Transcript
Gemma Spagh (0:00)
Foreign this is Open Mind. Welcome to a brand new week. Here is your Mantra I trust that my body knows what it's doing. I'm Jemis Beg and every Monday I give you a simple but powerful phrase to consider this bring into your life a philosophy to guide you in the week ahead and hopefully even beyond. At Open Mind, we value your support, so please make sure to share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow Mantra to help others discover the show. For more exclusive content, monthly bonus episodes, early access and ad free listening, join our Open Mind plus community on Apple Podcasts each month. You guys know I also love to respond to your questions, comments, dilemmas in our bonus episodes. So leave a comment comment on this episode or you can DM me on Instagram at Mantra Open Mind if you'd like to be included. Stick around. We'll be right back after this short pause. Fall is the season of cozy layers. 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To take advantage of this offer, book Your appointment by December 31, 2025 for complete terms and conditions and to book your appointment, just visit smilegeneration.com mantra that's smilegeneration.com mantra okay, let's get right into it. It is time for this week's Mantra I Trust Knows what It's Doing now before we get into this episode, just want to let you know we will be covering topics pertaining to body dysmorphia, health anxiety and our relationship with food. If that is something you are sensitive to, I totally understand that this episode may be hard, so feel free to skip it altogether. Go and listen to one of our other 40 plus mantras. Or you can come back later when you feel like you're in a better space. But just a reminder to take care of yourself. But onto this week's mantra I trust that my body knows what it's doing. The truth is, I think a lot of us don't fully trust our bodies and we most certainly do not talk about it enough. We doubt its signals, we question its instincts, and I think sometimes we even feel betrayed by it. This is especially true if you've experienced health anxiety where every sensation feels like a warning, every ache feels like a symptom of something bigger. Instead of seeing our body as wise and self regulating, we start to see it as unpredictable, as fragile, maybe even unsafe. Health anxiety is such a wild set of feelings to have. It's also known as hypochondria. It's this persistent fear that something is seriously wrong with your health, even when medical reassurance or evidence suggests otherwise. Now, it's not just like the occasional worry about a symptom. It's an ongoing preoccupation with the idea that normal bodily sensations might be a sign of illness. A headache means you have a brain tumor. A racing heart means you're going to have a heart attack. The anxiety isn't really about the symptom itself, but about what the mind imagines that symptom means. What it feels like is, I think, also a heightened state of vigilance, almost like having your internal alarm system constantly being set off by by your own body. Every twinge, ache, flutter, it gets magnified. You become hyper aware of sensations that most people would overlook. And actually, the act of paying attention makes those sensations feel stronger. This is often paired with compulsive reassurance seeking, Googling symptoms. Constantly being on WebMD, checking your pulse, booking doctor's appointments, asking friends and family what they think. That may temporarily calm you down, but it ultimately reinforces the cycle of worry. At its core. Health anxiety is just so exhausting because you're not just managing your body, you're managing the what ifs that spiral out of control so rapidly. It's that sense, I think, of never being able to fully relax or always scanning for danger, always feeling unsafe in your own skin. For many people, you know, this also carries a deeper emotional weight. Your fear of mortality, fear of losing control, fear of the unknown. But of course, you don't have to have health anxiety to know what I'm talking about and to know this sense of fear, or maybe unease. Sudden changes in things like our weight, our energy levels, our physical appearance, our skin, our muscle strength, even getting sick out of nowhere and feeling like it's taking longer for us to recover can leave us feeling kind of panicked that things are not working as they should. Of course, those moments feel scary because we rely on our physical body for so much, and our health is, I think, the most important and most precious thing that we have. Here's something we have to mention. Sometimes things are actually going wrong, and that's really scary to acknowledge. That is a fact of life as well. But despite things going wrong, your body is doing all that it can behind the scenes to take care of you. And you need to take care of it as well. The body is often far more capable than our anxious mind gives it credit for. It breathes without being told. It heals cuts and bruises without us telling it to. It fights off infections, it regulates hundreds of processes we don't even notice when we're caught in worry. It's easy to forget that this physical form you inhabit is built for survival, even when things may not be going well. But what we're talking about here are times when we are okay, we are just perhaps misreading or perhaps misinterpreting our body so that the signals it sends us, the way it's trying to help us, gets ignored. This is such an important point. Most of us aren't battling a serious illness, but we are just rather disconnected from our bodies. We override its signals because we think that our schedule, our ambitions, or our ideas of productivity or what we think our body needs should take priority. We think we know better than this. Like Brilliant, ancient system that has been perfected over years and years and years. And over time, this leaves us mistrusting the very cues designed to keep us healthy. One way this shows up is around hunger and food. Instead of listening to natural signals like stomach growls, dips in energy, or cravings, we impose external rules on ourselves, only being allowed to eat at acceptable