Why Your Nervous System Work Isn't Working: The Mineral Depletion Nobody's Testing For | Episode 19

Have you ever felt exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix?

You're eating reasonably well. You're resting. You're managing your stress as best you can. And you still wake up tired. Still drag through your days. Still feel like your body is working against you instead of with you.

If that's you, Sandy has something to share that changed the way she understands her own health — something years of traditional lab work completely missed.

What This Episode Holds

• What HTMA (hair tissue mineral analysis) actually is, and why hair tells a longer biochemical story than blood ever could
• Why Sandy decided to take this test on herself before ever offering it to a client — and what showed up in her own results
• The concept of a "calcium shell" — what it means when calcium becomes biounavailable, and why it often shows up in people who look composed on the outside while running on empty underneath
• What Sandy's thyroid and adrenal markers revealed about chronic, bone-deep fatigue that doesn't respond to sleep
• Why mineral patterns are not just physiological — they are psychological too, and how the calcium shell showed up in Sandy's behavior as well as her bloodwork
• Why nervous system regulation work — breathwork, somatic practices, therapy, neurofeedback — can only go so far if your minerals are depleted
• What it actually looks like to order an HTMA, what the process involves, and how Sandy walks clients through their results

Who This Episode Is For

• The healer or helping professional who has been running on reserves for years and has the labs to "prove" everything is fine, but doesn't feel fine
• Anyone whose exhaustion doesn't respond to rest, no matter how much they prioritize sleep
• The person who has done all the nervous system work — therapy, breathwork, somatic practices — and still feels like something underneath isn't shifting
• Anyone curious about functional or root-cause approaches to fatigue, thyroid sluggishness, or adrenal depletion
• The therapist or coach who wants to understand their own biochemistry before they ever consider offering tools like this to clients

"Minerals are the spark plugs of life. You can have a great engine — capable, intelligent, well-intentioned — and if the spark plugs aren't firing, nothing works the way it's supposed to. You don't need more discipline. You don't need more willpower. Sometimes you need to know what's actually happening in your body so you can give it what it actually needs."

How to Get an HTMA with Sandy

• Order your kit directly through Sandy Boone: https://www.sandyboone.com/offers/v7AJgJiC 
• The kit ships to your home — you collect a small sample of hair from the back of your head, close to the scalp
• You mail your sample to Trace Elements (envelope provided), the lab Sandy uses and trusts
• Results come back and you and Sandy sit down together for a full hour to walk through your specific numbers, ratios, and patterns
• Investment: $300, which covers the test, your one-on-one results session, and two weeks to ask Sandy follow up questions on Voxer

CONNECT WITH ME

Free Guide: 50 Things I Do to Calm My Freaking Nervous System: https://www.sandyboone.com/50-things

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesandyboone/

Learn More About Neurofeedback: https://sandy-boone.mykajabi.com/opt-in

The Ethical Exit Course: https://www.sandyboone.com/the-ethical-exit 

Work with Sandy privately: https://www.sandyboone.com/store

Rooted Calm Collective Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/rootedcalmcollective

