Stress and Internal Ecology: My Back Pain Disappeared the Moment She Said ‘Normal.’

Internal Ecology: What the mind holds, the body carries

Have you ever noticed what stress actually does to your body? I don't mean the abstract version we talk about in wellness articles. The physical one. The shoulders that won’t drop. The breath that stays shallow without you realizing it. The sleep that logs the hours but doesn’t quite restore. The pain that appears from nowhere and lingers without a clear cause. Most of us chalk these things up to being busy, getting older, sitting too long, not moving enough. We rarely connect them to what is actually happening in our mind.

I want to share a story that made that connection impossible to ignore. And then I want to talk about what it means for the way you lead and the way you live.

On July 1st, I had a renal biopsy on a kidney growth that we had known about for five years - since a scan that happened just after I finished chemotherapy for endometrial cancer. Originally deemed a lipoma and considered low risk, it had grown enough that my doctors wanted to confirm it was still benign. For most people, that might be a manageable level of anxiety. For me, with a cancer history and a genetic mutation called Lynch Syndrome that increases susceptibility to certain cancers, the waiting that follows any biopsy carries a particular weight. Over the last five years I have come to understand that what I experience in those windows is what clinical experts would call PTSD. The stress is visceral. The fear of seeing something in MyChart that signals the cancer is back is real and physical, not just emotional.

Before I left recovery that day of the biopsy, I made a pact with my doctor. He would call me directly when the results were in. No MyChart surprises or misinterpretations.

Two weeks passed. No call. No notification in MyChart either. I left a message. The next day something appeared in MyChart. I didn’t open it. I waited. Days went by and I played the games most of us play in those silences. Surely he would have called if something were wrong. Surely no news is good news. Surely.

Meanwhile, something else was happening in my body. I had tweaked a nerve in my back, twice in the last month. It was painful. I kept moving through it the way I always have, the way I wrote about in an earlier article in this series, the movement mix, listening to what the body needs rather than overriding it. But this time, even with that awareness, the pain kept returning. And to myself, I wondered: was the stress of not knowing holding something in my body that movement alone couldn’t release?

I have spent the last five years learning, in the most direct way possible, how powerful the mind actually is. Not as a concept. As a lived experience. During cancer treatment, I built a deliberate meditation practice not as a spiritual exercise but as a survival tool. I used it to intentionally calm my nervous system, to shift my attention toward what was possible rather than what was frightening, to notice the moments of beauty and connection and joy even inside something painful and difficult. It carried me through. And in the years since, from both observation and experience, I have come to understand something I now believe completely: we can stress ourselves into a genuinely compromised state, or we can deliberately shift the mind toward a different outcome. I have seen this in my own body more times than I can count.

Yesterday (as I write this article), nearly three weeks after the biopsy, I had a visit with a new general practitioner. I knew going in that as frightening as it was, I was going to have to confront MyChart. I was going to have to ask her to look.

And she did.

And the moment she said “Normal,” I jumped up to hug her. It was instinctive, unfiltered, completely unplanned.

And then I noticed something. My back pain was gone. Not reduced. Gone. In that exact moment, the body released what it had been holding for three weeks. I hadn’t realized how much I was carrying until it wasn’t there anymore.

This is not a coincidence. It's not a metaphor. It is biology.

When the mind perceives a threat, real or anticipated, it triggers a stress response. Cortisol and adrenaline flood the system. Muscles tighten. Breathing becomes shallow. Inflammatory processes activate. Sleep becomes less restorative even when the hours are there. These are not minor inconveniences. They are the body in a state of sustained alarm, holding physical tension as a direct expression of psychological fear. And the moment the threat signal lifts, the body begins to release what it has been gripping. Sometimes gradually. Sometimes, as I experienced yesterday, all at once.

This is one of the many reasons why CALM & RESET is not a soft domain in the Internal Ecology™ framework. It's not the domain you get to after you have handled everything else. It's the regulator. When the nervous system is dysregulated, every other domain underperforms. Your thinking becomes less clear. Your decisions become more reactive. Your creativity flattens. Your ability to connect genuinely with the people in front of you narrows. And your body begins to accumulate the physical cost of a mind that hasn’t been given permission to settle.

MOVE is connected to this more directly than most people realize. I kept moving through the back pain, and movement helped. But the stress that was amplifying the nerve pain couldn’t be moved out. It needed the threat to actually lift. This is the distinction between movement that maintains and movement that restores and strengthens. True restoration and real strength require the nervous system to genuinely downregulate, not just the body to be active. Without CALM & RESET working alongside MOVE, you can exercise consistently and still carry the physical burden of an unsettled mind, and you will never fully access the strength you are working to build. In fact, you can end up with the converse effect, getting injured.

Then there is CONNECTION, and specifically the connection with yourself. The pact I made with my doctor before I left recovery was an act of self-knowledge. I knew what I needed and I asked for it. The decision to wait, to not open MyChart alone, to bring the results into a conversation with a doctor rather than face them in isolation, that was also an act of self-connection. Knowing your own nervous system well enough to protect it, to set up the conditions that give you the best chance of receiving hard information well, or even to enter into a major challenge, is a form of inner leadership that most people never think to practice.

And GROWTH is perhaps the deepest thread here. The understanding I have now of the mind-body connection did not come from reading about it. It came from five years of living it deliberately, of building practices that tended to the nervous system, of noticing what happened when I shifted a thought versus when I let it spiral, of learning in real time that what you believe, and what you dwell on, has measurable physical consequences. That is not wishful thinking. That is neuroplasticity. The brain and body are responsive to what we feed them, including our thoughts.

Here is what I want you to hear as a leader, because most of you are not sitting in a medical waiting room right now. But you are waiting. On decisions from above. On deals to close. On people to come through. On quarters to land. On conversations you’ve been putting off. The sustained, low-grade stress of leading at a high level is not nothing. It is cortisol. It is muscle tension that you’ve learned to ignore. And it is sleep that logs the hours without fully restoring. It's the creativity that feels flatter than it used to, and presence that requires more effort than it should.

And so many 'successful' leaders have normalized it so completely that they no longer notice the signal the body is sending. Until something forces them to.

The question isn’t whether your mind affects your body and your capacity to lead. It does. Every time. Without exception. And there is a cumulative impact. The question is whether you are paying attention to what it’s telling you, and whether you have practices in place that deliberately tend to your nervous system rather than just pushing through it.

Because what you push through doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. And the body keeps a very accurate account.

Question: What is your body trying to tell you right now that you haven't stopped long enough to hear?