Emotional healing from stress can help with HPV recovery. 

Healing isn’t just physical. Your mental and emotional health matters just as much when it comes to fending off high-risk HPV and preventing health issues overall.

This is such an important topic to me because we’re typically taught that our mind and body are separate. We often go to different practitioners for our mental health than for our physical health. However, what research shows us is that there’s a profound mind-body connection – there’s actually no separation between our mind and body. 

Our mental and emotional symptoms can manifest on a physical level, and our physical symptoms can affect us emotionally. Ancient medicine has always recognized this connection and has used this understanding throughout time to help people heal. I want you to know about this so you can already be using it in your healing process.

Understanding Stress and Its Impact

Let’s dig deeper into understanding how stress and mental-emotional health issues can show up in the physical body, making you more susceptible to infections like high-risk HPV. 

There are various types of stress we encounter in our daily lives – stress from work, relationships, financial pressures, and caregiving responsibilities. Being human inherently involves some stress; we can’t expect to live completely stress-free lives.

Our health today is also influenced by past stress, including childhood experiences and even generational stress. Trauma, specifically, refers to when stress causes disruptions in the nervous system that haven’t had an opportunity to fully heal. 

These unresolved issues can make us more susceptible to health issues going forward. What’s particularly important to understand is that stress doesn’t just affect us in the moment – it can have long-lasting impacts on our health if not properly addressed.

When we experience stress, whether it’s from current circumstances or past experiences, our bodies respond in multiple ways. The effects can be seen across various systems in our body, and by helping our body to recover, we can erase the negative impact of stress.

This is why it’s so important to address both the physical and emotional aspects of healing when dealing with any health issue, including HPV.

The HPV-Stress Connection

Being diagnosed with high-risk HPV is itself a significant stressor. 

Many of you who’ve been diagnosed know it can make you feel stressed, afraid, and anxious – that’s a natural stress response to the diagnosis. Women often report feeling shame, anger, resentment, guilt, and embarrassment. 

Then, the medical procedures related to HPV can cause additional stress or even medical trauma, creating a cycle that needs to be addressed for complete healing, and to prevent HPV from coming back again.

While HPV typically enters our system through exposure, not everyone exposed to HPV will test positive or develop abnormal cells. The person who’s been under more stress and has unresolved trauma is more likely to test positive for HPV and develop abnormal cells compared to someone who’s been able to recover from stress and maintain their health. 

If you’re testing positive, especially if HPV hasn’t gone away after years or has caused abnormal cells, it likely indicates some underlying stress and emotional distress that needs addressing.

This connection between stress and HPV persistence is crucial to understand. When we look at two people who were both exposed to HPV, we often see different outcomes. The person who’s been under more stress and has unresolved trauma is more likely to test positive and have abnormal cells than the person who’s been able to recover from stress and not have depletions caused by stress. 

So if you are testing positive, and especially if HPV hasn’t been going away or has been around for years, it tells me that likely there’s some stress and emotional distress that’s remaining. When I can help you heal that, then I can help you fend off HPV.

How Stress Affects Our Immune System and Hormones

Stress impacts four major systems in our body: Digestion, immune system, nervous system, and hormones. 

This occurs through our stress response system and specifically through cortisol, our stress hormone. Maybe some of you have heard of cortisol. We need cortisol – we want it to be higher in the morning to wake us up and get us going, and lower at night to help us sleep. So it’s not that we want zero cortisol; we want that optimal amount.

However, when we’re exposed to stress and trauma that’s not resolving, what happens is that it leaves our cortisol either too high or too low, not at optimal levels. 

When cortisol is either too high or too low, it disrupts our digestion, meaning we’re not digesting food as well, we’re not absorbing nutrients as well, our intestinal cells are not healthy, and we develop something called leaky gut. Our microbiome is disrupted, so now we don’t have our healthy bacteria protecting us, which can also affect the vaginal microbiome.

The effects of stress on these systems are interconnected. When our digestion is compromised, it affects our ability to absorb nutrients, which in turn impacts our immune system’s ability to function properly. When our hormones are imbalanced, it can affect our sleep, which further impacts our stress levels and immune function.

What can happen overall when we’re exposed to stress and trauma is we become depleted in nutrients, our microbiome gets disrupted, and when the gut biome is disrupted, it disrupts the vaginal microbiome also. 

We end up with low antioxidants and high inflammation, and this sets us up for susceptibility to high-risk HPV,as well as other viruses and infections.

The Immune System and Stress Response

Studies clearly show that humans under significant stress, lack of sleep, or chronic trauma are more susceptible to infections, autoimmunity, and cancer. 

When stress throws cortisol out of balance, our immune system doesn’t protect us as effectively as it should. Instead of defending us against foreign infections and preventing them from becoming issues, unresolved stress makes us more vulnerable to infections, allergies, autoimmunity, and cancer.

This is particularly relevant when it comes to HPV because our immune system plays a crucial role in keeping the virus in check. When stress compromises our immune function, it becomes harder for our body to naturally clear the virus. 

Stress and the Nervous System

Stress significantly impacts our nervous system, making us more prone to anxiety, panic attacks, sleeplessness, and depression. 

