You are not just ONE symptom... S5. E5.

You Are Not Just One Symptom

Why fatigue, gut issues, stress, sleep, hormones, and inflammation are often more connected than you think

If you have ever felt like your symptoms are all over the place and nothing fully makes sense, this episode is for you. In this episode, Dr. Raquel talks about why you are not just one symptom and why whole-body healing looks at patterns, not isolated complaints.

Full description

So many people are told to look at one symptom at a time — gut issues, fatigue, hormones, sleep, stress, inflammation, brain fog. But the body does not work in isolated boxes.

In this episode of The Rockyn YES Podcast: Your Empowered Self, Dr. Raquel breaks down why symptoms often overlap, why chasing one symptom at a time can keep people stuck, and why the body needs a more complete look.

If you have ever wondered why one issue turns into three, or why fixing one thing never seems to fully solve the problem, this episode will help you connect the dots.

In this episode, we cover:

•  why you are not just one symptom 
•  how stress can affect multiple systems at once 
•  why gut health affects more than digestion 
•  why symptoms often start stacking 
•  why whole-body healing looks at patterns 
•  why testing can help bring clarity when symptoms feel all over the place 

Key takeaway

Your symptoms may not be random. They may be connected through a deeper pattern in the body.

Ready to Go Deeper?

If this hit home and you’re ready to get unstuck and become unstoppable (mind + body), check the links in the show notes for what’s currently open through Rockyn Health—including options like Reset, Rise, BE (Breakthrough Experience) and upcoming Retreats. Not sure what you need? Message “YES” and we’ll help you choose your best next step.

Connect With Dr. Raquel

Instagram: @dr.raquel_rockyn.health
Website: RockynHealth.com
Podcast: Rockyn YES: Your Empowered Self

Quick Note

This podcast is for education and inspiration and is not medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personal medical decisions.

