The Weird Ways My Body Protected Me

Even though at times it has felt like I’d been served a shit sandwich, I wouldn’t change it.

 Here’s why.

MCAS made me give up alcohol

No judgement for those who can enjoy a drink without horrible after effects.

I just couldn’t.

Alcohol made me feel awful. The histamine release, the effect on hormones, the sleep disruption. Just one glass could wipe out over a week of decent sleep and have me tossing and turning all night trying to relieve the hip pain from the histamine dump.

So I stopped.

And honestly, I think MCAS may have protected me in ways I didn’t understand at the time.

It stopped alcohol becoming a normal part of my life and, looking back, that feels like a huge blessing. Not just because of dependency risk, but because we now know alcohol is linked with some very real long term health risks for women, including breast cancer, liver disease, hormone disruption, poorer sleep and brain health.

My body was not subtle about it's displeasure in my drinking.

It led me back to my own intuition

It also stopped me expecting doctors to provide all the answers.

There are so many experts ready to weigh in on any given problem. Some are brilliant. Some less so. But there's a huge difference between expecting a doctor, coach, therapist or health practitioner to “fix you” and having someone guide you back to yourself, your own inner knowing and your own self healing.

No two people are alike. There is no one size fits all, even when it comes to this triad of syndromes.

After years of almost giving up hope from having no answers, I eventually pieced it together through years of my own research and finally got a diagnosis.

Which, honestly, hasn’t made that much difference.

The real difference came from learning to trust what I was seeing, feeling and noticing in my own body, and now I'm an expert.

It made me lift heavy

At 20, yoga became my thing.

Poses that took people years to perfect, I could do without much practice. I liked being that flexible. I’ve enjoyed a lot of yoga retreats and done a lot of classes over the past 30 years. In the early 2020s, I was doing four classes a week.

Then, after several knee dislocations and a lifetime of shoulder subluxations and an unstable pelvis, I had to face the slightly annoying truth.

My body did not need more bendy. It needed strength and stability.

So now I’m focused on what my body actually needs, rather than what I’m good at. Building strength around my joints is my absolute priority. And honestly, I wish I had understood sooner how important muscle is, especially with hypermobility, and especially as we get older.

For years, I thought health was mostly about eating well, walking, doing yoga, managing stress, taking the right supplements and not completely losing the plot in Waitrose because the lights are too bright.

All useful, obviously.

But building muscle is a huge part of the picture, especially for women in midlife and beyond. It is not about aesthetics or trying to be tiny. It is about metabolism, blood sugar regulation, joint stability, bone health, energy, hormones and being able to get off the floor with ease.

For a hypermobile body, muscle is not a nice extra, it's scaffolding. I love lifting weights now and my new pin up is Ellie Goulding. Have you seen her arms?!

For me, strength and stability became non negotiable much earlier than they do for many people. A lot of people only start realising that much later, or sadly end up too immobile to then make the change.

It made me remove toxic products from my environment

This has been a huge one.

Fragrance, chemicals, harsh cleaning products, plug ins, scented candles, personal care products. All the stuff we’re told is normal and lovely and “just part of modern life”.

My body said no thanks.

These things are harmful to all of us, but those of us with the trifecta often feel the effects immediately. Other people may only see the impact much later, when it’s harder to join the dots.

So I changed what I could control.

Better for me. Better for the environment. Better for everyone who walks through my front door, whether they realise it or not.

It forced me to leave the corporate world

My ADHD had me equal parts dismayed and frustrated as I changed jobs every two years, always thinking, “This one will be different.”

Spoiler. It was not different.

I worked in marketing for eight years and kept finding myself in the same slow, bureaucratic office world that either couldn’t, or didn’t want to, make changes that seemed so obvious to me.

Eventually the constant mismatch of my fast paced mind and the slow corporate world wore down my soul and ended in severe chronic fatigue, and meant I had to drop down to a four day week.

That was when I started looking for answers outside the medical system. I retrained as a naturopathic nutritionist and later in wellness psychology.

And that opened the AuDHD loving rabbit hole I will likely never reach the end of.

It gave me a career I could not be more engrossed in. Work that brings meaning to my life and, more importantly, much needed help to other people trying to understand their own brilliantly sensitive, reactive, exhausted, misunderstood bodies and minds.

It made my health a priority very early in life

This one has been frustrating at times.

From the outside, I can look like someone living an incredibly healthy lifestyle. And yes, some of that shows in my skin and hair and the way I’ve looked after myself.

My peak level health habits would probably have an average person applying for the Olympics. For me, they give me just enough baseline wellness to function day to day.

But on the inside, during a flare, I can still be in pain, exhausted, inflamed and wondering what's thrown my nervous system out that day. 

Still, I’m grateful that my health became a priority early. Many people are forced to focus on their health much later in life, often when things have already gone very wrong. I had to pay attention sooner and now thankfully I read my body very well.

It stopped me outsourcing my mind

I didn’t waste years, tears and tissues trying to dig through every corner of my past looking for the one thing that made me anxious (ahem… it was high histamine).
 

And I didn’t accept Valium or antidepressants as the whole answer either. That’s not a judgement on anyone who chooses medication. Not at all. There is a time and a place for all sorts of support.
 

But for me, the biggest shift came from understanding something much simpler and much deeper. That my experience of life is created from the inside out.The most calming realisation the nervous system can have.
 

Not by my circumstances directly. Not by other people’s moods. Not by every sensation in my body. Not by every weird little thought that wanders through my head. But by thought, moment to moment.

That changed everything. 

Because it meant I didn’t have to keep fixing every thought, analysing every feeling, or treating every anxious sensation as a sign that something was wrong with me.

I began to see that my mind was not broken, and that my thoughts were not instructions. My anxious thinking was not a prophecy or a balance sheet on the state of my life.
 

And feelings, however convincing they can be, move and change when we stop gripping them so tightly.

At the time, I didn’t know how closely some of my symptoms were linked to neuroinflammation from MCAS, or how psychiatric symptoms can show up when the body and brain is inflamed, reactive and running on fumes.

But this understanding gave me something steadier than symptom chasing.

It helped me stop being frightened of my own experience. And that has made the biggest long term difference to my happiness, my sense of wellbeing, my relationships, my work, my health and the way I support my clients.

Because the aim was never to become a perfectly regulated human who never struggles. The aim was to understand myself enough to stop believing every storm in my mind meant I was unsafe. And that changed everything.

If you recognise yourself in any of this, especially the combination of a busy mind, sensitive nervous system, hypermobility, histamine issues or that feeling of “I’m doing everything right, so why do I still feel like this?”, you are very welcome to book a free 20 minute clarity call.

It is not a sales ambush. Nobody needs that.

It is simply a chance to talk through what is going on, see what might be keeping your system stuck in high alert, and whether my way of working feels like the right fit for you.

You can book your free clarity call here: