Your Thoughts Make You Sick

My journey to escape the trap of health anxiety

Hello, lovelies!

I hope you had a great week. Slowing down on the weekends, if your schedule allows, is a form of rest. I love having extra time for self-care during the weekends as my time is completely occupied during the weekdays with my day job and business calls. I still take networking opportunities on the weekends but in a lesser amount.

The topic today was taken from a video by Dr Joe Dispenza I watched months ago in 2023 when I was strolling around Stirling, exploring its castle and pyramid (yes, we’ve got a pyramid here in Scotland). It was summer and tourists from all over the world flooded Edinburgh for her Fringe festival and I was wrapping up my dissertation. Wasn’t quite a fan for the massive festival (but I appreciate the bustling atmosphere of the city and the economic impact it makes every year), so I moved for a couple of weeks to live with a friend in Stirling.

I came to know Dr Dispenza from The Diary of a CEO podcast and I resonate with his thoughts and teaching. Having read The Secret in my youth, the idea that thoughts shape reality is not new to me. However, I kept stumbling across events that wavered my resolution to believe how potent my thoughts are and leave life up to chance. Oh, how very dangerous it is!

I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle where the entire book talks about the separation between the mind and the present moment. Mind confines us, while the Now (the present moment) liberates us. 

Dr Dispenza also talks about the scientific experiment, involving advanced tools like MRI to scan one’s brain, so he knows what he’s preaching. And yet, I still found myself stumbling in the damaging thoughts despite having the knowledge of what to do. I lived in cognitive dissonance, seemingly.

To illustrate how potent our thoughts are in shaping our reality, let me quote several passages from The Power of Now. I highlighted so many sentences or paragraphs in my Kindle so I can scroll up or down in my Notes now to share with you what resonates well.

“The thought pattern creates a magnificent reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern.”

This means that if you dwell mentally on the thing that causes the emotion, there is a feedback loop created between the thought and the emotion so that the emotion feeds the thought. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy or the confirmation bias. 

Imagine that!

Your mind is a blank slate every morning you wake up, and you choose to cultivate the thoughts. But then the thoughts live in your mind and give birth to emotions. Emotions are indeed powerful. If you don’t believe in the power of your mind yet, believe in the vibrational frequency of emotions. You can feel it yourself, how emotional speech moves the audience, how emotions you feel inwardly can make you cry or angry. 

Do a simple experiment with me. We can take 2 examples of how opposite the strong effects are of our thoughts.

First, the negative thought (so we can end with the positive thought later to carry with you for the rest of your day).

Remember one event when someone slighted you. Don’t take something too serious because the purpose is just to nail an example. Perhaps, when Jane from accounting (no shade on the accounting department, lol, just an example) added extra work on your desk near the end of Friday, right at the moment you thought you could wrap up early.

How did you feel? 

How do you feel?

Notice the past and present tense. Just by recalling the event you summon the ghost of the past event to influence your emotions, right? You feel angry or annoyed at it. 

Now, stop it. Break the loop.

Difficult?

Try invoking a new thought. This is the second step of the experiment. Recall a moment when you feel happy or made memories that you enjoyed. Perhaps, when you went back to your parent’s house during last year's end holiday, so that you were reminded of your gentle childhood. That’s cool! 

Or the last time you saw a rainbow.

Or any little thing that sparks your joy. People call it a “glimmer”. Hence, glimmer is the opposite of trigger.

Your thoughts feed your emotions and your positive emotion feeds your thoughts, creating an association via the newly-shaped neural pathway. You can reinforce or break the loop. As with anything in nature, breaking requires significantly less energy than making something new. That’s why when you’re too infused with neutral or negative thoughts, it’s going to be a tad difficult to shape new pathways of positive thoughts. But I know we’re getting there. It’s like creating new habits.

My experience with the thoughts that make me sick has something to do with my generalised anxiety. Or, rather, a specific one in the health department. I suffered from random bodily symptoms since 2020, which at first I attributed to the Covid shot. 

