What I Realised In This Mindset Series

Welcome to the final episode in our "mindset arc"! Here I put together everything we covered over the last 10 episodes, including the realisations I've had along the way.

So, if your phone is always within reach, your diary is full, your mind won’t switch off and somehow that’s considered normal. We’re closing the mindset arc by naming what sits underneath so much “failed mindset work”: a nervous system that’s exhausted, overstimulated and chasing relief. When you understand that pattern, you stop blaming yourself for needing comfort, certainty and distraction, and you can finally choose change that your body can actually sustain.

We talk about why consistency creates transformation, even when the steps feel tiny, and why “common” habits like overthinking, scrolling and running on autopilot can still be deeply unhealthy. I share one of the most empowering reframes I’ve learned: you are not your thoughts. Your brain is built to predict danger and keep you safe, which means it can sound convincing even when it’s wrong. Learning to witness thoughts rather than obey them changes everything from boundaries to burnout.

To ground it, I tell the story of a skydive that was meant to be meaningful and became truly terrifying, and what it taught me about feeling fear and still being safe. We also get honest about the wellness world: healing, mindset and nervous system regulation are nuanced, and quick fixes often collapse under real life. Hope isn’t pretending things are fine; it’s the spark that makes new behaviour possible.

If you want practical tools, we explore gentle ways to reset your system, build self-trust and create a positive snowball effect, plus why community matters when you’re trying to normalise calm. If it resonates, subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find their way back to their body.

Transcript

Welcome And 30-Week Reflection

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 30 of the You Are the Answer podcast. And I was just taking a moment to myself there to be like, wow, 30 weeks of consistently putting this out there, that is quite cool. And I have no expectations for this podcast at all, other than the sincere hope that it helps at least somebody when they come across it, trusting that the right people will find it at the right time. But this last nine episodes has been the mindset arc. And I guess I have learned through my own experiences and a lot of the reading I've done, and mainly the living of the advice that I've been given and read over the years, that consistency does create change, and it's through small little things done every day that the bigger picture I can look back and go, oh, I've been doing that for six months when it felt like this insurmountable mountain at one point. And of course, you can do the same yourself with anything that you wish to put your mind to in life when we move through the discomfort. And that's what we're going to talk about today. The last few weeks on the podcast, I've been exploring

Consistency Beats Quick Fixes

Naomi Mills 2:00

everything from placebo to projection, boundaries, productivity. We've talked about dopamine, stress, toxic positivity, and of course the nervous system all through that lens. And as I've been reflecting on how to pull this kind of arc together, I think there is a deeper pattern underneath it. And it's that I don't believe anybody is bad at setting their mindset. And it's one of the five pillars we always give people in chiropractic. You know, what's your nervous system doing, your nutrition, your hydration, your exercise, your sleep, and your mindset? And people are going to go, oh, I think it's a lot easier to work on these other things over here. And it's not because you're bad at mindset work, it's I really believe many of us are just exhausted, that we're tired. I think we live in environments that keep our nervous systems constantly stimulated, a bit distracted, overwhelmed, and certainly a little bit on alert. And then we struggle to kind of shift our minds out of that loop. And I do think that many of us are hungry for a quick and easy way to feel better because that's what our nervous systems want. We want relief, and a lot of the time, even something small can feel a lot. Like I just said about this podcast. We can make these mountains out of molehills in our minds and simply never get to beginning. We know that we love dopamine, that feel-good hormone. We know many of us like certainty and control. We like comfort. We also like to be distracted. And that is our survival wiring. It's how, as human beings, we have come to evolve and live for many thousands of years. And perhaps one of the biggest causes of suffering now in our modern culture is that this low-level stress has become our normal. Being tired but wired, considered totally normal. Being an overthinker, oh yeah, yeah, me too. Scrolling ever like looking around any public space and everyone's on their phones. Yeah, that's pretty common. People not switching off. Oh, I'm doing this, then I'm doing this, then I'm doing this, then I'm doing this, then I'm doing this, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not having time

