09/03/2026
✨𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡'𝐬 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 ✨
Dear friend and colleague,
I've been wanting to share about something that's been sitting heavy on my heart: anxiety. Not the obvious kind, the person who walks in visibly shaking or tells you straight out that they're panicking. I mean the quiet kind. The kind that hides behind someone who looks like they have it all together.
Over the past few years, and especially since COVID, I've watched anxiety move through my practice like a rising tide. It's showing up in people I never would have flagged for it, and it's showing up younger, in teenagers and kids, in ways I didn't see even a decade ago. What unsettles me most is how easily it goes unrecognized. By us. By me. Let me tell you about a client who changed how I practice. She had everything under control, or so it seemed. Perfectly put together. She was doing every single thing I asked. Taking her supplements, making the lifestyle changes, showing up faithfully. And the needle just wouldn't move. Month after month. I was
stumped.
Then one day it dawned on me: she had gotten very, very good at faking having her life together. When I finally started asking deeper questions, the picture changed completely. She was profoundly dysregulated, living in fight-or-flight, all day, every day. Once we turned our attention to her nervous system, everything else began to fall into place. I think about her often, because here's the hard part. It took me several months to see it. She was in front of me the whole time, and I just wasn't looking in the right place. I wish I
had started there. That experience left me with a question I now bring to nearly every case, and I want to offer it to you. Before we reach for the next protocol, are we sure the body is even in a state where it can heal? A nervous system stuck in survival mode will quietly undo our best work. All the right inputs land on a body that's too braced to receive them. Some of our most anxious patients are the ones who look the most composed. They've learned to perform "fine." They pass every visual test we give them. And so we treat the gut, the hormones, the fatigue, 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙚𝙭𝙘𝙚𝙥𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙛𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙝 𝙞𝙩 𝙖𝙡𝙡.
My encouragement to you is simply this: keep looking. When someone is doing everything right and still isn't getting better, let that be your cue to ask a different set of questions. Sit with them a little longer. Get curious about what their calm might be covering. Sometimes the most important thing we can do isn't to add another intervention. It's to finally see the one thing that's been there all along.
We can't heal what we haven't recognized. And once we learn to recognize this, I truly
believe we become better practitioners for it.
With warmth and respect, from the field,
Tracy Southwick, ND, HHP, AMP
We Bᴏᴜɴᴅᴀʀɪᴇs Mɪɴᴅ Bᴏᴅʏ Wᴇʟʟɴᴇss can’t resonate with this more… “I’m fine…” echoes through our clinic every day. 😌
