70% of the body's lymphocytes are actually associated with the gut microbiome, the gastrointestinal tract. The gut is also deeply involved in immune education, like barrier defense, ongoing communication between microbes, immune cells, and the nervous system, right? Immune education. How your immune system educates itself and your body to know what things it needs to fight against. So when people say casually things like, oh, a lot of the immune system is in the gut, that is not just a trendy podcast, like, you know, line that's trying to pull you in. It's not. It's it is grounded in immunology because your intestinal lining is not just a food tube, dog. It is a highly intelligent barrier. It's it's a screening system, it is a communication hub, if you want to look at it like that. It is it's where your body is constantly deciding what gets tolerated, what gets blocked, what gets attacked, and what gets signaled to the rest of the system also. And if that barrier gets disrupted, if the microbiome becomes imbalanced, if the nervous system is constantly firing stress signals into the terrain, you don't just get digestive problems. You get immune dysregulation, you can get inflammatory signaling, you can get that altered mood, you can get worsened metabolic health. You can get the feeling that your whole body is just not working right anymore. And for aging nurses, most of us are told that we're just getting older, we've been rode hard and put up with. Nurses are prime candidates for this kind of dysfunction because the environment of nursing is almost custom built to wreck circadian rhythm, to wreck blood sugar stability, to jack up stress hormones, and alter the rhythm of hormone regulation, and also decrease our recovery capacity, really. Chronic stress affects the gut microbiome and gut immune communication. Systematic reviews note that stress-related changes can literally alter microbiome composition. Stress-related changes can disturb intestinal barrier function like itself, the actual barrier, how well it functions. How does it filter out nutrients you need to come into your body and keep things out that don't need to be out? This chronic stress can also influence, I mean, it influences both the immune system itself and the brain function. Because stress can also increase intestinal permeability, which allows, you know, microbial products and inflammatory signaling and peptides that should have been breaking, broken down into smaller amino acids. It allows these things to leak into your system, right? Your intravascular system. And it allows these microbial products and inflammatory signaling to affect the immune system and like the neural pathways in a really broad way. So I really wanted to lay out that chain for you. I wanted to attempt to communicate. We've talked a lot about the nervous system. We've talked about how it impacts cortisol. We've talked about how it impacts the immune system, brain function, how it impacts the metabolic system and leads to metabolic dysfunction. In a lot of previous episodes, most episodes, we've touched on all of these topics, but we have not quite really talked about the immune system directly yet. What I wanted to do is kind of make a home run for nurses. I would love for you to absorb this information. Leave me comments, send me an email, jessica np at proactivewellness.net. Love to connect with you because this is something that many nurses are experiencing. We don't have time to go to the doctor, we don't have time to go to the gym, we don't have time to food prep. I know everybody in the whole world doesn't have time, but one of the reasons why for you, even if you only work three 12-hour shifts a week, right? People around you are like, I mean, I don't know. I really don't know why you can't get your shit together when you have four days off every week. I wish I was so lucky. And you know what? Now that I'm working a nine to five, eight to five nurse practitioner outpatient role, I am jealous. I am jealous of the days off, but I am not jealous of the 12-hour shifts. Now, caveat, I often work more than I usually work late. I usually have evening and weekend charting, but I am breaking up with that. I am working towards getting away from that. I'm working towards building a program that works for me as far as getting ahead with the charting and nurse practitioners or nurses working an outpatient that may have documentation piling up or calls or whatever it may be for you. How to organize that stuff more effectively so that it doesn't jack up your immune system and your nervous system and so that we can get rest. Because so many of us nurses, we don't ever reach that place of stability or we fall out so hard, and it can take a long time to get back on track, especially if you don't know what's going on, right? Especially if you are a nurse and you've gained a lot of weight or some weight, or you gained some weight during nursing school and you thought, oh, I'll get it off when I graduate. But then you graduate and it almost feels like you just started school all over again because you have so much to learn and you realize you don't really know shit. You know, and then you're like, am I good enough? Is this the career I really wanted? We've talked about identity crisis in previous episodes. You know, all of this cascade of things, they are interconnected. It is a chain. It is a chain of events that happens in our body. They are interconnected, they are not silos. Your thyroid, your immune system, your cortisol regulation, your melatonin, metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, all of this to say that you are the victim. Actually, you are the victim. I don't usually lean into like playing victim mode because it's a toxic place to be. I had to unlearn that. That is a part of something I really had to unlearn as a new nurse. I felt like I was the victim. Now, people around me that I was raised