Why Modern Life Keeps Us Wired

Naomi Mills 4:35

to call each other's space to see each other. Pretty normal. And if we're honest, feeling disconnected from ourselves is also pretty normal. But normal doesn't mean healthy, and I have a whole bit about this in my book. Because just because something is common, just because many of us share the experience, it doesn't make it normal or optimal or what we were made for. And I don't know whether this came across in the mindset series or not, so I really want to underline it here. One of my biggest things that I've learned over the years is to recognise that I am not my thoughts. And I'm sure we will return to this concept perhaps in the teen series that's coming up. Just because your brain says something, it doesn't make it true. There's a phrase I always like to repeat that the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. It's literally the supercomputer we should run our information through, but it doesn't make it the master, the one that makes all the decisions about the actions we're going to take. Because really, your brain is there to protect us and to predict, try and predict what's going to happen, to scan for danger, and ultimately it's there to keep us safe. And when I've learned to notice my thoughts and witness them and become curious about them, it's made

You Are Not Your Thoughts

Naomi Mills 6:05

a huge difference to I would say it was one of the most empowering shifts of my life. And a good kind of story to share about this is four years ago now. I went to do a skydive. I don't know if I've told this story on the podcast yet or not, but I went to do a skydive to recognize the 10-year anniversary of losing my mum to stomach cancer. So I did it raising money for cancer research and did it with her in my mind. And I thought I'm definitely going to really enjoy this experience. And it actually turned out to be one of the genuinely most terrifying things I've ever done. And

Skydiving Fear And Chosen Intentions

Naomi Mills 6:51

I was completely shell-shocked when I came down from that plane, and my my husband like kind of went like, How was it? How was it? And he just saw my face and he was like, Oh my goodness, what happened? I was like, I'll tell you in the car. It was so terrifying. I was literally running in the air thinking I was going to die, and I remember very viscerally feeling that I may never see my family again, and why on earth was I doing this? It was horrendous. And then, I mean, any regular human would then be like, Okay, well, we're not doing that again, like that's off the table. But when I went to do my mastery training for my firewalking, personal mastery is really about being able to see all of that noise, to feel the genuine physiology of thinking you're going to die, remember how awful it was the first time, and then choose how it's going to feel the second time. So setting a very strong intention that when I would jump out of the plane a second time, I could create and choose my own experience. Now, for whatever reason, the universe didn't want me to do a second skydive yet, because even though I was all kitted up and signed up and ready to go, the weather didn't work. But the lesson did. The fact that I was able to, and I absolutely would have gone up in that plane, and I was absolutely able to accept that I didn't have to just try and think my way out of something that I could notice everything that was going on both in my body, in my brain, from this like third space, this higher self, this awareness, and choose whether or not I wanted to do it again and create a new experience for myself was genuinely incredibly empowering. And I know now that I can feel like genuine fear and I can still survive. I know that I can do things that are really uncomfortable and put myself through them again. That my thoughts are not going to predict what's going to be the outcome of something. And just essentially, I'm a lot more capable than my nervous system sometimes allows me to believe. And I really think that's where the healing work sits. This is not about never experiencing stress or fear or negativity, but it's about slowly and consistently and consciously updating your own understanding of what is possible and what is safe and what is survivable.

Hope Healing And Real Nuance

Naomi Mills 9:42

And sometimes I feel like the wellness world can be a little bit simplistic. There's cute phrases and quick fixes and oversimplified advice for what is an incredibly complex nervous system. Every part of healing is really nuanced, and I see arguments going on online about body-brain connection, and does the body keep the score, does it not? And it's it's it's a nuance. It's always uh, well, you're just reading it in that way, and that's not quite the way that that meant, and we're not being completely literal here, but we do know that you know our mindset is affecting our epigenetics, for example. Like there's there's a lot of fine detail work here. And my job on the podcast is always to try and keep it as broad and as simple, as accessible as I can, so that you will go and do some deep dives on these areas that you feel drawn to. And I will tell you also, the ones that really make you feel uncomfortable, those are the ones to go for. It's very often the thing that we are avoiding the most, which is the one that's gonna break like bring us the greatest amount of reward. And over the last few weeks, I really hope that we've established that you can't just think positive in a body that feels deeply unsafe or mindset your way, or it'll be fine, I'm fine, your way out of chronic overwhelm, while completely ignoring what your body and your physiology is doing. And that you don't need to be perfect at any of this to slowly begin to build your own self-trust and your own understanding of how your system is experiencing the world and how it's communicating with you. And that's really important. And for me, when I say I trust my body doesn't mean I think I'm never going to be sick or stressed or sad or heartbroken. But I do believe that my body is adaptive, that it's protective, that it's always trying to move me towards healing. And that's been true, some like some of the hardest parts of my own life, including when I had to recover from two pulmonary embolisms, so blood clots in my heart. Like that was the big teacher for me because there was no medical intervention, there was the trust that my body would recover and it needed rest. Ironically, if you know my my life story, there might have been a message in there. But it's not about pretending or about you know blind positivity. For me, it's hope, it's having that little spark of hope. And I talked about it in last week's episode where I talked about the filter that we're putting on things, or it might have been the one before actually on placebo and nacebo, where when you give somebody with chronic disease hope, hope that things can be better than they are, not that they can be fixed or magically the disease goes away, but they hope that they don't have to live at the low level of life and health they're experiencing. That changes things on a very real level. And I really think understanding how all of this stuff fits together creates that hope.