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey y'all, I'm Sandy Boone, therapist, coach, and nervous system educator with 30 years in the healthcare and mental health fields. I built two practices, got diagnosed with ADHD at 50, and learned the hard way that healers need healing too. I help female therapists and healers regulate their nervous systems, reclaim their lives, and stop being everyone's everything. Welcome to the Braind Dunk with Sandy Booing. Have you ever felt exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix? Like you're doing all the right things, you're eating reasonably well, you're getting some rest, trying to manage your stress, and you still wake up tired, you're still dragging through your days, and still feeling like your body is working against you instead of with you? If that's you, this episode is for you. I want to talk about something that changed the way I understand my own health. Something that explained things about my body and my nervous system that years of traditional lab work had completely missed. It's called an HTMA, hair tissue mineral analysis. Before you tune out thinking this is some fringe wellness thing, stay with me. Because what I'm going to share today is grounded in real science and what my own results showed me was genuinely eye-opening, not in a scary way, in a finally makes sense kind of way. So let's start with the basics of it. As I said, HTMA stands for hair tissue mineral analysis, and it's exactly what it sounds like. A small sample of hair from the back of your head, close to the scalp, is sent to the lab. And that sample tells a story about your body's biochemistry over the past several months. Hair is such a useful sample because unlike blood, which reflects what's happening in your body right now in a single moment, the hair gives us a longer view. It's like the difference between a snapshot and a short film. Blood is the snapshot, hair is the film. What the test looks at is mineral levels and mineral ratios. And this is where it gets really interesting because minerals aren't just about whether you're getting enough calcium or magnesium in your diet. Minerals are actually the operating system of your body. They run your nervous system, they regulate your hormones, they control how your cells function, they influence your energy, your mood, your sleep, your stress response, your thyroid, your adrenals, everything. The lab that I use, Trace Elements, is one of the most reputable in the field. They've been doing this work for decades, and their methodology is solid. When I say HTMA showed me things traditional lab work missed, I'm not being dramatic. I mean that quite literally. Let me tell you why I decided to do this. I have had lots of lab work done, lots of functional medicine labs done, stool tests, urine tests, all the things. And I learned about my the HTMA through my functional medicine consulting group. And the more I understood about what it could reveal about the minerals and the nervous system and what traditional lab work consistently misses, the more I knew I had to do one myself. I don't ask my clients to do things I'm not willing to do. And if I'm going to sit across from someone and say, here's a test that's going to tell us things about your body that we don't know, I need to have done it myself first. I need to know what it feels like, what the process is like, what the results look like, and what comes up when you see your own numbers on paper. So I ordered one and I did my own. When the results came back, I sat down with the data and I had one of those moments where everything you suspected about yourself gets confirmed on paper. And after that, I started offering it to clients. Let me walk you through what I found on my HTMA because I think it'll help you understand what this test can actually tell you about your own body. The first thing that jumped out at me was my calcium level. My result was 161. The optimal is significantly lower. Now, when most people hear high calcium, they think, great, your bones are strong. Calcium is good for your bones. More must be better. But that's not how this works. When calcium is that elevated on an HTMA, it's not sitting where the calcium is supposed to be, which is inside your cells doing its job. It's sitting outside the cells. It's what we call biounavailable. My body has it, but it can't use it. And what happens when calcium accumulates outside the cell like that? It creates something called a calcium shell. And that is exactly what it sounds like. It's a layer of calcium that builds up around the cells and it acts like a buffer or a shield. It's a layer of insulation between me and the world. And from the outside, this can look like someone appearing calm, stable, like they have it together. They're not obviously falling apart, they're functioning. But underneath that shell is exhaustion, depletion, a nervous system that's working over time while the outside looks relatively composed, and cells that can't get nutrition in them. Sound familiar to anyone who's spent years being the person that holds it together? Yeah, me too. My calcium-potassium ratio, which reflects thyroid activity, was 40.25. The optimal is 4.2. 4, which means this was like 10 times higher than it should be. My thyroid was showing as significantly slow, not necessarily broken, but sluggish, working harder than it should have to for less output than it should be producing. And as one of my mentors says, sluggish thyroid, sluggish anything. That translates directly to the kind of fatigue that doesn't respond to sleep, the kind of tired that is bone deep, the kind where you wake up and you're already exhausted before the day has started. Now let me tell you about my adrenals because this is where it gets even more specific. My sodium magnesium ratio was 0.38. Optimal is four. That's not a slight variation. That's a signal that my adrenals were running significantly below where they needed to be. This nervous system is stressed. And what does low adrenal function feel like? It's fatigue, it's poor protein digestion, it's allergies, it's difficulty recovering from stress. That feeling of being stretched thin even when nothing particularly dramatic is happening. My sodium to potassium ratio, which Trace Elements considers the most important ratio on the entire test, was two, just under the optimal 2.4, and trending toward what they call adrenal exhaustion. This ratio reflects the sodium potassium pump, which is basically the mechanism that keeps your cells alive and functioning. When it's running low, you're not just tired. Your cells are working inefficiently. Your digestion is slower, your ability to handle stress is reduced, and