How To Adult Better Through Curiosity And Play

Your nervous system is not only reacting to life, it is reacting to what you expect life to be. Naomi Mills closes out the mindset series by getting practical about how belief, curiosity and playfulness change what your body does under pressure, and why the placebo and nocebo effect is not a niche science fact but a daily reality for your health and wellbeing.

We talk about what happens as adults when we become allergic to looking silly, failing publicly, or being new at something. Naomi shares a playful tool from improv, the “Yes And” game, and why practising agreement and creativity can open the system out of threat mode and into connection. We also bring back a simple perspective check many of us use with children, then forget for ourselves: will this matter tomorrow, next week, or next month?

From there we go deeper into mantras as belief filters, not pretty quotes. You’ll hear an example that lands for a lot of high-achieving people: “I am deeply loved even at rest”, and how shifting that kind of story can change your physiology, your boundaries and your capacity to recover. We finish with a grounded take on manifestation: get clear on how you want to feel, take action, and let your subconscious start highlighting the opportunities you used to walk past.

If you want a calmer, braver nervous system and a mindset that supports real change, follow the podcast, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find their way back to their body.

Transcript

Welcome And Mindset Series Finale

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 29. Thank you so much for joining me on this You Are the Answer podcast. So today I'm hoping not to ramble around the houses too much, but I'm wanting to do the last part of the deep dive into the mindset series. And last week we talked about nocebo and placebo, the real effect that your brain's expectation has on the biology in your body. And today I just want to playfully explore what that might also look like in your life, because it's something I love to play with myself. Before I go into that part of it, I want to really invite you to think about as an adult, whatever stage you are in life, can you take a moment to appreciate how our mindsets, particularly our willingness to explore, to say yes, and to feel curious, can certainly change over time.

Relearning Play As An Adult

Naomi Mills 1:53

And over the last few years, I've been lucky enough to work with a wonderful friend and professional who is a professional clown. And sometimes we put together events here in Edinburgh called joy and playfulness, and we are literally reminding ourselves as adults what it's like to be silly again, to not be afraid to fail, to be a bit funny and a bit curious and not worry about what other people are thinking. Or really, more accurately, just to recognize that it's not going to end the world or change how we see ourselves or how other people see us if we do something daft or we get something wrong. Because what that does is it invites much more joy, much more openness and curiosity, which is really what our nervous systems thrive on and crave and maybe mistakenly head to the screen to get or other outlets to get. When sometimes it's about allowing our barriers to come down a little bit so that we can sit in this sense of openness and play.

The Yes And Game

Naomi Mills 3:06

One of my favorite games that she has us go through as part of that process, and that you can very easily go home and play with somebody today is the yes and game. And it's something that you use in improv a lot, where you have a partner and you just have to agree with everything they say. And it's like you're creating a mad little story between you. So one of you will start with a sentence, it can be absolutely anything. Like today I went to the post office, and the other person goes, yes, and I met a giant blue ball of fluff there, and it could talk, and you're like, Yes, and it told me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's allowing it to get kind of as crazy and as mad, and it doesn't have to make sense. And you can almost feel your logical brain be like, oh, oh, like, and you're wanting to on some level perhaps put it in a box that makes a neat sense, but it's all about saying yes. And I know certainly as a parent, one of the ways that game really helped me was how often are we invited to, especially by our young people, because their brains are already wired for this. Remember, they're for the short-term dopamine, what feels good in this moment. Can you come and play? Do you want to look at this with me? Can we do this? And our logical adult brain is trying to run all the numbers, the timings, it could be costs, it could be risk. And they just want to in that moment, that young person just wants to hear a yes. And it's maybe putting down the quote, more important thing that we were doing to really be present and playful in that moment.

Perspective That Shrinks Worry

Naomi Mills 4:43

As we get older, of course, there are a lot of things that we might tell our children, or we're told as children. There's there's some great little phrases and tools that I think are very helpful to pick up again. Perspective being one of them. How often do you would you say to a young person, well, it's not going to matter tomorrow? Or is that going to matter in a week? And actually, for me, I love that idea of that perspective. I say it to myself sometimes when I my brain has gotten a little bit hooked on something or a bit worried about something. And I'm like, well, will this really matter in a month's time? And most often the answer is no. It won't even matter tonight or tomorrow. So it's a lovely way of using our minds and the way we, the things that we do and tell ourselves at different stages of our lives, kind of bringing back some of those tools for adulthood because they are just lost sometimes.

Fear Of Being Bad

Naomi Mills 5:41

Something I'm certainly experiencing myself, and I witness a lot of people experience as adults, is a fear, whether recognized or unrecognized, of starting something new, of being bad at something. It's one of the reasons it took me so long to even begin this podcast. And I felt absolutely incredible when I reached my first thousand downloads, which felt insane because I was afraid to even begin or be bad at something. When you've been a professional for 15 years and you're actually really good at what you do, and then you'd go on a sidestep into podcasting or it's teaching or it's writing or even starting a new hobby, going to a new class, something you know, I get it a lot with clients who would really like to maybe join a certain group or a class for socials or for exercise, hopefully, but of both, and they're like, oh, but I really don't feel comfortable going. Like, when did this happen? I don't mean that literally, but can you now notice this gentle but ever growing stronger aversion as we become adults, maybe as we move out of our kind of short-term thinking into our longer-term thinking brain of I don't feel comfortable being uncomfortable anymore. And so lots of the physical embodied work I do through retreats and events is helping adults become comfortable being uncomfortable. Because guess what? That's where all the best things in life happen. It's where you learn, it's where you build resilience. You may fall completely on your face and hate it, but you're always going to learn something, and the world isn't going to end. And people aren't going to change their perception of you in any great way because you didn't do something perfectly the first time, or you know, you tried something and you failed. And in fact, they're more likely to change their perception to think that you are a pretty cool human for giving it a go. So this episode today is me just really wanting to encourage you to reopen your mind past the things that you think you know and the things that you're comfortable with, but to play with more curiosity, to say yes to new things or things that feel a bit unusual or spontaneous, so that you can notice how that feels in your nervous system. Because, in my experience, your nervous system loves that. Your nervous system likes novelty, remember, it likes new, it it likes the unknown, it likes the dopamine rush of having done something, even if it felt a bit edgy or a bit scary. And I spoke two episodes ago about screen time and how from a nervous system lens, it's really you craving things potentially from the wrong source, or certainly not from a very efficient source, but you can get it in other places too, if we just kind of expand our ability to look beyond what seems really obvious and play a little bit more.

Mantras That Change Deep Beliefs

Naomi Mills 8:56

So, something I like to play with, and when done well, can be incredibly useful are mantras. Now I'm not talking about pretty Instagram mantras or thinking your way out of a problem. When I do mantra work with people, I'm trying to get down to the deepest layer of the sort of the negative, if you like. And if you're interested in mantras, we can do a whole episode on how to craft your own mantra. But we want to go right down to the deepest layer of what is the belief. Because if you changed that belief, is there a negative belief that you're holding that if you changed, if you did believe, that would change your life for the better? Because a mantra is a bit like a placebo or a nacebo in a different guise. It's a filter that you're putting on your life that you see your life through that's either making it better or not as good, depending on what that belief, that story is that you're holding. And a really powerful one for a lot of us is around our worth and productivity. And I remember working with somebody who was a very bright, bubbly, intelligent, successful business person in a relationship, has a family, has been working so hard to produce all this stuff and hold everybody up and be a really integral part of the household and the workplace, on some level, was deeply craving rest, nourishment, protection, because our nervous systems want a bit of everything, right? And we want to know that even when we're going, there's somebody somewhere safe that we can land. And they just weren't able to ask for it or express that or even realize it. And we dug and we dug and we dug and eventually got to the mantra. I am deeply loved even at rest. Like I am important even when I don't produce, and you could just see their face and their ability to say it, and they're like, oh. And that when I talk about mantras is what I mean, it's a statement that you don't yet believe, you don't believe it in yourselves at all. And we have a really cool little exercise that we do once we've got everybody's visceral mantras, the things that are hard to say, like even hard to speak, you know. But if you believed that, like if that person believed that they had value even at rest, what was that going to do for giving themselves permission to take the time and the breath and the space that they needed, that they so clearly needed, because their body was in fight-fight and they did feel overwhelmed and they loved their family and loved their work and loved all the production, but they were just were lacking that balance. And what they were missing was the permission to have the balance because of these deep-held beliefs, because their mindset given to us through childhood, through culture, through unconscious conditioning, through so many different places, not always received correctly either, or accurately, either, was holding their nervous system kind of captive in this one state, and they really wanted to shift it. So here's where the mind is creating the physiology, and playing with that, being curious can be a very powerful way of altering so many aspects of how you experience your life and your health.

