A personal story about confusing episodes & an unexpected conclusion (Part 1 of 4)
I’ve expressed my nuanced feelings about wellness before, so it feels natural to share a bit more about one semi-recent incident in particular that forced me to take a step back and re-assess how I was approaching health and wellness in the first place.
This is not a vulnerability or pity-party contest—I’m sharing because I know how it feels to relate to someone else’s story and pick up my own insights into how I might be able to move forward myself after a weird, clunky time.
And to be clear: I love wellness. I just realized I was starting to resent it because I was coming at it from a place of fear, lack, and anxiety—so my heartfelt efforts often ended up backfiring or glitching.
May is mental health awareness month, so I’m open to talking more openly about this so we can support each other through our individual and collective journeys.
For the next 3 weeks, I’ll share this story in parts—plus insights, tools, and practices that supported me on this unexpected anxiety-management path I found myself on.
Enjoy this beautiful quote as an illuminating precursor:
Anxiety is not an answer to a problem we are worrying about but the measure of our distance from the place where the answer lies. Our ability to escape from anxiety is found in our ability to do the simplest thing and to do it well: to breathe and to live easily in our breathing. This truth is too simple for the anxious mind to believe, therefore it is best to breathe in silence first and tell ourselves that we’ll get to curing our anxiety later. Anxiety cannot cure itself, the cure arrives while we are giving ourselves a real sense of rest. Anxiety is often created by trying to remember everything and keep it straight in our harried minds. No wonder then, that the cure for anxiety is found in learning to forget the very sense of self that first felt the fateful need to worry.
—David Whyte, “How to Heal the Anxious Self,” from Consolations II
The anxiety → the panic
After a series of sequential panic-related episodes—which took me a minute to identify as such—I decided it was time to take a real deep-dive look at the anxiety levels I had allowed to reach a peak level of functional discomfort.
It’s been an enlightening, weird, frustrating, educational, wild journey—especially while navigating most of it abroad, mostly in a language that is not my mother tongue.
Strangely enough, I didn’t mind that challenge of boiling down my feelings and symptoms into simple, succinct points in the hopes of uncovering a root cause. Who knows, maybe it even helped not overcomplicate it to some degree…
The sequence of events that led to said episodes are very non-linear, as the healing journey famously is. Yet when finally I connected the dots, it started to make sense.
From what I’m hearing and witnessing, many of you are also squirreling your way through something similar—whether the anxiety comes from health, relationships, or global disruptions. And if you’re chill and balanced, I welcome your wisdom!
The lead-up → the inconclusive results
In early 2018, I began bouncing around living situations almost monthly for over a year in NYC. In 2019 I relocated to Paris and moved ~7 times during my 3.5 years there. I settled in Nice over 3 years ago, and although it’s been wonderful to land somewhere for a while, I know there’s a chance it might also not be long-term.
Let’s just say that anxiety via uncertainty was very present, even though I initially thought that I was just really good at being “adaptable.” Classic.
I also thought that settling into a more stable home life would help settle a slew of physical symptoms I had been experiencing—some of which began in NYC well before my moving marathon.
I tried a laundry list of dietary protocols, from Ayurveda to beans to bland foods. All of them have merit, but nothing quite shifted things for me in a way that lasted.
While in France, I was tested for a variety of diagnoses in a variety of ways—but as of now I am still, apparently, Normal.
What an infuriating relief to be diagnosed as Well, while being totally perplexed as to why you still often feel Unwell!
The doctor’s appointment → the reckoning
Not long after arriving in Nice, I began experiencing severe digestive discomfort—alarmingly frequent nausea, including some super fun fatigue—which eventually led me to a doctor who recommended I see a gastroenterologist.
I realized that I’d sometimes felt this strange type of nausea while on the subway or teaching yoga in NYC, too—like I would either explode, be sick, or faint on the spot. Sometimes I’d even get a weird twitch or shiver. Not ideal when you’re leading a group of students through dynamic or restorative movement!
Those NYC symptoms happened after a series of pretty crushing events, so anxiety was definitely still tucked away in my proverbial baggage.
Back to the gastro: After reviewing my bloodwork, he asked me about my childhood, the past few years, the symptoms, and my stress patterns and levels.
He listened attentively and then kindly explained—without dismissing me—that because my bloodwork and other tests didn’t point to anything specific, he wholeheartedly felt I first needed to work on the anxiety I’d been experiencing for years before pursuing any further steps or treatments.
He believed anxiety could be at least one root cause of several of my symptoms, especially since an allergy or other diagnosis wasn’t presenting. And if there were other unknown causes to treat, anxiety was currently blocking their discovery.
My jaw almost dropped to the desk. As a classical French medical doctor with no indication of holistic methodologies—though I did mention I preferred natural methods myself—I was both shocked and slightly relieved by his recommendation.
That meeting reminded me of a time a trusted doctor in NYC told me something similar, so it was all becoming a bit more apparent to me. Plus I knew that studies show how chronic stress can cause significant digestive imbalance, too.
When I shared my gastro visit insights with my acupuncturist here in Nice—who had also been working with me on the same issues, especially the nausea-twitching-fatigue stuff—she asked candidly, “Do you think you’re having panic attacks?”
My jaw dropped once again, and I realized that—even though I still possibly had other gut-related issues—the nausea episodes always came the day after I’d have a stressful meltdown about a particular situation in my life. Something finally clicked.
But generally speaking, I was still wondering: If symptoms could technically be treated when there’s a specific diagnosis to treat, what was I supposed to do when my gut was still off and I was still anxious—yet I was also still “normal”???
To be continued…
Next week: I’ll share more about my humble recognitions—including insights from the gut-brain connection that helped me come to terms with it all.
The following week: Simple tools that worked for me and compassionate takeaways.
The last week of May: A more detailed, curated list of tools, products, and practices that moved the needle for me (and still do).
In the meantime—if you could use personalized support around your own relationship with wellness and/or anxiety, book a free assessment call.
Have you ever experienced anxiety-related physical symptoms? What supported you?
Take good care,
S
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