She Wrote the Book. She Also Lived It.

The Overprotective Brain - How your brain's attempts to protect you are hurting you

Today is launch day for my wife Hayley’s new book, The Overprotective Brain, she wrote it with Dr. Samuel Tyriver. I want to mark this day in a significant way, not just to beg for book sales but as a husband who watched something big happen.

For so long, I’ve watched Hayley coax her body to get through a normal day. She described herself as feeling trapped in an old lady’s body. Gardening, walking, getting out of the bathtub had become challenging. The migraines were the worst of it: 48 hr cycles, predictable like Old Faithful, derailing any and most all plans. She tried every protocol, every physician, every supplement. Nothing moved the needle.

Then she found Sam.

What he told her in that first appointment was not what any previous doctor had said. There was nothing structurally wrong with her. No damage or deficit or imaging red flag that explained what was happening. Her nervous system had just learned to treat ordinary sensations as threats. Her brain wasn’t broken. It was overprotecting.

That realization changed everything for her.

The book she and Sam wrote together is the book she wished she’d had years earlier. It’s built around a the big and scientific idea that butts up against most of what people have been told about chronic pain: pain is not a measure of damage. It’s the brain’s assessment of threat. And when that assessment goes haywire, when the alarm system stops checking the actual state of the body and starts reacting to past memories and anticipation instead, the result is real and sometimes debilitating pain with no structural cause to fix. As Dr. Sam says, “there’s no tissue issue.”

I know this matters to tons of people who have been told that their pain doesn’t make sense. People who have clean MRIs and still can’t function or maybe people who have tried every physical intervention and found only temporary relief. You even start to wonder if you are the problem.

Hayley was one of those people. She isn’t anymore.

That’s what I want to celebrate today, above everything else. I want to celebrate that my wife got her life back. The migraines are gone and the food sensitivities have quieted down. Her stiffness has loosened up. She didn’t get a diagnosis that explained everything or a drug that fixed it. She got a legitimate, scientific understanding of what her nervous system was actually doing and why and that understanding was enough to begin rewriting the script.

I watched her move to become a woman who gardens and travels and says yes to things again. That is not a small thing.

The book releases today. If you know someone living in a body that has stopped making sense to them whether that’s chronic pain, fibromyalgia, fatigue that doesn’t respond to rest, symptoms that migrate and shift and baffle every specialist they see, this book was written for them. It was written by a woman who knows what that experience costs and a doctor who has spent his career figuring out how to help people climb out of it

.You can find a great FAQ about the book at OverprotectiveBrain.com as well as links to subscribe to their podcast as well. And of course, no book launch day is complete without asking you to order your copy of The Overprotective Brain on Amazon.

I’m proud of Hayley and I’m grateful for Sam. And I’m quietly thanking God every single day for what it looks like when someone finally gets free.

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