Whiplash, Wedding, New Baby: Why Your Nervous System Needs A Bigger Plate

What if your health isn’t the space between illnesses but a capacity you can grow? We take a clear, compassionate look at how the nervous system decides whether you feel calm, grounded, and well, or stuck in fight, flight, or freeze. Using a simple Wheel of Health, we map the three stress loads that shape your daily experience—physical, chemical, and emotional—and show how to turn scattered memories into a coherent plan.

We start by challenging the myth that “feeling fine” equals healthy, drawing on a broader definition of well-being that includes body, mind, and social life. Then we guide you through building your own Plate of Health: from birth events, falls, surgeries, and desk posture, to ultra-processed foods, medication use, skincare and cleaning chemicals, and workplace exposures. Finally, we explore emotional stressors—bereavement, breakups, caregiving, stacked life changes—and how even joyful milestones can add strain when they cluster. You’ll learn how unresolved emotional trauma can stall healing, and why capacity-building matters more than chasing quick fixes.

By the end, you’ll know how to identify the biggest loads on your system, choose small actions with outsized impact, and expand your ability to hold life without tipping into overwhelm. Understanding how much you're "carrying on your plate" is the first step to creating better health and the life you desire. Grab the free resource at www.YouAreTheAnswer.co.uk, map your stress history, and start building resilience with simple daily steps.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs a gentler way back to their body, subscribe for future episodes, and leave a review to help others find their way here.

Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer.

Redefining Health Beyond Symptoms

Naomi Mills 0:41

Here we are on episode three. Welcome and thank you for joining me. So today is another big picture episode because I think it's really important that as you go through this in the 10 to 15 minute chunks, that you get a real sense of why you should even care about your central nervous system and trusting your body and rewriting your relationship with health. Now, most of us grew up with this very basic idea that if we're not unwell, therefore we must be healthy. And as I spoke to in episode two, this just simply isn't true.

Naomi Mills 1:25

And I shared that story about my mum appearing to be the most healthy person in my family, and then sadly losing her life just a few months later from an undiagnosed cancer. And the problem is when we think about how you look or how you feel as the definition of your health, it stops you really being actively engaged with creating as much health as possible. And often we end up waiting until something goes wrong before doing something about it.

Introducing The Wheel Of Health

Naomi Mills 1:54

Now the World Health Organization has a great definition of health, of health being a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease. Which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but what it's saying is health is made up of your physical being, your mental and emotional state, and your social state. It's not just about being quote unquote well or unwell or having a disease or not. And so this is where I want to start today: this understanding that health is something that is built and created rather than avoid losing. And actually, to do that, I want to share with you a tool that I do with every client that I work with.

How Stress Shifts The Nervous System

Naomi Mills 2:48

Sometimes I refer to it as the wheel of health or the plate of health. And it's a tool that you can go onto the You Are the Answer website, go under resources, and you can download your own PDF version that you can print out and fill out, or you can just get a piece of paper and make your own little pie chart and fill that out. And it's also got a lot of prompts on it to help you. Because, yes, through the episodes, we're going to be exploring different ways for you to create your health, but let's just pause and think about what is taking away from your physical, chemical, and emotional health. And these three areas are areas of stress that affect your nervous system. And when we have too much going on, it's going to put your nervous system out of this easy, relaxed, sleeping, healing, digesting state, the parasympathetic state where you feel emotionally regulated and hormonally regulated and generally grounded and function well into the state that goes towards fight, fight, or freeze.

Naomi Mills 4:04

The good news is that you collect this stress from birth. So everything that goes on through your life from when you are born to wherever you are now, physically, chemically, mentally, and emotionally, will have an impact on how well your nervous system is functioning today, which is wild, right? Now, of course, we can't always say how much of an impact, but actually taking wide view of everything that you've experienced in these three areas over your life gives you a very clear picture as to why your body is functioning as it is now. Particularly, of course, if you've had some real physical traumas or real mentally emotional traumas that's gone on in your life, and some of which you will have processed and maybe had therapy for or talked about or processed in some ways, and some of them that you won't.

Mapping Physical Stressors

Naomi Mills 5:09

As they come up in this exercise, they might still have a real emotional charge, or you might feel it physically resonating somewhere in your body. And these are all clues that there's work to do there. But really, I'm getting ahead of myself. And the idea of this podcast is to give you everything in small, manageable chunks so that you can be the one who really sees the bigger picture of your health and is then in the best position to go out and find well-trained professionals to support you with whatever it is you need to reduce the amount of stress load that you are carrying. And that's what I want to begin with today. So the three main areas that push your body into fight and flight, into stress, are the physical things. This is usually where I start with people because it's easier. Perhaps you were induced as a baby or born via C-section or somebody dropped you, or you picked up some other childhood traumas physically. You might remember breaking a bone or falling off your bike, falling off a swing and banging your head.

