When Your Problem Is Your Body Working Correctly
Understanding The Complexity Of Human Psychophysiology
When Your Problem Is Your Body Working Correctly
Understanding The Complexity Of Human Psychophysiology
Written by a human, for humans, always.
Have you ever had a problem...
Where you are looking for what is going wrong...
But you simply cannot find anything that seems to be broken?
Everything appears to be going right...
But there is clearly a problem?
Have you ever then asked the question...
If the problem is that something is working correctly?
Let me give you an example.
I was speaking with a client who was telling me they were worried they had a serious health problem because they were waking up in the middle of the night.
They had tracked that they were regularly having a cortisol spike...
And they feared it was being caused by a medical condition that had not been diagnosed.
The first thing I did...
Was tell them to go get checked by their primary care physician...
Because I’m an ethical person and I am not that kind of doctor...
I do not diagnose people.
I also know...
That everything that happens has some sort of explanation.
So, after they confirmed they were going to see their primary care physician about it to be safe...
We also explored what things could potentially be causing my client to wake up in the middle of the night with an increase in their cortisol.
We considered some regular factors...
Overall stress levels in their work and life...
Their workout schedule...
Their nutrient intake and whether it was adequate...
Emotional considerations in their relationships with others...
Things like blue light and noise levels.
One thing seemed to be consistent...
Everything seemed to be working as it should.
No changes in their workouts or nutrition that would warrant the sudden change.
Relationships had been improving with others.
Stress had been decreasing significantly.
Nothing seemed to be wrong.
But then...
They mentioned something...
They had recently gotten a new pet who was waking them up in the middle of the night before...
But that pet had started to become accustomed to the new environment and was sleeping during the night.
I knew exactly what was happening...
And I asked my client whether the cortisol spikes matched when the pet had been waking them up in the middle of the night.
Yes.
Just like that, we knew that the problem was not something being wrong...
The problem was that their body was working correctly.
See...
This client’s body had begun to develop a habit.
The pet would need some sort of attention at a point in the night...
The body would spike cortisol to wake up the client...
This way, they would be able to attend to whatever the pet needed.
It happened enough...
That the body began to naturally time out the cortisol spike to prepare and be ready to take care of the pet.
It is the exact same thing that happens to parents.
A baby starts to cry...
The body pushes us to wake up to make sure the baby is safe...
And if the pattern is consistent enough...
A habit is formed, and the body will preemptively prepare to take care of the child...
Or in this case, the pet.
Everything was working perfectly...
Just not as expected.
It is still wise to check with a primary care physician...
Just to be safe...
But all signs indicated that the body was just doing what it was designed to do.
If the pet has started to fall asleep according to a regular schedule...
The body will begin to adjust accordingly.
Here is the important takeaway...
Sometimes the problems we experience...
Are not actually problems.
They are byproducts of how our bodies are naturally designed to work.
Nothing is broken...
There is nothing inherently wrong with us...
The only challenge is that so many people do not realize how they are designed.
That is both good news and bad news.
It is good that nothing is truly wrong...
But the bad news is that when you do not know that...
You may go looking for something to be wrong...
Creating new stressors...
Changing how you are living and taking care of yourself...
Which then could actually create a real problem over time.
Not to mention that some individuals within the Western Medical Establishment are more than happy to prescribe medications...
Even when they have not thoroughly studied the potential problems...
A side effect of being overworked and how they are trained to think and handle situations within the limited time they see patients (13 to 24 minutes on average).
What I am trying to say here...
Is that when you do not know how you are designed...
How you operate at your best...
How to determine when something is working improperly...
How different patterns work...
What different systems naturally do...
It is extremely likely that you are going to believe that the problem you are experiencing is being caused by something going wrong...
When your real challenge is that everything is going right...
You are just unaware of it.
How often do you think that people go trying to fix things that are not broken?
As I’ve come to learn more and more about human psychophysiology...
The answer is clear...
Very regularly, people attempt to fix things when nothing is broken.
The consequences...
Are becoming more and more severe.
In our quests to try to fix things...
We end up changing other things that are also not broken...
Which then causes them to break.
We are so quick as humans to assume that when things are not happening the way we imagine they should...
That it means that something is broken.
But we need to learn that is not always the case.
Sometimes things are not actually broken...
Sometimes things are working exactly as they were designed to work...
But we simply were not aware of the consequences of that.
What this means...
Is that we should become more interested in how things are designed to work...
So that we can determine whether things are actually broken and therefore need to be fixed...
Or...
If things are just working as they were meant to and we simply need to adjust as necessary to get the results we desire.
To Your Sageship,
Cody
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