Why I HATE "Keep Calm And Carry On"

“Keep calm and carry on” can sound like strength, but what happens when your body never gets the second half of the story: the part where you finally get to feel, process, and come back to safety? I’m Naomi Mills, chiropractor and healthcare professional, and I’m exploring how this deeply British mindset can quietly train us to ignore signals, delay support, and stay functional at the expense of our nervous system health.

I share one of the most painful moments of my life when I carried on too soon after losing my mum, and why that choice shaped my healing for years. From there, I tease apart the nuance: sometimes it truly is wise to hold it together in the moment, especially when circumstances or responsibilities demand it. The harm comes from the silent add-on many of us live by: carry on forever. That’s when unprocessed stress and emotion can get stuck in the body, keeping you in fight, flight or freeze, disrupting sleep, digestion, and your ability to feel at ease in your own skin.

We also talk about practical somatic healing ideas that help the stress cycle complete, including the power of shaking, reflection, and journalling. If you’ve ever been told you’re “so strong” while privately thinking you’re not fine, this will land. Subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find their way back to trusting their body.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Message

SPEAKER_00 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.

The UK Habit Of Pushing Through

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Now, today is a subject that I have thought about for a really long time. It's something I feel incredibly passionate about for my 15 years of working with people in a clinical setting in the UK. I will say this is a UK culture issue that I'm sure exists in other cultures as well. But it's this idea of keep calm and carry on. You know that wartime saying, and you had all the posters, and it was really elevating the idea of that time you were in genuine danger, the world was potentially ending, your community was at threat, your family was in threat, and what the government was trying to do was maintain a sense of order and calm because we needed to. But I feel in our very marrow, we know messages get passed generationally, both externally and internally within our bodies, and this British mentality of keep calm and carry on, I believe, holds so many people back from seeking help or taking action much, much earlier when they first become aware that they are not functioning or feeling as well as they want to. I mean, I've had clients walk into my office. I had an older lady walk in with a broken hip who was just absolutely didn't want to go to hospital or wasn't going to let anything hold her back. And there's a real important issue there. And we carry it ourselves, or speaking for myself, as a full-time working parent who runs several businesses, and you want to show up for everybody, and it's much easier than it should be to put yourself aside and push through. Because there is a nuance here, keeping calm and carrying on might be the absolute right thing to do in that moment, it's all a matter of perspective, and it's just coming

The Cost Of Returning Too Soon

SPEAKER_00 3:46

up for me now. I I want to share probably the worst time that I kept calm and carried on was in 2012, and I'm 26 years old, and I was a chiropractic associate, so I was working for this principal, and he was going away on holiday back to his homeland in Canada with his family, and my mum died incredibly unexpectedly, and you know, I was there for her dying, and it was singularly the most difficult and horrific thing I have dealt with in my life before or since that entire uh week that happened because she died of sepsis in the hospital, and I felt and looking back now through nobody else but like a deeply ingrained sense of obligation. I remember calling him and telling him and almost hearing, though he never said it, him going, Oh god, well, she's had this terrible family trauma, but I'm going away, and we have a business to run and many clients, you know, booked in and waiting to come. And I said, I'll come back to work. And I remember him sort of slightly checking in, Are you okay to do that? And I'm like, Yeah, yeah, I'll come. And looking back now, it's one of the most damaging things to myself I ever could have done was to go back at 26 years old, three days after your mum dies on you unexpectedly. And I felt obligated to keep calm and carry on. And I wonder where that comes from. And there's part of me that would say, gosh, what I really wanted or needed in that moment was for somebody else to swoop in and say, No, no, no, Naomi, this is not okay. But I wonder if I would have even listened to them. And I wonder if you can resonate with that feeling where you've looked back and seen where it has cost you that push through, that just let's bottle it up for now and move on. And you kind of wish somebody had called you out on it. But here's the thing: we have to learn to do that for ourselves. This is the whole point of this work, is not to make it an outside job. Healing is an inside job, and so it's how do we get to a place where you can see it for yourself and take action for yourself.

