What happens when we stop listening long enough
Let me ask you something. When was the last time you actually stopped what you were doing because you were thirsty?
Not finished the email first. Not waited until you got home. Not thought “I’ll grab a glass in a minute” and then completely forgot.
Actually stopped, right then, and drank some water. For most of the women I see in clinic, that question lands with a kind of quiet recognition. ……
Because the honest answer is: “not recently.” Maybe not for a very long time. And thirst is just the beginning.
Your body is constantly talking to you
From the moment you wake up to the moment you finally lie down at night, your body is sending you signals.
Clear, consistent, biological signals that are designed — literally hardwired into your nervous system — to keep you functioning well.
Things like:
• Needing to urinate — your kidneys are doing their job, asking for a moment of your time
• Feeling thirsty — your body flags that your fluid balance needs attention
• Feeling hungry — your blood sugar and your gut hormones both gently (then not so gently) reminds you to eat
• Feeling tired — your brain and your adrenal system are asking you to ease the load
• Needing rest — not sleep necessarily, but a genuine pause, a moment to be still
• Bowel urges — your digestive system operating on its own rhythm, signalling it’s time
• The urge to take a deep breath — your respiratory system and your nervous system are both asking for more oxygen, asking you to slow down for just a second
These are not inconveniences. They are communication.
What happens when we ignore them long enough
Life gets busy. I understand that completely — I am in practice, I run a business, I am a primary caregiver, I know what it is to have a list that never quite empties.
And when life gets busy, we do something very human. We override. We hold on when our body says go.
We push through when our body says rest.
We grab something quick when our body says nourish me.
We breathe shallow and fast when our body is quietly asking for something deeper.
And for a while, the body adapts. It is remarkably good at compensating. That’s what it is built to do. But adaptation has a cost.
When you consistently hold your bladder, you can alter the signalling pathways that govern urinary function.
When you chronically suppress hunger, your blood sugar regulation and your gut hormone patterns start to shift — and not in the direction you want.
When you ignore bowel urges, your gut motility changes.
When you routinely override fatigue with caffeine and willpower, your cortisol rhythm and your mitochondrial function both pay a price. – Goodbye sleep and Hello muscle weakness and brain fog!!
And shallow breathing? That one is quietly running in the background for most busy women I see. Chronic shallow breathing keeps your nervous system in a low-grade state of stress, which affects everything from your digestion to your sleep to your hormones.
The signals do not go away. They just get louder. And eventually, they stop being signals and start being symptoms.
From signals to symptoms — the slow drift
This is the part that so many women do not connect until they are sitting across from me in clinic.
They come in with bloating, or constipation, or that heavy foggy fatigue that just won’t shift.
They come in with disrupted sleep or recurrent infections or hormonal symptoms that have crept up on them over years.
And they want to know what is wrong……. Very often, what I find is not a broken body. What I find is a body that has been communicating for a long time and has not been heard.
The constipation did not come out of nowhere. It came from years of suppressing bowel signals at inconvenient times, from rushed meals eaten standing up, from chronic low-grade dehydration that nobody noticed because the thirst signal had been overridden so many times it stopped registering clearly.
The fatigue did not come out of nowhere either. It came from years of running on stress hormones instead of genuine fuel, from skipping meals, from never quite resting enough, from a nervous system that has been operating in overdrive so consistently it has forgotten what calm feels like.
This is not about blame
I want to be clear about something, because I think this is important.
The women I work with are not ignoring their bodies out of carelessness. They are ignoring their bodies because they are holding an enormous amount.
Jobs, families, ageing parents, businesses, commitments that feel non-negotiable.
They have been conditioned — most of us have — to see their own needs as the thing that gets attended to last, if at all.
This isn’t about you doing something wrong. It is a pattern.
And patterns can be changed.
But the first step is recognising what is actually happening.
Because your body is not malfunctioning. It is responding to the environment you have been placing it in, day after day, year after year.
Something is off, yes — but it’s not you falling apart. It’s you being asked to pay attention
Starting to listen again
The good news — and I genuinely mean this — is that the body is also remarkably responsive when you start working with it rather than around it.
I am not asking you to overhaul your life. I am asking you to start with something much simpler…… Notice the signals.
When you feel the urge to go to the bathroom, go.
When you feel thirsty, drink.
When your body asks for food, eat something real.
When fatigue lands on you in the afternoon, ask yourself what it is actually telling you — not just “how can I push through this,” but “what does my body need right now?”
And every so often, take a slow, full breath. Not because it is on your to-do list. Because your nervous system is waiting for it.
These are not small things. After nearly thirty years in clinical practice, I can tell you that the women who make the most meaningful shifts in how they feel are almost always the ones who start by learning to listen to themselves again.
If your body has been trying to get your attention and you are not sure where to start, that is exactly what I am here for. The answers are usually less complicated than you think — and they often begin with you simply deciding that what your body is saying actually matters.
Warmly,
Teressa,
Naturopath | Clinical Nutritionist | Biochemist