Manifestation As Focus Plus Action

Naomi Mills 12:43

And so to kind of cap off the mindset part, it felt like I don't want to avoid talking about what you might know as manifestation. And I don't mean that in a in a kind of woo-woo spiritual way, manifestation is being really clear in your mind what it is you want to experience and then putting a load of action into it. But there's a lovely part in the middle where you know if you are looking at a white volvo, for example, suddenly you see white volvos everywhere when you've never even noticed one before. And that's because your subconscious mind has clocked, oh, the consciousness thinks this is important. I'm going to make sure it notices it. You think about joining a gym, suddenly you notice every gym you go by, or if you ever get pregnant or your partner gets pregnant, you suddenly notice everything about babies and pregnant people in the world that's always been there, but was never rated as important for you to consciously notice. And for me, manifestation works exactly like that. I focus very much on what I want my life to look like, how I want it to feel that sense of abundance, safety, fun, creativity. You know, I feel like, well, we have enough for what we need, we have choices, we have deep connection in relationships, and actually spending time consciously every day, just for a few minutes, to really fine-tune my brain on that is what I am looking for. What you're allowing it to do again is changing expectations, it's changing physiology, and it is causing your subconscious to make you alert to different situations and opportunities that are going to bring you closer to that. And for me, that's how manifestation works. That is my own personal sort of understanding of it. It's not that you think about something and it magically appears, but it means you become so focused on a path you want to go down that everything starts to align to allow that to happen. And which is why I think more about how I want to feel and experience life than what I'm physically doing. And it both works. I've done both because let me tell you, everything I have ever focused on mindfully in that way has in some way or other come to be.

Practices For A Grounded Life

Naomi Mills 15:14

And so it's such an important part of this whole nervous system lesson is that when we allow the system to run us, when we allow all our external environment to push us into fight or flight all the time, and we're in survival and we're concerned on a deep level about where the fear is, what's the next thing that's going to happen, what do I need to be alert for? When we can't take care of our own kind of neural pathways, when we can't soothe ourselves and keep ourselves grounded, we can't create the lives that we really want. And when we start from a place of, I am going to become aware of the stories my mind is telling me, I'm going to develop practices that help me separate my thoughts from myself. I'm going to very consciously do things that get me out of my brain and less online and more in person, on the ground, in my body, in real life, maybe doing something that feels a bit challenging so that I can build resilience and learn something about myself. All of these things then really give you the power and the inner technology to create a life that feels fulfilling and meaningful and purposeful for you. And that's the you are the answer brand in a nutshell. It's come and have a look at this picture and use it to your advantage. Use the way that we are innately wired, the stuff that we cannot change, we wouldn't want to change, but let's work with it rather than feeling a little bit out of control, a little bit like we don't understand what's going on. Yes, it's a lot, yes, it's a big picture, but my hope is that by sharing it with you for you know 10 to 15 minutes every week, that you will really get to feel your way back into your body, into health, and into your best possible life.

Questions And How To Connect

Naomi Mills 17:13

Next week, where I'm going to put the last 10 episodes all in a nice little neat bundle for you, tie up that mindset arc. And if you have any questions, any topics you want me to cover, anything that hasn't landed for you, then send me an email hello at uartheanswer.co.uk. You can find me on social media at yat underscore answer or leave a comment. And if you've got some time today, please think about leaving a review and sharing this with a friend. Have a great week. 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 been.