I Have Been the Patient No One Believed
That is why I started The Nervous System Eats First™. I began my career as one of the first Black female pediatric surgeons in Texas. Nine years of surgical training. Hundred-and-forty-four-hour weeks. Two kids. A dissolving marriage. A culture that rewarded precision and punished feeling.
I kept moving for decades, carrying everything with me, wondering why I kept feeling so off in my own body. The podcast is the conversation I needed back then and never got.
The Nervous System Had Been Eating First the Whole Time
What I know now is that I was not burned out. I was in what trauma researcher Dr. Stephen Porges calls a functional freeze. Doing everything. Feeling nothing. My nervous system had been running the show the entire time, and no one had ever taught me to listen to it.
I was not too sensitive, and I was not cold. I had undiagnosed autistic traits and alexithymia, a neurological difference that made naming or feeling emotions nearly impossible. As a Black Gen X woman, I had spent decades over-functioning to survive and dissociating to cope.
“I was finally putting clinical language on the map of my own interior. I became the expert in the thing I had survived.”
Every episode of this show does that same work out loud. It puts language on the place where the nervous system, hormones, sensory processing and identity all meet, for the woman who already knows something is true in her body and has been waiting for someone to believe her.
Credentials Behind the Conversation
Board Certified, American Board of Surgery
Menopause-Focused Physician with a Lifestyle Medicine Lens
Lifestyle Medicine Board Candidate, sitting for boards fall 2026
Creator of The Neuroaesthetic Reset Method™
Member, American College of Lifestyle Medicine
Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies, Trauma Research Foundation with Bessel van der Kolk, MD
PhD Candidate, Lifestyle Prescriptions University, in Neuroaesthetics & Metabolic Health
Founder, Ceyise Studios
Host, The Nervous System Eats First™ Podcast
Listen, or Work With Her Directly
Hear the frameworks on the show, or step into clinical care built around exactly how you are wired.
The Essays
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The longer-form essays behind the show, the research, the stories and the language for what your body has been trying to say. Free, straight to your inbox.