around have some victim mindset tendencies. So I have already needed to like unlearn that for my general life. But during nursing, oh my gosh, I immediately felt like I was, it was just out of control. I felt like the victim. I felt like who could ever live a life like this forever? Who could ever live at this level? It's so easy to feel like no one outside of your profession understands what you're going through, what you actually experience, the thickness, the intensity of the chaos that you experience. Kudos to all of the regulated nurses. Please also reach out to me. If you're a regulated nurse, please reach out to me and help help collaborate with me. Let's do a podcast episode. Let's you can get in on one of my lessons in my course. Yeah, interesting stuff. I just really felt like laying that out there this morning because, well, I have an ear infection for the first time in forever. And it was a rough couple months. I'm onboarding a new nurse practitioner at my primary care job. There's been a lot of chaos, a lot of change that will be for the better, but it's a big strain, a big demand. And I'm trying to set clear boundaries with my patients. It took a big toll on me because I just want to be everything for everyone, right? So my point is, is I've been giving, giving, giving and not filling back up my cup. And I hit a wall with like this Easter holiday and you know, this past week. Just anyhow, my point here is that I was feeling dysregulated and my immune system got low. And I know that the immune system takes a hit from dysregulation, but I wanted to connect the dots for you physiologically, right? So we went and pulled some metadata from systematic reviews to tell you about how the immune system impacts the nervous system. And again, we've covered this time and time again, but this cascade of things is really going on in your body if you are dysregulated. And then you have to also consider are you somebody who was dysregulated even before nursing? Some people can relate to being dysregulated the majority of their lives. So if you've always had trouble with weight, or if you just newly have trouble with weight, consider reaching out to me. I do coaching for nurses, and I am building a group coaching program that will launch soon. That is transformative weight loss for nurses, is the book that I wrote that I've basically turned culmination of all the research I've ever done and all the work I've done with patients and clients, and all of the ways that I've helped heal myself and learn how to more easily re-regulate when I become dysregulated so that it doesn't become this big debt cycle of anti-energy vortex, soul-sucking bullshit. You know, help regulate earlier. It is not easy, it's ongoing, it's a forever type of thing. This is what your body is going through, and it is why you are the victim. The way I broke that cycle for my mindset as a nurse in the hospital was I had to stop telling myself, oh my gosh, this is like inhumane. This is impossible, inhumane. All of the negative stream, which is another thing I work with people on a lot, is the negative internal dialogue and how to manipulate your internal dialogue. But I basically had to start telling myself, I am not myself, you know, I am not the victim here. The patient is the victim here. End of story. There are no questions. Like that mindset shift really helps me because I didn't just get my leg amputated. I did not just have open heart surgery. I am not being forced to be off work or away from my animals or whatever. Horrible, painful, vulnerable thing that your patient may be experiencing. Put yourself in their shoes, take yourself out of that victim mindset. And that's actually one really powerful first step. If you are in the chaos grind inside of your head like that, frequently, please work to unravel that. And if you would like support, reach out to me. Again, Jessica NP at proactivewellness. And I am here to help regulate you, right? I really want you to reach a place where you can start releasing this weight because you can do gimmicky diets. You can yo-yo, you can ride that train dog. You can ride that train all you want, but you're gonna gain the weight back. If you don't regulate your system, if you don't help feel your internal dialogue and communicate with your internal child that everything is okay, you are safe. Your cells, your body, your systems will not be ready to release that weight. Why would it? It's not gonna release weight in survival mode. That would be stupid. That would go against the beautiful physiological, God-made design of our bodies, right? It would go against all that. So, in closing, please reach out to proactivewellness.net. Really, I'm gonna be putting some links in the bio if you're checking it and they're not there yet and you're interested in connecting or just chatting. Proactive wellness net, Jessica NP at proactivewellness.net. I'd love to hear from you guys. I will be launching the beta program really soon. I'm super excited about it because it really is a culmination of my life's work. So I look forward to talking to you again. Please share this with the people that you think it might help, even if they're not a nurse. I actually have a lot of people reach out to me that are not nurses, but I focus on nurses because that's the most extreme personalized experience that I can share. However, you can apply this data to anyone, really. If you know other dysregulated people, I'm launching the metabolic recovery method for nurses, but I am also So once this gets sort of stabilized, I'm gonna also provide the metabolic recovery method that anybody can be in. Because it is the same core data. It's just that for nurses, we have a lot of extra layers that make it wild. So getting close to 25 minutes, and I've been rambling for at least 10. So I just want you all to know that I sincerely mean it when I say I love you already. See you in the next episode.