Hey friend,

For a long time, I thought my mind AND body were failing me.
I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t think the way I wanted to think.
Feel the way I wanted to feel.
Or physically do what I was asking myself to do.
And for someone who had built so much of his identity around being able to fight, push through, lead, and find a way…
that scared me.
Looking back now, I understand that chapter of my life very differently.
My mind wasn’t my enemy.
My body wasn’t my enemy.
Something was happening to me that I didn’t yet understand.
And instead of listening…
I kept trying to overpower it.
I told you in my first email that I’ve experienced concussions through football and, later, rugby while I was at Palmer.
What I didn’t tell you was what was happening in my life around them.
At the time, I was trying to earn—and keep—a scholarship that would help me pay for school.
That mattered to me.
A LOT.
I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to become a chiropractor.
I wanted to learn what I needed to learn to become a great doctor.
I didn’t want to graduate with a mountain of student loan debt that could follow me for decades.
And I loved being part of a team.
I loved leading.
I loved having a goal in front of me and working alongside other people toward something that mattered.
There was just one problem.
I had spent most of my life learning one particular way to overcome obstacles:
FIGHT.
Work harder.
Push through.
Don’t quit.
Find a way.
Get it done.
And to be fair, that mentality had gotten me pretty far in life.
It was part of what made me…me.
So when my mind and body started telling me something I didn’t want to hear, I responded with the strategy I knew best.
I fought harder.
I’d get a concussion.
I needed recovery.
But I wanted to keep my scholarship.
I still had school.
I still had to learn.
I still had responsibilities.
I still had a team.
I still had a goal.
So I pushed.
My body would send signals.
I’d push through them.
More signals.
Keep going.
Migraines.
Keep going.
There were times the migraines became so intense that I needed to be somewhere cold, quiet, and dark just to escape the agonizing pain.
But what was happening to me wasn’t only physical.
My ability to think changed.
My ability to focus changed.
My emotions changed.
My energy changed.
My outlook changed.
I became depressed.
Sometimes I felt numb.
Everything could look relatively normal from the outside while internally I was becoming someone I barely recognized.
And that’s difficult to explain.
Because when your body hurts, sometimes you can point to the pain.
But when your thoughts, emotions, energy, focus, and even your sense of yourself begin changing…
what are you supposed to point to?
I didn’t just wonder:
“What’s wrong with my body?”
The question became much more personal.
“What’s wrong with ME?”
Why can’t I just do this?
Why can’t I push through this like I’ve pushed through everything else?
Why can’t I focus?
Why can’t I feel like myself?
Why can’t I get it together?
I was frustrated with my body.
I was frustrated with my mind.
And if I’m being truthful, I was frustrated with myself.
Today, I look back at that version of myself with a lot more understanding.
Because the qualities that had helped me accomplish so much—
my drive,
my determination,
my willingness to fight,
my refusal to quit—
were also making it incredibly difficult for me to hear what was happening.
I thought the answer was:
Fight harder.
But I had experienced physical injury.
I was under tremendous stress.
I wasn’t allowing myself enough recovery.
I was trying to perform academically.
Trying to compete athletically.
Trying to protect my scholarship.
Trying to build the future I wanted.
And I kept asking more from myself.
Push.
Fight.
Keep going.
For a while, I could.
Until I couldn’t.
That’s one of the most important things those years eventually taught me:
I wasn’t a mind over here and a body over there.
I was one person experiencing all of it.
The physical injury mattered.
My stress mattered.
My sleep and recovery mattered.
My thoughts mattered.
My emotions mattered.
The pressure I was putting on myself mattered.
The environment I was living in mattered.
It was all happening to the same person.
Me.
My mind wasn’t stupid.
My body wasn’t stupid.
And neither one was simply the enemy standing between me and what I wanted.
My system had experienced injury, stress, repeated demands, and inadequate recovery.
There was a story underneath what I was experiencing.
I just didn’t understand the story yet.
Maybe you’ve never had a concussion.
Maybe you’ve never played football or rugby.
But maybe you recognize a different part of my story.
Maybe you don’t feel like yourself lately.
Your patience is shorter.
Your thoughts feel heavier.
Things that used to excite you don’t hit quite the same way.
You have trouble focusing.
You’re more emotional than usual.
Or maybe you feel strangely numb.
Your body feels exhausted while your mind refuses to slow down.
You wake up tired.
You don’t recover like you used to.
And you’re frustrated with yourself because you keep thinking:
“Why can’t I just get it together?”
I’ve asked that question too.
Or maybe you’re doing what I was doing.
You’re accomplishing.
Providing.
Parenting.
Working.
Leading.
Serving.
Holding things together.
From the outside, it might even look like you’re doing great.
But internally…
you know there’s another story.
And like we talked about in my last email, there just isn’t as much of you available for your life as you want there to be.
That’s where I’ve learned to replace judgment with curiosity.
Not:
“What’s wrong with me?”
But:
“What’s happening here?”
And being a dad has taught me to extend that same curiosity to my kids.
Because kids communicate too.
They just don’t always do it with words.
Sometimes it’s behavior.
Sometimes it’s a meltdown.
Sometimes they can’t sit still.
Sometimes transitions feel HUGE.
Sometimes sleep is difficult.
