Three Brains, One You

Your body is not a puzzle to solve—it’s a guide you can learn to trust. We dive into the “three brains” model and show how the head, heart, and gut each carry a vital piece of your decision-making. The head compares options, the heart aligns with values and relationships, and the gut protects life and energy. When these centres work together, anxiety eases, choices feel simpler, and you move with conviction instead of second-guessing.

We unpack why the gut matters so much for mood and motivation, from its role in the stress response to emerging links between microbiome balance and mental health. Then we zoom out to a whole-system view: how emotional strain, mental habits, and physical symptoms form one loop, and why listening to your body can change the course of healing. Think of a touch tree in a forest—the reliable spot you return to when you feel lost. You can build your own through a short, practical muscle test that helps you access a clear yes or no from your body before the mind starts to spin.

You’ll learn how to calibrate the test, apply it to everyday choices, and pair it with reflective questions so you honour all three centres of knowing. Along the way, we share reading paths for both scientific and spiritual explorers and reframe self-trust as a skill you can train. If you’ve been craving a grounded way to connect with intuition without abandoning reason, this conversation shows you how to blend insight and embodiment.

If this conversation sparked something for you, follow the show, share it with someone who needs a touch tree today, and leave a quick review so more people can find their way back to their bodies. Stay connected, stay curious—and remember, you are the answer.

Try the muscle test on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/A6BYlllVfxo?si=psNbVfPWyAF7Mklk

Transcript

Welcome And Core Promise

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.

Introducing The Three Brains

The Touch Tree Metaphor

Naomi Mills 0:41

Welcome to episode 7 of You Are the Answer. If you're listening to this as they are being released, then it is just turned the new year. So what better time to talk about your gut? But actually not in the way you're possibly expecting. Today I want to talk about your three brains. Yeah, three of them. And what I'm really talking about is intuition and the different levels in your body of which we have in our knowing.

Naomi Mills 1:20

So when an explorer goes into a forest, they quite often will mark a tree and they might call it a touch tree. But it's essentially a spot that they can always return to. So that no matter where they wander off or how far they go, they can find their way back to that tree. And in that way, the explorer can't get lost. Talk about your own version of a touch tree. And really, that is being in deep connection with your own higher self or spirit. And I'm also going to talk you through a few fun ways that you can play with this concept to see if you can make it real for you.

Spirit, Self, And The Body

Head, Heart, Gut Explained

Naomi Mills 2:08

Because you might already be thinking, I'm not in for this episode, I'm not a quote-unquote spiritual person. And I guess that's because there's no organ or place in your body where our spirit lives. I will tell you though, as somebody who has had the opportunity to sit through quite a number of autopsies while I was training in my medical career, when you do see a person that has died or passed away, there is an invisible spark, an element of them that is just simply not them. It's not there. And for many, many years, like I'm sure most of us are, I was quite scared of dying and pretty scared of seeing a dead person until I had the privilege of being around them and really realized in my gut, I'm about to say, that the human body is a shell that holds our sense of self and our spirit, and they do feel like very different things.

Science Catching Up

Naomi Mills 3:21

Research in psychology shows that we talk about our head or our heart or our gut while we make important decisions in different areas of our life. It's thought that the gut brain holds our immune system and is linked to feelings of self-preservation, fear, anxiety, mobility, and action. And as you know, the gut is also linked to your fight-flight response, and digestion will shut down when we go into that survival mode. Scientists have also found that reseeding the gut with bacteria from a healthy person helps them to overcome depression. So, in all of these ways, and as we go into the whole you are the answer, mind, body, nervous system, deliciousness that I want to explore in this podcast, you will see there are layers of things that we intuitively know as humans, things that we have culturally done, and science racing to catch up, basically, and to use these connections that have always been there to our health benefits.

Whole-System Health

Naomi Mills 4:30

And then it's also said that our heart brain is usually where we turn regarding relationships and values, and that as we experience feelings and have instincts in different parts of our bodies, researchers have come to create this concept of us having three brains. Not in a literal sense, of course, but in this more esoteric sense. And it really reinforces the idea that our body does work as a whole system rather than several disconnected parts. So it's why, right back in the beginning, when we talked about the stressors on your plate, emotional and mental trauma puts a huge amount of strain on your healing process. And many, many people are not physiologically thriving because of things that have happened to us mentally and emotionally, because everything is connected.

Reading And Research Paths

Muscle Testing How-To

Naomi Mills 5:30

So I want to explore the idea that your instinct or your spirit is the third element of your nervous system, along with your body or your brain. And there are numerous ways that you can begin to explore and play with this idea, whether it's reading around this, and I mean spiritual texts or scientific texts, or looking to some of the real modern-day classics around the body keeps the score, or when the body says no, some of these great works of scientific literature that are linking our emotional behavior and regulation with our physiological medical health.

Naomi Mills 6:12

One of the simplest and sort of fun ways I like to introduce this to people is through a little bit of muscle testing. And so what you do is you hold your index pointing finger against your thumb, and with the opposite hand, you're going to try and pull that finger and your thumb apart. And in your mind, you're going to set the intention that if it holds strong and it resists, then that's one answer. And if it breaks open, that's the opposite answer. And you have to assign to your own body what is what. So for example, I might ask my body, like, what do I want to eat right now? Do I want an apple? And I might go to pull the fingers apart. And if it holds strong, yes. If it breaks, no.

Using Body Input In Decisions

Training Your Touch Tree

Naomi Mills 7:10

You can do it with food, you can do it with decisions, emotional-based decisions, work-based decisions. And what you're playing with here is a way of talking to your body, to your inner instinct, to this spiritual inner self-knowing, and trying to get some input from the body rather than just the brain. And you can do it for fun, you can play with it and experiment with it, and you may be very pleasantly surprised on the outcome because very often I will know deep down what it is that I would like, like what is going to be the right thing for me, though it might be hard to do, and I'll use the muscle testing and the body's saying the answer that it wants. You then get to go ahead with your logical brain and decide whether you're going to follow the body or override it.

Building Trust And Practice

Naomi Mills 8:16

But this is actually the practice I'm talking about when we develop a touch tree, a way of coming back to ourselves, using a very simple muscle test like this, is a way of training your whole nervous system not to always follow the brain, which is a wonderful computer. It is there to compare and give you all the options, but it's not ultimately the one that should be making the decision. Often in spirituality, we talk about a higher self, a part of you that's able to actually see yourself being in fight or flight and saying, even though I feel all of this and I see all of this, I know that this is not the action that I'm going to take. And that takes practice.

Invitation And Next Steps

Links, Share, And Sign-Off

Naomi Mills 9:01

Tuning to listen into what your body is indicating is a really wonderful first step to developing trust, to developing communication, and to making this all seem a little less theoretical and more real for you. So that is my invitation for you today to begin to develop an awareness of what might be called your gut instinct or you know your body having its own language and maybe using this muscle test as a fun way to play with the concept to get to know yourself in a different way. I'm also going to put on the show notes a link to YouTube with me demonstrating and explaining the muscle test again so that you can go and have fun with it and be open, be curious, and just see what answers your body holds for you.

Naomi Mills 10:04

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparked 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.