Dr.Mirella

The advice on stress has been consistent for thirty years. Reduce it. Manage it. Avoid it where possible. Most of the wellness industry points in the same direction: stress is the enemy.
I want to challenge that.
In thirty-five years of practice the people who suffer most from stress are not always the ones who have the most of it. They are often the ones with the most complicated relationship with it. Who fight it, fear it, interpret every stress response as a sign that something is wrong.
Stress is not the problem. Unresolved stress is the problem. Chronic stress is the problem. But stress itself, in the right dose and with the right recovery, is how the body gets stronger. The research on this is clear. Moderate stress improves performance, sharpens memory and strengthens the immune system.
The problem is stress without recovery. The body was designed for a rhythm of activation and rest. Modern life has disrupted that rhythm almost completely. The stressors are chronic rather than acute. The activation runs continuously and the recovery never fully arrives. That is what damages the body.
Stop trying to eliminate stress. Start trying to complete it. Move your body after a difficult experience. Allow the emotional completion of hard things rather than suppressing it. Build genuine recovery into your life as the other half of a rhythm the body requires.
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It is the middle of summer. Time off is either here or coming. And yet the laptop is open, the emails are being checked, or the body is on holiday while the mind is very much still at work.
This is not a failure of willpower. It is a nervous system that has not yet received the signal that it is safe to stand down.

The sympathetic nervous system activates in response to cues, not just to actual demands but to the habits and signals associated with them. Take those cues on holiday with you and the nervous system stays on regardless of where you are. The phone checked first thing, the email app still open, the habitual loop of monitoring and responding still running. The body is in a different location. The signals are the same.

Genuine rest is not the absence of activity. It is the presence of safety. The nervous system needs enough reliable signals that nothing requires its immediate attention before it will fully let go.

The holiday you were hoping for is still available. The body just needs a little help finding it.
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https://www.drmirella.co.uk/post/large-intestine-part-nineteen

At some point, someone sits across from you and gives a name to what has been happening. And there is often real relief in that. Something invisible now has a word. Something that felt like weakness turns out to be a recognised thing.

But something else can happen over time. The diagnosis, which was supposed to explain a chapter of your experience, quietly becomes the whole story. The label that was meant to be a door begins to function as a ceiling.

The body is listening to everything. The stories we tell about ourselves most repeatedly have measurable physiological effects. A person who has deeply identified with a diagnosis is rehearsing that state many times a day simply by thinking of themselves through that lens. The body shapes itself around the story it is told most often.

Your diagnosis is a description of a chapter. It is not the title of the book.

The difference between acknowledging what is happening and becoming what has been named is where the healing begins.

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Check in with your jaw right now. Is it clenched? Slightly held? Now your shoulders. Are they where they belong or carrying something invisible upward?

If that is familiar, this is about perfectionism. Not the drive to do things well. What perfectionism does to the body when it runs as a background programme rather than a conscious choice.

In thirty-five years of practice, perfectionism is one of the patterns I see most consistently written into the bodies of the people who sit across from me. The jaw that never fully releases. The shoulders that never fully drop. The chest that never fully opens. The breathing that is always slightly shallow. Most of them have no idea it is there.

Perfectionism is almost always a learned response to an environment where love or safety felt conditional on performance. The child who learns that builds a nervous system organised around that belief. The adult who carries it is often extremely capable and chronically exhausted in a way that rest does not touch, because the programme runs whether they are working or not.

The standards do not need your body to hold them in place. That is the thing the body most needs to learn.

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32 degrees in the UK this week. The body is doing its best but extreme heat is a genuine physiological stressor and the nervous system feels it.

If you have been more irritable than usual, more foggy or more exhausted by tasks that would normally cost you very little, that is not a personal failing. Your cortisol is elevated, your digestion has slowed and your Heart energy in Chinese medicine terms is working overtime. Your threshold is genuinely lower than usual and that is entirely reasonable.

A few things that actually help beyond the obvious: cool the pulse points rather than standing under a cold shower which can cause the blood vessels to constrict. Eat lightly and include cooling foods such as cucumber, watermelon and mint. Rest the Heart energy by reducing emotional stimulation where you can. And try the cooling breath: inhale slowly through a curled tongue, exhale through the nose. Five times. It works.

The irritability of a heatwave is physiological not personal. The body needs support this week not pushing through.

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The body keeps score on the small things too.

Not just the big events. The comment that lodged somewhere unguarded. The apology that never came. The friendship that ended without a proper ending. The time you performed being fine when you were not.

None of these were dramatic enough to process at the time. All of them left something behind.

This week I named 17 of them and what each one does in the body. If you are not already on the newsletter list you can sign up at drmirella.co.uk

The sun is out. Everyone seems to be having a wonderful time. And they cannot quite locate themselves in any of it.

There is a flatness underneath the brightness. A sense of being slightly outside the warmth even while standing in it.

In Five Element Chinese medicine this is the Fire element out of balance. The Heart is the organ of joy and connection. Its season is summer. When it is nourished it receives what summer offers easily and naturally. When it is depleted the warmth becomes a reminder of what is missing rather than something that can be taken in.

The Fire element is depleted by chronic overgiving without reciprocity. By disconnection from the body. By unprocessed grief sitting in the chest where joy is supposed to live. By the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people but not truly known by them.

If summer feels harder than it should this year, that is worth paying attention to.

It is not ingratitude. It is the Heart asking for something it has not been given.

It is a bank holiday weekend and the sun is out. So this week I have one thing to say, backed by thirty five years of practice and a reasonable amount of peer-reviewed research:

Go outside.

Sunlight triggers serotonin production in ways no supplement has replicated. It sets the circadian rhythm that governs sleep, mood and energy. Simply being outside in natural light has measurable effects on cortisol and nervous system regulation.

In The M Method, summer is the season of the Fire element — joy, warmth, and the ease that arrives when you stop long enough to let it in. This weekend the conditions are perfect.

Sit in the sun. Do nothing in particular. The emails will be there on Tuesday.

This one is for the person who is always the one holding things together.

The one people call when something goes wrong. The one who stays calm when everyone else cannot.

The one whose steadiness is so reliable that nobody thinks to ask how you are because you are always fine. You have always been fine.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from years of this. It does not look like collapse. It looks like functioning.

It looks like being present and capable and available. But underneath it, there is a depletion that rest does not seem to touch, a flatness that arrives after the crisis has passed and everyone else has recovered.

Every time you absorb someone else's distress without fully processing your own, a residue remains in the nervous system. Over time those residues accumulate into a chronic low-level activation. The jaw tension you stopped noticing. The shallow breath that became normal. The sense of always being slightly on alert for the next thing that needs managing.

Being the strong one has never been a flaw. But a gift given without end, without replenishment, without anyone asking what you need that is not strength any more. That is depletion wearing strength's clothing.

The body is not asking you to stop caring for others. It is asking for someone including you to care for you with the same attention you have always extended outward.

You are allowed to put some of it down. Not permanently. Not all at once. Just enough to be held by something other than your own resolve.