Why your body's alarm system sometimes won't switch off

A client asked me last week why she seemed to catch every cold going round her office while her colleague, who eats worse and sleeps less, never gets so much as a sniffle. It's one of the questions I get asked most in clinic, in one form or another. Why does my body overreact to everything. Or why does it never seem to react at all until I'm really unwell.

The answer usually comes down to inflammation, and more specifically, whether it's being resolved properly once it's done its job.

Two immune systems, two very different speeds

We don't have one immune system, we have two, working together.

The innate immune system is your first responder. It's fast, arriving within minutes to a few hours, but it's also fairly blunt. It reacts the same way every single time, whatever the trigger. Think of it as a smoke alarm. It doesn't distinguish between burnt toast and a house fire, it just goes off.

The adaptive immune system is slower to mobilise, taking anywhere from seven to fourteen days to properly switch on, but it can stay active for days or months once it does. What makes it remarkable is that it learns. Each time it meets the same threat, it responds faster and more precisely than the time before. This is the system behind immunological memory, and it's why your second bout of a particular virus is often milder than your first.

In TCM terms, this maps quite neatly onto the idea of Wei Qi, our defensive energy that circulates at the body's surface and mounts the first line of defence against external pathogens. When Wei Qi is robust, we fend things off before they take hold. When it's depleted, through poor sleep, overwork, or chronic stress, we're more susceptible to catching everything going round, much like an under-resourced innate immune response.

Inflammation isn't the enemy, it's the process

Here's the bit I think gets lost in a lot of wellness messaging. Inflammation itself isn't a problem to be eliminated. It's a vital, appropriate response to injury, toxins, infection or damage. When you get sunburnt, the redness and heat you see is your body rushing blood, and with it immune cells, to the site to begin repair. That process of vasodilation is essentially a communication highway, ferrying in the cells that clean up damage and carrying away the debris.

The issue isn't that inflammation happens. The issue is what happens next.

Resolution, the process of switching inflammation back off once the job is done, is just as active and coordinated as the initial response. Neutrophils (a type of white blood cell) need to die off on schedule and be cleared away, which itself relies on healthy lymphatic flow. Omega 3 fats play a genuine, specific role here too, not as a general anti-inflammatory, but as the raw material for what are called pro-resolving mediators, compounds that actively tell the immune system the danger has passed. They stop new neutrophils being called up, help macrophages shift from attack mode into clean-up mode, and even help switch on stem cells to repair the damaged tissue.

When the alarm forgets to reset

Resolution fails when the original injury, infection or exposure continues, or when the body simply doesn't have what it needs (nutrients, lymphatic drainage, a properly functioning stress response) to complete the process. When that happens, the body doesn't go back to its original healthy baseline. It settles into a new normal where the immune system stays partially switched on.

This is why one flare, one infection, one prolonged period of stress, can leave someone either hyper-reactive afterwards, jumping at every subsequent trigger, or paradoxically under-responsive, getting ill more often because the system no longer mounts an adequate defence. Both are versions of the same underlying story: an immune system that never properly reset.

In TCM, we'd recognise this as a pattern shifting from an acute excess condition into something more chronic, where heat or dampness has lodged and the body's own regulating mechanisms are struggling to clear it.

What this actually means for you

If you're someone who feels like you're either constantly fighting something off or constantly run down, the useful question isn't "how do I dampen this down." It's "why did my system not switch off properly in the first place, and what does it need to complete that job."

That might mean supporting lymphatic flow through movement or manual therapies, making sure omega 3 intake and ratios are actually adequate rather than assumed, or looking further upstream at what's kept the alarm ringing (which is exactly where we're headed in the next post in this series, on the everyday drivers that quietly keep inflammation switched on).

For now, the main thing I want you to take from this is that your body isn't malfunctioning when it inflames. It's doing its job. The question worth asking with a practitioner is whether it's also being given what it needs to finish that job properly.

If any of this sounds familiar, get in touch and let's have a look at what might be keeping your system switched on.