When Your Cells Cry Out - The Spiritual Battle of Oxidative Stress

Your body runs like a city. Every cell is like a little factory doing its job. But sometimes, those factories produce waste in the form of free radicals - unstable molecules that damage cells, DNA, and tissues. It’s like smoke from a chimney that never gets cleaned out.

If you have enough antioxidants from whole foods, sleep, rest, and proper rhythms, your body can clear the smoke. But when you're under chronic stress - physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually - those free radicals multiply fast. This is oxidative stress. And it can burn through your vitality, silently.

Physical consequences of high and unresolved oxidative stress:

• Damages the structure of cells, disrupts how cells function, causes cells to age, malfunction, or die prematurely

• Increases chronic inflammation which contributes to brain fog, anxiety, depression, fatigue, joint pain, weakened immunity

• Systems, organs, tissues dysfunction:

  • Cardiovascular system: promotes artery damage and high blood pressure

  • Nervous system: linked to neurodegenerative conditions

  • Digestive system: disrupts gut lining and microbiome balance

  • Skin: accelerates aging and inflammation (eczema, rosacea)

The Emotional Burnout You Can’t See

Oxidative stress shows up emotionally as:

• Anxiety that simmers beneath the surface

• Sudden mood swings

• Emotional numbness or irritation

• Deep fatigue that doesn’t go away with rest

Your nervous system becomes frayed. Your hormones are going crazy. And you live in “fight or flight,” even while folding laundry.

Mentally, You’re Not Crazy. You’re Inflamed.

Brain fog? Memory lapses? Trouble focusing in prayer or at work?

Oxidative stress inflames your brain. Neurons don’t fire properly. Neurotransmitters like serotonin or dopamine get imbalanced. And you feel it not as “just stress,” but as disconnection from joy, clarity, and meaning.

Spiritually, You’re Exhausted

Oxidative stress can dull your spiritual sensitivity. You pray but feel numb. You know what you should believe, but it doesn’t feel alive. Chronic physical and emotionally provoked inflammation can make spiritual desolation worse. Your nervous system can no longer distinguish between a true crisis and the demands of your inbox. And your soul? It can not wind down to rest in God.

“Thus, the elements also sustain a person when they act within them in an orderly way and bring them health. But if they begin to clash within, they drive the person into illness and death. The mingling of humors - which arise from heat, moisture, blood, and flesh and enter into the human being and exist within them - preserves health if they function in peace and in the proper mixture. But if all of them are stirred at once and attack without moderation, then they bring weakness and death.” - Cause et Curae, Hildegard von Bingen

This passage from St. Hildegard reflects a deeply integrative view of health: physical vitality depends on the order, harmony, and peace of the elemental and humoral forces. When disordered or inflamed, these forces cause breakdown - physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

It’s a perfect theological-philosophical parallel to oxidative stress, which is essentially the breakdown caused by imbalance and internal "clashing" on a molecular level.

Enter: The Fast from Stress

It’s not about doing more but about stepping into a rhythm that allows your body, soul, and spirit to breathe, digest, metabolize and detoxify well again so your body on the cellular level can start renewing, recovering and building up vital reserves to function well.

Get the guidance to:

• Eating antioxidant-rich meals rooted in Hildegard of Bingen’s wisdom

• Resting strategically with simple rhythms of the day and week

• Praying using your lungs, brain, and heart, with the sacred patterns of the Church

• Letting go of the lies, thoughts, foods, and habits that are keeping you inflamed

Oxidative stress is real. But healing is just as real—and it begins with making space.