Chronic Pain and the Nervous System: How I Healed Naturally

Written By Michael Roviello

From Surgery to
Self-Healing

Chronic pain isn’t always caused by a structural injury. In many cases, it’s driven by the nervous system. It’s in how your body processes stress, trauma, and prolonged tension. If you’ve tried treatments, medications, or even surgery and still experience pain, the missing piece may not be your body… but your nervous system.

In this story, Optimyze co-founder Michael Roviello shares how years of chronic pain, surgery, and high-performance stress led him to discover a different path. One focused on nervous system healing, mind-body awareness, and natural recovery.

Chronic Pain and the Nervous System: What Most People Miss

How I Rebuilt My Body, Nervous System, and Life After Chronic Pain

The Pain Wasn’t an Event. It Was an Atmosphere.

For most of my adult life, pain wasn’t something that happened to me once.

It was something I lived inside of. Pain started as my Navy career kicked off in 1999.

It followed me quietly at first, like background static. Then it would surge forward in waves so intense they stopped my life in its tracks. Weeks at a time I’d be crippled, sleep destroyed, movement limited, mood shot,then it would settle down just enough for me to pretend I was fine.

But it was never gone.

Stress would ignite it. Poor sleep would amplify it. One wrong movement would bring it roaring back. I learned to manage it. I learned to push through it. I learned to hide it.

I did not know how to heal it or where it was coming from. There was no major “accident or crash”. It was normal for me to blame it on my physical training. I was living in “Go mode”  from the time I entered bootcamp for the U.S Navy. 

.

How Chronic Stress Rewires the Nervous System

A Nervous System Built for War

I’ve learned something that I wish more people understood: your body doesn’t just “have pain.” Your nervous system carries a story.

As a U.S. Navy Search and Rescue Swimmer, my nervous system was trained in high gear. I jumped from helicopters into the open ocean. I flew at night using night-vision goggles, low and fast over terrain. I carried heavy rescue gear. I operated in chaos. There was no room for hesitation, people could die or get severely injured, it was a lot of pressure, pressure I was ready for, trained for, its necessary for the job. 

I deployed in November 2001 aboard one of the first aircraft carriers to go to war after 9/11, during Operation Enduring Freedom. We were young and on edge, operating in a world that had suddenly changed. There was pressure in the air 24/7. Even when nothing was happening, everything was happening.

That kind of environment wires you.

Modern neuroscience shows that chronic stress can reshape brain networks involved in threat detection and pain processing (Apkarian et al., 2011). When you live in fight-or-flight long enough, your baseline becomes tension. Your “normal” becomes vigilance. Your physiology forgets how to downshift.

When I left the military, I didn’t leave that wiring behind.

I carried it.

.

Chasing Success Without an Inner Foundation

After the Navy, I moved from San Diego to Scottsdale and started building a new life. I built a corporate career. I pursued an MBA at night. I stayed active. I kept a full social life.

And I chased success like it was going to save me.

New cars. Boats. motorcycles. Houses. Status. Upgrades. I honestly believed material achievement would bring peace. I thought if I built enough on the outside, I would feel stable on the inside.

But I didn’t have spiritual grounding. I didn’t have inner stillness. I didn’t have real mentorship teaching me emotional maturity, purpose, or alignment. My identity was built on performance.

On paper, I looked unstoppable.

Inside, I was running on cortisol, self-pressure, and grit. I was a mess! 

.

When My Body Forced the Conversation

The pain in my neck didn’t arrive dramatically. It crept in starting back in my Naval training in 2000.

Stiffness became radiating pain. Pain became neurological symptoms. Numbness showed up. My hand strength declined. My balance shifted. Reflexes changed. I developed clonus,those involuntary muscle contractions that are hard to ignore when you know what they can mean. In the Navy it showed up as physical pain that would come in waves. I ate Motrin like they were candy, just what the doc ordered. Flying is high stakes, they will ground you quickly and resort to a desk job. I didn’t train for that, we pushed through, “Embraced The Suck”. The pain came back with a vengeance after my career in the Navy ended. This time neurological issues came on strong. That changed everything…

Doctors started talking about multiple sclerosis.

That was terrifying.

My grandmother had MS. I watched her lose mobility, independence, and quality of life. She ended up paralyzed and blind. The two weeks between MRI and results felt like the longest two weeks of my life.

The results came back.

It wasn’t MS.

It was two severely herniated cervical discs compressing my spinal cord. The protective sheath had been compromised. I was leaking cerebrospinal fluid. Emergency surgery was required.

.

Why Surgery Didn’t Solve the Problem

The Surgery That Saved My Spinal Cord, But Didn’t Heal My System

I had an Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion (ACDF). Surgeons cut through the front of my neck, moved my esophagus aside, removed the damaged discs, inserted cadaver bone grafts, and stabilized everything with a titanium plate and screws.

Structurally, it was a success.

Neurologically, it preserved me.

But it didn’t change how I lived.

