Why Stress Is Worsening Your Autoimmune Symptoms (And How to Stop It)
- Katie Potratz
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
If you’ve ever noticed your autoimmune symptoms flare up after a stressful week (or month), you’re not imagining it. The link between stress and autoimmune disease is real — and powerful.
For people living with autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or multiple sclerosis, stress can act as the invisible switch that flips symptoms “on.” But here’s the good news: once you understand how stress interacts with your immune system and nervous system, you can start to retrain your brain and body to calm that response, and even reduce flare-ups naturally.
In this post, we’ll explore how stress affects the immune system, why nervous system regulation is key for autoimmune healing, and how mind-body and brain-training approaches can bring real autoimmune relief.
How Stress Disrupts the Immune System and Affects Autoimmune Symptoms
Your body’s stress response was never meant to be long-term. We are meant to move in and out of the stress response, not to stay stuck in it. When you face a threat — like an accident, argument, or even an intense thought — your brain sends signals to the adrenal glands to release stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.
In short bursts, that’s healthy and protective. But when stress becomes chronic, the constant surge of stress chemicals throws your entire system off balance.
Here’s what happens behind the scenes:
Cortisol dysregulation: Prolonged stress keeps cortisol levels high, which suppresses parts of the immune system while simultaneously increasing inflammation.
Leaky gut and inflammation: Chronic stress alters gut permeability, which can trigger immune hyperactivity — a known factor in many autoimmune diseases.
Immune confusion: The immune system begins to misfire, sometimes attacking healthy tissues, which is the core issue in autoimmune conditions.
Research has shown that people with autoimmune disorders often have higher baseline stress levels, and flare-ups tend to follow stressful life events. While stress doesn’t necessarily cause autoimmune disease, it absolutely fuels it (and is definitely a contributing factor) — keeping your body stuck in a loop of overprotection and inflammation.
If you’ve ever noticed your symptoms worsen after a period of emotional strain, sleepless nights, or even internal worry — that’s your body’s way of saying: “I don’t feel safe.”
The Nervous System Connection: Why Regulation Matters
To understand how stress worsens autoimmune symptoms, you have to look at the nervous system — the master controller of both your body’s stress and immune responses.
Your autonomic nervous system has two main modes:
The sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight)
The parasympathetic nervous system (rest, digest, and heal)
When you’re under constant stress, your sympathetic system is always “on.” Your body is scanning for danger, keeping muscles tense, digestion sluggish, and inflammation high. The immune system takes cues from this state — it assumes you’re in danger, and ramps up its defenses.
Over time, this dysregulation keeps your body stuck in survival mode instead of healing mode.
Here’s the thing: You can’t heal when your body thinks you’re in danger.
That’s why nervous system regulation is at the heart of mind-body therapy. When you retrain your nervous system to feel safe again, your immune system follows suit. Inflammation lowers, hormones rebalance, and symptoms can begin to ease.
The vagus nerve — the main nerve of the parasympathetic system — plays a big role here. It connects your brain to most of your organs and directly influences inflammation. Stimulating and strengthening this nerve through breathwork, humming, gentle movement, and emotional regulation helps your body shift into a calmer, more regulated state.
How Brain Training Helps You Heal
A powerful tool for autoimmune relief is brain training — the practice of retraining your brain’s habitual responses to stress through neuroplasticity.
Your brain is constantly adapting based on what it repeatedly experiences. If it’s used to scanning for danger, predicting pain, or bracing for stress, those pathways strengthen over time. But when you begin to teach your brain to associate safety, calm, and ease with daily experiences, new neural connections form — and old stress patterns begin to weaken.
Here are a few effective mind-body approaches that use this principle:
1. Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy helps you access the subconscious mind — where many automatic stress responses originate. Through guided relaxation and focused suggestion, hypnotherapy can help reprogram limiting beliefs, resolve the emotional root-cause of dysregulation, reduce fear around symptoms, and calm the body’s internal alarm system.
2. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)
PRT teaches the brain to reinterpret signals of danger or discomfort that often accompany autoimmune conditions. When your brain no longer misreads normal sensations as threats, symptoms like pain, fatigue, or tension can ease significantly.
3. Visualization and Guided Imagery
Visualization has been shown in studies to influence immune function. When you vividly imagine your immune system calming down or your body healing, you activate neural networks that correspond with those states — essentially giving your body a “blueprint” for balance. (Download my Immune Boosting Hypnosis for Free!)
