Are you protecting the very thing that's hurting you?

Another test came back normal and the specialists are confused because nothing serious has been found, yet you still don't feel well. The tension keeps returning, the fatigue never fully leaves, the pain settles down for a while only to reappear again months later, and you feel this lingering sense of body carrying a weight that nobody seems able to explain... Everything seems to be relatively normal, but you know something isn't right.

A recurring pain or discomfort without an obvious structural cause can be deeply confronting, so you spend months looking for the missing diagnosis. But your case refuses to fit neatly into the medical story you want. You feel that you need a villain you can point at and efectively fight against, but instead you get ambiguity. And ambiguity has a way of consuming enormous amounts of energy, so you decide to do your homework on Medicine 2.0. You research, read books, listen to podcasts, learn the language of inflammation, hormones, mitochondria, gut health, nervous system regulation, trauma, fascia and functional medicine overall. You get closer and finally start asking the right question, not "how do I fix this?" but "why does it keep coming back?". Yet even then, after finding the right practitioner, following the protocol, changing the diet, buying premium supplements and doing everything you were told should work, the strange symptoms appear, disappear, and reappear just when you think you've finally moved past them. Until one day a different possibility appears.

What if your body is not failing you, but faithfully reflecting the life you are asking it to carry? What if it's your most loyal messenger that keeps showing you the same truth until you're ready to look at it? (A warning to all the woo-woo sensitive readers who didnt close this tab yet: we've now reached the part where science gets slightly nervous as things become delightfully unprovable)

What if the recurring tension, the jaw clenching, the digestive issues, the fatigue, the headaches, the pelvic pain, the stiff hips or the sciatica are not evidence that your body struggling to adapt to modern life, but evidence that it has adapted exceptionally well, becoming exactly as vigilant, tense, and protective as the conditions it experiences every day require it to be? Let's assume it's true and a more interesting question begins to emerge - what exactly is it adapting to? Because most women are no longer running from predators, fighting wars or carrying water for miles every day. Yet many of them wake up and immediately start living in the future, mentally rehearsing conversations, solving problems and carrying responsibilities that have not even arrived yet. Does it sound familiar? The problem is that your body doesn't know the difference between a tiger and a never-ending mental to-do list, but it certainly knows what constant vigilance feels like.

It knows what it feels like to postpone rest until everything is done, to continuously place other people's comfort ahead of your own, or to say yes when every cell in your body wants to say no. It also knows what it feels like to stay in situations, commitments and identities that stopped fitting a long time ago.

... And perhaps most importantly, it knows what it feels like to live under a set of expectations so demanding that no human being could ever fully satisfy them. Not because somebody else imposed them on us, but because somewhere along the way we did it to ourselves.

Female body is remarkably obedient. If aher nervous system perceives life as requiring constant vigilance, it starts favouring muscles that help her brace and prepare. Give your body a life that constantly demands more and it will learn to always stay ready. Give it a life that values productivity above all else and it will learn to stay switched on long after the work is done. Give it a life where slowing down feels risky and it will start treating tension as protection. I could go on, but the point is that many of us have stopped recognising these responses as adaptations. We call them personality, work ethic, responsibility, high standards, ambition (oh, hello my favourite ego boosters!)

The modern world encourages and admires these automatic responses, and we love building identities around them, wearing them like badges of honour. They make us feel capable, valuable and occasionally ... a little superior. Until one day the body asks for the bill. Initially it arrives in a flexible instalment plan: tension, fatigue, pain, digestive issues, insomnia, anxiety, headaches, or symptoms that seem completely unrelated until you step back and look at the bigger picture. The problem is that many of us keep postponing the payment!

We learn how to manage the symptoms, negotiate with them, work around them and silence them just enough to continue living in exactly the same way. We become experts at finding temporary relief while remaining remarkably committed to the conditions that created the problem in the first place. But if the invoice is ignored for long enough, the body eventually stops sending reminders and demands your full attention. And when that happens, it can be a deeply humbling experience because once the body gets its debt collection department involved, it has very little interest in our carefully constructed identities. It doesn't particularly care how productive, resilient, ambitious or indispensable we believe ourselves to be. When it decides that something can no longer continue in the same way, it tends to be remarkably persuasive.

Nobody wants to find themselves in that place, so perhaps it's time to stop researching why the smoke detector keeps making noise and finally walk through the house looking for the fire.

Because perhaps the body is not asking you to become healthier. Perhaps it is asking you to become someone else - someone who no longer mistakes tension for strength, exhaustion for achievement, or self abandonment for success.

And perhaps that is why healing can feel so frightening?

Not because we are afraid of getting better, but because getting better may require us to question parts of ourselves that have been rewarded for years: the achiever, the fixer, the strong one, the woman who always copes the woman who carries more than she should and secretly takes pride in her ability to do so...

What if the fire isn't threatening your health at all?

What if it's threatening the very qualities you have spent a lifetime being praised for? ♥