This occurs because stress disrupts our neurotransmitters and our neurotransmitter processing. We end up depleted in things like serotonin, GABA, and dopamine, which affects our mood, focus, sleep, and energy levels.

Additionally, stress and trauma can affect our ovarian hormones, so estrogen and progesterone levels, thyroid, insulin, and any other hormones in the body just don’t function as well. 

When all four systems are affected by stress, we’re probably not going to feel good. HPV could be testing positive, but you might also notice that your digestion doesn’t feel good, and you might be susceptible to other kinds of infections like bladder infections, sinus infections, or skin infections. 

You might find that your hormones are fluctuating, blood sugars are imbalanced, thyroid’s out of balance, and potentially you’re feeling anxious and not sleeping as well or experiencing low mood.

We need to start reversing all of this, and it’s completely possible.

Emotional Healing and Other Solutions to Recover from Stress and HPV

The good news is that we can address the imbalances caused by stress. We can take steps to restore our healthy nutrients, restore healthy hormones, restore neurotransmitters and microbiome. 

While we address the physical body, it’s equally important for women to focus on mental and emotional healing. 

We can start to learn how to help understand what we’re feeling and then gain awareness for that and start to use different tools to help us navigate this experience of living in a human body with stresses that we’re exposed to.

For example, mindfulness, meditation, and biofeedback can all help us heal. I teach mindfulness and biofeedback to my patients and my program participants. 

The Say Goodbye to HPV Program includes modules on how to do biofeedback, guided imagery, and meditation because these are mind-body tools that help you gain awareness of what’s happening in your body, feeling your feelings, processing your feelings, and recovering from what you’ve been through.

One thing we see in psychology and beyond is that when humans have a feeling they’re not allowing themselves to fully feel, it can create problems. Many women who come to me testing positive for high-risk HPV express that they are feeling anger. 

When we really sit and listen and ask what they’re feeling, they talk about how they feel anger, shame, and embarrassment about what’s happening to them. Sometimes they feel guilty about themselves that this has happened to them. Sometimes they feel resentment about what has happened or potentially anger and resentment toward their partner.

These are emotions that are important to first recognize and to feel and process with compassion and presence. When we can process and really feel an emotion and allow ourselves to feel it even on a physical level and process it, then we can discover the other side of these feelings. 

Women then feel forgiveness and gratitude, learn to feel compassion and love for themselves and their body, and reconnect with themselves and their passion.

Becoming Resilient and Preventing HPV and Cancer

It’s really an amazing process to observe when women choose to go through a process of emotional transformation and start to learn how to be present with their own emotions, how to allow themselves to cry or whatever emotional feeling needs to come through.

It’s something we can learn to practice each day using mindfulness techniques and as well as journaling, time in nature, and communicating with loved ones—these are all ways that we can express ourselves and connect with ourselves so that we can actually move through and really understand what it is that our bodies are trying to tell us.

If you have questions, you can always reach out to me and ask how you can learn to use these different modalities to help yourself process stress and trauma that you’ve been through, to heal the relationship with yourself and your body, and through that, to get more connected with yourself, your purpose, your passion, and your body’s ability to protect yourself.

Remember, we live in an ecosystem where we’re going to be exposed to viruses, bacteria, and parasites. That’s part of human existence. 

What we need to be doing is helping our inner defenses be able to protect us from anything that might be pathogenic or harmful to us. It’s not just about avoidance; it’s also about how to support our inner protective abilities, including our immune system, but also our microbiome, our hormones, our stress hormones, and our emotional state can protect us from the things we’re exposed to.

Through my practice at doctordoni.com, I offer one-on-one patient care virtually to women around the world. I also offer group online programs, such as the Say Goodbye to HPV Program.

To me, mental-emotional and mind-body healing are essential components of the healing process. 

A patient reported to me today that she just got a negative pap smear result after following my protocol,implementing diet changes, taking the supplements I suggested, using vaginal suppositories, and practicing mindfulness every day. 

If you are ready and would like to start taking the first steps towards clearing HPV, I encourage you to sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV Program. You can access it from anywhere in the world because it is online videos, with handouts, recipes, resources, as well as live sessions and a private app, where I teach you to implement my protocol over 12 weeks.

You’ll also get access to order specialty testing I recommend to help us understand what your body needs in order to heal, as well as vaginal suppositories. I’d love to teach you how to heal and protect yourself from HPV. 

If you are looking for supplements to start your journey to get HPV to negative you can find my HPV Support Bundle.

You can also go to clearhpvnow.com. There, you’ll find lots of resources and stories from women I’ve worked with. You can see that this approach really works, and it can work for you too. Or you can set up a one-on-one appointment here.

To learn more about my approach to healing using my Stress Recovery Protocol which involves optimizing cortisol and adrenaline levels to heal the adrenals, as well as neurotransmitters, using nutrients, herbs and C.A.R.E.™ – my proprietary program to support clean eating, adequate sleep, stress recovery and exercise – I encourage you to read all about it in my latest book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to temporarily clear HPV but to keep it negative going forward. To do that, we need to be looking at what your body has been needing help with, and oftentimes what is needed is emotional healing and recovery from stress and trauma. 

I welcome you to reach out through my website to learn more about becoming a patient or joining one of my group programs. 

Thanks again for joining me today, and I look forward to helping you on your healing journey.

Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of any disease.