Your Body is Talking, Are You Actually Listening?
Dee Mani is a holistic healing advocate and founder of My Way CBD, who transformed her life after overcoming an aggressive breast cancer diagnosis using natural remedies. She is an author, entrepreneur, and speaker dedicated to empowering others through the healing potential of cannabis and holistic wellness practices.
We have become incredibly good at silencing our bodies, which has somehow become the norm. A headache appears, so we take something for it. We get acid reflux, so we suppress the acid. We can’t sleep, so we look for something to make us sleep. We are exhausted, so we drink more coffee. We become constipated, bloated or uncomfortable and search for something that will make the symptom disappear. But how often do we actually stop and ask the most important question of all: why is this happening?
Your body cannot sit you down and have a conversation with you, so it communicates in a completely different way, through pain, fatigue, inflammation, headaches, digestive problems, skin problems, disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, changes in bowel habits and that general feeling that something just isn’t quite right. Yet instead of listening to those changes, we have been conditioned to silence them as quickly as possible, and I think that is where we have gone very wrong when it comes to understanding our health.
The symptom isn’t necessarily where the problem started
One of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that the place where we feel the symptom must also be where the problem lies, but it simply isn’t always that straightforward. If somebody cannot sleep, the immediate focus becomes sleep, but what is actually keeping them awake? Is it chronic stress, too much caffeine, blood sugar fluctuations, hormonal changes, digestive discomfort, an overstimulated nervous system, or something happening emotionally that they have never really dealt with?
The same applies to almost every symptom we experience. If somebody continually suffers from headaches, why do they keep getting them? If they are bloated after almost every meal, why? If they are exhausted despite spending eight hours in bed, why? If their skin suddenly changes, why? I am not suggesting that we should diagnose ourselves or assume that every symptom has some sinister hidden meaning, but I do think we need to rediscover something incredibly basic, which is curiosity about our own bodies.
Instead of only asking, “What can I take for this?” maybe we should also start asking, “What could be contributing to this?” That one simple change in thinking can completely alter the way we approach our health and stop us from constantly treating the end result without ever looking at what may have come before it.
Your body leaves clues
Our bodies are performing an extraordinary balancing act every second of every day, regulating temperature, blood sugar, digestion, circulation, hormones, fluid balance, immune activity and countless other processes without us consciously doing anything at all. So when the body repeatedly begins telling us that something feels wrong, surely that deserves our attention.
Constant exhaustion is information. Recurring digestive problems are information. Poor sleep is information. Persistent headaches are information. Skin flare-ups are information, and pain is information. None of those things automatically tell us exactly what the cause is, but they do give us somewhere to start looking, and sometimes what the body needs is not particularly complicated.
It may need better nutrition, more water, proper sleep, movement, sunlight, less alcohol, less ultra-processed food, more time outdoors, better stress management, improved digestion, support for a nutrient deficiency, or simply the chance to rest properly. We have become so accustomed to searching for complicated solutions that sometimes we completely overlook the basics, when in reality the basics are often where we should have started.
Stress does not stay inside your head
Another mistake we make is separating mental and physical health as though they exist in completely different bodies, when of course they don’t. Stress creates very real physical changes because when we perceive a threat or pressure, the nervous system responds. Our heart rate can increase, our muscles can tense, digestion can alter, sleep can become disrupted and stress hormones are released. This is useful when we genuinely need that response, but it becomes a very different story when the body is living in that state for weeks, months, or even years.
Financial pressure, unhappy relationships, work stress, caring responsibilities, lack of sleep, constant notifications, social media, rushing from one thing to another and never truly stopping can leave somebody living in a nearly permanent state of tension. Then we wonder why the body eventually begins complaining.
When somebody tells me they are exhausted, I don’t just want to know how many hours they sleep. I want to know what their life looks like because health does not exist separately from the life you are living, and I think this is something we still massively underestimate.
We throw the word stress around so casually that it can almost sound harmless, but there is a huge difference between having a stressful day and living in an environment where your nervous system rarely feels safe enough to switch off. The body does not separate emotional stress from physical stress in the neat way we sometimes imagine it does, and while I would never claim that stress is responsible for every illness, I do believe it needs to be taken far more seriously as part of the bigger picture.
Pay attention to your gut
The digestive system is one of the clearest examples of symptoms becoming normalised, because people will often tell you they have been bloated for years as though it is simply part of who they are, while others live with reflux, constipation, diarrhoea or discomfort and have almost accepted that this is just how their digestive system works.
But if something happens repeatedly, it is worth asking why. What are you eating? How quickly are you eating? Are you actually chewing your food properly? Are you eating while stressed or rushing? Are you getting enough fibre and fluids? Do certain foods repeatedly make you feel worse?
Digestion plays a fundamental role in breaking down food and absorbing the nutrients our bodies need, and it is closely connected with immune and metabolic processes too, so ignoring digestive problems indefinitely makes very little sense. Your body may have been trying to get your attention for a very long time, but because those symptoms have become familiar, you may have stopped seeing them as signals altogether.
Don’t wait until the whisper becomes a shout
The part I feel most strongly about is the fact that we are very good at pushing through. We push through exhaustion because we are busy. We ignore poor sleep because life has to continue. We normalise pain, we become used to bloating, and we stay in situations that are draining us because we convince ourselves that we can cope. We live stressed for so long that eventually we forget what being relaxed even feels like. Sometimes we ignore the whispers until our body has no choice but to shout.
My own health journey completely changed the way I viewed the human body because it taught me to stop looking at health as something we only deal with once a diagnosis arrives and start seeing it as something we should be participating in every day. Looking back now, I can see that my own body had been trying to get my attention long before I was diagnosed with cancer, but at the time I did exactly what so many people do, which was to manage the symptoms instead of asking why they were there.
