The Invisible Load Your Body Is Carrying.
And what begins to change when you address the nervous system that's at the root.
Most of what we're taught about healing centres around managing symptoms — eat better, move more, think positively, manage your stress. And while none of this is without value, the way it is approached tends to leave the root of the problem completely untouched.
What most approaches don't account for is that your body may be holding onto unresolved stress that has been accumulating in the body for years (or decades even), patterns of over-functioning, making yourself small, and self-abandonment that have kept you safe, and a nervous system that has been running in survival mode for so long that it has become your baseline. Until that's addressed, the symptoms are likely to keep returning, habits will feel impossible to sustain, any change even for the better will feel like a threat to your survival, and even the most well-intentioned lifestyle changes may not land the way you hope.
The difficulty isn't your willpower or your discipline. It's that the survival patterns that once kept you safe and helped you succeed may now be standing between you and the health and ease you're looking for.
In peri/menopause, the hormones no longer buffer the nervous system which is why your symptoms may be flaring up. You’ve become more reactive. More sensitive. More easily overwhelmed.
I want to help you understand more closely three reasons why you may be feeling stuck:
1. You're treating the symptoms, not what's underneath them
If you're a high-functioning woman in midlife, you're likely very good at managing. You've found ways to cope — staying busy, staying productive, performing capacity. And from the outside, it works. But your body may be telling a different story through fatigue, digestive problems, poor sleep, emotional reactivity, or stubborn physical symptoms that nobody can quite explain.
What's often happening beneath all of this is a nervous system that has been in a chronic stress state for so long it no longer has the capacity to fully recover between stress and demands on you. You might be eating healthily and exercising consistently, but if your nervous system is operating in threat mode, your body struggles to fully benefit.
Because movement itself is neutral. Movement only changes your state when you can sense it in the body - and for that we need to slow down enough to feel. (This is an important point which I want to develop further in a separate article). Healthy habits can feel forced, unstable, or short-lived because they're being layered on top of an unresolved physiological state, without you being present with it - sensing whether or not it is having an effect, if so how, what’s changing, what’s surfacing in the body and so on.
The forcing and pushing and overriding the body with the mind is what I sometimes call a faux window of tolerance: you're coping, but you're not actually regulated. And your body knows the difference, even when your mind doesn't.
2. Living in predominantly from the head is working against you
You're smart. You're highly capable. You’re intelligent. You can research, strategise, and think your way around most problems. So naturally, when you feel exhausted or anxious or stuck, you bring your considerable mental capacity to solving it.
The difficulty is that when the nervous system is dysregulated, the part of the brain responsible for higher thinking — focus, creativity, nuanced decision-making — is quite literally less available. The survival response takes over, and no amount of journaling, positive reframing, or self-help reading can reach your nervous system in the body.
And the nervous system is 80-90% afferent - there is 4 times more information being sent from the body up to the brain than the other way around. So your nervous system is in the lead and the mind follows. The thoughts that we have are mostly reflexive. They can’t be changed through the mind, only through the body.
There's something else worth naming here. Many high-achieving women in midlife have learned — often from a young age — to suppress difficult emotions in favour of staying functional and keeping others comfortable. Positive thinking isn’t bad of course, but it can also become a sophisticated way of bypassing what the body is actually trying to communicate - through feeling. What gets suppressed doesn't disappear. It tends to move into the body, showing up as chronic symptoms.
Healing isn't about thinking differently. It's about learning to feel — gently, safely, and at your own pace — and to find your way back into the body.
3. You may not recognise your stress as stress
This one tends to surprise people. Chronic stress can become so familiar that it stops registering as something out of the ordinary. It's just how you are. How you've always been. How life feels.
Unresolved stress can act as a kind of numbing agent — gradually blunting your connection to your own body, your emotional needs, your sense of what's actually true for you underneath all the performing and over-delivering. Over time, this disconnection can show up as difficulty making decisions, a persistent sense that something is missing, or physical symptoms that seem to appear from nowhere.
