Episode 012 – Overcome your health anxiety and escape the “Chronic Illness Loop”

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

Overcome Your Health Anxiety And Escape The “Chronic Illness Loop” 

Our society is facing a massive proliferation of health challenges – autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, inflammatory conditions, hereditary diseases, thyroid dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, brain fog – just to name a few.  Today, we explore WHY that is and what the REAL cause is that’s making so many people suffer, so much so that you’d think we’re falling apart as a species.

My Personal Healing Journey

Let me preface this by saying that I’m speaking from my own personal experience. Over the course of nearly two decades, I went on my own very extensive health journey. Back in 2017, right after I did my first big annual event, the Powerful Living Experience LIVE, I started to have what I would best describe as neurological issues.

I continued experiencing these situations where I would know I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.  If you were listening to me or watching me, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference, but I could tell that my tactile senses were off – there was some sort of disconnect.

And so I went to my general practitioner doctor, who ran some blood work.  And go figure, they didn’t find anything medically wrong with me.  But the symptoms started to increase and I knew that something was off. 

I mentioned this in passing at one of the retreats that I do with my high-level coaching clients and a woman who’s a functional medicine doctor approached me and said, “tell me about your diet.”  At the time, I was actually following a diet very similar to the one Tony Robbins followed and recommended – no red meat, no poultry, just fish and vegetables.

When I explained this to my functional medicine doctor client, she told me that there was a really high probability that I was suffering from mercury poisoning.  She told me about all of the dental amalgam that was discharged into the oceans and causing high levels of mercury in the fish supply, and that some people don’t detoxify the mercury very well, causing it to accumulate in our systems over time.

I ended up finding a doctor who could administer a Tri Test, where they do a measurement between your hair, urine, and blood and triangulate everything to find an accurate reading of mercury levels in the body.  Low and behold, this test revealed that I had astronomical levels of mercury in my blood.  So I ended up going through a two-year chelation process of removing this mercury from my system and finding out if it was in fact this mercury build-up causing this neurological disruption.

Becoming Afraid Of My Own Body 

At the age of 17, I went to the doctor due to experiencing pain in my stomach.  All the markers indicated that I had a gallbladder attack.  This happened 3 times before the doctors decided to remove my gallbladder.  But the pain didn’t stop.  

I believe these past traumatic health experiences created my future health challenges.

In fact, it goes all the way back to observing my mom having health challenges. So why am I sharing this with you? It goes back to the core of everything we talk about – your thoughts are creating your reality and the traumas and the limiting beliefs that you develop at a very early age play out in this materialized life experience that you have.

So part of this has been my journey realizing that there’s nothing wrong with me,  because that was a fundamental emotional and psychological belief that I had developed that was manifesting in my body – and my mother modeled that for me. 

Now, back to the mercury poisoning, because of this disregulation in my system, I started experiencing more anxiety, heart palpitations, a weakened immune system, mold toxicity, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  And somewhere along my journey, I was like, “Wait a minute, I’m creating my own reality. I’m creating this.” 

So one thing I did was that I started looking at the beliefs that I had, and seeing where they aligned with these cycles of chronic pain and health challenges that I was having.

The other thing I did was that I became aware of the fact that I was in this heightened state of anxiety – I became afraid of my own body. 

And I’ve found this is true for A LOT of people who may be experiencing autoimmune or inflammatory conditions, thyroid disregulation, anxiety, brain frog, depression, leaky gut, chronic fatigue, arthritis, joint pain, and the like.  You may very well be experiencing a fear of your own body in a sense, where your body becomes an adversary. 

Healing Starts By Identifying And Removing The Interference

BJ Palmer, the founder of modern chiropractic, once said, “Your body can operate at 100% on its own. It can heal itself – as long as there isn’t misalignment or interference in your body.”  Eastern medicine would also say that if your “chi” can move freely, your body will take care of everything else.  In other words, your body will always return to homeostasis. 

We see this in nature itself quite frequently.  You can look at areas around the world where ecosystems have been decimated by both natural disasters and manmade disasters, whether it’s overfishing, deforestation, or something like the Chernobyl disaster –  nature always comes back. 

The planet has the ability to heal itself, because of the intelligence that is the planet.  So too does our body have the ability to heal itself, because of the intelligence that is the body.  But only when there’s no interference. 

