What Are Your Symptoms Trying to Tell You? - A "Symptoms" Reframe

One of the most overlooked but important steps in healing anxiety, depression, or trauma is learning to not be afraid of your symptoms. Hit play for a conversation about symptoms and how the way we understand or perceive them can intensify or de-intensify them.

Here's the 3 takeaways:

1. Symptoms are Messengers, not problems: Whether physiological or psychological, your symptoms are communicating that something in your system is out of balance. Instead of fearing or avoiding them, get curious about what they are trying to tell you.
2. Psychological and Physiological Symptoms are Connected: Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations often overlap. For example, spiraling thoughts or catastrophizing may be both a mental pattern and a physiological response to a stressed nervous system.
3. Reframing Your Relationship with Symptoms Reduces Their Intensity: By learning to observe and accept your symptoms instead of resisting or judging them, you can reduce their intensity and begin to heal more effectively. This shift in mindset helps break the cycle of fear, shame, and frustration that often worsens symptoms.
   
   

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Transcript

0:00  
Welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Today's conversation is on a topic I think is so crucial for anybody on a healing journey. It's a conversation I've had a number of times inside the membership in the last couple months, and I wanted to bring it to this space. What we're going to talk about today is symptoms. Whether your symptoms are physiological, psychological. For most of us, there's a little bit of both. Let's spend today reframing our understanding of symptoms, how we perceive them, how we engage with them, because I think one of the most overlooked but important steps to healing anxiety depression or trauma is learning to not be afraid of your symptoms, and instead to learn how to be more neutral towards them or about them, even to get curious about them and understanding them, learning How to be with them rather than wishing them away. So often, I can't tell you how many times I talk to people every single week who mentioned something like I just need this to go away. I need this to stop happening. I need to fix this, or fix me. And what we need to realize is that our symptoms have a purpose. They're there for a reason, and that's the conversation I want to unpack today. 

So when I'm talking about symptoms, they generally fall into two categories, physiological, body based, symptoms and psychological so let's start where we start a lot when we're learning here with definitions. So physiological symptoms are the body's way of communicating that something is off balance. Maybe something is functioning too much or too little. There is excess or depletion, maybe there is injury. Your body is trying to tell you something so that you can fix it, so that you can recalibrate. Sensations are the language of the body. So physical symptoms and sensations are the way that our body tries to get our attention. It's trying to talk to us. Then we have psychological symptoms, and these are more connected to our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, I would say emotions in particular can be tricky, because they really ride a line in being psychological or physiological, because they happen in both the mind and body. Emotions, actually, the sensations of emotions happen in the body, but they're oftentimes brain derived. We think a thought. We tell a story about something, and that creates a particular about it. But no matter where your symptoms fall, whether psychological or physiological, I want us to together today form a new context for them. 

Instead of seeing them as something to fix, avoid or numb, let's see them as messengers, because every single symptom that you are experiencing right now, whether brain based, body based, mental, emotional, physiological, psychological, it is either serving you right now. Hey, pay attention. Something's off, or it is an echo of something that served you in the past, and we're going to talk a little bit more about what I mean by that, and when you can truly understand that, that this is either here to serve me now or because it served me in the past, that can also bring a lot of self compassion. And we talk about this with our clients all the time, that self compassion really is the thing that has to drive our healing, self compassion curiosity, and today we're talking about having those qualities around our symptoms. 

So let's backpedal for a few moments. One of the things I mentioned was that I believe one of the biggest barriers to our healing is the fear that we have around our symptoms, and if we are constantly believing that our perfectionistic tendencies, our spiraling thoughts, the tightness in our chest or the digestive issues, our fatigue, if we're constantly labeling all of those things as bad or wrong, then not only do we have these tough experiences, perfectionistic tendencies, tough, spiraling thoughts, frustrating tightness in our chest, digestive issues and overly activated or shut down nervous system, all of these things are uncomfortable. Well, but now we have the uncomfortable with a layer of fear, shame, frustration, judgment, because we've labeled those things as bad or wrong, and this creates a really vicious cycle. The fear of the symptoms further activates or shuts down your nervous system, which makes those symptoms worse, or even creates additional symptoms. 