Two weeks later I was back at work wearing a neck brace. Back in night classes. Back in overdrive. Back to taking on too much. Back to saying yes. Back to the same nervous system that created the conditions for breakdown in the first place.

And about a year later, the waves returned, this time in different parts of my spine.

More epidurals. More anti-inflammatories. More muscle relaxers. More “solutions.”

No one asked about stress. No one asked about emotional load. No one asked about the war deployment, the years of hypervigilance, the identity built around performance, or the way I lived with my nervous system constantly braced.

My body was being treated like broken machinery.

The Mind-Body Connection Behind Chronic Pain

Everything shifted when I encountered Dr. John Sarno.

Sarno was a rehabilitation physician at NYU who treated thousands of chronic pain patients. Over decades, he observed something that didn’t fit the traditional structural model of pain. Many patients with severe disc abnormalities had no pain, while others with minimal findings were debilitated. Symptoms migrated. Pain intensified during emotional stress. Surgery often failed to resolve chronic cases.

Sarno proposed that much chronic pain is driven by what he called Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS). Today, pain science uses terms like central sensitization and neuroplastic pain,the idea that the nervous system can become hypersensitized, and pain can persist even after tissues heal (Woolf, 2011; Apkarian et al., 2011).

This is the part people misunderstand, so I’m going to say it clearly.

Sarno wasn’t saying the pain is fake.

He was saying the pain is real, but the driver is often the brain and nervous system, not a damaged body part.

The brain’s job is protection. If your brain perceives threat,especially emotional threat,it can amplify pain signals to keep you focused on the body. Pain becomes an alarm system stuck in the “on” position.

When I read Sarno, I saw myself on every page: intense, driven, perfectionistic, high-achieving, emotionally guarded, constantly “on.” I had lived in a sympathetic state for years. I didn’t even realize it because it was my normal.

The first Sarno book I read was The Mindbody Prescription. It hit me like a lightning bolt. Then I read Healing Back Pain. Then I read The Divided Mind. I read his work the way you read something when your life depends on it, because it did.

Sarno’s remedy wasn’t a pill.

It was awareness, education, and emotional truth.

He taught patients to stop viewing their bodies as fragile. To stop obsessing over structural findings. To recognize the emotional patterns underneath pain. To identify the internal pressure, the suppressed anger, the people-pleasing, the fear, the grief.

He encouraged journaling, not as “dear diary,” but as an emotional audit. He taught people to name what they were not allowing themselves to feel.

He taught something that felt radical to me at the time: sometimes healing starts when you stop being afraid of your own emotions.

Sarno didn’t negate the reality of my surgery. I believe my ACDF was necessary to preserve neurological function. But Sarno gave me language for why pain persisted even after the structure was stabilized.

He changed my relationship with pain.

Instead of asking, “What’s broken in my body?” I started asking, “What’s my nervous system protecting me from feeling?”

.

Nervous System Healing Techniques That Changed Everything

Beliefs, Biology, and the Chemistry of Stress

Around the same time, I started studying the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Joe Dispenza. Their message landed because my lived experience was already proving it: your internal environment shapes your physical outcome.

Modern epigenetics shows that gene expression and inflammatory signaling are influenced by stress, environment, and perception (Zanos & Gould, 2018). Repeated thoughts create repeated chemistry. Repeated chemistry shapes the body.

I had lived in stress chemistry for a long time.

When you live like that, pain isn’t just possible.

It’s predictable.

Brazil, Iquitos, and Ayahuasca: Emotional Integration at a Deeper Level

Some emotional layers were deeper than conscious awareness.

That’s what led me to Brazil and later to Iquitos, Peru.

For people who don’t know what ayahuasca is: it’s a traditional Amazonian ceremonial brew made primarily from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and Psychotria viridis leaves. Indigenous cultures have used it for centuries for healing, insight, and spiritual connection, not recreationally, but in a guided ceremonial context.

Modern research suggests ayahuasca and other psychedelics can decrease activity in the brain’s Default Mode Network, the network associated with rigid self-identity and rumination,and increase markers related to neuroplasticity, including BDNF (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016; Ly et al., 2018). Ayahuasca specifically has been studied for potential therapeutic effects related to depression, trauma, and emotional processing (Domínguez-Clavé et al., 2016).

But here’s the truth.

Ayahuasca wasn’t a “hack” for me. It wasn’t entertainment. It wasn’t a trend.

It was a mirror.

It showed me where I lived in fear. Where achievement became armor. Where I avoided vulnerability. Where I was trying to control life instead of living it. It brought suppressed grief to the surface. It forced honesty.

And as emotional suppression softened, my body softened.

Healing didn’t happen in one night. It happened in layers. It happened through integration, how I lived the next day, the next week, the next month. The work came after the ceremony, the phone calls, the “I’m sorry” conversations, resolving the repressed emotions.

How I Started Healing My Nervous System Naturally

Wim Hof: Training the Nervous System Until It Changes

If Sarno helped me understand the “why,” Wim Hof gave me the “how.”

