The Wellness Habit We Like to Skip

Most days I’m knee-deep in conversations about postpartum muscle building and why eating the appropriate amount of protein does, in fact, make a difference. Those things matter. But there’s a complex layer beneath the habits and the protein math that drives the whole process, and it might be the most powerful lever you have: your mindset.

And no, I don’t mean that in a positive-vibes-only kind of way. I’m talking about the evidence-based, your-thoughts-physically-affect-your-body kind of way. Unfortunately, it’s easy to gloss over this stuff because we, as humans, like the concreteness of tangible things. We like data. It’s why so many Type A women I work with gravitate to step counts and macros. However, what you deeply believe about your health and your body has a direct impact on everything from your nervous system and your hormones to your ability to change anything and everything in your life.

For years I would have written this off as woo-woo, easy to dismiss as another wellness buzzword. But here’s the thing about your brain: it doesn’t fully distinguish between a perceived threat, like catastrophizing every symptom you feel, and an actual one, like your 2.5-year-old catapulting himself off the couch.

When you believe something is wrong with you, your nervous system responds accordingly. Maybe you carry the story that you have chronic problems with your lower back or that you always feel awful before your period. Whatever it is, your nervous system does its thing - it becomes more vigilant, scanning for evidence that the story is, without a shadow of a doubt, true.

Stress responses get amplified (they’re triggered more easily and harder to turn off). Cortisol stays elevated. Inflammation lingers. Digestion slows down. Sleep gets wonky. Basically, your body stays in a low-grade state of fight or flight. And not because of an immediate physical danger, but because of the narrative running in the background, like the TV after you’ve fallen asleep.

Quiiiiick caveat here: I'm absolutely not dismissing physical pain. Acute and chronic pain are real (I’m no stranger to them), whether that's a broken bone or a bulging disc or all the aches and discomfort that hitch a ride during pregnancy. Mindset work doesn't always replace medical care. But it should work in tandem with it. So even with a diagnosis that's objectively physical, your mindset still shapes how much inflammation shows up around it, how intense the pain feels day to day, and in many ways, how quickly your body recovers.

Piqued your interest? Dr. John Sarno spent decades treating chronic pain patients through exactly this lens, and Nicole Sachs built her JournalSpeak method on the same premise. In essence, that for a lot of persistent pain, the nervous system is running the show, and treating the emotion underneath it matters as much as treating the body itself.

I’m not trying to make you feel guilty for how you feel. I just want you to recognize that the stories you repeat to yourself, about your body, your health, your worth, your ability to heal, aren’t neutral. They’re instructions your nervous system is listening to. And when those stories shift, your capacity for healing (and for that matter, the relationship with your body) can shift with them.

Research in the field of mind-body medicine continues to show that belief in one’s ability to heal is one of the strongest predictors of actual healing. As I mentioned, belief doesn’t replace medicine or nutrition, but it does alter the internal environment in which your body operates. A nervous system that feels safe is a nervous system that can rest, digest, repair, and produce hormones the way it’s designed to.

If you’ve been reading here a while, you already know that stress and hormones are deeply intertwined. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which suppresses progesterone, disrupts ovulation, impairs estrogen metabolism, destabilizes blood sugar, and increases inflammation. I know, it’s not exactly the list that makes your cortisol levels drop. And if you want to dig deeper, pop back into my archives because I’ve written about most of these pieces on Substack individually.

But here’s the part that gets overlooked: stress isn’t just external. It’s not just your job, your to-do list, your kid(s) waking up before 6 am, or the group text thread that won’t hit the brakes. Some of the most persistent stress your body carries is internal. It’s the pressure to be everything to everyone. It’s the belief that rest is lazy. It’s the self-criticism running on a loop in the background. It’s the repressed emotions you’ve never had a chance to process because you’ve been too busy holding it all together.

Your body holds onto all of that. Over time, it can show up as symptoms that feel purely physical. Think tension, fatigue, digestive issues, hormonal imbalance, pain with no clear explanation. The mind and body aren’t separate systems. They’re the same system.

The most impactful mindset shifts usually come from intentional, low-effort practices rather than Pinterest-y overhauls. These are my tried-and-true reccs: