Read on or listen to this post:
There’s something profound about the body’s wisdom that we’ve been systematically taught to ignore. We’re told to override our gut feelings, rationalise away our discomfort, ‘give people a chance’ even when every cell in our being is firing off distress flares like a ship going down.
Here’s the thing though: Your body is not overreacting. It’s giving you data.
And I’m not talking about vague woo-woo intuition here. I’m talking about hardcore neuroscience and your nervous system doing exactly what millions of years of evolution designed it to do: keep you alive and away from threats. Even the subtle, smile-while-they-stab-you kind.
The Personal Education I Never Wanted
I’ve experienced this repeatedly – romantic relationships, friendships, work situations, family dynamics, casual encounters. That colleague whose presence makes your shoulders migrate towards your ears. The friend whose texts trigger a stomach clench before you’ve even read them. The family member you love but somehow always leave feeling like you’ve been wrung out and hung up to dry.
In romantic relationships? One partner where I suddenly needed to pee eight times a night and couldn’t sleep properly. Another where I lived on Buscopan for constant digestive chaos that vanished – vanished – the moment we split.
And here’s the kicker: the night-time bathroom marathons? I genuinely believed I slept better with him. I did fall asleep faster, that much was true. But I was up constantly with what seemed like an idiopathic urological issue – nothing medically wrong, just my body absolutely refusing to relax. Turns out the only thing wrong was lying next to someone who was fundamentally not good for me. I even blamed the creatine I’d started taking around the same time we got together. My body knew. I just wasn’t listening.
The worst instance? A first date where I felt violently ill despite nothing overtly ‘bad’ happening. Everything looked perfect on paper, charming even. That relationship became the catalyst for me leaving to live in the wild for a year. Not exactly a small thing. Rather devastating, actually.
In every single case, these people were being deceptive, manipulative, or fundamentally misrepresenting who they were. But the surface? Often charming. Sometimes magical. The kind of thing that makes for great stories… just not great reality.
The Science Bit (Bear With Me, It’s Actually Fascinating)
Neuroception: Your Subconscious Bodyguard
Stephen Porges gave us the term ‘neuroception’ – your nervous system’s ability to detect safety or danger without conscious awareness. Your vagus nerve is essentially running a constant background security scan, picking up on:
- Micro-expressions that flash across faces for fractions of seconds
- Vocal tone shifts your conscious mind doesn’t register
- The gap between what someone’s mouth says and what their body language screams
- Behavioural inconsistencies between promises and actions
When someone’s being deceptive or wearing a mask – even a very good one – your nervous system detects these incongruences. You just get a feeling that something’s ‘off’, even when you can’t articulate why.
Your Autonomic Nervous System: The World’s Worst Housemate
Here’s what happens when you’re around someone who isn’t safe, even when you can’t consciously identify the threat:
Your sympathetic nervous system (the ‘fight or flight’ one) never fully switches off. It’s like living with your foot hovering over the brake pedal 24/7, engine perpetually revving. This causes:
- Unexplained physical pain and tension
- Sleep disruption and hypervigilance (hello, 8 nightly loo visits)
- Digestive chaos (IBS symptoms, nausea, living on Buscopan)
- Immune suppression (constantly getting ill)
- Chronic fatigue that no amount of sleep fixes
The Gut-Brain Axis: Your Belly Has Opinions
Your digestive system contains more neurones than your spinal cord. It’s literally a ‘second brain’ with a direct hotline to your central nervous system. This is why chronic stress and deception don’t just make you feel sick – they make you actually sick. Your gut responds to relational threat before your conscious mind catches up.
The Unbearable Weight of Maybe
Here’s what’s particularly cruel: research shows that uncertain threat is more physiologically exhausting than clear danger.
With clear danger, you can fight, flee, or take cover. But with uncertain threat – where words say one thing, actions another, where promises don’t match behaviour, where you’re constantly trying to read someone who’s fundamentally unreadable? Your nervous system stays activated indefinitely, scanning constantly, trying to solve an equation that has no solution.
This is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
What Happens When You Finally Stop Ignoring It
After living solo in the wild for a year, and now working in natural outdoor environments with people who come specifically to be as authentic as they can manage (there are always exceptions – wannabe influencers who love the idea of wild living more than the frequently cold, wet, uncomfortable reality), I have almost zero tolerance for masks and performance.
I haven’t owned a TV for 15 years because scripted fluff drives me absolutely insane, regardless of how interesting the subject matter or clever the storyline. I can manage the odd thing, but television in general is rather painful. So is small talk. Corporate speak. Sales pitches. Anything that feels like performance rather than genuine communication.
It’s not snobbery – it’s that after a year of nothing but honest interaction (wind, rain, cold, hunger, and the occasional curious deer don’t lie to you), my tolerance for human bollocks has essentially evaporated.
The Upside: When Honesty Becomes Your Superpower
But here’s the interesting flip side: this hypersensitivity to inauthenticity can work massively in your favour.
When I was operations manager and head of communications for a national organisation working to preserve countryside access, one of the most common things I heard – often from people I’d been at complete loggerheads with – was: ‘I believe you.’
We’d start meetings as adversaries. They wanted to remove public access altogether; I was fighting to preserve it in perpetuity. But most situations ended with solid working relationships and solutions, not wars.
Why? Because I never strived to simply ‘win’. I was brutally honest about the pros and cons on both sides. I genuinely wanted solutions, not victories, and people could tell. Even when we disagreed fundamentally, they trusted me because there was no performance, no hidden agenda, no mask.
Your body’s truth-detection system works both ways. When you’re authentic, people sense it. When you’re not, they sense that too – even if they can’t articulate why.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Knowing Doesn’t Make You Immune
Here’s what I wish someone had told me: understanding all of this intellectually doesn’t make you immune to ignoring your own warning signs.
I know this stuff. Intimately. I’ve studied it, lived it, teach it. And I still missed the signals with my most recent ex. I blamed creatine for the sleep disruption. I convinced myself I was sleeping better because I fell asleep faster, conveniently ignoring that I was up all night. I explained away every red flag with increasingly creative rationalisation.
The person who drove me into the wild in the first place? That wasn’t a minor inconvenience. It was devastating. Life-altering. The kind of experience that fundamentally rewrites who you are.
And yet somehow, I still found myself making similar mistakes, just with different details.
Why? Because we’re wired to want to believe people, especially people we care about. Because loneliness is real. Because hope is powerful. Because sometimes you’re so busy looking at what someone’s saying that you miss what your body is screaming.
But Sometimes, You Actually Catch It
That said, I’m not entirely useless at this. Sometimes the system works exactly as it should – when I actually listen to it.
There have been countless times I’ve spotted people who are overtly ones you’d want to avoid – the obviously aggressive, the blatantly manipulative, the ones practically wearing signs saying ‘I will make your life miserable’. Those are easy. Your body doesn’t need to work particularly hard to alert you to clear and present danger.
But some are far more subtle. These are the trickier ones, the performances so polished that even people who should know better get taken in.
There was a woman at my gym. Very sociable, everyone appeared to like her, regular as clockwork. I’d hear her constantly – always being nice, enquiring about people, the sort who seemed to know everyone’s business in the best possible way. For ages I didn’t even see her properly because I was focused on my workout, not nosing about, but I’d hear that voice. Always pleasant. Always interested.
Something felt off.
I couldn’t have told you what. She was saying all the right things, doing all the right things. Everyone seemed to think she was lovely. But that feeling persisted – a low-level alert I couldn’t quite explain. So I kept my distance. Not obviously, just… maintained boundaries.
Eventually, I became one of her regular chatters. Casual gym talk, nothing deep. But I never let myself get close, even as she seemed keen to draw me in. When I initially spotted the lack of authenticity, I thought perhaps I was being harsh – maybe she was just a bit nosy, the well-meaning sort who wants to know everything about everyone.
Turns out it was much worse than nosiness. When I witnessed something unpleasant and mentioned it – not dramatically, just pointing out what I’d seen – I was swiftly discarded. The friendly interest vanished like smoke.
My instinct had been right all along. That ‘something off’ feeling? Spot on. My body had been picking up on the performance, the mask, the fact that the warmth wasn’t real – it was a tool for collecting information, for maintaining an image, for control.
The difference this time? I’d actually listened to that initial warning and kept appropriate distance. When the mask slipped, I wasn’t devastated. I wasn’t blindsided. I was simply… unsurprised.
That’s the thing about learning to trust these signals: you won’t always avoid harm entirely, but you can at least avoid letting it get deep enough to destroy you.
What Relief Tells You
The most diagnostic evidence? What happens when these people exit your life.
Suddenly you sleep through the night. Your digestion normalises. That mysterious pain vanishes. You have energy. You can breathe.
This isn’t coincidence. It’s your nervous system finally downshifting from chronic threat-detection mode into actual rest. The relief is proof: your body was right all along. Something was wrong, even when you couldn’t articulate it, even when the surface seemed not just acceptable but wonderful.
Learning to Trust What You’ve Been Taught to Ignore
We live in a culture that actively trains us to override our instincts – particularly if we’re women, people-pleasers, or highly empathetic. We’re labelled ‘too sensitive’, ‘overthinking’, ‘paranoid’, or ‘not giving people a fair chance’.
But what if your sensitivity is actually sophisticated threat-detection? What if your ‘overthinking’ is your brain desperately trying to reconcile data that doesn’t add up? What if your body’s discomfort around certain people – even when you can’t explain it, even when nothing overtly ‘bad’ is happening – is the most reliable information you have?
After that year in the wild, I learnt something crucial: nature doesn’t lie. A cliff edge is a cliff edge. Cold is cold. Hunger is hunger. A storm rolling in looks exactly like a storm rolling in, with no hidden agenda or performance.
The human world? Far less honest. We perform, we hide, we present carefully curated versions of ourselves. Some people make this into an art form, crafting personalities so convincing that even people who know better get taken in.
Your body, though? It’s still running on that ancient, honest operating system. It responds to reality, not performance. It picks up what’s actually happening beneath the script.
The Bottom Line
Your body keeps the score. It remembers what your conscious mind wants to forget or explain away. It responds to threats before you’ve intellectually processed them. And when someone is fundamentally dishonest or unsafe – even if they’re charming, even if nothing overtly ‘bad’ happens, even if you desperately want to believe they are who they claim to be – your body knows.
The question isn’t whether your body is overreacting.
The question is: are you finally ready to listen?
Because I can tell you from experience – from devastating experience, from living-in-the-wild-for-a-year-to-escape-the-aftermath experience – ignoring those signals costs far more than heeding them ever will.
Your insomnia, your digestive issues, your unexplained anxiety, that feeling of being constantly ‘on edge’ around certain people? That’s not you being dramatic. That’s your incredibly sophisticated threat-detection system doing exactly what evolution designed it to do.
Maybe it’s time we started trusting it.
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