It sounded right. It didn’t work.

This morning I got an email from a coach I follow. She described the stress of a busy day — too many open tabs in her head, heart beating too fast. Then she meditated for twenty minutes, and everything melted away. Her body went soft. She felt light. Reset.

She wanted me to know I could have that too.

And I read it thinking:

that would make me worse.

Not because there’s anything wrong with meditation. Not because she’s lying about what it does for her. But because my nervous system doesn’t work that way. It never has.

When I sit still with stress in my body, the stress doesn’t dissolve. It gets louder. The walls come closer. The restlessness turns into something heavier — not calm, but a kind of trapped feeling that has nothing to do with peace.

What actually regulates me is movement. Jumping. Walking fast through trees. Activation, not stillness. My body doesn’t need to be talked down. It needs to move through.

I’ve known this about myself for a long time. But it took a doctor to give me permission to believe it.

When I was a student, I had terrible headaches. Constant. The kind that eat your days. Everyone had the same advice: relax more. Do less. Stop pushing yourself so hard.

So I tried. I pulled back. I rested. And I felt worse — not just physically, but in every way. Less engaged, less like myself, and the headaches didn’t budge.

Then I sat across from a doctor — an experienced woman who looked me in the eyes and said something no one else had said. She told me about a family member who’d been given the same advice: just slow down. And how that advice had made her miserable, because it went against everything she actually was. The doctor said she saw the same pattern in me.

She said: if you stop your engagement, your activation, you won’t get better. You’ll just be unhappy on top of being in pain. Keep being you. And let’s find the actual cause.

She found it. It was my eyes. Not my lifestyle. Not my ambition. Not the fact that I cared about too many things. My eyes.

Everyone else had been treating the wrong problem — and prescribing a cure that was itself a kind of harm.

I think about this a lot in my work.

Because the people I talk to are often carrying the same wrong prescription. Someone — a coach, a book, an Instagram post, a well-meaning friend — has told them the answer is to do less. Slow down. Simplify. Find stillness.

And for some people, that’s exactly right.

But for others, the problem was never the pace. It was what they were carrying. The wrong things in the wrong pack. And being told to sit down with all of that still on their back doesn’t help. It just makes them feel broken for not finding the stillness restful.

The answer isn’t always less. Sometimes it’s different. Sometimes it’s taking out what doesn’t belong so the walking feels right again.

That doctor didn’t tell me to stop moving. She told me to keep going — and helped me find what was actually wrong.

That’s the work I want to do too.