You're Not Just Sensitive — Your System Doesn't Have Enough Buffer

On why so many people feel like everything is too much — and what's actually happening underneath that

There's a particular kind of person who finds their way to my work.

They've been at this for a while. They've done testing. They've tried protocols. They're not lazy — if anything, they've been trying harder than most people would. And somewhere along the way, things stopped adding up. Supplements that used to feel neutral started feeling like too much. Foods that should be nourishing started feeling inflammatory. Their nervous system got more reactive, not less. And instead of getting clearer, everything started to feel more confusing.

At that point, most people assume they just haven't found the right answer yet. That there's still something they're missing — some lab marker, some supplement, some piece of the puzzle that will finally make things click.

What I see instead is a system that doesn't have the capacity to handle what's being asked of it.

That's a different problem. And it requires a different approach.

It's not that you're doing it wrong. It's that you're working with a system that doesn't have enough buffer to absorb what's coming in.

What I mean when I say unbuffered

Sensitivity is how most people describe this experience. And sensitivity is real — I'm not dismissing it. But I think the word leads people in the wrong direction, because it makes it sound like a fixed trait. Like some people are just built more sensitive than others, and that's the end of the story.

What I'm actually seeing in the people I work with is something more specific than that. It's a system that doesn't have enough buffer.

Buffer is what allows the body to absorb input without overreacting. It's what lets you take in food, stress, a new supplement, a hard week — and process it without everything feeling like too much. When that buffering capacity is intact, the body can adapt. It can respond and then return to baseline. When it's not, everything gets amplified. The same input that would be neutral or even helpful in another body feels overwhelming in yours.

This is why things backfire. And I want to be specific about what backfiring actually looks like, because it's rarely dramatic. It's usually subtle and confusing.

Someone starts a supplement that's supposed to support them and instead feels more anxious, more wired, more off. Someone tries to increase magnesium or add a probiotic and their digestion gets worse or their sleep gets disrupted. Someone shifts their diet toward what should be more nourishing and instead feels heavier, more inflamed, like their system just can't process it. Someone tries to push through a detox protocol and comes out the other side feeling worse than when they started.

It's not that the intervention was wrong. It's that the system didn't have the capacity to receive it.

That distinction matters enormously — both for how you understand what's happening in your body and for what you do next.

What this actually looks like in the body

I work primarily with hair tissue mineral analysis and comprehensive gut microbiome testing, and over time I've started to see consistent patterns in bodies that feel this way. I want to go a little deeper on two of them — not because I want you to go hunting for them on your own results and try to fix them in isolation, but because the physiology underneath is genuinely interesting. And I think when you understand what the body is actually doing, it changes how you relate to your own experience of it.

The first is a low sodium to magnesium ratio on hair mineral testing. Normal sits around 4.0. I regularly see people coming in well under 1 — sometimes dramatically lower than that. That's not just a low number. That's a window into a system in a deeply conserved, protective state.

Here's why. Sodium drives the sodium-potassium ATPase pump — the primary mechanism that maintains electrical potential across cell membranes. Every nerve signal, every active cellular exchange, every process that requires the cell to actually do something runs through this pump. Sodium is also regulated by aldosterone, which connects it directly to adrenal and HPA axis function. When sodium is severely depleted relative to magnesium, what you're seeing is a system that has been under load long enough that it has turned its own drive down. It's conserving. It's protecting. It has essentially throttled itself. Which, in a person, doesn't feel like calm — it feels like low capacity.

And this is where the clinical picture gets interesting. When you try to add magnesium into a system in this state — which makes complete sense on paper — it can create real discomfort. Not because magnesium is wrong, but because sodium and magnesium compete for some of the same transport mechanisms. In a system where sodium is barely present, adding more magnesium without first replenishing those electrolyte minerals together, in a form and amount the body can actually handle, can further disrupt what little cellular exchange is happening. People feel it in their digestion, their sleep, their energy. I've seen this pattern enough times to pay very close attention to how we bring the minerals back in — because how you do it matters as much as which minerals you're bringing in. The goal is to gently start to throttle the system back on — not to flood a depleted system with something it isn't ready to receive.

The second pattern is in the gut, and specifically in the keystone species that are most consistently absent. Two that come up for me almost universally are Akkermansia muciniphila and Lactobacillus reuteri — and their absence points to different but related problems.

Akkermansia lives in the mucus layer of the gut and is critical for maintaining it. When it's absent or severely depleted, the mucus layer thins, tight junctions weaken, and the gut becomes more permeable. That increased permeability raises systemic inflammatory load — including the kind that travels through the gut-brain axis and contributes to nervous system reactivity. Akkermansia also produces short-chain fatty acids that feed the cells lining the colon. When it's gone, those cells lose one of their primary fuel sources. The structure starts to quietly break down.