4. Breathwork and Somatic Regulation
Intentional breathing, grounding, and gentle somatic practices calm the vagus nerve and send a message of safety to the brain. When practiced regularly, they retrain your body to exit the stress loop faster and spend more time in a healing state.
These approaches aren’t just about relaxation — they’re about reprogramming your nervous system for resilience and safety, which is the foundation for reducing autoimmune flare-ups.
Simple Daily Practices to Regulate Stress and Support Healing
Here are a few science-backed, mind-body tools you can start practicing today to begin calming your system and supporting your body’s healing process:
Practice slow, deep breathing.
Try inhaling for 4 counts and exhaling for 8 counts. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system and lowers cortisol levels.
Ground yourself through the senses.
Notice what you see, hear, feel, and smell to anchor yourself in the present moment. This signals your brain that you’re safe now.
Use visualization for calm.
Picture your immune system functioning in perfect balance — inflammation cooling, cells communicating harmoniously, your body feeling light and safe. Or just listen along to my guided session here.
Engage in gentle movement.
Stretching, walking, or yoga can regulate stress hormones and improve circulation without overactivating the body.
Journal or reflect on emotional triggers.
Unprocessed emotions and self-pressure can keep your body on alert. Bringing them into awareness helps release stored stress. (These kinds of emotional roots are what we explore and resolve in 1:1 Hypnotherapy sessions)
Prioritize restorative rest.
Sleep is the body’s primary time for repair and immune regulation. Create a calm bedtime routine — no screens, low light, deep breathing.
These practices complement medical treatment beautifully. They don’t replace your care — they enhance it by addressing the missing piece most people overlook: your nervous system.
Real-Life Results: How Mind-Body Work Helps Ease Autoimmune Symptoms
To bring this home, let me share an example.
When my client first came to me, she was completely exhausted — physically, emotionally, and mentally. She had been living with Lupus for years, managing unpredictable symptoms like chronic pain, digestive issues, fatigue, and food sensitivities. Despite trying every conventional approach — medications, dietary changes, supplements — nothing created lasting relief. Deep down, she knew there had to be another way.
During our work together, we explored how her nervous system had been functioning over the years. What she discovered was eye-opening: her body had been living in a constant state of stress since childhood. Like many people with autoimmune conditions, she had grown up in an environment where she felt unseen and burdened, always bracing for the next emotional blow. Over time, this chronic stress response became her body’s default state — one that kept her immune system on high alert.
When the nervous system stays stuck in fight-or-flight, the immune system receives a steady stream of “danger” signals. In that state, the body can’t repair or regulate properly, which can contribute to inflammation and autoimmune flare-ups.
Through hypnotherapy and nervous system regulation work, we began uncovering and releasing the deeply stored emotions that had been keeping her system in survival mode. In hypnosis, she accessed old memories of fear and powerlessness that were still living in her body as tension and inflammation. As those emotional imprints were processed and released, her body finally began to shift out of defense and into healing.
Within weeks, she noticed changes. Her pain eased. Her digestion improved. Foods that once triggered reactions no longer did. Her energy returned, and perhaps most importantly, she felt a profound sense of peace — the kind that comes from a body that finally feels safe.
As she continued practicing the nervous system regulation and brain-training techniques we worked on, her symptoms continued to fade. The flares that once defined her life became rare, and she felt in control of her health again — not through willpower, but through a regulated, resilient nervous system.
Healing Starts with Safety
Stress is unavoidable — but the way your body responds to it can be transformed.
When you live with an autoimmune condition, your body needs more than symptom management — it needs nervous system regulation and mind-body harmony.
By addressing the stress response at its root, you’re not just calming your mind — you’re signaling your immune system that it’s safe to relax, rebalance, and heal.
You can’t always control what life throws at you, but you can retrain how your brain and body respond. And that’s where true, lasting autoimmune disease stress relief begins.
If you’re ready to calm your stress response and reduce flare-ups, you don’t have to do it alone.
I help clients retrain their nervous systems and reprogram subconscious stress patterns using Hypnotherapy, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and my signature brain-training program, The Recovery Code that support autoimmune healing from the inside out.
✨ Book a free 30-minute consultation to learn how this work can help you create safety, calm, and balance in your body again or check out my brain training program, The Recovery Code and get started today.
Katie is a board-certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and Pain Reprocessing Therapist who helps people retrain their brains, calm their nervous systems, and heal chronic pain and illness naturally. She teaches somatic techniques, guided visualization, and hypnosis to reduce stress, inflammation, and anxiety, empowering clients to step into wellness, self-compassion, and lasting healing. Explore her signature brain retraining program, The Recovery Code to start your journey toward recovery.