© 2026 Rockyn Health. All Rights Reserved.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Rock and US podcast, Your Empowered Self. This is the place where we talk about healing from the inside out. We talk about connections between your health, your mind, your nervous system, your patterns, and the deeper root causes that may be keeping you stuck. Because healing is not just about chasing symptoms, it's about learning to understand your body, support it, and step back into the life you were meant to live. So if you've been feeling like your symptoms are all over the place and nothing seems to fully make sense, this episode is for you. So today I want to talk to you about something that I think can really shift the way you see health. You are not just one symptom. You are not just your gut issues, you are not just your fatigue, you are not just your hormones, you are not just your stress, you are not just your brain fog, just like you are not just your neck or your low back or your mid back or a leg or an elbow. The body is connected. And when we only look at one symptom at a time, we often miss the bigger picture. So today I want to help you see that bigger picture a little more clearly. So first, what does it really mean when I say you are not just one symptom? So here's the thing our bodies are a dynamic human machine. And everything connects and talks and communicates together. So you can't just be, like, say, a neck, because a neck is connected to what? Your head, your shoulder, your body, and your body is composed of all the organs, ligaments, muscles, tendons, your entire rest of your body. So you aren't just one thing, one symptom. Everything is connected. Kind of remember that song, the hip bone is connected to the backbone kind of thing, and then you know, the whole thing, how it goes. I don't remember the exact words, but you got the right idea. So I want to talk about because it's sometimes it's easier. Like when I'm with clients and like they say, like, well, my low back hurts, and I'm adjusting people. And I have to explain to them that, well, you might have low back pain, but it might be coming from somewhere else. It could be coming from the anterior part of your body, like your stomach, the hip flexor muscles, but it also could be stemming from your neck. So what may seem so far and away from something can still be one of the main things is contributing to it. Same thing with your neck. Sometimes people have like horrible neck pain, but until we clear the pelvis, the lower back, we can't get rid of the neck pain. So everything works together. Now, this is the same thing that's very true for your stress, your gut, your hormones, all of that. So here's the thing: your hormones are a part of everything in your body. So every organ system has basically its own set of hormones. And hormones interconnect or communicate with each other inside your body. They're kind of like their own little space system. So I also like to describe it as a little bit of a web. So you have your hormones that are part of all the different parts: your gut hormones, your thyroid hormones, the adrenal hormones, your sex hormones, liver hormones, you know, the all of that stuff all connects and communicates. So if one part is off, the thing is, is because if one hormone goes off, they all go off. So it might feel like, oh, hey, you know, I'm getting really tired and sluggish. So maybe it's our thyroid that's not able to work 100%. But we have to trace things back. Because there's more than just the one thing that can affect a thyroid and affect that fatigue and affect your stress of the internal stress system of what's going on. Because if the gut isn't working, your body can't convert your T4 into T3. T3 is active, the active form of your thyroid. And if we don't have those conversions in the gut or the liver, then your body isn't producing your active thyroid hormones. So therefore, you're gonna feel a little more fatigued. Same thing is also gonna happen, like so, say the gut is off. The gut also is gonna control many conversions of a lot of different things, but it's also gonna control the absorption of your nutrients. So for your thyroid to work, you have to have certain nutrients always working or always being absorbed in your body so that your body has it to be used. And if your body is deficient in vitamin Bs, C's, D's, E, K's, any of those, that's gonna affect how the body is working. So sometimes what can happen is you start to think, we get trapped in these little boxes, right? You know, we we can't, we have we get so caught, our head is down, we're like, but I have this issue. I am so tired all the time. My hair is falling out, I don't feel good, and I'm just really exhausted and I don't feel like me again. And we're we got our heads down and we're just looking at this. But what I want you to do is look up. Just look up and look around you, look around your body, figure out what else is going on because so many different things are focused in on looking up. So if we can look up, we can get the bigger picture, the bigger idea of what's actually truly happening in your body. So if we look up and we look around and you're like, wait, okay, my thyroid's a little off. I've got some dry skin, my hair's kind of falling off, my nails are a little weaker than normal. Um, I'm starting to gain weight, I'm not sleeping as well, I'm not waking up as well. See, now you've picked up your head and you can see more symptoms. And again, these are symptoms. Symptoms are just expressions of your body trying to get your attention to let it know something is off. But once you've got like the sex, you think, oh, hey, you know, my skin is dry, you think it's a skin issue. And then you're like, oh, my nails are bad. So now you think you have a nail issue, or again, that's part of the skin system, right? Or your hair is falling out, so now you think there's something else going on. When all of these things are interconnected, because if you don't have the right nutrients, your body isn't gonna function. It's always gonna come down to looking at your nutrients, and then you have to look at what is stealing your nutrients. So say you're putting