Your body

If you want to use herbal remedies, two things carry most of the risk. Make sure whoever prescribes for you knows what you are taking, and buy from a source that has been independently tested.

That is a short list on purpose. Nearly all the harm in this area comes from an interaction nobody knew about or a product that was not what it…

Herbal products are rarely covered by insurance and they add up quickly. That cost belongs in the decision, particularly when you cannot be sure the capsule holds what it says.

Money spent here is money not spent elsewhere, and often the alternative is a treatment that is covered and has been tested. Nobody is telling you…

What you feel does not stay in your head. Emotional states register in the body's immune signalling too, which is one reason a long stretch of unspoken distress can leave you physically run down.

This is not a claim that you can think yourself well or ill. It is closer to saying the body keeps a tally. If you have been carrying something heavy…

Water, sleep, food and digestion are not the boring preamble to the real work. When those are running badly, everything else you try has less to work with.

It can feel almost insulting to be asked about breakfast when what you carry is so much bigger than breakfast. But a body short of sleep and short of…

Health advice usually assumes a kitchen, a fridge and money for the week. If you are working with less than that, the answer is not to try harder at the advice. It is to shrink the plan until it fits what you actually have.

A plan you cannot keep does more than fail. It quietly adds to the pile of evidence that nothing you do makes any difference, and that pile is heavy…

When digestion goes wrong there are usually two things to look at rather than one: something you are eating that does not suit you, and a body too braced to digest properly. Checking only one door tends to leave you stuck.

Digestion mostly happens when your body believes it is safe. If you eat every meal with your shoulders up round your ears, that alone can show up as…

A physical symptom is not a free floating fact. Read it next to what your life has actually held, the early parts included, and it often makes more sense than it does on its own.

This works in both directions. It stops you treating a body complaint as something random that landed on you, and it stops you treating it as a…

Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.

People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…

Months of fog, where thinking feels like wading, is a real complaint and deserves looking into rather than waving away. It usually has more than one cause, which is part of why it gets dismissed.

Fog sits where several things overlap: dissociation, anxiety, poor sleep, thyroid and iron problems, infections, medication. Because it belongs…

There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.

If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing…

Thirst, hunger, the ache of having sat too long: these are not nagging, they are instructions. When self-care keeps failing, it is often because the instruction never arrived.

People who have been through a lot sometimes stop registering the signal at all, and then eating, sleeping and resting all go sideways. If that is…

If you are going to bring attention to your body, start with where your body is rather than what it feels. Feet on the floor, back against the chair, the weight of your hands in your lap.

Attention to the inside, the chest, the stomach, the throat, sits close to the emotional wiring and can open more than you meant to open. Position in…

Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.

This is why you can leave a perfectly pleasant meeting wrung out, or take against someone who has done nothing you could point to. The reading is…

The reading happens without you, but you can catch up to it. Naming what your body has already concluded, out loud or in your head, is most of the work.

Something like: my shoulders came up when he walked in. That is all it needs to be. You are not deciding yet whether it was fair, you are bringing a…

An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.

Most talk about trauma assumes the first: too much alarm, too often. But some people come out of hard years with the volume turned right down,…

One question does a lot of work: is what my body is doing right now a fair match for what is actually in front of me? Ask it plainly, and let the answer be either yes or no.

The point is not to talk yourself out of the feeling. The signal is information and it deserves a hearing. But you can hold it up against the room…

When someone is distressed, moving too fast to settle them can land as a message that their distress is not welcome here. Let them set the speed.

Offering a breath, a blanket, a change of subject: all of it can help, and all of it can arrive as a shutting down if it comes before the person has…

You do not have to close your eyes. If keeping them open, soft and lowered, is what lets you stay in the room, that is the better version for you.

Closing your eyes takes away your ability to check the room, and for anyone whose body is used to watching, that costs more than it gives. Make it an…

Try going into the next few minutes without deciding in advance what will happen in them. Curiosity in place of prediction.

A mind used to danger plans constantly, because planning once kept you safe. Sitting somewhere ordinary and letting the next moment be unknown is…

The body answers in sensations, in pictures, in a mood that turns up without explanation. If no words come when you check in, nothing has gone wrong.

People often decide they are bad at this because they went looking for a sentence and found a tight jaw instead. The tight jaw is the answer. Take…