This is also ironic and can show you a clear example of how the pathway affects my life. I heard and read that vaccines make people sick and it manifests in many symptoms. My first unexplained symptom was when I had chest pain in December 2020 that I thought must be the onset of a heart attack. To give you an idea of why my mind jumped to that scary conclusion, that was because my dad had a heart attack in 2019 that required him to have a stent installed. Despite multiple tests being run on me by GP and cardiologists and all confirmed I was (and am) in good cardiovascular health, every now and then I got chest pain and thought that I was about to die.

Memento mori is a good philosophy, I believe, because then you won’t waste your time doing meaningless tasks and instead, doing what you’ve been called for. But there’s unhealthy, excessive thought of “I’m going to die” every time I find irregularities in my body, associating them with the worst possible outcome. This health obsession is unhealthy, and I was looking for ways to break the loop.

Somehow, it’s shown to me by God that if I’m not careful, my thoughts indeed make me sick. Guess what? Since I kept thinking that there must be something wrong with my heart, I kept having chest pains every now and then. Since I got a clean bill of health, I started finding another cause. My overactive, anxious brain had a new culprit: GERD. It must be GERD, I thought.

Guess what? I got GERD and its symptoms not long after. I used to enjoy beans without any issues (I love legumes). When I moved back to Scotland, access to shirataki noodles was difficult. But I could now enjoy various types of beans, white beans, cannellini, butter beans, black beans, chickpeas, borlotti beans, lentils, peas, and many more. In my home country, due to our location in South East Asia, the beans are of different kinds and rather limited for daily meals, such as mung beans, red kidney beans, and long beans. The rest of the legumes are usually procured processed, for example, salted broad beans. Since I aim for more unprocessed foods, this is far from ideal. So my moving back to where beans are sold in tins with only water, or dried, is a breeze. But I read somewhere that beans give flatulence symptoms (basically beans make your GI tract gaseous), and I started having the gas, although months ago I was totally fine eating beans every single day (with only 3 months break, and still eating beans in Indonesia although not of high amount).

Could you imagine that?

Maybe it’s a curse and a blessing of a manifesting mind.

Lately, I’ve been feeling chilly. This is also an ironic story. If the cold/chill were caused by my body adjusting to a new temperature, by all logical means, I should only have the symptoms in my early days of moving back to Scotland, right? (late November)

Totally not in late January, where the temperature has increased a bit no less. It’s not even snowing or with flurries anymore, and the temperature can reach as high as 12 degrees C! Like early summer in Scotland.

I didn’t shiver during the -1 or -2, I could even walk outside in this white sweater (did a challenge to myself back then) in early January. But why did I feel chilly these days?

Tracing back, it was because I googled about chilly hands and feet, which are symptoms of anxiety. Coupled with other unexplained physical symptoms (similar to my chest pain, occasional difficulty swallowing, my GERD and gassy tract that came out of nowhere), I came to realise it was my anxiety speaking.

Tracing back a litttle longer, the first chest pain I got in 2019 was probably nothing, and totally physical due to having neglected a good night’s sleep for a couple of weeks for binging a series on Netflix (LOL). But my mind blew it out of proportion and immediately conjured up the worst scenario.

After receiving the clean bill of health, my mind was still restless, and immediately scanned for other possible root causes: GERD.

See? My mind was only trying to protect me.

Anxiety was only trying to protect me. In ancient times, having a fight-or-flight response kept our ancestors alive so that we’re here today. But in the absence of life-threatening danger (I hope so for the majority of us today), our brain constantly scans for the next threat. 

That’s why conviction matters. That’s why we’ve got cases of obsessive information seeking (through Googling our symptoms, and so on) despite the lab results coming out OK. Because our mind is more attuned to the negative information than the positive. 