times, ignoring hunger to stay on track with a diet, even when it's costing us psychological peace of mind, drinking coffee to suppress our appetite. We adopt diets because some guru has said they are the best, when actually, unless you have strict needs or allergies or medical conditions, what is simple is best. What our body asks for is what it should receive. Balance, nutrients, goodness, fats, carbs. This pattern around hunger and food is one of the clearest examples of how we lose touch with our body's natural wisdom. At its core, hunger is not the enemy. It is a finely tuned biological signal designed to protect us, to make sure that we have energy and the nourishment that we need to survive. But instead of respecting that, many of us have been taught to see hunger since childhood, since our teen years, as something to control, suppress, outsmart. We follow arbitrary rules about when and what we should eat. We count calories instead of noticing satisfaction. And we prioritize discipline over intuition. And in doing so, we are essentially telling our body, I don't trust you to know what I need. I'll let my mind or an outside voice decide for you. The danger here is physical. It's also psychological. When we repeatedly override hunger cues, our body learns that it cannot rely on us to respond. This erodes the natural feedback loop between sensation and satisfaction, leaving us either chronically undernourished or swinging to the other extreme of overeating. Once restriction becomes like truly unbearable, food then begins to take on an emotional load. It becomes loaded with guilt. It becomes associated with control or morality, good versus bad, rather than what it really should be, which is a source of nourishment. The result is not just a mistrust of food, but a mistrust of ourselves. We stop believing that our body is capable of guiding us, and instead we place authority in external sources. Influences, wellness trends, diet books, the external validation we think we will receive from our body, looking a certain way when internally we are probably miserable. What's often overlooked is how intelligent your body truly is. Cravings are not just random, they are messages. A sudden desire for salt can signal electrolyte imbalance. A pull towards carbs might be the body asking for energy. A craving for rich foods could be that your body needs fats to support brain health and hormones. So again, by dismissing and shaming these signals, we lose the opportunity to understand ourselves on a deeper physical level. And instead of honoring the body's quiet wisdom, we flood it with rules and noise that only create more confusion. You know what another big element of this is? Sleep. Sleep is another big area. Our bodies give us such clear signs when it's time to rest. You know, drooping eyelids, sluggish thinking, irritability. We know when we are tired. But modern culture often treats fatigue as something to fight against. We have to load up on caffeine, we have to push through deadlines, or we end up binge watching shows until late at night, Convincing ourselves that we can make up for it later. This entire mindset and cultural mindset that devalues rest and that frames it as a weakness or an inconvenience Is truly not doing us any favors. And in doing so, we ignore one of the body's most fundamental healing processes as well, Sending the message that, again, we don't believe it knows what it needs. The irony is that the very things we're trying to achieve by staying awake, Whether it's productivity, creativity, connection, they are deeply dependent on sleep. A well rested brain processes information more efficiently. It finds solutions to more creatively. It maintains a stronger emotional balance. It's better able to regulate itself. You know, the body also uses sleep to repair tissues, to balance hormones, to consolidate learning. So when we do treat sleep as expendable, we are not only ignoring one of our body's clearest signals, but also stripping ourselves of the very energy and clarity we need to live fully. I think rest, in the broader sense is also something we resist Even when our body is signaling beyond tiredness, But a sense of burnout through headaches, muscle tension, low mood, we push ourselves harder, and we implicitly believe that rest equals laziness. Fatigue is actually a source of wisdom. It is absolutely a very clear sign from our body that we are not taking care of it. When we continue to ignore that, again, it erodes our trust in our body's great wisdom and guidance. If we truly believe that our body is always working in our best interest, the entire relationship we would have with ourselves would shift. Instead of viewing symptoms, sensations, discomfort as threats, Instead of viewing fatigue or hunger as something to suppress, we might begin to see them as communication, you know, messages designed to protect us and to kind of call us back into balance. I think this perspective transforms the body from an adversary to an ally. We are in unison. It would also, I think, soften the anxiety that so many of us carry. Much of our health related fear comes from interpreting the unknown as catastrophic. If we do then trust that the body is inherently wise and self regulating, we wouldn't need to jump to worst case scenarios. Instead we could just sit with not knowing. We could be grounded in the belief that even if we don't understand why a process is happening, it is still unfolding with purpose and that trust would free us from constant hypervigilance. Believing in the body's benevolence would also change how we treat it day to day. We might move from punishment to partnership, from pushing it past exhaustion, starving it of nourishment, criticizing it harshly to feeding it well, resting it when it asks us to moving it with care, and also respecting its limits at a deeper level. I think this brings us a lot of peace. It brings us this sense of unison and a relationship between our mind and the space that it occupies, that being our body. Okay, when we come back, I'm going to share a little bit more about how this mantra has shown up in my own life, plus some journal prompts and further tips. So so stay tuned.