For people unfamiliar: the Wim Hof Method is a system that combines structured breathing exercises, controlled cold exposure, and focused mindset training. It’s designed to train the autonomic nervous system and stress response.

A landmark study showed that trained practitioners could voluntarily influence aspects of the immune response and inflammation (Kox et al., 2014). Cold exposure can increase norepinephrine and improve stress resilience. Breathwork influences autonomic regulation.

But beyond science, here’s what it did for me.

Cold taught me that discomfort does not equal danger.

When you step into cold water, your brain sends threat signals. Your breath tightens. Your heart rate spikes. Your instincts scream, “Get out.”

But when you stay, breathe, and relax into it, the nervous system learns a new pattern.

“I can handle stress without being harmed.”

That one lesson changed my life.

I didn’t just dabble in Wim Hof. It became a daily practice. It reconnected me with nature, discipline, and humility. I trained deeply, and I eventually became one of Wim Hof’s U.S.-based instructors. Now I teach globally.

What started as personal healing became part of my mission helping people to become Healthy, Happy and Strong! 

The Sauna: Where Stillness Became Therapy

Cold trained resilience.

Heat trained surrender.

The sauna became one of the most healing places in my entire life, not just for the physical benefits, but for what it forced me to do emotionally.

I would sit alone in the heat. Sometimes listening to personal development podcasts. Sometimes doing guided meditations. Sometimes in total silence. No phone. No tasks. No performance. Nowhere to be.

Just presence.

Physiologically, sauna exposure has strong data behind it. Long-term Finnish studies link frequent sauna bathing with lower cardiovascular mortality and reduced risk of dementia (Laukkanen et al., 2015; Laukkanen et al., 2017). Sauna also supports circulation, endothelial function, and heat shock proteins.

But for me, it was more than heat stress.

It was therapy.

It was the first place in my life where I could stop running from myself.

Edgar Cayce: “Mind Is the Builder”

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Edgar Cayce brought me back to spirituality.

Cayce taught that the mind is the builder, that thought, intention, and inner alignment shape physical outcomes. Whether someone interprets that spiritually, psychologically, or symbolically, the message hit me: my inner world mattered.

For most of my life, I had none of that. Little spiritual foundation through my upbringing in the Catholic church. My relationship with God and Jesus Christ was inconsistent, only calling on him for problems and even then I had this way about me that I can solve it myself.. No quiet inner practice.

Returning to faith softened my fear and opened my heart while changing my intentions and relationships with others through kindness. 

And when fear softened, my body followed.

There Was No Silver Bullet. There Was a New Life.

People ask me what fixed my pain.

Nothing did.

There wasn’t one miracle ceremony. No magic supplement. No single modality. Healing came from integration and consistency: awareness, nervous system training, emotional honesty, spiritual grounding, boundaries, lifestyle change, rest.

Over time, the waves faded. My balance returned. My strength improved. My flare-ups shortened.

I didn’t fix pain.

I transformed the conditions that created it.

That journey became the foundation of Optimyze with Jesse Moreng, helping people to adapt and react to stress in a healthy way, a daily practice using breathing, sauna, cold plunge, magnetisms (PEMF), and light therapies. A place to train your nervous and immune system. A place where people can connect authentically, feel welcome, and make lasting relationships. 

If you’re living with chronic pain, I want you to know this: you are not broken. Your nervous system may be overwhelmed. Your emotions may be unprocessed. Your life may be misaligned.

And that can change.

Healing is possible.

I’m living proof.

Academic References

1. Apkarian, A. V., Hashmi, J. A., & Baliki, M. N. (2011). Pain and the brain: Specificity and plasticity of the brain in clinical chronic pain. Pain, 152(3 Suppl), S49–S64.
2. Carhart-Harris, R. L., et al. (2016). Neural correlates of the psychedelic state revealed by multimodal neuroimaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(17), 4853–4858.
3. Domínguez-Clavé, E., et al. (2016). Ayahuasca: Pharmacology, neuroscience and therapeutic potential. Brain Research Bulletin, 126, 89–101.
4. Kox, M., et al. (2014). Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(20), 7379–7384.
5. Laukkanen, T., et al. (2015). Association between sauna bathing and fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events. JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(4), 542–548.
6. Laukkanen, T., et al. (2017). Sauna bathing is inversely associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in middle-aged Finnish men. Age and Ageing, 46(2), 245–249.
7. Ly, C., et al. (2018). Psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity. Cell Reports, 23(11), 3170–3182.
8. Thayer, J. F., et al. (2012). A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies: Implications for heart rate variability as a marker of stress and health. Biological Psychology, 90(3), 173–180.
9. Woolf, C. J. (2011). Central sensitization: Implications for the diagnosis and treatment of pain. Pain, 152(3 Suppl), S2–S15.
10. Zanos, P., & Gould, T. D. (2018). Mechanisms of ketamine action as an antidepressant. Molecular Psychiatry, 23(4), 801–811.