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- Let the Fear Come
For a while, I believed I had healed. The food was clean, the gut was calm, and for the first time in years, I could breathe without the weight of panic pushing on my chest. I thought I had cracked the code—that fixing my gut had cured my anxiety. But then came the setback. A crowded room, a wave of dizziness, a familiar spiral. And just like that, I was back in the warzone, wondering how I could have been so wrong.
What I hadn’t understood yet was that gut healing is only part of the puzzle. The real battleground is the nervous system—a hyper-sensitive electrical web that doesn’t care whether the stress originates in the body or the mind. If it perceives threat, it reacts. And if you haven’t trained yourself to face that reaction without resistance, you’re still trapped. Because it’s not the fear itself that feeds the loop—it’s your fear of the fear.
The Bioelectric Feedback Loop of Doom
When the nervous system sounds the alarm, whether from inflammation, caffeine, lack of sleep, or a triggering thought, a cascade begins. Your heart races, your limbs tingle, your chest tightens, and your brain screams, “Something is wrong.” But what makes it worse is not the symptom—it’s your interpretation of the symptom. Stressing about stress is the ultimate amplifier. You are signaling to your cells, quite literally through bioelectric and hormonal messages, that danger is real and present. The system doubles down. A feed-forward loop is born.
In this state, logic is useless. No amount of “rational calming down” will help if your nervous system is conditioned to interpret any spike as a red alert. I had trained my gut, but I hadn’t trained my response to fear itself. That’s when I discovered the work of Dr. Claire Weekes.
Radical Acceptance: The Missing Skill
Claire Weekes taught something I had never fully heard before, though perhaps I’d glimpsed it in all the wrong ways: these symptoms are not dangerous—they’re just the signs of a hyper-vigilant nervous system. And more importantly, the only way out is through.
Let the fear come. Let it wash over you. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Don’t try to fix it. Let it be.
This was not the easy answer I had hoped for. In fact, it felt like the cruelest of teachings. When I’m standing in a packed supermarket, lightheaded, detached from my body, my mind racing with thoughts of passing out—it takes everything I have not to escape. But it’s in those moments that the real training begins. To stay. To observe. To feel the symptoms, but not fight them. To say: “Okay. Do your worst. I will not flinch.”
And slowly, very slowly, the nervous system learns: I am safe. The symptoms don’t mean danger. They are echoes of past trauma, outdated scripts still running on the hardware of my body. But the story no longer fits.
You Can't Think Your Way Out of Fear
What I had done—like many others on this path—was replace one form of control with another. Instead of numbing with alcohol or distraction, I was trying to fix myself into wholeness. I thought, “If I can just find the right supplement, the right gut protocol, the perfect morning routine…” I would be safe. But safety doesn’t come from control. It comes from surrender. And not the weak, collapsing kind of surrender. The kind that takes all the courage in the world.
Fear is not the enemy. Resistance is.
If you constantly search for solutions when your body feels off, you are reinforcing the message: “This is a problem.” Instead, what if you treated it like weather? “It’s stormy today. Let’s carry on anyway.” That shift—from rejection to allowance—is the true healing.
A New Kind of Strength
The warrior is not the one who eliminates fear. The warrior is the one who befriends it.
So now, when I feel that wave rising—when my vision blurs, my heart races, and my mind starts whispering all the worst-case scenarios—I try to remember: let the fear come. I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to pretend I’m brave. I just have to not run.
Healing the gut gave me a foundation. But training the nervous system—through radical acceptance, non-resistance, and compassionate observation—is what builds resilience. It's what turns a worrier into a warrior, not because the fear is gone, but because it’s no longer in charge.
Let the fear come. Let it pass. Let it change you. Not by overpowering it—but by finally, truly, not fighting it at all.
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For years, I pushed through stress, anxiety, brain fog, and low energy — thinking I could outwork it all. But behind the scenes, my gut was inflamed, my brain running on fumes, and my body depleted. It wasn’t until I got serious about root causes — fixing my digestion, calming my nervous system, and supporting myself with the right supplements — that things shifted. Magnesium, omega-3s, a high-quality B-complex, and targeted gut support became non-negotiables. If you’re a high performer, don’t wait until burnout hits. Test yourself. Fuel yourself. And give your system what it actually needs to thrive.
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