Symptoms Are Not Mistakes – What Our Nervous System Is Really Showing Us

The body often knows long before the mind what is good for it.

Sometimes a moment is enough to simply sit and look. Our nervous system constantly reacts to its surroundings — water, movement, sounds, nature. The body does not regulate itself only through solutions, but often through what we see, hear and experience. Sometimes regulation does not begin through control, but in the moment the body feels safe again.

Sometimes a moment is enough to simply sit and look. Our nervous system constantly reacts to its surroundings — water, movement, sounds, nature. The body does not regulate itself only through solutions, but often through what we see, hear and experience. Sometimes regulation does not begin through control, but in the moment the body feels safe again.

Many people see symptoms as a disturbance. Headaches, exhaustion, sleep problems or inner restlessness are supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. But from a biological perspective, symptoms are often not mistakes of the body. They are reactions of our nervous system to stress, life circumstances and inner tension. The body responds to the life we live.

We have learned to treat symptoms like enemies. Something is not working, so it has to be fixed. But the human organism is not working against us. In biology, nothing happens without connection. The body is constantly trying to restore balance.

Interestingly, the word itself already reveals a lot. The term symptom comes from the Greek sýmptōma and means something like “that which comes together” or “that which becomes visible.” A symptom is therefore not primarily a defect in the system, but a sign or a hint. Something in the body reacts to something in life.

This raises an important question: When does a symptom actually begin?

Most people believe a symptom begins when it hurts. When the head aches, the back blocks, sleep disappears or exhaustion becomes so strong that we cannot continue. But biologically speaking, a symptom usually begins much earlier.

The body works in the background long before we notice anything.

Our nervous system constantly scans the environment. Safety, pressure, conflict, expectations, responsibility, speed. All of this information is evaluated continuously. The body reacts: hormones shift, muscles tense, energy is redistributed, sleep changes, the immune system responds differently.

At first, we usually notice nothing.

The body compensates.

Many symptoms therefore have a history that we overlook.

First there is regulation in the background. The nervous system tries to balance stress. Maybe sleep becomes slightly lighter, we become more irritable, or it simply takes more energy to move through the day.

Then a second phase begins. The body starts to change its behavior. Fatigue, tension, inner restlessness, digestive changes or difficulty concentrating appear. In fact, these are already symptoms, but socially they are rarely taken seriously.

Only in the third phase does it become obvious. Pain. Migraine. Insomnia. Exhaustion. At this point the body can no longer be ignored.

Many people say at that moment: “It came out of nowhere.”

For the body it did not come suddenly.

For our awareness it did.

A thought about this came to me years ago through a film that stayed with me for quite a while: Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson. In the film, within a Mayan community, fear is not simply described as an emotion but almost like a kind of illness. What is interesting is not the drama of the scene but the perspective. Fear is recognized through signs. Body tension, behavior, the look in someone’s eyes, restlessness. In other words: symptoms.

This perspective is surprisingly close to what we know today about stress biology and the nervous system. The body constantly reacts to safety or threat. Often we only notice the symptoms long after our nervous system has already reacted.

From the perspective of psychoneuroimmunology, health never arises in isolation. It develops through the interaction of body, nervous system, immune system, experiences, stress and lifestyle. The organism responds to the life we live.

And this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

Because if symptoms are information, they also tell us something about decisions, boundaries, adaptation and sometimes about how far we have moved away from ourselves.

Our society has learned a different model. Function. Optimize. Keep going. Fatigue is overridden with coffee, stress with discipline, inner restlessness with distraction. The body is expected to keep up, no matter what life looks like.

But the body is not an employee of our calendar.

At some point it begins to speak more clearly.

Migraine. Sleep problems. Exhaustion. Tension in the body. Digestive issues. Nervousness. Many of these symptoms are not random disturbances. They are attempts by the nervous system to restore balance.

One could even say it more provocatively:

The body is often healthier than the life we are living.

An especially uncomfortable thought is that symptoms sometimes even serve a function. They force pauses we would not allow ourselves. They stop a pace that has long been too much. They create space.

Not consciously. Not planned. But biologically understandable.

Symptoms only seem meaningless when we ignore the connection between biology and life.

Health cannot really be separated from the way we live. If we want to understand symptoms, we have to look at the life behind them.

That is the core of my work.

The question is not which door we have to walk through.

The question is what we are finally ready to see.

— Anne von Aufseß