Symptoms Are Not Noise — And They Are Not “Normal”
Paige Elizabeth
Founder and Coach
Your Body Tracks Reciprocity — Whether You’re Conscious of It or Not
Fatigue?
“Normal.”
Brain fog?
“Just stress.”
Anxiety, insomnia, digestive issues, hormonal swings, aches, inflammation, mood changes?
“Welcome to modern life.”
That narrative is convenient — but it’s wrong.
Symptoms are not noise.
And they are absolutely not normal.
They are information.
And when we dismiss them, we don’t become resilient — we become disconnected.
How we were trained to ignore the body
Most people didn’t wake up one day deciding to ignore their symptoms. They were trained to.
From an early age, we’re taught:
to push through discomfort
to override hunger, fatigue, emotion, intuition
to keep functioning no matter what
to normalize pain as the cost of productivity
By the time people reach adulthood, they’ve learned to interpret symptoms not as signals, but as inconveniences.
Something to suppress.
Manage.
Medicate.
Work around.
The body becomes something to control instead of something to listen to.
The problem with calling symptoms “normal”
When we say something is “normal,” we stop asking why.
But prevalence does not equal health.
It may be common for people to:
wake up exhausted
feel wired and tired
rely on caffeine to function
crash at night but not sleep
live with chronic pain or inflammation
feel emotionally flat or chronically anxious
That doesn’t make it normal.
It makes it widespread dysfunction.
Calling symptoms normal is how systems avoid responsibility — and how individuals learn to abandon their own signals.
Symptoms are adaptive responses, not malfunctions
Here’s the reframe that changes everything:
Symptoms are the body’s attempt to survive conditions it was never meant to tolerate long-term.
Anxiety isn’t random.
It’s a nervous system scanning for threat.
Fatigue isn’t laziness.
It’s an energy conservation strategy.
Hormonal disruption isn’t betrayal.
It’s the endocrine system adapting to chronic stress, under-fueling, or overload.
Digestive issues aren’t coincidence.
They’re the gut responding to inflammation, fear, or rushed living.
The body is not broken.
It’s communicating.
Why suppressing symptoms makes things worse
When symptoms show up, most people do one of two things:
Ignore them and push harder
Suppress them without addressing the cause
Both teach the body the same lesson:
“You’re not being listened to.”
So the body escalates.
What starts as subtle signals becomes louder:
mild fatigue becomes burnout
occasional anxiety becomes panic
tension becomes chronic pain
hormonal fluctuations become full dysregulation
Not because the body is dramatic — but because it hasn’t been heard.
The nervous system is usually the first place things go wrong
Before labs change.
Before diagnoses appear.
Before symptoms become “clinical.”
The nervous system shifts first.
A dysregulated nervous system:
misreads safety
stays in threat mode
diverts energy away from repair
alters digestion, hormones, immunity, and sleep
That’s why symptoms often appear “unrelated.”
They’re not separate problems — they’re downstream effects of the same system being overloaded.
This is why “your labs are normal” doesn’t mean you’re fine
One of the most gaslighting phrases people hear is:
“Everything looks normal.”
Labs measure ranges, not resilience.
They don’t capture:
chronic nervous system activation
subtle hormonal misfires
cumulative stress load
emotional suppression
years of self-abandonment
You can be “normal” on paper and deeply dysregulated in reality.
Symptoms show up before pathology.
They are early-warning systems, not inconveniences.
Healing starts when you stop negotiating with symptoms
Healing doesn’t begin when symptoms disappear.
It begins when you stop arguing with them.
When you stop saying:
“This shouldn’t bother me”
“Other people have it worse”
“I just need to be stronger”
“I don’t have time to deal with this”
Symptoms are not moral failures.
They are feedback.
And feedback ignored always gets louder.
Symptoms are the body asking for a different relationship
Most people try to fix symptoms without changing the conditions that created them.
But symptoms don’t resolve through force.
They resolve through re-patterning.
That includes:
nervous system regulation
adequate fuel and rest
emotional honesty
boundaries
reducing chronic pressure
stopping self-betrayal
Not quick hacks.
Not willpower.
Not pretending you’re fine.
Why listening doesn’t make you fragile
People fear that listening to symptoms will make them weak.
The opposite is true.
People who ignore their bodies eventually become fragile — because systems pushed past capacity fail catastrophically.
People who listen early become robust.
They:
recover faster
adapt better
age more slowly
have more energy and clarity
experience fewer crises
Responsiveness is strength.
Attunement is resilience.
The cost of ignoring symptoms is always higher
You can pay attention now —
or you can pay later with:
burnout
illness
injury
emotional collapse
lost time
The body will always collect the debt.
Symptoms are the body trying to renegotiate the terms before the cost becomes irreversible.
The truth no one tells you
Symptoms are not random.They are not annoying.They are not character flaws.
They are not normal.They are intelligence.
And when you learn how to listen — not fearfully, not obsessively, but honestly — the body often doesn’t need to shout anymore.
It just needs to be heard.
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start listening, let’s navigate this path together.
Book a discovery call today to begin translating your body’s signals into a sustainable plan for healing.