Highly Sensitive? You need to know about The COMT Gene
If you are a highly sensitive Christian mother like me, knowing how your body is methylating can be incredibly empowering.
Lets talk about it:
As a highly sensitive Christian mother, learning how my body methylates transformed the way I viewed healing and support during my postpartum experience.
It has also equipped me to care for my body and mental health in ways that are supporting my nervous system and helping me restore my resilience and vitality.
Here is an example:
When you complete a methylation panel, you learn about specific genes that make up your unique methylation blueprint like the COMT (aka, the sensitivity gene).
You also learn where you hold SNP's that impact how this gene expresses.
Overall this gene and it’s SNPs impacts our mood, focus, stress hormones, and
how our body handles estrogen.
In someone like me, a SNP in this gene can lead to a slow COMT pathway, which often leads to imbalanced estrogen and slow metabolism of stress hormones, keeping the nervous system hypervigilent.
Women with imbalanced estrogen may experience irritability, increased anxiety, and a have a low tolerance for stress. We also are more prone to estrogen driven cancers (which is rampant in my family).
In our bodies, estrogen levels in the brain and body impact our levels of norepinephrine and dopamine, which are two neurotransmitters that are involved in mood balance.
Our individual COMT pathways work differently in each of our bodies.
So if you are like myself, and have a slower COMT pathway, the slower this pathway, the longer dopamine, norepinephrine (adrenaline), and estrogen signals stay active in the body.
Some women, like myself, also do not produce extra stress hormones when we experience stress, we actually clear them slowly and they linger in our bodies longer.
Which can lead to:
Feeling wired but tired
Tendency to replay and ruminate on conversations
Difficulty time napping, even when exhausted
Holding excess tension in our body
Sensitive to certain supplements
Struggling with hormone & blood sugar imbalances
In order to do it’s job effectively, this enzyme also needs optimal methylation action, which requires nutrients like:
B12
Folate
Choline
Which happen to be some of the nutrients used up in pregnancy.
These nutrients are also among many others that are used up when we live in a chronic state of stress (which slow COMTer's tend to do because it feels productive and safe).
Stress is nutrient expensive, and many of us, born with this pattern, never learned how to cope with stress in a healthy way, so we turned to maladaptive behaviors, which depleted us even more.
In the context of pregnancy, your body tremendously increases methylation demand because it is busy building beautiful things like:
a placenta
a God designed brain
a God designed nervous system
As a result your body diverts nutrients away from you and gives them to your baby. Which is a beautiful process, but if you are already depleted, it can wreak havoc on your postpartum body.
A depleted body leads to a nervous system in overdrive and eventual collapse and burn out.
Pair that with being a new mother, sleepless nights, and it is a recipe for a crash out.
This crash out will often manifest in a new onset of thyroid issues, mental health issues, or even a new onset of autoimmune issues.
The body goes into protection mode.
When this process in not recognized, and tended to, many women will often spiral after pregnancy, failing to realize how depleted they are.
Unfortunately, living in a society that normalizes survival mode, focuses on “bouncing back” after pregnancy and quickly losing weight, often pressures a woman to focus on restriction rather than repletion, harming her body and mental health even more along the way.
This is why knowing your methylation pattern and how it impacts your nervous system can be so empowering because it helps you step back into the drivers seat.
There are ways to support yourself and get out of a state of depletion and overwhelm. There are ways to support a slow COMT pathway. I am living proof.
If you are interested in learning about your unique methylation blueprint, you can order yours here from my favorite HIPPA compliant DNA testing center.
With the caveat of: do not use this data to live a fear based life, use it to live an empowered life. And do not use it just to attempt to supplement your way out of a pattern. Supplements can be beneficial, but this is not a quick fix.
If you want feedback or help viewing your results through a holistic lens, join our monthly wellness Collective to receive group access to me where you can post results for feedback as you self navigate!
You'll also receive monthly access to my nervous system program and functional health library where I dive deeper into topics like this one!