nutrients in your body, right? But then it's what's stealing your nutrients? So now we got to get into do you have some like parasites or different bugs in your gut system that are basically feeding on everything? So therefore, your body's not getting these nutrients, or could there be like different mold and toxins where they go and they block your receptors from being able to absorb these nutrients, so therefore they just flush right back out of your body. So there's a lot of different things that can be happening. So I'm gonna go on to the next topic in here, and I've kind of divided this podcast into some different topics, and it's all revolving around that one symptom. And this topic is why do people get stuck treating one symptom at a time? Because you go to your medical doctor, and generally in the medical system, things have changed due to insurance rules and things. So you get 15 minutes, right? To talk about one thing. And you get 15 minutes and you get to say one topic. And if you have multiple topics, you get to come back and get your next 15 minutes. You don't get to put it all in that one. That's just not how the system is allowed to work. So you get one symptom, and they're like, well, you know what? Based on that dry skin issue, and you know you're it's itchy, or there could be, you know, so obviously maybe we need to send you to a skin specialist. So the thing is, is then they'll send you off to somebody else. When in reality, anything that happens with the skin is technically a gut issue. You always want to look to the gut when you have skin issues, whether if they're psoriasis or if it's dry skin or if your things are breaking out or any of that kind of stuff, you always do want to look at the gut. The gut is one of the main key pieces. So if I had to pick a hub, like the main, I've got a big circle my fingers are putting up. And think of this as like the spider web. This is a center of the spider web, and you've got all the branches going off. So that center is like your gut. And when the gut's not working, it's gonna affect the liver, it's gonna affect your thyroid, it's gonna affect your pancreas, it's gonna affect your energy, it's gonna affect how you balance your sugars, it's gonna affect your adrenals and your cortisol and your inflammation, it's gonna affect your immune system, it's gonna affect all of these things. So no matter what, I we always do want to address the gut because if you have a happy gut, you can have a happy life. So, what happens is you go to the medical system, you tell them you have the one issue, they send you to somebody else, and they either find something that could possibly be going on, or they give you some kind of a cream to put on your skin to help it. Or maybe instead of going to the doctor, you just go and get some lotion. Now we have to make sure that lotion is clean because if you're putting toxins on your body, now the skin is absorbing those toxins, and guess where that's going? Back to the gut is making you toxic, which is now gonna overlay into many other things. So, can you start to already see? I'm kind of describing how one thing can now start to lead to other things, but those other things were leading to that one thing, right? So, again, this is about picking the head up. It's about getting yourself outside of that little trapped box in the medical system and getting out and looking at what are the healing opportunities, what's truly going on, what's the underneath root cause of what's going on in here in your body? A lot of it is the micronutrients, a lot of it's food sensitivities, a lot of it is that your gut has infections, there's co-infections, parasites, bacteria, viral. And there could be, you could have mold in your system, you could have chemical toxins, heavy metals. All of that stuff is starting to create chaos inside your body. And when that happens, we have what's called metabolic chaos. So this is again that spider web. You have that one center thing, all these things going off. But now we're going to look at it. You have this one issue, and then the next thing you know is it leads to something else. And then that leads to something else, and then it leads to something else. Just like when people have an autoimmune. Generally, if you have one autoimmune, you are more likely to get a second, third, and fourth autoimmune because your body's under attack. You already have the gut issues going on, whether or not if you feel gut issues or not, a lot of it's gonna be stemming from the gut. It's stemming from overreactive inflammation, it's stemming from because you're full of toxins, it's stemming because you're micronutrient deficiencies. As that keeps going on, that's gonna keep creating those issues that you have going on. So your thing is you're gonna be feeling like you're symptom chasing because as soon as you maybe put enough lotion on and things, so now your skin isn't so dry, right? But then you're gonna be like, well, I'm still really tired. So maybe I just need to go get some caffeine. And then what happens? Most of the time when you eat, drink enough caffeine when it comes nighttime, it's hard to sleep. So you don't get quality sleep, or maybe even sleep, but you don't get deep, deep sleep, restorative sleep. So therefore, when you wake up in the morning, you're tired. So guess what you do? You reach for the next set of caffeine or the next thing of uppers to get you going. So then it just this becomes a big loop. This becomes you're chasing one symptom to the next and you're trying to cover up that one symptom with something else. So when we're looking at this, we want to make sure that we're we're getting back to the root, getting back to the core of the nature of what is going on. Because you can get temporary relief, but temporary relief does not mean that you're going to be fully better because it's just a relief. We need to break the patterns that is going on. And these symptoms is just your body telling you, hey, we are bad enough that now you have a symptom. We are bad enough that now you have a symptom. So when we look at the blood work, I was kind of talking to the girls the other day. And when we look at blood