Naomi Mills 6:22

We just slowly go through your life thinking of everything physical that you've been through. And we can all put on there screen time, sitting, per posture, the things that we share commonly with each other. But it's also hospital tests, surgeries. I put on their drunken mishaps because I've never forgotten the time I went through this with a man and he said no to everything. And then when I said drunken mishaps, and you said, Oh, I did fall off a wall and break my back once. So this is about helping prompt your subconscious mind to bring things back that you've possibly forgotten. And so when you get to filling this out for yourself or doing this exercise for yourself, it's quite helpful sometimes to ask a sibling or a parent or a partner if they can remember anything as well. So this physical section can end up being quite big. Accidents, even where you do not believe that you were injured. That part's incredibly important because, in my experience, the younger you are, the less likely you are to have noticed whether it injured you or not. I have lost count of the amount of clients I have worked with that have been in car accidents and when they have been young, especially under age 25, and didn't believe they had any problems, which then later on x-ray, it seems very likely that they had a whiplash or even undiagnosed fractures. So all accidents.

Chemical Load And Daily Exposures

Naomi Mills 7:56

What I can say with a degree of certainty is if it comes to your mind now, then it probably was significant in your body. And if you've completely forgotten it, then perhaps it wasn't, as a very, very general rule of thumb for that one. So we look at everything that you have physically been through, like medically, just in life, sports-wise, so sports injuries, all of that stuff goes on there since the day you were born.

Emotional Events And Hidden Charge

Naomi Mills 8:26

The second area we look at is the chemical stuff. So when we put this chart together, we're not looking at something being bad, good, positive, negative per se. A stressor is something that requires energy. So it might even be taking extra supplements every day because that's just something a bit extra that your body's processing. But the key chemical things would be ultra-processed foods, which most of us share, sugars, medications. Those can be things you are given by healthcare professionals or might be choosing to use for other reasons such as weight loss drugs, just any chemicals that are going into your body that wouldn't organically be there. That's what we put in here. Environmental toxins. So having a think about the stuff that you put on your body, shampoos, kitchen things, things that you are coming into close contact with, all of this comes in our chemical load. You might also have a job where that becomes more pertinent as well. So we go through all the chemical things that your body has had to work with. And then finally, we look at the mental, emotional, because how your brain is functioning emotionally can really put the handbrakes on your healing. It can be a complete game changer.

Naomi Mills 9:58

I have worked with clients who have got big unprocessed emotional events that they've maybe not had the right kind of therapy for, and it's really is evident that this is why their physical body is struggling. Or sometimes you might have had a lot of work done in your mind to process that, but your body's holding on to it for some reason because the body and mind always marry each other, which is why it's so important at the beginning to just get this big picture view of how much stress your body has carried over the course of your lifetime, without judgment, without leaping to conclusions, but to get a sense of how much you are carrying. So most of us have shared being in a global pandemic, which created a sense of unsafety and risk for many years. So that definitely goes on there.

Seeing Your Full Plate Of History

Naomi Mills 10:55

It can be a period of your life where lots of good things happened, like you got married and you had a baby and you moved house. But sometimes we tend to do a lot of those things close together, and that can actually, if you've ever done it, create a lot of strain for you, even when they are enjoyable activities that are going on. Can be redundancy, loss of loved ones, pets, bad breakups. Just like I said with the physical trauma, when you start gently inquiring this of yourself, your subconscious will just bring up things. And your job is to not go like, oh, what's it done that for? If it fits in the box, put it on and start to get a sense of what it is that you've been through. It takes energy to be a parent, to be a carer. If you are emotionally or physically responsible for somebody, that's important. How happy or not you are in your work environment, that's important. So work stress is always on there, whether that's voluntary work or paid work, all of these things need to go on the list. And then what's going to happen is you will now have sense, a broad sense of everything that your nervous system has been carrying since birth.

Naomi Mills 12:21

The reason I create it in like a pie chart is because to me that represents a plate of everything that you have been carrying throughout your life, most of which we can do nothing about, or we can't undo it or take it away. What you can do is do work to make that plate bigger, to expand your ability to hold all of that history without it having the same effect on your body. And that's where all the nervous system tools come in. And those are going to be the subjects of many more episodes to come. So this is something for you to sit with, to think about over the course of a week, perhaps, giving yourself time for more things to pop up, give yourself the opportunity to have conversations with people that might help you fill it out, and you will start to get a sense of just how full your plate has been, and you might even get an aha moment of this is why I feel overwhelmed. And you know what? That's absolutely great because you're giving some context to why you feel how you feel. Because most of us normalize this feeling of overwhelm as actually I'm okay because it's what you've known for such a long time.

Action: Download And Reflect

Naomi Mills 13:44

And what I find with this work is you don't actually know just how well your body can function and how great you can feel until you start creating some of that health. And the very first step has to be creating this awareness around everything that you have individually experienced because it's completely unique to you. So today's gentle invitation is to go onto the website, go onto the resources and get your plate of health and start filling that out and allowing yourself to reflect what your own definition of health might be and where it may need to change. Because here's the final important truth.

Closing And Next Steps

Naomi Mills 14:40

These stresses are happening all the time. They are completely unavoidable. Every single day you will have physical, chemical, and emotional stress happen to your body. And our job is to understand what it is, what it looks like, and what we can do about it so that it no longer pushes us into overwhelm. So good luck, have fun, and stay curious. Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparks something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.youaretheanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have been.