Compassionate Steps That Rewire Patterns

Naomi Mills 12:56

Understanding your nervous system and how you are wired. So you understand why you're struggling to switch off or that you feel exhausted, why rest can feel really inconvenient or uncomfortable, why they self-sabotage, why you keep reaching for the dopamine, that chocolate for the brain, and you struggle to stay consistent. But that's all okay because you know why, and you know it's because of how you're wired, and the only way to change that wiring is actually to soften, is to be more compassionate. It's about taking the small steps that you can take, the consistent ones, that slowly over time allows all of that stuff to shift. And I really hope it takes away any shame or the sense that I can't do it and it's not for me, because it is for all of us. And when you start to get a little bit more compassionate with yourself, you bring about your own feeling of safety and being okay, and you can take the pressure off yourself a little bit, and again, that creates the space for some change. And I see it all the time in practice, and sometimes I am that catalyst as the practitioner because someone can like lie down, let me help you, let me do this thing to your body that allows it to move into a healing state so that you can have the capacity to take back the reins of your nervous system, and you can do that through chiropractic, you can do it through meditation, you can do it through grounding, you can do it through many, many means. It's all about finding the one that is going to be your little spark of change and growing it because it's never one thing, it's all the right things at once in a very consistent, gentle, conscious way. And I find lots of my clients, once they begin to understand their nervous system, instead of feeling kind of attacked by it, they become more hopeful. And ironically, that's when they start to usually succeed, and they have what I call the positive snowball effect where they've started here, but they're just organically without effort, saying, Oh, I stopped doing this, I've started doing this, I've changed that, I'm sleeping really well, I've got more energy, I've got more emotional capacity. And I'm like, of course you do, because we've finally given the system a bit of a reset and the space. And I also think that's why community is so important. It's I hold the events that I hold as much for myself as for everybody else, because I need the consistent connection, the reminders of this work and of this, the just the power of being around other people and other people that are doing what you're doing, other people who are starting to normalize being calm and not being overwhelmed, and having a quiet diary and saying no to things, because sometimes you just need to surround yourself in a community that's helping you buck your trend and your cultural conditioning, and that is a great source of strength. I love that so many of my clients and they come to me because of how I see the world and operate in life, but they very often are doing the same as me, and I find that reciprocal very, very helpful to keep me on the path and away from the overwhelm and the burnout that I experienced in the early part of my career. Because this work is never done, it's never finished, it's never a fixed point. Your nervous system is going to be adapting and responding every moment for the rest of your life, and this is why having the understanding and the tools and the consistency are going to be so important because it's never finished, it's always evolving.

Community Curiosity And Closing Invitation

Naomi Mills 16:59

And so, to end the mindset series, I just want to give you permission to stop running on autopilot, to stop letting the outside world dictate your inner world if you can, and instead invite you to become curious about your thoughts, your body, your patterns, your triggers, your stress responses, your joy, your exhaustion, your relationships, and what you need. Because being curious, taking away all the pressure and the expectation and the oh being curious will give you the space to take a small step forward. Just when I was like, oh, I'm curious. What if I did start the part? Like, what would I say? What would my first episode be about? What would that look like? What would that sound like? And then before you know it, you're 30 episodes in, having the time of your life, whether or not somebody listens to it, whether or not somebody likes it, but really appreciating it as a connecting creative endeavor. So that's why the podcast is called You Are the Answer, because none of us have to heal on our own. We don't magically know everything, but really because our bodies are communicating with us all the time. And this work isn't about becoming somebody new or different, but it is really about learning how to listen. So thank you very much for being part of the mindset series. I really hope these episodes have helped you feel more seen, more hopeful, or more connected to yourself. And if there is a person in your life that you would feel would benefit from some of this, please feel welcome to share it with them. I will be back next week with episode 31 and a whole new arc. So join me then. Thank you for joining me on YouAre 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.