If you're navigating chronic symptoms without a clear cause, it may be worth understanding that emotional and relational stress is stored in the body in ways that are just as real as physical injury. The nervous system doesn't always distinguish between the two — both can leave lasting imprints that shape your health, your mood, and your capacity for change.
Why nervous system regulation is the missing piece
Your nervous system governs everything from your physical health (your immune system, hormones, the gut, your brain and muscles), your emotional and mental well-being, your relationships and your sense of success, happiness, and fulfilment. It's a pretty vital thing!
And yet most approaches to wellbeing skip it entirely.
Working gently and directly with the nervous system — learning to track your own states, gradually building the capacity to feel safer in your body, and slowly expanding what you can hold without going into overwhelm — is what tends to create lasting change rather than temporary relief. It's not about adding another protocol to an already full life. It's about addressing the root so that everything else has a chance to actually work.
Felt sensation is the language your nervous system actually understands.
Finding your way back to your body at this level tends to involve three things, woven together:
Education:
It's likely that you need a healthy dose of education about how stress works in your nervous system and how your mind and body actually work. So that you can understand how you came to be where you are today. And also stop blaming and shaming yourself for it while stepping into the driver’s seat of your own health and wellbeing,
Self-awareness skills:
Unresolved trauma and chronic stress often stunt our ability to feel safe and connect to ourselves, others, and our environment. Healing then is often about growing our capacity to come back to connection with these things in the present moment awareness.
When I talk about connection, I am not talking about some mystical thing that's out there in the ethereal space. I am talking about good old-fashioned sensory input and embodied grounding and presence. Whether you're struggling with gut issues, tension, brain and mental focus, autoimmunity or chronic fatigue - learning how to bring this connection back is essential to your healing.
Embodied practice:
Stress and trauma doesn't happen in our mental sphere (even if it shows up as mental struggle such as over-thinking or rumination!). It happens in our physical body that's driving our thoughts, beliefs, stories and behaviours. We can learn to be deeply grounded in presence and connection through embodiment (body) practices, which help us regulate our nervous system. Practices are the third piece of the puzzle, in addition to education and self-awareness tools. It's where the healing magic happens!
Start here:
Track your nervous system state - notice
There is no need to try to shift or change your state. There is nothing to fix. You are not broken. Your nervous system knows how to return to connection. Simply placing your attention on which state you’re in begins to create separation between stimulus and response. It allows you to notice how you are responding to the people, places and situations you come into contact with every single day in your life.
Begin to recognise and acknowledge the various states of activation that you go through over the course of a day or a week, with curiosity and self-compassion. This begins to break up your habitual patterns of reactivity, like hitting the reset button on your brain and body. It allows you to begin to rewire yourself for new ways of being.
2. Felt-sense of safety
When the world seems unsafe, literally or metaphorically, you need to calm your biology by giving it a felt sense of safety.
Do this by focusing on pleasant sensations in your body. This can be something as simple as a warm sun on your skin, a cool breeze, the feeling of a blanket, your favourite hot drink in a mug in the palms of your hands, petting a soft cat or any other sensory input that is calming and pleasant.
Do this for ten to twenty seconds multiple times a day. The more you bring your awareness to what feels good, the more quickly you will pull yourself out of survival states.
3. Coming home to yourself (as in, your body)
Focus on feeling your body. Put your attention on sensations in your physical self. Notice what you notice: the texture of the floor under your feet, the weight of your pelvis on your chair, even the sensation of breath expanding your chest.
You may also find it helpful to practise orienting in your immediate environment - allowing your eyes to wander around the room slowly, landing on any colours, shapes or textures that draw your attention. Notice what shifts, if anything, in your body - in your breathing, tension patterns, and movement.
What do you notice?
Are you quietly longing to put it all down? Start here:
Join me for my guided somatic and embodied grounding practice session hosted on Teams once a month for a small group of 8 women. The sessions are designed to help you learn body-based tools to slow down and connect with your body so you can ease overthinking, mental overwhelm and energy drain. Reserve your spot