Healing Takes Time: Building A Body That Bounces Back

Healing rarely arrives on a timeline our culture celebrates. We want next day delivery for our bodies, yet physiology rewires through repetition, rest, and steady inputs that teach the nervous system it is safe to heal. In this episode of You Are the Answer, Naomi Mills, chiropractor and advocate for the body’s natural intelligence, unpacks the unsexy truth: resilience is earned through consistency, not hacks.

We dig into what resilience really means in real life — the reserve that helps you skate past the office bug, recover from surgery, and enjoy that winter ski trip without falling apart. Naomi shares the ginkgo symbol on her wrist as a reminder of longevity and adaptability, and explains how nervous system care, sleep, nutrition, and movement enlarge your “stress plate” so your body can hold more without tipping into symptoms. If you’ve ever muted pain with a quick fix only to watch it return louder, you’ll learn why those signals matter and how to respond without fear.

From the herb-pot analogy to the reality of 12–18 month timelines for deep change, this conversation offers practical steps to shift from breakdown into balance: trim obvious stressors, build simple daily rituals, and trust your body to decide what heals first. Expect a grounded, hopeful take on why slow healing is not failure but proof your system is learning a safer, stronger pattern. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs patience today, and leave a review to help more people find their way back to their bodies.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Message

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.

Defining Resilience In Daily Life

Naomi Mills 0:41

Welcome to episode 5, which I am calling Healing Takes Time, subtitles The Unsexy Truth About Healing. You don't often want to hear, actually, that the life and health that you desire, and I think many of us feel that we should have by default, is going to take commitment, time, energy, and quite often money. What it's definitely going to take is consistency. So that's what I want to share with you today. And really what we're striving for in life is something I call resilience. So knowing that if you have a really challenging day with your family or at work, you can reset yourself. So it doesn't set you off on a crisis of overthinking and not sleeping and your digestion going through the floor for a few days, weeks, or even months. Or knowing that if you are in the office this time of year and everybody's getting sick, that you're not likely to pick up the office bug. And if you do, you know you're going to ping back from it. It could even be going for an emergency or an elective surgery and trusting that you have the reserves that you need to recover from that quickly and efficiently. It could be thinking about going on a ski holiday this winter and knowing that you've got the health and fitness required to get yourself up and down those slopes.

The Ginkgo Symbol And Longevity

Naomi Mills 2:22

It's resilience. It's knowing that you have all the capacity that you need to do the things that you want to do, both chosen and the things that you're not going to choose that are going to happen to you anyway. And funnily enough, I have a tattoo on my left wrist, which is a symbol of resilience. It is ginkgo leaf. And the ginkgo balboa tree has been around for more than 200 million years, and it's a symbol of power and longevity. Now, one tree alone can live for more than a thousand years, and its leaf has come to represent adaptability and resilience because these trees have developed over their millions of years, resistance to fire, and two of them even survived the nuclear bomb of Hiroshima. And it is the joke of my household that the ginkgo tree survived Hiroshima, but not me, because I did actually, of course, buy one to try and grow here on the Moorland of Scotland, and it did not survive me. So make of that what you will.

Building A Bigger Plate For Stress

Naomi Mills 3:52

Although I didn't know why, I was really drawn to it, and it's beautiful, it's black and white, looks sort of hand drawn, it's not in a traditional tattoo style. And that later became the emblem of my chiropractic office because when I am working with somebody's central nervous system and teaching you to understand what it is to have a healthy physiology in your body, it's because what I want for you is to develop this resilience against the stresses of life. Those physical, chemical, and emotional challenges that are coming at you all day, every day. And this is not our deep dive into the health-building behaviors.

Culture Of Instancy Vs Physiology

Consistency And Lifestyle Change

Naomi Mills 4:55

But I will say these are the behaviors that, if you skip back to episode three, is what is going to make the size of your plate holding all of this stress bigger, so that you can hold all of the stress without it expressing itself the same way in your life and health. Now we live in the world now of instant credit, get now, pay later, Amazon next day delivery. We are so accustomed culturally and subconsciously to have it now. My young child thought the television had broken a couple of Christmases ago because she saw her first advert and she wasn't used to waiting for her next program to come on. So subconsciously, as a culture, we are being drawn more and more into this idea of instancy. And it's really unfair when it comes to our physical and mental selves to expect that because it's not how our physiology is built. And I always say to people: getting healthy, retraining your nervous system out of stress and into ease is like going to the gym, going on a diet.

