The Subtle Shift: When Healing Becomes a Checklist—and How I Found My Way Back to Trust

There’s something I’ve been sitting with lately: the duality of healing work when you’re high-functioning, self-aware, and have already been on a personal growth journey for a while. Especially when, like me, you’ve spent years building habits, rituals, and a toolkit that truly helped you—only to realize somewhere down the road that those same practices started feeling more like survival mechanisms than healing.

When I first started my healing journey in 2020, I was in tune with myself in a way that felt empowering. I learned to slow down. I leaned into practices that genuinely supported my nervous system. Journaling, movement, breathwork, intentional routines, and deep inner reflection made me feel alive again. They worked. They helped me reconnect with my intuition and find moments of peace and clarity during a time when I needed them most.

And then, slowly, something shifted. The more progress I saw, the more I feared losing it. I became hyper-attached to doing all the right things to stay in alignment. My once-supportive rituals became checklist items. The intention behind them changed. I started acting from urgency rather than intuition—afraid that if I missed a journaling session or didn’t work out, I’d regress.

This shift was subtle, but it mattered. It wasn’t that the wellness habits were no longer working. It was that my old trauma response—the drive to perform, to push through, to control outcomes—had found a new costume. The very things that once grounded me had been co-opted by fear.

But here’s the part I think so many people miss, and something I’ve come to deeply appreciate:

Those habits? They still helped me. They still built a foundation. And they are why I was able to come back to myself more quickly and more deeply.

Because I had already practiced listening to my intuition, I could eventually hear when something was off. Because I had already learned to sit with discomfort, I could recognize when I was only tolerating it, not truly moving through it. Because I had already strengthened my self-awareness, I could notice the difference between pushing myself versus honoring myself.

So when I got my Hashimoto's diagnosis—when I finally asked for help, saw a naturopath, started EMDR therapy—I could meet the deeper layers of healing. And I could do so with more grace than I might have before.

The truth is, I hadn’t failed in my healing. I hadn’t gone backwards. I had simply reached the next layer of it.

And that layer taught me this:

There is a difference between tolerating discomfort and being with discomfort.

Tolerating discomfort sounds like: “I’m fine. It’s not that bad. Just push through it.” Being with discomfort sounds like: “This is uncomfortable, and I can allow it. I can hold space for this.”

High-functioning people are incredibly good at tolerating discomfort. We’ve normalized it. We’ve mastered it. We’ve praised ourselves for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

I didn’t think I was that fatigued until I stopped pushing through it. I didn’t realize how dysregulated I was until I created enough stillness to hear what my body had been saying all along.

And now? I’m learning to listen deeper.

Some days, I read for two hours and don’t touch my to-do list. Some days, I rest even if I planned to create content. Some days, I go to the gym because it feels good, not because it’s on the schedule.

That’s healing, too.

It’s not about abandoning the tools. It’s about using them from a place of trust instead of fear. It’s about knowing that alignment isn’t a perfect routine—it’s a living, breathing relationship with yourself.

What’s been especially full circle for me is realizing that the same tools I created before my diagnosis—like my Nervous System Reset Guide—are the ones I still come back to. But the difference now is the intention behind them. I’m no longer using them from a place of pressure or fear. I’m using them to go deeper. To ground. To regulate from a place of safety, not survival.

In fact, I talk about this exact experience in my free training. I describe healing like investing in the stock market. You don’t always see immediate returns. There are fluctuations. Dips. Even internal recessions. But the longer you stay in the game, the more resilient your baseline becomes. Eventually, you build enough emotional equity that even if you drop below that resilience line, you bounce back faster.

And June? I dipped below that line. But I can feel the skyrocket. The internal shift. The soft rebuilding.

That’s the thing no one talks about: healing is not about feeling amazing all the time. It’s about building the capacity to move through it all — and still trust the process.

My TSH levels are improving. My nervous system is regulating in new ways. And my energy, slowly but surely, is returning.

This is the real work. This is the real win.

If you're in a season like this — where it doesn’t look like growth, but you know it is — I see you.

And if you're ready to deepen your healing and learn more about how to support your nervous system through anxiety, burnout, or autoimmunity, I walk through the exact framework I use in my free training.

Reflection Questions:

• Are there any routines or habits that started from a place of love but now feel fear-driven?

• What would it look like to reintroduce them gently, from a place of trust?

• How does your body respond to doing nothing? Can you sit in that space without judgment?

• What does your intuition sound like when there is no urgency?

You are allowed to evolve your healing. Let it become softer, quieter, deeper. Let it be enough.

Want to explore this for yourself?

I created a free Nervous System Reset Guide to help you understand the difference between survival mode and true rest, especially if you feel burnt out. It’s a great starting point if you’re beginning to realize your healing habits may be coming from fear instead of alignment.

And my Free Training walks you through the foundational layers of healing high-functioning anxiety, stress and burnout—from understanding your nervous system to reconnecting with your intuition. These are the exact tools that supported me, even when I didn’t know how much I needed them.

Give yourself permission to stop doing healing perfectly. You’re allowed to meet yourself exactly where you are—and grow from there.