Why “Silent Forever” Hurts

SPEAKER_00 6:26

And there's a real nuance with this keep calm and carry on story that I think is very, very important to highlight. And that is it's not just keep calm and carry on forever, and it's the silent forever that I think is the absolute killer. Because as I was saying earlier, there will be times when it is just not okay or appropriate or safe even for you to fall apart in that moment. Perhaps just because of the circumstances you're in, or maybe you're with other people, or I'm thinking even being with children, people who are emotionally regulating from you, and you feel, for whatever reason, you just taking on what's happening and holding it without allowing yourself to feel it and break down and go through that emotional process, might be the right thing in that moment. And that's the part that's so important. So, what I hate, and that's a strong word coming from me, about the keep calm and carry on story is the silent forever that comes on the end. Being stoic, being able to move through hard things and not falling apart is part of what gives us strength and resilience. However, at some point you must get to a place of safety where you can process, where you can honestly go back through that experience, that trauma, that really hard thing, and feel the feelings and allow them to dissipate through your body. I talk about fight and flight all the time on this podcast, and there's the third F, of course, which is freeze. And so if an animal plays dead, which is kind of what this Keep Calm carry-on story is, I'm gonna pretend it hasn't happened in this moment. I'm gonna emotionally play dead so that I can bring myself out of this in a safe, coherent way. But then the animal that plays dead, when it comes back out of that process, they very often shake. And it's that dissipation of the energy, the adrenaline, it's the moving through the body. Shaking is actually one of my favorite ways to help people move difficult emotions through their bodies to just kind of literally shake it off, as the gorgeous Taylor Swift would say. It's very helpful embodiment work, actually. So I would like the phrase to be keep calm, carry on, then process. And when we don't get to the processing part, this is when emotions get stuck in our body. This is

Fight Flight Freeze And Shaking

SPEAKER_00 9:35

when our physiology becomes stuck on fight, flight, survive. It's when our functions shut down and we don't sleep so well and we don't digest so well, and we don't feel safe in our bodies, so then our brains are constantly wired to look for threat and worries, and we become stuck in this negative feedback loop, and often we don't even know it. And even worse than that, it's often rewarded. People will say, You're so strong, you're amazing. I can't believe you got through that and you're fine, and you're thinking, I'm not fine, or maybe you believe you're fine until you eventually find out what it has cost you. So I'm not saying don't practice stoicism, don't hold difficult things, and then you know, because the opposite of that is just you fall apart and you don't manage to make your way through the situation in a way that's helpful or safe. But it is about taking that time to process. Because when my mum died really suddenly, and I put all of that aside to plan her funeral and to tell her friends and family and to go back to work in service of other people. And I remember saying so clearly, I'll be fine if you just don't talk about it. Don't talk to me about it, don't mention it, don't look at me in a caring way, or I'll fall apart. You know, it took so much for me to do that, that I didn't realise how much I was shutting down on deeply unconscious emotional levels, and it took many years of talking therapy and retreat work and space, like lots of energy, money, and time to come back from that. And I don't know we ever fully do come back in the same way before. And what I really needed to give myself in that moment was okay, I need to make these calls, I need to do this thing, and then I need to give myself some space to process. And of course, I'm talking about one of the biggest traumas that's happened to me. It doesn't have to be something huge, it can also be a little altercation you have with somebody at your work or in the playground or in the gym, a negative moment, something that happens with your child that actually really triggers you because it brings up something from your childhood, and in that moment you're going to be the adult and you're going to carry on, or there's a big situation at work that really does require you to dig deep so that you can be there for your team and you can make that achievement, and then there has to be a period of space and processing, otherwise, we carry it with us.

Reflection Prompts And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 12:42

So, the thought I'd like to leave you with today is an invitation, really, just to spend some time reflecting on this. If you can journal, that's even better, or meditate on it. But just give yourself an opportunity to think of a time when you kept calm and carried on. And what was the cost and what was the benefit? And is there anything left there that you want to process to release? And maybe you want to have a think about where these stories come from. And if there's any gift I can give you as a result of this podcast, it would be that awareness. So the next time it becomes a conscious choice to keep calm, to carry on, and then process. Remember, you can follow me on Instagram at yat underscore answer or visit the website www.uartheanswer.co.uk and you can drop me an email. 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.