The Body Is a Miracle Healing Machine

Somewhere along the way, I heard the human body described as a "miracle healing machine," and the term stuck with me. It's funny, because we so often think of the body as flawed. We have aches and pains. Over a lifetime, we have plenty of encounters with medical situations that are difficult, and sometimes genuinely debilitating. It becomes easy to forget just how much miraculous work the body does on a day to day basis, and how tirelessly it works on our behalf.

Think about the day to day operations of the body and everything it manages at one time, without any effort on our part. The nervous system. The digestive system. The brain and its billions of neurons. All of these integrated systems performing miracles daily that we absolutely take for granted.

I think it's important to remind ourselves of this, because when we struggle with anxiety, panic, and mind-body issues, we can experience all sorts of aches, pains, and system turbulence. Headaches, stomach issues, IBS, and a seemingly endless list of others. It's very easy, when you suffer with an anxiety condition, to become pessimistic about the body. I don't think that's the right way to view this. Even when we're struggling with symptoms, even when we feel genuinely awful some of the time, or for some of us, all of the time, the fact remains that the body is working its hardest for you at every moment.

I recently got a powerful reminder of this. A real world injury.

The Injury

I enjoy working out, and I'm active. And for someone in their 50s who has been extremely active, aches, pains, and injuries do pop up. Recently, I had a run-in with an extreme bout of shoulder pain, likely agitated by working out, and then a minor trauma to the area. I became injured without even knowing it, and woke up one morning with moderate pain.

Over the next several days, the pain graduated to the point where it was difficult for me to understand how that much pain was even possible. It finally got so bad that I headed to urgent care, not once, but twice, for pain management. And I'm somebody who doesn't even like taking Tylenol if I don't have to. For this level of pain to motivate me to address it that way, it really had to be extreme.

Now, it's natural during times like these for those of us coded with anxious tendencies to look at worst case scenarios. But in an interesting way, the pain was so severe that my mind didn't have a lot of time to create narratives. My mind was focused on how do I survive moment to moment? How do I manage this pain responsibly? How do I behave in a way that will be most advantageous to my healing? I tried to keep myself in order the best I could, despite what was going on.

I finally saw a surgeon, who recommended an MRI. And this is where it got interesting. Before my follow-up appointment to go over the results, maybe three or four days after the peak of the pain, I found myself feeling remarkably better. I couldn't even get my head around it. I was sure I had torn something, or broken something, period.

The Diagnosis

When the MRI results finally came back, they surprised both my expectations and my imagination. I had a condition called calcific tendonitis (hydroxyapatite deposition disease), along with a possible partial labral tear. But my rotator cuff and bicep were intact. No major tears. Nothing broken.

This was good news, but it didn't explain my pain. Without going into too many boring details, it turns out this specific condition is well known by orthopedic specialists to present some of the most extreme pain possible. Pain that mimics fractures. Some patients report it as worse than kidney stones.

So how could I have that much pain when nothing was actually broken?

The Body Knew Exactly What to Do

As it turns out, the body has a defense already prewritten into its genetic code to address this exact situation. When this condition occurs, the body mobilizes its defense mechanisms, namely inflammation and white blood cells, sending them to the injury to completely immobilize the area.

At one point, I was completely unable to move my left arm. The body had done this deliberately, to keep me from getting in the way.

This was fascinating to me. The body knew how to fix what was wrong, and it had a message for me: "Stay the hell out of my way!" It didn't need my help. To keep me out of the way, it created extreme level pain to make me stop using that side of my upper body entirely. Sure enough, within days, it did the work it needed to do, and then began slowly allowing me range of motion and light use of that arm and shoulder again.

The Perfect Analogy

When I stepped back and thought about it, this was a perfect analogy for what we go through with anxiety, panic, and mind-body disorders.

Because we've grown to distrust our bodies, we assume we need to solve and fix, analyze, support, change, and get involved in the solution. But as with my injury, this is not the case. The recovery process doesn't need constant involvement. Your nervous system doesn't recover because you constantly monitor, analyze, or fix it. The body knows exactly how to revert itself to a state of normal living. It knows how to eliminate the aches and pains that come from stress and psychologically induced sensations.

Like the white blood cells rushing to my shoulder, the nervous system has an extraordinary capacity to return to regulation when we stop continually signaling danger. What it needs is for us to stay out of the way, just like my shoulder needed. And when we do, the results can feel almost miraculous.

Of course, certain acute injuries and conditions require medical intervention, and we're not talking about those. Those are easy to parse out, and modern medicine does a wonderful job of identifying the need for actual intervention.

But if you're reading this, your day to day likely involves a distrust of your body, and that's understandable. I'd urge you to think about my injury story, and maybe even apply it to some of your own. Remind yourself that the nervous system is just like any other part of your body. It is a piece of an interconnected, miraculous healing machine that is begging for you to stay out of its way and allow it to do the healing work it is so perfectly designed to do.

This is the same idea at the heart of the book: that recovery comes not from fighting your body, but from learning to trust it.

Take note of the incredible work your body does every day. This is something I'm trying to implement myself. It is a process. And remember, sometimes the greatest support you can offer is simply creating the space for it to heal.