Lactobacillus reuteri does something different. It's primarily a lactic acid producer — it ferments sugars into lactic acid and other organic acids that create an environment inhospitable to pathogens. It produces reuterin, a potent antimicrobial compound, and it strengthens the intestinal barrier while reducing pro-inflammatory cytokines and supporting immune regulation at the mucosal level. When it's absent — and in my experience it's rarely detected on comprehensive microbiome testing — you lose a layer of front-line protection and structural support that the gut relies on to hold itself together under stress.

And then there's GABA production. The microbiome test I use tracks this as a functional marker — and a significant number of people I work with show no detectable GABA production at all. This matters because GABA is the nervous system's primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. It's what turns the volume down. It's what gives the system the capacity to absorb stress without overreacting. Bifidobacterium longum is one of the primary GABA-producing species in the gut, and its Bifidobacterium relatives contribute acetate and other metabolites that help hold the gut ecosystem together. When these species are depleted or absent, you lose not just a structural piece of the gut but a neurochemical one. The gut-brain axis becomes less regulated. The nervous system has less of the inhibitory tone it needs to buffer what's coming in.

Put these patterns together — a mineral profile showing a system with very little available drive, and a gut missing the organisms that produce structural integrity, front-line antimicrobial protection, and neurochemical calm — and you have a very coherent picture of a system that is working hard just to hold itself together, with nothing left over to absorb what's being added to it. These two tests alone could tell us far more than what I've touched on here. But the point isn't to go deeper into the markers. The point is that even just a few of them, seen in context, tell you something clear: this system is under-resourced, under-buffered, and running without the reserves it needs to respond to life without tipping into overwhelm.

Why most approaches make this worse

The default response to finding markers like these is to try to correct them. Add the missing organisms. Push the minerals up. Support the pathways that look underactive. Which, in theory, makes sense.

But what I've watched happen, over and over again, is that when you try to correct markers in a system that doesn't have the buffer to process what you're adding — you create more instability, not less. The system doesn't have the reserve to receive the intervention. It responds defensively instead of adaptively. And the person ends up feeling like they're going backwards, when what's actually happening is that they've asked more of their system than it could handle.

I've been in this pattern myself — where my body didn't have the capacity to absorb what I was trying to do, even when it made perfect sense on paper. And I see it now regularly in the people who come to work with me. They are not lacking information. They are not lacking effort. They are working with a system that has been so focused on managing its load that it doesn't have anything left over to integrate what's being asked of it.

Doing more is not the answer. Doing the right amount at the right time is.

Capacity before complexity. Before you ask your system to do something new, you have to build its ability to receive it.

What letting the body lead actually looks like

When I talk about letting the body lead, I'm not talking about doing nothing. I'm talking about starting with what the system can actually handle — and building from there.

In practice, for most people in this state, that means going back to very foundational things first. Food that is regular and grounding rather than complex or restrictive. Minerals in a form and amount the body can actually tolerate, which is rarely as much as someone might assume. More consistency in the day — rhythm, sleep, eating patterns — so the nervous system has something stable to organize around. These aren't exciting interventions. They're the conditions that allow everything else to work.

From there, I'm watching how the body responds. Not looking for quick improvement. Looking for stability. Can the system integrate what we're doing without becoming more reactive? Is there more ease, or more turbulence? That response tells me where we actually are — and it tells me more than any lab marker could on its own.

If something creates more instability, I don't interpret that as "push through it." I interpret it as information. We adjust. We slow down. We meet the system where it is rather than where we want it to be.

And this is where I want to say something clearly: no protocol fits every person. Even when people come to me with similar markers, their histories are completely different. What they've already tried is different. What their nervous system has been through is different. What their gut has been asked to manage is different. The markers are a starting point for a conversation — not a prescription. And the person in front of me always has to take precedence over what the paper says.

The goal is never to fix the markers. The goal is to build a system that can actually handle life.

How this changes what recovery looks like

When you start to see your body through this lens, the whole orientation shifts. You stop trying to find the thing that will finally fix it. You stop interpreting your reactions as failures or as signs that something is deeply wrong with you. You start paying attention to what your system can actually handle — and treating that as real and important information rather than a frustrating obstacle.

Things move more slowly this way. But they also hold. And for people who have been trying things that keep backfiring, slow and stable is not a step down. It's the whole point.

I think of my work as helping people rebuild the conditions that allow their system to respond to life again. Not just to supplements or protocols — but to food, to stress, to change, to healing. That responsiveness is what was there before things got to this point. And it can come back. But it comes back through building capacity, not through adding more complexity to a system that's already overwhelmed.

If you're in a place where everything feels like too much — where you're trying hard and things keep backfiring and you can't figure out why — this is the frame I'd offer you. Your system doesn't have enough buffer yet. That's not a permanent state. It's a starting point. And it requires a different way of working with your body than most people have been taught.

If this is you, you don't need to push harder.

You need a different pace and a different approach.

This is the population I work with most inside Minerals & Microbes — learning how to work with your body instead of overriding it, and building capacity in a way that actually holds.

I do have space for new clients right now if you're feeling called to go deeper.