I Stopped Trying to Feel Better

The moment I stopped forcing and started feeling it all

Feb 24, 2026

What if our obsession with feeling better is actually keeping us from feeling at all?”

This was a question that came up for me a week ago when I came down with the flu. Started with a persistent throbbing headache. You know, the kind that radiates up from the base of your neck into your brain? Yeah, that kind. Followed by a tickle in the throat. Muscle fatigue and body aches like I just competed in 3 day cross fit competition, but I don’t actually do CrossFit, so that clearly wasn’t it.

I knew I had it handled, my medicine cabinet is fully stocked with a sea of herbal tinctures, every supplement of the alphabet and even some hard-to-come-by medications like Ivermectin.

My first instinct wasn’t to rest. It was to figure out how to feel better faster so I can get back to my laundry list of things to do that awaited me. I just returned from an impromptu trip to Florida, and I was already behind, and the guilt was building.

I caught myself doing the math. If I go to bed a little earlier tonight, I can get back to work tomorrow as if nothing happened. If I just throw everything at it, I’ll feel like a million bucks in the morning.

I was treating this virus like an inconvenience to be solved, rather than a message my body was trying to send.

I told myself I never get sick and when I do, it’s only for a minute. So I continued to half-assedly tidy up my house, finish my laundry from my trip, and review my Asana to-do list for the next day as if I were fine. I was ignoring the signals in hope that I would just feel better.

And underneath the physical stuff, I was feeling something else unfamiliar. A dull melancholy. A flatness. A strange grief I couldn’t describe. The world felt heavy, and I felt disconnected, but I wanted so badly to feel alive and well.

Maybe you have felt this feeling before? Not rock bottom. Just….grey.

And if you’re anything like me, your first move is to fix it.

But this time was different. My body wouldn’t let me resist what I had been feeling, and my mind was thinking. The only thing left was to let go completely and rest. Not the let-me-fake-like-I-am-resting while I am doing other things, but the sleep-all-day while my house goes to shit, calls go to voicemail, and text messages fill my inbox kind of rest.

One day turned to two, two to three, three to seven. Seven days of no makeup, greasy hair in a bun, wearing my fuzzy robe, and petting my dog as I stare out the window with no real strategy on how to get better. This was the surrender I was being called to.

Through that surrender, I realised that, unfortunately, sometimes our bodies have to put the brakes on, to truly feel the energy beneath a busy, productive life.

I am here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way for us overachievers.

We’ve been trained to fix, not feel.

We live in a culture that has made discomfort a problem to solve. Low energy? Optimise your morning routine. Feeling off? Find a supplement, the hack, the mindset shift. Melancholy creeping in? Post something inspirational and talk yourself out of it.

We’ve become incredibly skilled at managing our inner landscape without actually sitting with what is. This isn’t a weakness. It’s how we’ve been conditioned.

Most of us learn early on that falling apart is weak and unsafe. Slowing down meant falling behind. That feeling badly was something we just got beyond as quickly as possible, not something to embrace and allow.

We become really good at performing recovery. We rest just enough to function, not to thrive. We process just enough to say we did. We become professionals at checking the box and then moving on. Even when we aren’t ready to move.

But the subconscious doesn’t work on our timeline. Our bodies are more intelligent than our logical thinking brains. The body is honest and keeps a record of everything we’re too busy to feel and experience.

Your body will make the decision that your mind won’t make because of programming and beliefs.

Last week, I didn’t decide to slow down and feel. My body chose it for me. There’s something important there. Because I talk about slowing down. I teach it for God’s sake. I believe in it. And when it came time to actually stop, I resisted. Not because I don’t know better, but because the conditioning runs deep.

The exhaustion, the melancholy, the dullness — these aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re signals that something within you is ready to be felt. The body grows tired of holding what your mind resists. It will create stillness one way or another. It will find a way if you don’t make the way. That’s how incredibly intelligent our nervous system is.

My mentor told me that sometimes we need to slow down to speed up. Not as a productivity strategy but to honour our own energetic cycles. When we are in constant motion, even internal motion, we don’t give our deeper layers a chance to integrate, to shift or align.

The slowdown is the work.

Surrender isn’t giving up, though it can feel like that to a nervous system accustomed to moving or doing. It’s when the rewiring happens. Where you give your subconscious proof that it’s safe to be still.

There’s a version of rest that many of us know so well. It’s performative. It’s reactive. Still monitoring and waiting for the moment you feel better so you can get back to being yourself again. Then there’s the other kind.

The type where you stop trying to fast forward through the discomfort. Where you let grey be grey without making yourself wrong or broken for it. Where there’s trust that something deeper is happening beneath the stillness, the angst, the doubt. That’s the surrender that actually moves the needle at a soul level.

The subconscious does its deepest work in the pauses. The gaps and the in-between moments of life where nothing seems to be happening, but there is actually a lot that is percolating within. There is no amount of effort that can make this happen. It’s through the allowing that the transformation happens.

Slowing down is progress. Allowing is the task. Surrender is strength. It’s just not what we’ve ever been taught. That’s the difference.

By day four, I still had the headache, the stiff neck, the cough that wouldn’t quit. I had a meeting with my mentor on the calendar, and I kept telling myself I could push through to make it. That morning, I finally stopped negotiating with myself and cancelled it.

And something unexpected happened. Not disappointment. Not falling behind. My mentor encouraged the rest. Genuinely. And I felt something loosen that I didn’t even realise I’d been holding — this quiet fear that slowing down meant letting people down. That cancelling meant I wasn’t prepared, wasn’t committed, wasn’t enough.

It didn’t mean any of that. It meant I was finally listening.

That one decision — small, unglamorous, not a complete breakthrough — was the most aligned thing I’d done all week. The disappointment quickly faded. I was slowing down to speed up. And even though today, I am not 100%, I am 95% feeling myself again.

I can look at the past seven days as another initiation point of continuing to break the pattern of always being available and ready to perform.

The good news? You don’t have to be sick with the flu to give yourself permission to slow down. To rest. To just be.

Take 10 minutes today — not to fix anything, just be with what’s there in the moment. The tiny thought. The tingling in the toes. The quiet whisper.

Then…. If you want to go deeper, try these journal prompts:

What am I afraid will happen if I stop pushing right now?

What has my body or my mood been trying to tell me that I keep talking myself out of?

What would it feel like to let today — exactly as it is — be enough?

Don’t try to answer these from your head. Let your hand move and see what comes through. The subconscious speaks when we stop performing for it.

I know I can’t be the only one who is rewiring the Go Getter mentality. If something in this landed for you, I’d love to know. Comment below — what have you been white-knuckling through lately?

Soul & Mind Alchemy

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