Understanding A Healing Crisis Can Change How You Heal

Ever made a healthy change and felt worse before you felt better? We dive straight into that unnerving moment and explain what a healing crisis really is: a short, intense recalibration as your nervous system responds to new inputs and starts to reorganise. From sleepless nights to tender muscles and big emotions, we unpack why these spikes can be signs of progress rather than proof you’ve done something wrong.

Across the conversation, we put the central nervous system at the centre of health—touching everything from digestion and hormones to mood, focus, and pain—and explore how years of physical strain, chemical load, and emotional stress push it toward survival mode. You’ll hear clear, practical ways to lower the “water level in the cup” so your system has room to adapt: creating space in your schedule, swapping high-intensity workouts for gentle movement, using breath to downshift, and building quiet rituals like journalling, restorative yoga, qigong, and unhurried walks. We also cut through the noise around buzzwords like vagus nerve and somatic. No gadgets needed—most effective tools are simple, body-led, and free, and they work because around 80% of vagal signalling travels from body to brain.

We share how to scale inputs when symptoms surge, track trends over weeks, and pair physical practices with supportive self-talk to steady the process. Most of all, we come back to trust: your body’s intelligence may not match your diary, but it is on your side. Progress often looks like release before relief. If you’re navigating a rocky patch on your healing journey—or supporting someone who is—this conversation offers reassurance, clear steps, and a reminder that you are not broken.

If this resonates, share it with a friend, leave a quick review, and visit our site to explore resources and the book You Are the Answer. Subscribe for new episodes each week and tell us: what gentle habit helps your nervous system feel safe today?