your immune system is more vulnerable. This test was essentially showing me a picture of a body that had been running on reserves for a very long time. Which, if you've been in a helping profession for 30 years, probably not a surprise. Here's what I love about the HTMA and why it's different from looking at individual lab values. It's not just about the numbers, it's about the patterns, the relationships between the minerals and the ratios. My results showed what's called a slow metabolizer pattern, specifically a parasympathetic dominant state. My body was in an energy conserving mode, not thriving, conserving. The difference between those two things is significant. I also showed signs of an iodine deficiency pattern, low lithium, which correlates with iodine status, and thyroid function. And my excretion of certain heavy metals, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, uranium, was very poor, which means my body wasn't clearing them out efficiently. They were hanging around when they should have been moving out. Now I'm not telling you this to alarm you. I'm telling you this because none of this showed up in my regular blood work. My thyroid panel was fine. My standard labs look fine. But my hair told a different story, and that story explained a lot about how I had been feeling and was very validating. I want to make this concrete for you because if you're a healing professional, this is where it gets really relevant. Again, the nervous system runs on minerals. Magnesium is literally called the antistress mineral. It's involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body, and it helps convert blood sugar to energy. It calms the nervous system. Zinc supports proper nerve function, immune health, and digestive health. Calcium and potassium regulate how your cells communicate. Sodium and potassium run the pump that keep your cells alive. And when these minerals are out of balance, when they're depleted or when they're present but biounavailable, stuck outside the cells where they can't do their job, your nervous system pays the price. This is why I talk about this in the context of both my clinical work and my coaching, because you can do all the nervous system regulation work in the world: breath work, somatic practices, therapy, neurofeedback. And if your minerals are depleted, you're working against a physiological headwind. The nervous system needs resources to regulate, and minerals are a core part of those resources. For healers specifically, people who have been giving from their reserves for years, mineral depletion is extraordinarily common and it's almost never tested. And so people keep wondering why they can't regulate and why they can't recover and why the right things aren't working. Sometimes the answer is in the hair. So what does someone do when they get results like mine? Well, first, don't panic. You get curious. The goal of the HTMA is not to scare you, it's to give you a roadmap, a starting point that is specific to your biochemistry, not a generic protocol that might or might not be relevant to what's actually help happening in your body. For my calcium shell specifically, the work is about helping calcium become bioavailable, which is getting it into the cells where it belongs. And that involves specific nutritional support, targeted supplementation, and working on the underlying patterns that allowed that shell to form in the first place. For my adrenals and thyroid, it was about support, not stimulation. This is an important distinction. The goal is not to push a depleted system harder, the goal is to give it what it needs to rebuild. And the emotional piece matters too, because what the research on HTMA shows, and this is the part that really connects my two worlds, is that mineral patterns are psychological patterns as well as physiological ones. The calcium shell that was showing up in my body was showing up in my behavior too. The composure that's actually exhaustion underneath, the holding it together that's actually depletion, wearing a calm face. Getting to the root of that physiologically and psychologically is the root. Here's the part where I tell you how to get one. If you're a healing professional, or really any human, who has been feeling like your body isn't quite right and traditional testing isn't giving you answers, this test is worth considering. I offer the HTMA through both of my practices, and here's what it looks like. You can go to sandyboon.com and order through me. I send you the kit, it comes to your home. You collect a small sample of hair from the back of your head, close to the scalp. We're talking like a teaspoon's worth, nothing dramatic, and you mail it back to Trace Elements, the lab. If you are someone who colors your hair, you would need to wait until you were due for another color. I actually had my hairdresser cut hair for me. We get your results back and sit down together for an hour, just the two of us. I'll walk you through what your specific numbers mean, your ratios, your patterns, your excretion status, what's depleted, what's biounavailable, and what we can do about it. The investment is $275. That covers the test itself and our hour together to make sense of the results. And I want to be clear, this is not a sales pitch wrapped in a podcast episode. This is me telling you about something that changed my understanding of my own health and that I've seen change the picture for the people I work with too. If it resonates, the information is at sandyboone.com. Minerals are the spark plugs of life. That phrase comes from the HTMA world, and I think about it all the time because it's exactly right. You can have a great engine, capable, intelligent, well-intentioned human. And if the spark plugs aren't firing, nothing works the way it's supposed to. You don't need more discipline, you don't need more willpower, and you don't need to try harder. Sometimes you need to know what's actually happening in your body so you can give it what it actually needs. And that's what the HTMA does. That's why I did it, and that's why I offer it. Thanks for being here. If something resonated, check the show notes. You'll find a link to grab my free guide, 50 things I do to calm my freaking nervous system. And if you're curious about neurofeedback or HTMA, there's information in the show notes for both. Come find me on Instagram at the Sandy Boone. I'd love to keep the conversation going over there. And if you're a healing professional looking for a community that actually feels good to be in, come join us in the Rooted Calm Collective on Facebook. It's a space built for support, nervous system tips, and building your best life as a healer without all the drama.