So if right now you’re experiencing symptoms of a health challenge that you’d like to alleviate, there may be some form of interference inserting itself into your own experience.  And when you can remove that interference, it’ll allow your dis-ease or your health condition to resolve and your body to return to its natural order of homeostasis.

Now, by no means am I saying that you shouldn’t run labs, seek out specialists, or consult with your doctors.  But as more and more people are finding, Western medicine has the tendency to ONLY attack the symptoms – not the actual cause of the problem itself, which causes the problem to continue exacerbating itself.

What’s actually happening when you’re experiencing these symptoms – like pain in your body, brain fog, or any of the things I’ve previously mentioned, is that your body has accumulated so much stress and tension and it’s searching for a way to release it.  This tension comes in the form of both physical interference and emotional and psychological interference.

Physical interference comes in the form of food toxins, glyphosate in the food and water supply, mercury, mold, dental amalgam, gluten and lactose (for some people), and a variety of other things that we consume either directly by eating and drinking or indirectly by absorption.  All of these things have an incredibly harmful and inflammatory effect on our guts, bloodstream, and nervous system.  We’ve also got electromagnetic frequencies radiating out of the myriad of electronics we’re surrounded by on a daily basis – which may or may not be contributing to higher rates of cancer and other serious conditions.

The point is that everything is energy.  There’s energy that’s resonant and contributing to our well-being, and there’s energy that’s dissonant and causes physical disruptions in our body.  And like I’ve said, your body will restore itself and maintain good health if it doesn’t have interference – because nature needs no help.  But over time if we’re putting too much of a load burden on our body, our body doesn’t have any way to cope other than do what it does, which is create symptoms.  It creates these symptoms as a result of no longer being able to manage the dissonance.

Now, mindset also plays a tremendous factor here. Because as human beings, we’re not meant to operate from fight or flight on an ongoing basis, which is the sympathetic expression of the nervous system.  That’s meant for small bursts when we’re truly in danger – it’s a built-in survival mechanism where you release adrenaline, testosterone, and epinephrine.  Unfortunately, what’s happened as a result of our inability to effectively manage our own mindsets, our limiting beliefs, our traumas, and living in this threat-based environment that is our modern society, we are constantly moving into a fight or flight response. 

And we experience all of these thoughts as emotions that become stored (or trapped) in the body.  Dissonant thoughts produce dissonant emotions, which create stress and tension in our nervous system – and our bodies can only manage but so much of it.  But what I want to focus on here are the psychological, emotional, and spiritual self-infliction of tension that comes about as a result of our beliefs, thoughts, and habits that move us into fight or flight.

And our system is not designed to be doing that for most of the day. Yet most of us are spending most of the day in some form of fight or flight, in some form of stress, tension, and overwhelm. And eventually, at some point, your system begins to break down, because it can only manage so much of it.

Your Symptoms Are The Healing Process

As I’ve talked about many times before, your symptoms are not a problem – they are your body’s way of healing. In other words, when you get to a place where you start experiencing pain in your body, it’s because that inflammation is in such a state of overflow and your body can no longer manage it.  It’s like a cup filled with water that starts to run over and it has several different options…

It might be a heart attack, it might be cancer, but the body has an intelligence that starts at the lowest level of disruption to try to offload some of the accumulated tension.  Meaning, your body will try to cue you into the healing process it’s going through with “smaller” symptoms before jumping straight into the serious prognosis.  Oftentimes it’s anxiety or brain fog or chronic fatigue or insomnia. So those are the early signs that there’s an opportunity for you to start alleviating your system of the tension that you’re putting on it through your limiting beliefs and through your stress-based thoughts.

It’s your body’s way of saying that we have to find a way to reduce the amount of tension we’re putting on our own system on a day-to-day basis.  And this doesn’t have to be complex.  Just think about all the time you spend on an average daily basis either stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, angry, judging yourself, judging someone else, feeling like you’re not good enough, and so on. How much time do you spend in what I would call a primal state – in suffering? 