And so the thing I want you to entertain today is, what if instead we learn to be with those symptoms, to notice them, to get more curious about them. Because when we remove that layer of fear or judgment and get to a place where we can observe the symptoms for what they are, that, in and of itself, oftentimes helps to decrease the intensity of those symptoms. And so you're stuck in this tricky predicament, right? We don't like these symptoms, so we have the story that they're wrong or bad and we want to fix them, and that makes those symptoms worse. The opposite cycle happens, where if we have these symptoms and we instead have a different story about them, they're here for a reason. They're here for a purpose. They're serving me now, or they served me then. And you can also not like them, and you can also find them pesky and uncomfortable and frustrating, but if the story becomes, what are they trying to tell me? What is the message? Then those symptoms are just those symptoms, and we're not adding a story or additional emotion or fear or charge that exasperates them. A really key example to this that comes up for a lot of our clients is this idea that they get anxious about their anxiety. 

A client just shared, I don't know, maybe a few weeks ago how she'll start to feel nervous about something, and then her brain immediately goes, Oh, but this usually leads to a panic attack. And so what was just a little nervous about something now it's Oh, I don't like this feeling, because this leads to something bigger, which is like pouring gasoline on an anxiety fire. And so it's the anxiety about anxiety, the nervousness about nervousness that leads to the anxiety attack, that leads to the burnout, to the shutdown, to the overwhelm. 

Now let's focus this conversation on physiological symptoms for the next few minutes. Last month, inside the membership, I did a post and I said, Hey, I'm looking to create some extra resources specifically around symptoms that you associate as being part of anxiety or depression or nervous system dysregulation, drop the symptoms that you struggle with below, and there was everything from chronic fatigue to TMJ, digestive issues, tension headaches, sleep disturbances. And I want to talk you through the resource that I would create for something like this. So let's say it's digestive issues. If I was creating a resource where somebody could come into the membership look at a list of symptoms, and they're like, Yep, I've got that. I want to learn more about that. They click on digestive issues. And this might be a video, or it could be a PDF, that, hey, here is why digestive issues and anxiety or depression usually go hand in hand. Let me help you understand your vagus nerve, you know, your brain gut connection. And here are a couple root causes for this digestive issue. It could be that you have a really imbalanced gut microbiome due to poor diet, illness, antibiotic consumption, and so your gut is really stressed out, and it's sending these stress signals up into your brain, which is manifesting as what you're with, what you're labeling is anxiety. The reverse could be possible as well. You may have patterns of thinking like catastrophizing. Worst case scenario, you may have stress in other areas of your life, and so your brain, through the vagus nerve, which is this mind body highway, is sending a ton of stress signals to your gut, and it changes your gut motility. It changes the way that your gut works, where it can digest food faster or slower, which means you may not be absorbing as much nutrients, which can have a ripple effect. Now you are less nourished. You have maybe a micronutrient deficiency, which is another place where your body is saying, hey, there's less than we need here. 

And this is coming back to this term that I will use till I'm blue in the face, which is, we have to be taking a whole human, whole life approach to the way that we think about the way that we educate clients, the way that we help them navigate their healing. And so if you have a physiological symptom of digestive issues, and then you have a psychological symptom that gets diagnosed as or cluster of symptoms that gets diagnosed as anxiety or depression in the mainstream medical model, those are going to be treated separately. And what we do in our practice is we look at them holistically. We look at it all together. We know that mental and physical health are the same thing, that the stress that's playing out in your brain is caused. Causing stress in your body. It's also caused by stress in your body that there is this feedback loop and to stay on track with today's specific conversation. What this comes down to is recognizing that, yes, these digestive issues are uncomfortable, and yet these symptoms have a purpose. They are your body's way of communicating to you and hopefully encouraging you to take action so that there isn't further dysfunction. 

