Your body has been trying to tell you something

A Soft Place to Land

Nervous system-focused care for overloaded humans

Issue 02  ·  Your body has been trying to tell you something  ·  Week 2 of 52

  A NOTE FROM JENNY 

I want to start this week by acknowledging something: last week's topic — the idea that your pain might be a message — can bring up a lot. I've heard from people over the years who felt almost relieved when they first encountered this idea. And I've heard from others who felt a flash of something closer to guilt or even anger, as if the implication was that they had somehow caused their own suffering.

I want to be very clear: that is not what I'm saying. Pain is real. Your symptoms are real. You are not imagining them, and you did not bring them on yourself through failure or weakness. What I am saying is that the body and the nervous system are deeply intelligent systems — and understanding how they work gives you more power, not less. That's what this week is about.

— Sincerely and with Gratitude,

Jenny

 THIS WEEK'S TOPIC 

What stress actually does to your body — and why it matters

Most of us know, in a general way, that stress is bad for us. We've heard it our whole lives. But knowing something abstractly and understanding it viscerally — in your body, as lived experience — are very different things. So let's make this concrete.

When your brain perceives a threat — real or imagined, physical or emotional — your body launches a cascade of physiological responses designed to protect you. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. Your heart rate increases. Your breathing shallows and quickens. Blood is redirected away from your organs and toward your large muscle groups, because if you need to run or fight, your legs matter more than your digestion right now. Your immune system is temporarily suppressed. Your pain sensitivity increases. Your thinking narrows to focus only on immediate survival.

This is an exquisitely designed system. For short-term, acute threats, it works brilliantly. The problem is that the human nervous system was not designed to run this response all day, every day, for years. 

But for many of us, it is.

Chronic stress — the low-grade, relentless kind that comes from overwork, difficult relationships, financial worry, grief, trauma, or simply the accumulated weight of living in a world that demands too much — keeps the body in a state of low-level activation. The threat response never fully switches off. And the systems that get suppressed to make that response possible — digestion, immunity, tissue repair, sleep — stay suppressed.

This is why chronic stress produces such a predictable constellation of symptoms: muscle tension that won't release, headaches, digestive issues, disrupted sleep, lowered immunity, fatigue that rest doesn't fix, pain that moves around or doesn't respond to treatment in expected ways.

When I work with someone's body on my table, I am not just working with muscles. I am working with a nervous system that may have been in protection mode for a very long time. Bowenwork, though not the massage everyone knows and loves,  is particularly powerful here because it communicates directly with the autonomic nervous system — the part that runs below conscious thought and governs all of this, and does it in a way that says less is more by giving the nervous system room to breathe. But the work on the table can only go so far if the conditions producing the stress remain unchanged.

That's the honest truth I want to offer you this week. When you come in for your sessions and say, “Please fix me.”

I can’t fix you. Bodywork is not a cure for a stressful life. 

It is a profound support, a reset, a way of giving your nervous system permission to down regulate. 

But the longer-term work is in understanding what is keeping your system activated — and learning to change it.

  THIS WEEK'S REFLECTION 

Map your stress signals

Your body has its own stress signature — a pattern of symptoms that tend to appear when you're under pressure. Learning to recognize it is one of the most useful things you can do for your health.

This week, see if you can identify your pattern. When stress ramps up in your life, where does it show up first in your body?

•   Do your shoulders creep toward your ears?

•   Does your jaw clench — especially at night?

•   Does your digestion get disrupted?

•   Do you get headaches, or notice your breathing gets shallower?

•   Does your lower back tighten, or do old injuries flare?

•   Do you find yourself exhausted but unable to sleep?

Journal prompt: What are my first three stress signals? When did I first notice them? How long have they been my pattern?

  CLIENT STORY 

A voice from the zoom room

G Is a Building Your Personal Resilience client. Meeting in the zoom room for 8 weeks we were there with a goal of helping them reduce their stress response and leverage skills to increase their resilience capacity so that when stressful events occurred, they wouldn’t always feel so sick to their stomach. 

Finances were a particular stressor for them. Having recently moved and needing to find a new job in a new town was proving to be a struggle and it was showing up with digestive issues and just that pit in your stomach you get when you are anxious about something. 

What was interesting was as we went along in the program, putting the tools into practice and identifying patterns, they realized that the pit actually had less to do with the job search and more to do with their relationship to their significant other and feeling insecure. The job was the immediate stressor, but the stress behind the stress was relational. 

Once they landed on that realization, the pit in their stomach didn’t go away but there was this sense of “being heard” that their body experienced and the feeling was less heavy, and as they identified further what was going on in their mind around the relationship in it’s context to the job search, continuing to implement stress and emotional regulation tools, they were able to regain their confidence, make sincere connections and open communication with their significant other which helped to facilitate their ability settle in to their new life with more ease and a pain free solar plexus.

If you'd like to share your story for an upcoming newsletter, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at hello@jennyodell,me

  A FINAL THOUGHT FROM ME 

Understanding your stress signature is the first step toward working with it rather than just enduring it. If you've been wondering whether there's a more lasting way to address what keeps coming back, that's exactly the conversation we have in my resilience coaching program.

If this week's topic is resonating with something you've been feeling but haven't had words for, I'd love to have a conversation. My Building Your Personal Resilience coaching program exists for exactly this — to take the awareness you're building through bodywork and turn it into lasting change. Learn more or book a free clarity call at jennyodell.me or send me voice memo on VOXER  simply reply to this post with any questions, comments or concerns. 

Sincerely,

Jenny O'Dell