For most of us, it’s A LOT of time – but our body’s can only handle so much of it.  So what ends up happening at some point is that the body and its infinite wisdom begins to manifest symptoms.  But the symptoms are not the enemy. The symptoms are actually the healing process.  It’s our body’s way of reacting through the lens of our limiting beliefs and our childhood traumas and our stories, and moving into a primal state far more than we’re meant to be moving into. 

What’s Coming Is Going

So what happens when we get an unfavorable diagnosis or we experience one of these stress-related diseases, chronic pain, autoimmune, or inflammatory conditions?  Typically, we’re led to believe that there’s actually something wrong with your body that needs to be “fixed”, cured, or that you otherwise have to live with forever.

But as one of my mentors once shared with me: what’s coming up in your body is actually going – there’s a healing process taking place.  So when it feels like pain is coming up, it’s actually going or offloading.  When brain fog is coming up, it’s actually going.  When heartburn is coming up, it’s actually going.  And so on and so on.  All of these symptoms are your body’s way of releasing this dissonant energy that you’ve accumulated over time. 

This happens because the human body hasn’t evolved to create a way to release this dissonant energy in the same way that other animals have.  When animals have a confrontation with each other, they’ll roll on the ground, flap their wings, or shake their horns to release the dissonant energy so that they can go back into homeostasis.  We don’t have a built-in release mechanism for this tension.

So the release mechanism is the symptoms that you’re experiencing and what’s happening is a healing process – what’s coming is going.  And because no one ever explained this to us, we move into an adversarial relationship with our own healing process.  Traditional medicine has led us to believe that we need to get rid of these symptoms, that the symptoms are actually the problem, versus the underlying cause of it, causing us to become afraid of our own bodies.

We haven’t been taught to accept, allow, and relax through these symptoms, even if they’re uncomfortable at the moment.  And because of that, we become afraid of the conditions by which we find ourselves afflicted.  We convince ourselves that something is wrong with us and we need to find a solution to fix the damage and, if we don’t, our lives are going to be negatively affected forever.

What’s interesting about this is that all of these conditions seem to be more prevalent than ever.  It seems like everybody has one issue or another – whether it’s chronic pain, anxiety, autoimmune conditions, you name it.  And it’s not that these things aren’t real or that the symptoms that come along with them aren’t painful or uncomfortable, but what’s causing this epidemic of sorts is our beliefs.  As a society, we’ve accepted this belief that there’s something wrong with us, there’s no solution, and we’re never going to be well again. 

Escaping The Chronic Disease Loop

Our nervous system picks up on this energy, becoming even more sensitive to the tension we’re placing on it and further exacerbating the symptoms – essentially creating this “chronic disease loop”. The good news is that if you’ve gone from doctor to doctor and no one can seem to help you, there’s a very high probability that the linchpin or the key to open the door to your healing is actually doing nothing other than transforming your belief system around your own experience of your disease or condition and moving away from these beliefs that are creating tension. 

As soon as you can move away from beliefs like “I’m never going to get better” or “there’s no cure” and begin to accept that what’s coming is going and your body is going through a natural healing process…and as soon as you can learn to simply allow your symptoms to take place and relax around the discomfort – you will become well again.

Now, I don’t want you to take all of this and move into a state of worry or place too much emphasis on your limiting beliefs or proclivity for experiencing stress in your life.  All I’d encourage you to do is to focus for a moment on the fact that you can heal yourself and that your body does possess the capacity to heal. That’s why this mindset thing is so important.  We all must develop the skills to guard our minds to stand unshaken amidst the crashing of worlds, because there are always going to be external things going on that tempt us into fight or flight and operating from a primal state – there’s nothing we can do about the things we see going on externally.

The way that you do that is to take a look to see if you’re allowing your healing process or if you’re afraid of your healing process because you misunderstand your healing process as something that is an internal threat.

Do you have a loving relationship with your body knowing that it’s working towards your full restoration of health and vibrancy and wellness? Or do you have an adversarial relationship with your body where you believe that you’re trapped inside of it and that if you or some doctor can’t figure out how to fix your problem, you’re never going to be able to live the life that you envision living?

So this can be a massive shift for you into what I call “supreme health”.  This process of acceptance and allowance may take us a little longer to heal, but regardless of how old you are or what symptoms may be causing you suffering, you have the capacity to alleviate yourself of any health condition that you’re experiencing and return yourself to vibrancy, wellness, and full healing.