work, and I was doing things like how the blood work, you might get it back and you feel you don't feel good, but your blood work comes back normal. But here's where it is. Also with the blood work, and this was in the past app past episode, is when you get that blood work back and say it says it's normal, again, that could be the traditional lab values. And those traditional lab values are a wide, wide range. They are not for optimal health, they're based on sick people. You want numbers based on what does it take to have optimal health, to be in true health. That is going to be very different looking at numbers, and that's gonna be a different goal for you to get into that number set so you actually feel really good. Okay, so let's go on to the next topic. Let's I like how these are kind of working together. I kind of made a list of questions and uh topics, and we're just kind of talking about some of this stuff. So, how can stress show up as multiple symptoms at once? So that's a good one. So, stress isn't just emotional stress, there's all kinds of stress. There's good stress, bad stress. So, you stress is good stress, distress is bad stress, there's emotional stress, but then there's the hidden stress. And hidden stress is the stress that's going on inside your body. That's your hormones, that's your immune system, that's nutrient deficiencies, that's the endocrine system being off, that's things not being in balance in homeostasis. And when that happens, that creates internal stress, things you don't even know about. So you've got not only emotional stress that's coming at you, work, life, career, business, whatever it is coming at you, but then you've got the internal stress going on in your body, and your body gets to the point where it's like, whoa, this is a little too much for my body to handle. And it gets your body can get overwhelmed and irritated, and then that starts to create this cascade of issues. So we call this like the stress cascade. So say maybe we start off with a headache, and then that leads to skin issues, that leads to fatigue, then that leads to going in and maybe, maybe you now get a diagnosis. Now maybe you have an autoimmune or some kind of dis-ease in your body, then that leads to other health issues. So do you see how this can go down to down to down at all of that cascade? It's just overflowing into the next, unless you get up, go upstream and start taking care of your body. You find out what's actually going on inside the body so you can actually heal it and support it from the inside. So this is about understanding your hormones. This is about understanding your micronutrients, this is about your um food sensitivities, this is about what's going on inside the gut. This is about finding out if there's toxins in your body, if there's genetic things going on, and then coaching your body up, supporting your body up, giving it the building blocks that support life. And the building blocks is not drugs. You are not drug deficient. The building blocks are your micronutrients, your minerals, your proteins, the things that make your body actually work. So when you can actually get that stuff to work, now we can allow the stress to calm down. When the stress calms down, sleep gets better, your hormones get in balance, you start to feel better, you start to feel emotionally better. But now your body is starting to work for you versus against you. I hear way too many people always say, My body's just working against me, my body just hates me. It really doesn't. It's just trying to get your attention, it's saying, hey, it's got its hands waving up, maybe it's jumping up and down, trying to flag you down. And it's like, I need some help. And it does that by giving you symptoms. It's the only way it sometimes knows how to get your attention because you many people are so not in tune with their body. One thing I find when I start working with clients, whether if it's through health coaching and stuff, or even through chiropractic, I do my best to teach you guys to understand how to listen to your body so you become better listeners, so you can catch things faster, but also so that you become more aware of how your body works. So here's another one. How does gut health affect more than digestion? Well, we kind of talked about this earlier because remember, if your gut's not working, you're not gonna absorb nutrients. Your body isn't gonna be able to maybe take inactive hormones and turn them into the active form. Uh, you're not gonna be able to, so that conversion events go off. Um, if your gut isn't able to, if your gut is leaky, we've talked about this in other episodes. So again, this is about leakiness. This is about if your gut isn't to have tight junctions, things can happen where the nutrients can go back and forth between the blood and the stool, but also that means viral infections, bacterial infections, food particles go back and forth. And then your body starts to create these inflammatory reactions because they're like, wait a second, that's not supposed to be there. And it starts to attack it. And then we get autoimmune starting, we get the leaky gut, we get the bloating, we get the not feel good, we get the feel sleepy after you eat. We get all these different symptoms that you start to feel. It affects your mood, it affects your brain fog, it affects, it just affects how you show up in life. And then by the time you're getting home at night, now you're just completely exhausted, right? But then you catch your second win because all of a sudden you can kind of rest a little bit, you can kind of calm down from the day. Then you get the second win, and then you can't go to sleep because you override your system because there's all this other stuff you've got to do too when you get home, right? All right. Topic five. Why can someone have fatigue, brain fog, bloating, and hormone issues all at once? Well, it's because sometimes what happens is you ignore your symptoms for so long that they start building up. And then it just becomes overwhelming. So think about if you're lifting five pounds, five pounds doesn't sound like much, right? But now consider every micronutrient deficiency that you