Naomi Mills 6:18

We all wish that we could go once and it was done, but that's simply not how the body works. And when you are retraining your physiology, it's your body again. And you might be retraining that in some ways through exercise or nutrition. So everything is going to be much slower. It's about consistency. I myself went through a huge weight loss journey maybe 10 years ago now, losing 30 kilograms or about five stone. And I wish I could just stick there. But I've had to make consistent changes in my diet and in my lifestyle to maintain that positive improvement. And even though you know this intellectually, there is still a huge part of our subconscious that has been trained by the outside world to want a shortcut.

The Silver Bullet Trap

Naomi Mills 7:20

Everybody wants the silver bullet, myself included. And you might want to think of a really simple example of having an ache or a pain or a problem that's developing and you reach straight for the painkiller. And maybe that's okay in the short term. But what that painkiller is doing is switching off the signal to your brain that there is a problem in your physical body. And when it does that, it might just get in the way of your body putting that right, either through healing it or teaching you the behaviors that you're doing, which is causing the problem, and teaching you to stop doing it. So many people push through or work through these signals, they ignore them.

From Breakdown To Balance

Naomi Mills 8:08

And what happens? The pain gets worse, or maybe now the pain is radiating, or you've got tingling or numbness or weakness. The body starts to shout louder. And now you're in a bit of trouble. And now your silver bullet of let's hide the problem from the brain is no longer feeling as good as it once did simply because that problem has been ignored and it's getting bigger and bigger. In my experience, it's not just a physical problem. Lots of us then have compounded the other things we've talked about, the mental and emotional stress, the poor sleep, lots of generally low kind of levels of health that is really lowering our resilience to again bounce back from this problem that's now coming up for us. And so now you're dealing with a chronically compensated, overwhelmed stress system. And it can't just heal at the click of a button. It can't suddenly switch from I'm in breakdown, I've been in emergency mode for a while, and you've not been hearing me to, oh, now I'm better.

Healing Timelines And “Miracles”

Naomi Mills 9:24

You have to begin to think of creating your health, first of all, very often is turning a tide from being in that fight-flight breakdown state into neutral, into I'm okay, I'm kind of coming away from breaking down and I'm getting better balance. I'm taking more rest. I'm maybe going to get adjusted, I may be exercising, getting massage, meditating. I'm beginning to put some of this goodness in that my system has needed. Maybe I've taken away some of the stress that I've recognized was causing the problem. And then you need time in healing. Think of it as a massive shift that's going to occur internally, and then it's going to take time. And I can give you the numbers and the stats on the rate at which the body heals, but it's going to be different for every single one of us. And it's not tomorrow. It is a process. And actually, in my clinical work, where I've seen what I would call miracles, and by miracles I mean the body correcting something that somebody's had for a long time.

Naomi Mills 10:35

Quite often, actually, not something they're coming to see me specifically for as a chiropractor. It's been when they've been under care for many months or years and they've made other lifestyle changes, and their nervous system has been in a healing state for a prolonged period of time, normally 12 to 18 months. And we've had some crazy things happen where blood pressure has regulated, or even someone's toenail that had been dead for eight years grew back. That's the fun thing about healing, by the way, is that none of us get to control which part the body heals first. It's about shifting the whole tide of breaking down into building up and trusting the body's going to get there eventually. And it does take time.

The Potted Herb Analogy

Naomi Mills 11:28

One really simple way for you to see this is if you buy one of those potted herbs from the supermarket. And if you're anything like me, it gets bunged on the kitchen windowsill, and you completely forget to water it for the however many days it is until you're making that recipe, or maybe you've used it once and you forget it exists, and you see how limp and pale it goes really, really quickly, because they're not in good quality soil. And I panic and I pick it up and I put it under the water, but it doesn't just immediately spring up before my eyes. If I'm lucky and I've caught it in time, over the next few days, and probably if I've watered it a couple more times, it might come back to life and I'll be able to use it again. And we really are no different to that analogy.

Giving Yourself Time And Grace

Naomi Mills 12:21

The quality of our soil, how well we are in our lifestyles generally will make a big difference as to how quickly you bounce back from something, how resilient you are. But no matter how good we are polishing the facets of our health, as we talked about in episode one, it's still going to take time for each and every one of us. And my wish for you is that you give yourself the grace to spend the time and to give your body the time to make the changes I know it is 100% capable of making. So today I want to invite you to honestly reflect on how much time and grace you are allowing yourself to heal.

Closing And Next Steps

Naomi Mills 13:17

Are you a little bit guilty of getting your body to bounce back or change very, very quickly? And perhaps you are ignoring all of the stressors that have built up on the plate of health in your life. And if you haven't done that little exercise yet, go back to episode three, your plate of stress, and do it because it holds all the answers as to why your resilience might be low. And the answers to what you can do about it are coming up very soon. Thank you for joining me on YouAre 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.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have it.