Another example could be fatigue. Fatigue could be telling you we're not sleeping enough. There's too much stress in our life. We have dysfunctional breathing patterns, brain fog, tension in your body, TMJ, pain. Why are those things happening far too often. Our clients and my own personal experience is a medical model that focuses more on symptom management than asking why we're having those symptoms in the first place, and if we are operating through a lens of these symptoms are wrong, these symptoms are bad, these symptoms are too much. I can't handle them. It makes perfect sense why we're going to jump on a solution that makes these symptoms go away, versus asking yourself, why are these symptoms showing up in the first place? What is it that I might be able to do to get to the root cause of that? And that is sometimes it's it's it's grayer, it's murkier. It's not as easy or as clear of a path as symptom management, and it is going to be the thing that supports you in the long run. But in order to step down that less known trail, we have to reorient ourselves to how we think about symptoms in the first place. 

So let's jump now to talk about psychological symptoms. These are more thought based symptoms, beliefs around I need to be perfect in order to be accepted or loved, people pleasing tendencies. Maybe you shut down during conflict. Your thoughts spiral out plan for Worst case scenario all the time. What I want you to understand about these patterns is that every single one of them served you at one point. If it didn't, you wouldn't have it at one point, a younger version of you learned that you were more accepted when you did things right, or maybe you learned that it wasn't safe to not be perfect. A younger version of you felt safer, more connected, more secure, or your needs got met when the caretakers around you were happy with you, maybe they didn't have the ability to emotionally regulate themselves, and so it fell to you to do people pleasing, to predict their different moods, to show up differently, to hopefully stay in connection. You learned the skill of shutting down during conflict, likely because there was a time or a place where it wasn't safe to do anything else. Our nervous system shifts into shutdown when fight and flight are not an option, these spiraling thoughts, yeah, because remember that one time you didn't plan for Worst case scenario, when it happened and you found yourself unprepared. Something I love to share is that you are just a bigger version of a tiny you who had to come up with a lot of creative ways to feel safe, connected, get your needs met, avoid rejection, and so each of these behaviors were learned as a way to survive or protect yourself. And the friction point is that now they may no longer serve you in the same way, and the key here is to recognize that they were there to protect you. And from this place of understanding, this place of compassion, you can start to shift how you respond to these patterns. You can help yourself work with that part of you to soften your internal system. We talked about this in the parts work episode a few weeks ago, so that you can establish new patterns, new ways of being. But if your story is I'm wrong for this way, why is it that I always shut down in conflict? It's going to be really hard to compassionately turn towards and understand why you shut down during conflict. If you have a story that it's wrong and bad and you're less than because of it. 

I Oh, man, it was probably over a year ago on the podcast, I had a conversation around the tone of what if. And here you could say the tone of why, right. The the essence of that is, you can sit here and from a place of anxiety, ask yourself, like, what if this? What if this? What if this? What if this. But if you have the capacity to take a deep breath, to get regulated, to resource yourself, externally, internally, relationally, a lot of times those, what if questions are actually really good questions, but you're never going to get good answers when you're out. Asking them from a place of dysregulation. So it's not the what if, it's the tone of what if that shifts what your system gives back to? You know, what if I get rejected? What if I'm late for this appointment? When we are regulated, our prefrontal cortex is online, that logical part of our brain, and we can actually come up with a plan that shifts the story from, oh my gosh, what if and if that happens, I'm doomed to, even if that happens, I can figure it out. 

Similarly, It can be the tone of, why, you know, why? Why? Why do I always shut down during conflict, uh, versus. What an interesting pattern. What an interesting psychological symptom for me to notice. I wonder, why? Why do I think I always shut down during conflict? And do I always shut down during conflict, or is it certain types of conflict or right? And what you see is that's a natural gateway to curiosity. Is it all the time? Is it only sometimes? Is it in certain settings? When did this pattern start for me? And this is deeper work that we do with our clients in our practice, usually through a lens of ifs or parts work, but these psychological symptoms and physiological symptoms, they go hand in hand, they feed into each other. And the overarching theme that I want you to take away from this conversation is that they all have positive intent. Every single symptom has positive intent to keep you safe, get your needs met, to help you be more well or less unwell than you find yourself to be in the moment and when we really internalize this new context for symptoms, we can avoid that spiraling of fear around our symptoms or this story that something's wrong with us or we're less than we have to fix it right now, and instead, we can take time. It's slower. It's slower than probably symptom management approach, but we can take that time to get curious, to look at them, and sometimes we need help. 