Sometimes focusing is difficult.
Sometimes emotions come out much bigger than the situation seems to call for.
And sometimes, as parents, we’re exhausted ourselves.
So it’s easy to look only at what’s happening in front of us:
Why are you doing this?
Why can’t you just settle down?
Why is everything such a big deal?
I’ve asked versions of those questions too.
I’m a dad of four VERY different kids.
Knowing about the nervous system does not magically make every parenting moment peaceful. 🙂
But I’ve learned to add another question:
“What might be happening underneath what I’m seeing?”
Not because every behavior is a symptom.
Not because every hard day needs to be fixed.
And not because there’s one explanation for every struggling child.
Kids are kids.
They get tired.
They get angry.
They get overwhelmed.
They test boundaries.
They have bad days.
But remember the question we asked in my last email:
Is this a hard day…or has this become a pattern?
If it’s becoming a pattern, I want to understand more of the story.
What has this child experienced?
How are they sleeping?
What stresses are present?
How do they recover?
What seems to overwhelm them?
What helps them settle?
When do we see the best version of them?
When do things seem hardest?
What is their behavior communicating that they might not yet have the words to explain?
That last question matters to me.
Because the behavior is real.
The struggle is real.
But what we’re seeing on the outside isn’t always the whole story.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve become fascinated with the nervous system.
Our brains and bodies are constantly communicating and responding.
We adapt.
We protect.
We compensate.
We learn.
We respond to what’s happening around us and inside of us.
And that’s a GOOD thing.
You WANT to be able to respond when life requires something from you.
You want your heart rate to change when you exercise.
You want your attention to sharpen when something important happens.
You want to mobilize when there’s a real challenge in front of you.
And afterward?
You want the capacity to settle, recover, and adapt.
The goal isn’t to never experience stress.
It isn’t to be calm every second of every day.
And it certainly isn’t to label every difficult emotion as dysfunction.
Life is supposed to move us.
The question I’m much more interested in is:
How well can we move through what life asks of us and then recover?
Because sometimes, after injury, repeated stress, sustained demands, or difficult experiences, patterns can develop.
Some of those adaptations may have helped us get through something.
But that doesn’t automatically mean every pattern remains useful forever.
And it doesn’t mean every symptom or psychological struggle can be reduced to one simple explanation.
That’s important.
I’ve learned enough to know that human beings are far too complex for that.
So I’m not interested in ignoring symptoms.
I’m not interested in telling someone that something is “all in their head.”
And I’m equally uninterested in pretending that our thoughts, emotions, relationships, stress, and experiences somehow have nothing to do with our physical lives.
We’re whole people.
Physical health matters.
Mental and emotional health matter.
Stress matters.
Sleep matters.
Recovery matters.
Relationships matter.
Environment matters.
Experience matters.
And the patterns that develop through all of it matter.
That’s why I’ve become less interested in immediately asking:
“How do I make this symptom go away?”
And more interested in first asking:
“What’s happening?”
“What pattern are we looking at?”
“What has this person experienced?”
“What might their mind and body be responding to?”
“How much capacity do they have right now?”
And:
“What else do we need to understand?”
Because understanding more of the story gives us the opportunity to make better decisions about what comes next.
That’s one of the unexpected gifts those incredibly difficult years gave me.
They forced me to learn.
I wanted to understand what had happened to me.
I wanted to understand my brain and nervous system.
I wanted to understand how physical injury could affect how I thought and felt.
How stress affected me.
How recovery worked.
How the nervous system communicates.
How patterns develop.
Why two people can experience something similar and respond completely differently.
And why someone can look perfectly fine from the outside while living a completely different experience internally.
The more I’ve learned, the more curious I’ve become.
And the more I’ve learned to listen before assuming.
That changed the way I see myself.
It changed the way I parent.
And it changed the way I care for people.
I don’t want you afraid of your body.
I don’t want you ashamed of your mind.
And I don’t want you assuming that you or your child are somehow failing because something is difficult right now.
I want us to become curious.
To listen.
To ask better questions.
To understand as much of the story as we can.
And then…
we have to decide what to do with what we’ve learned.
That’s where something else I believe very strongly comes in.
Understanding shouldn’t make you less involved in your health.
It should make you more involved.
More informed.
More capable of asking questions.
More prepared to make decisions.
More able to take ownership.
Because when you come into Live Better, I don’t want you handing your story over to me.
That’s not the relationship I want with you.
I can listen.
I can evaluate.
I can look for patterns.
I can explain what I’m seeing.
I can share what I know.
I can tell you where I believe we can help.
And I can be honest when I don’t believe we’re the right answer.
But I can’t own your story.
No doctor can.
So who should?
I think you probably already know the answer.
And that’s exactly what I want to talk about next.
Because one of the most important things I can ever tell you about our relationship is this:
We’re not the hero of your story.
You are.

Dr. Joe

LIVE BETTER.