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. Hello and welcome to episode 16 of You Are the Answer. Thank you so much for tuning in. And if you're enjoying listening to these podcasts, please do share them with a friend. And perhaps today you know somebody that needs to hear this. Because today we're going to talk about something called the healing crisis. And it might be something you've heard before, or it might be a completely new term to you. But I've been working in direct clinical contact with people for more than 15 years now. And I can tell you that a very important part of my job is trying to predict what's going to happen for somebody. Primarily because they really want to know what to expect and their practicalities, like how many sessions they're going to need, what's it going to cost them, and what their journey is going to look like. And that is not an easy thing to predict sometimes. And what I saw over the years was that quite a few people could appear to have the same kind of mechanical problem, if you like. And I might do a very similar type of treatment and it might be a similar frequency. But some people would just get better much more quickly than I expected. Some would follow what I would call the average curve. And then some would get much worse before they got better. And I think it's said sometimes, isn't it? Things will get a lot worse before they get better. But that's not always true. So how do you know if that's going to happen to you? Or maybe you've tried making a positive change in your health, tried a new intervention, tried to do something new, and then backed away because things got much worse. So that's why I think it's so important to understand what we mean when we talk about a healing crisis. And for me, the answer laid through studying neurology and about how the brain and body are intricately connected and how the nervous system reacts to lots of different situations. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you will know that the premise is that your central nervous system is responsible for everything. Your digestion, your sleep, how much energy you have, how well you balance your hormones, your focus, your health, how your body expresses itself physically, and therefore has a massive impact on how you experience life mentally and emotionally too. And by the same token, the things that start to affect your central nervous system and help us to become dysregulated. So it's not really a help, is it? But cause us to become dysregulated are physical things, particularly sitting down all the time, not exercising, falls, surgeries, accidents, even where you didn't feel like you were hurt. But the physical load of your life, then there's the chemical loads, known and unknown, because there's environmental toxins, there's stuff that we're putting into our bodies that we're really not realizing it, along with the ultra-processed food, sugars, caffeine, alcohol, medications that we are aware of, and then the mental-emotional load that you've built up again for the whole of your life. And what I started to realize was that people who, quote, got worse before they got better had a chronically dregulated nervous system. They had a nervous system that had just been trying to hold up so much and deal with so much that even though every part of your intrinsic wiring wants you to get back to health, vitality, resilience, basically functioning and feeling well, sometimes we've put up with so much for so long that that system is really depleted and it's at a state of overwhelm. And so even though we're trying to create a positive change, it can in that moment feel like it's too much. The analogy I often give is like you're a cup filled with water, and that water is almost right to the brim. And so you have very little capacity for anything, even if what you're trying to do is ultimately create more healing and therefore capacity for life and health. And that's why it's so important to understand the healing crisis as a concept, because arguably, if you've been holding a lot in your life, physically, chemically, and emotionally, you need more than anybody to be refueled, refilled, and supported to release all of that and to do a reset. But you're also more likely to have a really tough time doing it. And this is what self-empowerment is: is you actually understanding how this process is happening in your body so that you can say to yourself, I know why this is getting really difficult, I know why my skin is flaring up, or my sleep's getting terrible of a sudden, or I feel exhausted. And it's because your nervous system is starting to shift and change, and all sorts of stuff can be brought out and brought up because it wants to be processed and healed, or it's your body's way of just freaking out physiologically almost, so that it can, which is just what it needs to do to get to a place of calm and regulation and healing. So it's like with that cup full of water, it's like the water's temporarily spilling over to create more space. And I love working with these people because if you believe that and you get on board with that concept and you're willing to see the work through, these are the people that have really big shifts in their life because they understand that what their nervous system needs is much more positive input. And you can go back to the episodes I covered right in the beginning that talked about what your stress releasers are and all the free and easy things you can do yourself at home to both minimize the stress for yourself now and also what you can do to help release it. I will get on my soapbox ever so briefly because if you've not been through a healing crisis, this part's going to be really helpful for you too. At the moment, in social media terms like vagus nerve, and I've done a whole episode on that one, somatic, which means felt in the body, and I'm trying to think of the third word that I wanted to say. It will come back to me. Anyway, these have become synonymous with kind of marketing jargon online. So clients say to me, What could I do? Somatic release. Well, somatic means felt in the body. Anything you do in your body, the stuff I've talked about, dancing, getting adjusted, breath work, movement, touch, regulating self-touch, you know, holding, squeezing, just placing a hand on your heart, all of these things are somatic. Life is somatic. And when we talk about the vagus nerve, all of the things we talk about on this podcast help regulate your vagus nerve. That is your survival system. And you know, 80% of the information carried in the vagus nerve comes from body to brain, which is why this embodiment arc is so important. It's only 20% of the information is coming from brain to body, and 80% body to brain. So that's why it's so important often to have a physical way of helping your nervous system regulate along with a mental way, because you actually need both. So that's my little kind of sidebar on do not fear the healing crisis and also do not get sucked into the idea that you need something to be trained in or bought or these fancy tools. And yes, they may work on the vagus nerve, but so do all of these approaches, and it's not one or the other, it's more and more and more, and you layer it, and that's how you're going to create consistent long-term regulation and health in your life. So, how can you help ease the process of healing generally, particularly in a healing crisis? But anytime you decide to add one of these new things to your life to create more health. And if you keep the bowl of water in your mind for a moment, and imagine your glass of water now has ice cubes in it. And these ice cubes represent the life stress that you're carrying every day. And of course, you'll already know that the more ice cubes you choose to put in that glass in your mind's eye, the more that water level will have risen. And so these ice cubes are going to represent the lifestyle changes that you can make today. Effectively, what can you pick out of your life to already drop that water level? Because we're all too busy, we're all telling ourselves we've got to, got to, got to. And sometimes it's just permission, permission to be, permission to respond to what your body is asking you for, which 90% of the time isn't something new or different, it's space. And that's why I love it when clients take on things like a retreat class or a meditation practice, a journal practice, a yoga class, Pilates, qigong, things that are quiet, things that are gentle, because that is 90 plus percent of the time what your nervous system is looking for, because it needs that space and capacity to shift and to change. So when you create that extra capacity, it puts you in a much better place to deal with the stress of healing and change. The question is, what is it that your body is asking you for right now? What does your nervous system need? And how can you honor that? And the health key that I want to share with you from the chapter in my book that inspired this episode, and the the chapter is called Do Not Fear the Healing Crisis. It says the natural intelligence of the body, the natural intelligence of your body knows what it's doing, even if it doesn't do what you expect, or what you have time for, or what feels convenient. So my invitation for you today is to think about what your nervous system and body is asking you for and how you can better honor that. And if you want to go deeper and understand more about your brain-body connection, your central nervous system, including information about the healing crisis, head on to the website www.uartheanswerco.uk. Order a copy of my book called You Are the Answer, Why It's Time to Trust Your Body. Like the podcast, it's in lots of very short, easy-to-read segments. And educate yourself so that you can become your own healer, your own doctor, your own primary caregiver. And that's ultimately what each of us is called to do. Have a great day, and I look forward to speaking to you on next week's podcast, which is all about self-trust and asking the question: what does self-trust actually feel like? 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.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have been.