Around a year before my diagnosis, I developed a cough that I simply could not shake off. After that came an unexplained rash followed by extreme fatigue, but I never once connected any of those things to the enormous amount of stress I was living under at the time. I was in an abusive relationship, my nervous system was constantly overwhelmed, and yet I still saw each symptom as a separate problem that needed fixing, rather than asking myself whether my body was trying to tell me that something deeper was going on.
I used steroid creams for the rash and took antibiotics for the cough, neither of which resolved the problem. If anything, I now look back and feel that I was simply adding more pressure to a body that was already struggling. At the time, I did not understand any of this because I had spent most of my life learning how to cope, how to keep going, and how to function through stress without ever really questioning what that stress was doing to me physically. It took a cancer diagnosis for me to finally stop and look at the whole picture.
The root can go back much further than you think
When I look back now, I personally believe that the roots of what I was experiencing went back much further than the abusive relationship I was in at the time. I was raised in a toxic household and carried a great deal of unresolved childhood trauma into adulthood without ever really understanding the effect it had on me. Like many people, I had learned to survive what happened, but I had never properly dealt with it.
Then, years later, I found myself in an abusive relationship, which created another overwhelming period of stress, and I believe that became the trigger that pushed an already exhausted system even further. I am not saying that trauma or stress alone caused my cancer, because cancer is far more complex than that, and I would never reduce it to a single cause. But I do believe that unresolved trauma, chronic stress and the state of my nervous system formed a very important part of my own personal health picture.
By the time I was diagnosed, I can only describe my central nervous system as being completely torn to pieces. I had spent years living in survival mode without even recognising it as survival mode, and when you have lived that way for long enough, it becomes your normal.
That diagnosis forced me to look at everything, not just what I was eating or what supplements I was taking, but the life I was living, the people I was surrounded by, the stress I was carrying, the trauma I had buried and the way I had trained myself to push through everything instead of listening to what my body was telling me.
That was the point where I began to understand that health is not just about food, exercise or supplements. Sometimes the root is emotional, sometimes it is environmental, sometimes it is relational, and sometimes it goes all the way back to things that happened years before we ever became physically unwell.
Your life experiences can affect your health
When we talk about root causes, people often immediately think about food, toxins, nutrient deficiencies, poor sleep or lack of exercise, and all of those things can absolutely form part of the picture, but sometimes we also need to ask what has happened to the person.
What have they lived through? What are they still carrying? What relationships are they surrounded by? Do they ever feel safe enough to switch off? Are they permanently anxious? Are they suppressing grief, fear, anger or trauma because they believe they need to be strong? Are they living in an environment that keeps their nervous system on constant alert?
I think these questions are just as important as asking what somebody eats because the mind and body are not separate, and you cannot put one through years of emotional strain and assume the other will remain completely unaffected.
For me, healing therefore became about far more than changing my diet or taking supplements. It meant looking at the life I had created around myself, understanding my past, learning boundaries, protecting my peace, removing myself from situations that kept me in survival mode and finally understanding the difference between merely coping and actually feeling safe.
9 years later, I listen differently
After I was declared to have no evidence of disease (NED), I made my own personal decision not to continue with routine imaging because I did not want repeated radiation exposure unless I felt it was necessary. That was my choice, and I am not suggesting that anybody else should make the same decision, because follow-up after cancer is individual and everyone needs to decide what feels right for them.
For the first two years after being declared clear, I continued with regular blood work. Over time, I found myself relying more and more on knowing my own baseline and paying attention to changes in my body. Now, nine years later, I feel more in tune with myself than I ever have before.
I practise mindfulness, I protect my peace far more than I used to, and I care for my mind just as much as I care for my physical body. I pay attention when something feels different instead of immediately overriding it and carrying on. I also listen to my intuition in a way I never did before because I have learned that your body often gives you information long before you consciously understand what is going on.
I genuinely cannot remember the last time I was properly unwell, and I am not saying that mindfulness or intuition makes somebody immune to illness, because of course it does not. But what I do know is that the relationship I have with my body now is completely different from the relationship I had with it before cancer. Before my diagnosis, I thought, worried, coped and pushed through. Now I listen.
Become curious about your own body
I’m a huge believer in people becoming active participants in their own health, but that doesn’t mean obsessing over every sensation or refusing medical advice. It means knowing your own body well enough to recognise when something has changed and being willing to investigate why.
Notice patterns and ask yourself questions. When did the symptom begin? What was happening in your life at the time? What makes it better? What makes it worse? Has anything changed in your diet, sleep, environment or stress levels? How are your relationships? How does your body feel around certain people? Are you actually resting, or are you simply collapsing at the end of another exhausting day?
One of the biggest things I have learned is that symptoms should not always be treated as an inconvenience to get rid of as quickly as possible. Sometimes they are information, sometimes they are warning signs, and sometimes they are the body’s way of trying to get your attention before something becomes much harder to ignore.
That does not mean living in fear of every headache, every rash or every tired day, because that would be just as unhealthy, but it does mean paying attention when something persists, changes or repeatedly comes back. Your body should not have to scream before you acknowledge what it has been whispering for months or even years.
I wish I had understood that before my own diagnosis, but I understand it now, and that has completely changed the way I view health, healing and my own body. Your body is communicating with you every single day, and the question is whether you are actually listening.
Read more from Dee Mani
Dee Mani, Natural Health Consultant, Best-Selling Author & Founder of My Way CBD
Dee Mani is a Natural Health Consultant, bestselling author and founder of the award-winning My Way CBD. With a professional background in pharmaceuticals and a personal journey that reshaped her approach to health following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2017, Dee is dedicated to educating and empowering others through nutrition, lifestyle and evidence-informed natural therapies.