And that's really what I want to leave you with. Today. I want to leave you with an opportunity to ponder and think about your symptoms, whether they be psychological or physiological, not being your enemy, not being a problem. And when we practice or learn to instead notice them, to be with our symptoms, just for a moment long enough to be curious about them, this is when we begin to break the cycle of fear and resistance that makes those symptoms worse. When you are dealing with difficult symptoms that you want to resolve, you first need to work with the fear around that symptom. Too often, we seek to resolve the symptom first, without resolving the judgment or fear around that symptom. And so my question for you is, Can you be more neutral about your symptoms? Can you understand them for what they are? Their information, you don't have to love them, but you also don't need to fear them. So maybe when you notice a symptom this week, my invitation for you is to pause and ask, what is this trying to tell me? How is this symptom serving me, or how did it serve me in the past? And with time, you may find that your relationship with your symptoms changes, and in that shift, that you experience more ease and less intensity of your symptoms overall. 

And this doesn't always have to be that deep an experience I had with this this week was I was sitting working, and I started to get a headache, and I did what many of us do, and I was like, oh, stupid headache, whatever. I just got to get through this thing. And then my headache called for my attention again. I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, why do I have this headache? And I met this symptom with like, frustration, and almost immediately my body was like, Yeah, because you haven't drink in any water today, and it's like, 2pm Of course, you have a headache, right? This headache, this symptom, wasn't there to just be annoying. It wasn't there just to make my life harder. It was my body saying, Hey, we have a need that's gone unmet. I need to get your attention so that you can pause, be a little bit of a detective, and figure out what it is that we need, lo and behold, drink a glass of water. 10 or so minutes later, headache gone, headache gone, and it could have been gone five minutes earlier, had I not have first met that symptom with irritation, frustration. Just go away. You're a nuisance to my day. And so this is something like everything I talk about here on the podcast that I'm very much in the act of learning and embodying and practicing, right alongside my request for you to do so. 

And then sometimes maybe this is more deep. Maybe it is looking at patterns of protection that are. Derived from traumatic childhood experiences, and to look at those patterns, it can be really helpful to do so with a trauma informed practitioner. So bringing this all together are three takeaways from today. Summed up is that symptoms are messages, not problems, and whether they are psychological or physiological, your symptoms are communicating that something in your system is vying for your attention, and instead of fearing or avoiding them, what if you got curious about what they were trying to tell you? 

Number two is that physiological and psychological symptoms are connected. Our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations oftentimes overlap this mind body connection. And so it may not just be one thing, which is why, as an ecosystem rise as we offerings. Offer you everything from that deep inner work community based support our newest program, I keep putting teasers out for where you can get blood work done. You can see, is there a micronutrient deficiency? Is there a thyroid issue or hormone imbalance, and are some of your symptoms derived from internal imbalances that with personal health data, you have a pretty clear and strategic way to remedy and 

TAKEAWAY NUMBER THREE is this understanding that simply reframing how you understand your symptoms what you understand them to be, reduces their intensity by learning to observe and Accept your symptoms instead of resisting or judging them, you can reduce their intensity and begin healing more effectively. A

ll right, that's it for today. As always, thank you for being here. Thank you for continuing to take this courageous step to show up in mental health spaces for yourself, for those you love, for the world at large. I know that seems dramatic, but the work that you do to heal you, and the work that you do to be a better support person, to help those around you heal. It changes. It changes the world. It matters. So thank you for being here, and until next week, I'm sending so much hope and healing your way. Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

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