When Your Body Is Asking You to Look Deeper
When you’ve been living with chronic symptoms for a long time, it’s natural to want one thing: for them to stop.
You search for answers. You try different approaches. You learn ways to calm your nervous system, change your habits, manage your triggers, and hopefully feel a little more like yourself again. And when something helps, even temporarily, it can feel like you’re finally getting somewhere.
But sometimes there’s a deeper question waiting underneath all of that: What if your body isn’t simply malfunctioning? What if it’s responding for a reason?
That question became an important turning point for Toby Adler. Her experience with POTS began during pregnancy and intensified after the birth of her son. What followed was a long journey through debilitating symptoms, searching, and eventually a completely different relationship with her body.
When Life Becomes Organized Around Symptoms
At the height of Toby’s illness, her symptoms determined what her days looked like. Dizziness, fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and other symptoms made even ordinary activities feel enormous. As a new mother, she wasn’t simply navigating a major life transition. She was trying to function while her body seemed increasingly unpredictable.
This is one of the hardest parts of chronic illness. Little by little, life can begin to organize itself around what the body might do next. Can I go there? Can I stand that long? What if this makes things worse? Before long, symptoms aren’t only something you experience. They become something you anticipate.
That anticipation can create its own cycle of hypervigilance. We begin watching the body closely because we’re trying to stay safe. And while that response makes perfect sense, constantly searching for signs of danger can keep reinforcing the very state we’re desperately trying to escape.
What If the Body Isn’t the Enemy?
Toby had already spent years exploring different approaches when she found Mind Change. What caught her attention wasn’t simply another technique for making her symptoms disappear. It was the invitation to become curious about why they might be there.
That is a very different relationship with the body.
Instead of, “Why are you doing this to me?” the question becomes, “What are you trying to do for me?” We stop approaching symptoms only as enemies to defeat and begin considering whether they may be connected to something deeper that the subconscious has learned about safety, control, responsibility, or threat.
For Toby, this opened the door to looking at patterns like perfectionism and hypervigilance differently. Pregnancy and motherhood had represented an enormous shift in her life. Becoming responsible for a child intensified an already familiar need to protect, control, anticipate, and get things right.
When we understand those patterns with curiosity rather than judgment, we can begin working with ourselves instead of fighting ourselves.
Regulation Isn’t Always the Same as Resolution
There are many practices that can help us feel calmer. Breathing exercises, meditation, relaxation techniques, and other nervous system tools can all create a temporary shift in our state. Toby had experienced that herself.
The challenge was what happened when life triggered her again.
She could reach a calmer state, but if the underlying trigger remained unresolved, her system could quickly return to the same familiar response. This helped her recognize an important distinction: feeling regulated in a moment isn’t necessarily the same thing as resolving what keeps creating the dysregulation.
Mind Change work invited her to go toward the trigger rather than continually trying to calm its effects. By understanding the deeper subconscious reason a response developed and then rewiring that pattern, change could begin to feel more natural. It wasn’t about constantly reminding herself to be calm. It was about changing what her system believed it needed to protect her from.
Safety Changes More Than Symptoms
One of the most meaningful parts of Toby’s story is that her transformation didn’t stay contained to her physical symptoms.
As she developed a deeper sense of safety and trust within herself, she began noticing changes in how she parented. She had previously been much more vigilant with her son, watching closely and trying to make sure he was safe. But as her own internal experience changed, something shifted in him too.
He became more independent and more willing to explore. Toby could see that the safety she was embodying was influencing the environment around him.
Children are constantly receiving information from us, not only through what we say, but through how we move through the world. When we are anticipating danger, they can feel that. When we become more grounded and trusting, they can feel that too.
This is where healing becomes so much bigger than symptom relief. The patterns we change within ourselves can ripple outward into our parenting, relationships, work, and the way we allow the people around us to experience life.
Healing Doesn’t Have to Become Another Form of Perfectionism
There’s an easy trap to fall into when we discover inner work: we can start trying to heal perfectly.
We search for every problem. We analyze every reaction. We wonder whether we’re doing enough self-work or doing it correctly. Without realizing it, we may bring the same perfectionism and hypervigilance that contributed to our struggle into the process of trying to change it.
Toby noticed this in herself too. At one point, she realized she was looking for things to work on throughout the day. But whatever we continually search for, we tend to find more of.
Over time, her approach became simpler. Instead of making healing another project she had to complete correctly, she began integrating the work naturally into her life. Gratitude, awareness, curiosity, and changing a pattern when something genuinely arose became part of how she lived rather than another list of things she had to accomplish.
That shift matters. Healing isn’t supposed to become another way to prove that we’re good enough.
You Are More Than the Version of You Who Learned to Survive
Perhaps the most powerful part of Toby’s experience was not simply having moments without symptoms. It was getting a glimpse of herself beyond the hypervigilance, fear, and control she had carried for so long.
She described experiencing more safety, trust, freedom, joy, and even a childlike quality that had been difficult to access before. It felt less like becoming someone new and more like discovering who had always been underneath the protective patterns.
This is why getting to the root matters.
Our patterns usually developed for very good reasons. Perfectionism may have helped us feel safe. Hypervigilance may have helped us anticipate what could go wrong. Control may have once given us a sense that we could prevent something painful from happening.
We don’t need to hate those parts of ourselves or force them away. We can understand why they developed, appreciate how they tried to help us, and then rewire what is no longer serving us.
When Curiosity Replaces Fear
If you’re struggling with chronic symptoms, Toby’s story isn’t an invitation to compare your journey with hers or expect your healing to look exactly the same.
It’s an invitation to become curious.
What if your body isn’t betraying you? What if some of the responses you’ve been fighting began as attempts to protect you? And what might become possible if, instead of only trying to silence those responses, you became willing to understand what’s underneath them?
Healing can begin to look very different when we stop approaching ourselves as problems that need to be fixed.
Sometimes the greatest change begins when fear gives way to curiosity, judgment gives way to compassion, and we finally learn that we can work with our body rather than against it.
Go Deeper with Mind Change
At Mind Change, we believe lasting transformation begins when we look beneath the surface. Our patterns, symptoms, triggers, and relationship struggles are often connected to deeper subconscious programs created for protection.
The Mind Change Method helps identify and rewire these patterns at the root, so healing can move beyond awareness and into real, lasting change.
Watch the full episode on The Mind Change Podcast to explore this conversation more deeply.