If everything looks good, all right, and proper, the mind wouldn’t have anything to work on. So it seeks the next threat, the next danger, and so on. It doesn’t reward life if the mind fails to identify danger that can compromise our safety. So, our brain is never at rest (even when we’re sleeping).

I’m guilty of this, and working on myself.

This is a major wake-up call for me, Sekar Langit, who seeks to coach more people on slow living. Because I apparently am still far from being at peace with my brain, people! Or, rather, I still have my episodes of anxiety.

(when in Glasgow last week)

I was diagnosed with anxiety in 2017 or 2018, can’t remember. I worked with therapists every now and then. Another ironic thing is: that even after having removed the trigger (it was from my previous failed relationship and traumatic household), the anxiety still lingers here, and now looks for another culprit. If previously, it was the household, now that the household has been removed as a factor and I’ve been living a new life on my own, the mind looks for the inherent part that I can’t remove anymore: my well-being.

It vilifies my body’s normal reaction, turns into real symptoms that warrant my anxious feelings and investigation, and perpetuates the evil loop.

This is where I knew the real enemy of answering my true calling as a disciple of God is my own mind.

My thoughts make me sick. Having practised the spirituality that is within the Church, having recognised my calling and walking on this path, my mind realises the power of instant manifestation (I’ll give the examples soon, down below). 

But the curse with manifestation that not many people are aware of is every single thing can be manifested by your subconscious mind. Yes, even the less ideal ones.

Nobody actively thinks of being sick. But your subconscious mind may be thinking about it as we speak. In my case, that’s what caused me to keep googling this and that. The symptoms validate the thought, creating the emotion that yes, something’s wrong with my body. Because of Covid vaccine. Because of long Covid I suffered from later (I got it anyway, even after 2 or 3 shots I can’t recall). Or because of my innate GERD. Or because of my anxiety (voila, acknowledging the real enemy now) that gives me inexplicable chills in my extremities. 

Recognising anxiety as the real culprit did not even bring me healing, yet, as it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a confirmation bias, where I kept HAVING CHILLS.

Bruh . . . 

Fortunately, I’m also reminded by God about how my mind holds an extraordinary power to turn my life around.

These are the examples:

1/ About books

At an Ethereum meetup last Thursday, I saw my friend display blockchain-related books on the table. I wanted to borrow some of them but I didn’t know how I could return the books (that obliged me to go back to Glasgow to return them to him).

The next morning, I received an email from my local library in Coatbridge that the books I reserved were now ready to pick up. I’d forgotten about the case already and was reminded by the email.

So: relatively small loss of opportunity to borrow books → replaced by a new opportunity, more accessible in my town.

2/ Women empowerment talks

I kept approaching female business leaders to offer a group coaching/talk that could offer them some split revenues. No positive feedback so far. But my mind was trained on the idea. As I finished reading about the Ignatian spirituality practices, I received a LinkedIn message from an old friend to become a guest speaker in her LinkedIn live talk (about to start in 2hrs). Will post the link to the talk here (it’s in Bahasa).

3/ Holiday

A chit-chat with a friend about her wish to go to Spain this year, specifically Majorca. I said back to her that she had planted the idea so I now must act upon it this year, to see Majorca.

My good friend called me the next day, talking about his holiday plan to Majorca, flying there this coming Tuesday. 

So, if my thoughts can invite opportunity or conversations around certain topics to multiply, which is proven by the positive examples above, the negative things that multiply must also come from the same stream of thoughts!

It was as if God had been tired of me not being able to learn anything about my mind these many years. As if these:

• Thoughts shape reality

• Your life today is a manifestation of what you thought in the past

Don’t mean anything.

Okay, okay, now I got it.

It’s as if I wish for health, I take inspired actions to take care of my well-being (the 3 pillars of nutrition, rest, and exercise), but I forgot the most important thing:

That my mind overrides the command centre 😅

I wanna scream at the top of my lungs about how frustrating it is, tbh. 