have. That's five pounds. Say you have four of them, that's 20 pounds on your body. Then say you have maybe a gut infection, maybe you have a bacterial imbalance, now you got another five pounds on. And then say you have some mold issues, maybe you've got sensitivity to mold, and now you got another one. Maybe you have some toxicities and environmentals or heavy metals, now you got some more. So the next thing you know is you got 40 pounds of these stressors on your body that you that are all building up. So now that all creates that fatigue. This is too much on the body. It's tired, it can't think, it's bloated, it's screaming, it's mad, it's inflamed, it's on fire. And it needs you to take the weight off. That means supporting it. That means getting rid of the toxin issues, that means getting you the gut balance, that means supporting the new micronutrients, that means not putting the bad foods that your body can't handle into it. And that's different for everybody. When you do a food sensitivity test, you find out all the unique things that are specific for you. And there's not all food tests are created equal. So I'm actually going to I want to kind of go into a couple questions that I've had come up. So here's one is why do I feel like I have so many random symptoms that do not seem connected? So some of the ones that might not seem connected, is like maybe you have skin issues, right? But you have bloating, and then maybe you're tired. So you might think those are all three different things, and maybe even have some low back pain or mid-back pain. And you're like, well, these are all different things. I need to do this for that, and this for that, and that for that, when in reality they're all coming from the one body. But they usually are all coming from how they all connect. And even if you try and play like, oh, I'm just gonna treat this one symptom to see how what that does, sometimes one symptom can overcorrect or undercorrect something else and create some other issues. So when you're looking at it, you can't, you don't want to just treat one thing at a time. Again, this is about treating the whole body, the whole person that includes your mind. So when I do coaching with people, I also work at helping you clear the mental clatter, the chatter, the the and reframe the negative thoughts, the things that keep your body stuck. Because if you're always thinking negative things and you're not supporting your body, you're gonna create negative issues too. So everything is connected. We have that spider web again. Remember, we have at the center, I would say, is like your gut, but it can be you depending on how you want to look at it. But no matter what, every little strand is connected. And if you pull one strand, it affects another. So what you have to do is you have to get to the core. And you fix the core. You heal the core. Um, let's see. So here's another one. Why does it feel like every time I try to fix one thing, another symptom pops up? Well, it's kind of like what we've talked about. Sometimes when you clear one thing, it's just kind of like, oh, people are walking and this kid falls and he's got pain in his knee and whatever not. And he's complaining of the pain. And I think somewhere along like this little wisdom guy, so it could be like the um Lion King, he comes up and hits him in the head, and he's like, ah, now my head hurts. So it's kind of about where that focus, like the next thing hits and it distracts your attention. The same thing kind of happens when you start to clear one thing, then all of a sudden the thing that was hidden in the background can come up forward, can say, Hey, now it's my turn for attention. But the thing is, is again, this is all about supporting the body from the inside out. How do we give it the support and nutrition that it needs? Um, the other thing it can be doing, the body will compensate. So if say something is off in the body and you're developing maybe an iron deficiency, the body might steal something from somewhere else to make up for that. It's just like when you run a fever, your body steals calcium from your bones to fix it. So therefore, people are will eventually in time have more calcium deficiencies, especially if they're sick. So when people have fevers, give them calcium. That'll help. That's a little tip for you. I don't remember where I heard that once upon a time and many different things. But thank you for joining me today. Um, there's a lot of really interesting things that we talked about today. So one of the most powerful shifts you can make is to stop asking, what symptom do I fix first? And start asking, what is my body trying to tell me? Get back to the core, get back to the building blocks of your life. Because your body's not random. Your symptoms are not random. And if you've been trying to fix just one thing at a time and you still are not feeling like yourself, that does not mean you're failing. Again, this is looking at the whole body, finding my job is to be like a detective and to find what is going on in your body, how do we coach it up, how do we build it up? And it may mean we have to look a little deeper. Sometimes we have to do a little bit of extra testing. We have to give it the support along with time. Sometimes the key thing is always consistency plus time. So sometimes you're doing the right things. But you just need patience. The patience to give it the appropriate amount of time to see true results happening. And sometimes we don't want to give it a month or two months or a year. Because we're in the world of instant, we want it now. And things don't just happen now. So it may mean your body is asking for a more complete look. That is where healing begins to shift. Thank you for being here with me today on the Rockin' Yes podcast, Your Empowered Self. And I'm Dr. Raquel, and I really enjoyed talking to you today. So if any of this resonated with you, I would totally appreciate it if you wanted to share, like, comment below. I would love to be able to communicate and talk with you. Um, and feel free to share this with any friends that you feel like this might be a benefit for them. You have a wonderful and beautiful day.