And recently I came to this Instagram account, which has this prominent post which speaks true to myself:

Eating clean doesn’t solve my health problem because it’s only half side of the story!!

The nervous system in the GBA (Gut-Brain Axis) provides feedback to the gut, as it’s a 2-way communication system!

If my mind is in dysregulation or even entertaining an overthinking tendency, then it will manifest.

That’s why the title is not “Your thoughts can make you sick” as if it’s a probability, but “your thoughts make you sick” as in certainty because that’s what I experienced.

At first, I didn’t want to take any responsibility towards my thoughts because it’s so damn difficult!

How many thoughts could I monitor in a day?

Tens of thousands. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

My laziness now costs me my physical health. 

I’ve been in irregular periods since November, and it’s very little and concerning in January that my GP recommends that I have my blood tested in the lab this coming Wednesday.

I could’ve complained to the universe that hey, I eat healthy, exercise regularly, and maintain sleep hygiene. But why do I have this?

I believe that God has hammered this lesson harder to me now, and I finally learn. I want to serve Him in my conduct, my job, my business. But I can’t do all well if my health is compromised. And why is my health compromised? Because of the very thoughts I nurture in my brain. It shows a lack of faith on my side that I’m taken care of because my brain kept scanning for possible complications. 

God is Abundance. God sends Health to whoever believes in Him. By scanning for the next possible threats, I show my lack of His Divine Providence.

By asking Him about a certain amount of money but going back to the low-level vibration of: oh, I don’t know, I can settle with less anyway, I doubt His power to provide for me the money I need.

By despising the idea of people wanting to attract money because I thought I would displease God and that I should only attract the business opportunity that serves His Kingdom, I doubt His abundance because it’s like saying with my thoughts: You know, I don’t believe I can have both money and the business.

By getting confused as to why my period is irregular and thinking that I followed the 3 pillars diligently, I actively neglected the role of my brain in shaping my reality. This is something about my orthorexia overthinking: that I MUST avoid certain foods at all costs. I avoided meeting people because I was afraid that social situations would warrant buying food/eating out.

For my brain, there are only 2 opposite ends of the spectrum: binge-eating sugary/flour-based foods, and strict real foods/occasional keto.

There’s no in-between. 

That puts my hypothalamus, the hormone regulator in my brain, never at ease with my body. It’s basically DISMISSING my control, telling straight to my body that I can never trust her to eat responsibly, to know my limit.

Today, I’m going to buy some gluten-free wraps and make some tortillas to accompany my veggie soup. Little by little, I’ll stretch my comfort zone of eating to combat this orthorexia.

I hope I can induce my brain to feel safe again in my body, and eventually, to restore my fertility by getting my period again.

This morning, before writing this piece, I had a chat with Dad to tell him how strong our minds in shaping our reality is. He shrugged it off as it was a casual piece of knowledge for him: Yeah, of course, all the trainers told so. People in MLM put up posters of luxury holidays, houses, yachts, etc, to focus their minds, which eventually tap into the (quoting Napoleon Hill) Infinite Intelligence to open the strategy for the goals.

My good friend also warned me of how my comment was dangerous: about a conversation where I associated a certain attribute of myself with an undesired state. I immediately thanked him for the warning.

It’s as if God reminded me through the safe figures around me about how my self-talk and casual responses are sometimes not in favour of my best interest.

I’ll end this post with another passage I highlighted from The Power of Now:

“The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the problem.”

I’m thankful for this learning opportunity.

Current Stuff

» Trying gluten-free wrap (store-bought) as a baby step to eat my “fear food”

» Current Read

Well, I borrowed 5 books to be precise, from my local library. Three are about money and 2 about slow living.

If you're curious about how embracing feminine leadership can transform your life and career, I invite you to a complimentary 45-minute discovery call with me. Together, we'll explore the possibilities of your journey towards a more fulfilling and aligned life.

Until then,