Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #19. Being Highly Sensitive and Empathetic Is Making Your Chronic Illness Worse Every Single Day – How to Change It Now

Transcript

#19. Being Highly Sensitive and Empathetic Is Making Your Chronic Illness Worse Every Single Day – How to Change It Now · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are highly sensitive woman or an empath, you feel things more deeply than most.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You also cannot fully settle until everyone around you is okay.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is not just how you are wired.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a physiological pattern and it is one of the most overlooked drivers of chronic illness.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to complement, not replace your medical care.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why highly sensitive and empathetic women carry a physiological burden most doctors have never considered.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'll also learn how absorbing other people's emotions without realizing it keeps your body in a state it cannot heal from.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, one practical shift that begins to separate what is yours from what you've been caring for everyone else.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's dive in.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most highly sensitive and empathetic women have spent their entire lives being told they feel too much.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And most of them have spent their entire lives trying to manage that, for themselves and for everyone around them.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because here is what actually happens in the nervous system of a highly sensitive woman.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: She walks into a room and before a single word has been spoken, she already knows what everyone is feeling.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: She can sense the tension between two people across a dinner table.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: She feels the anxiety of the person sitting next to her as if it were her own.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And without thinking, without choosing it, she starts adjusting herself to manage what she has picked up.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: She cannot settle until everyone around her does.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that process, the reading, the absorbing, the adjusting, never fully stops.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It happens at work, at home, in relationships, in pausing interactions with strangers.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is running constantly in the background.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is what makes this so important for chronic illness.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a network in the brain often linked to what are called mirror neurons that help you pick up on and internally simulate what other people are feeling.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: For highly sensitive and empathetic women, research shows that mirror ring response can be significantly stronger.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emotions you pick up from the people around you don't just pass through.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They land in the body with a physical intensity that is comparable to emotions you generated yourself.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body processes them in the same way.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It responds to them the same way.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it carries them long after the moment has passed.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This means you're not just managing your own emotional experience every day.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're managing everyone else's too.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while you have always known you feel things deeply, nobody has ever told you that it is directly impacting your physical health.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is what this looks like in real life.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me, this started early.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I grew up around people whose emotional states were unpredictable, not occasionally but consistently.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You never knew what version of them you were going to get, and when the mood shifted, it shifted dramatically.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I learned very quickly to read the room before anything happened.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: To pick up on the subtle signals, a tone of voice, a look, a silence that felt different from the one before it.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: To sense what was coming so I could somehow prepare for it.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That pattern followed me directly into my adult relationships.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was in a relationship where my partner at the time ran hot and cold, warm and connected and loving one moment, and then completely withdrawn the next, and literally acted like he didn't even like me.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I could never work out what triggered it.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I did the only thing I knew how to do.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I watched, I monitored, I shaped my behavior around managing very emotional state, hoping that if I got it right, the relationship would stay stable.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't eat dinner in peace until they were okay.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't have a relaxed morning until I had assessed their mood.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't enjoy a night out with friends without part of me remaining on a lurk for what I might be walking back into.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does this sound familiar?
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because this is what it looks like for so many women.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It might not be an unpredictable childhood or a difficult relationship.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It might be the colleague whose mood sets the tone for the entire office.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The friend who needs to be emotionally managed every time you see her.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mother who's feelings have always taken up more space than your own.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The partner who's silent sends you into a spiral of trying to figure out what you did wrong.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This specific person changes, but the pattern is the same.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are so finely tuned to other people's emotional states that your own comfort, your own settling, your own ability to just be, has become entirely dependent on everyone around you being okay first.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And your body has been responding to that pattern every single day.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why does this become physical?
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you are constantly absorbing and processing the emotional states of the people around you, your body never fully gets to stand down.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same physiological response that fires when you experience your own emotions, fires when you absorb someone else's.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a highly sensitive woman, that is happening dozens of times a day.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about what your body is actually doing.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just processing your own fear, your own grief, your own joy.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's processing your partner's anxiety, your mother's disappointment, your colleagues' frustration, your friends' overwhelm, all of it landing in the body.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of it are acquiring a physiological response.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of it needing to be processed and moved through.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And most of the time, it isn't moved through.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It gets absorbed and held.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the highly sensitive woman is so focused on managing the emotional environment around her that she rarely stops to process what she has taken on.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That accumulation day after day, year after year, is one of the most significant and invisible drivers of chronic illness
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body was never designed to process two people's emotional experiences simultaneously, and the cost of doing that long term shows up in the immune system, in inflammation, in persistent symptoms that medicine keeps struggling to explain.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what actually interrupts this?
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It starts with learning to distinguish what is yours from what you have absorbed and the way you do that is simpler than you might think.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next time you notice your mood dropping, your anxiety spiking or your energy shifting.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before you do anything else, ask yourself one question.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was I okay before I walked into this room, spoke to this person or read that message?
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the answer is yes, what you're feeling right now is not yours.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You picked it up.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the moment you recognize that, something important happens.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: You create distance between yourself and the emotion, and distance gives you a choice about whether to carry it or put it down.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most highly sensitive women have never been taught that this is even an option.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: They absorb, they carry, they eventually crash and have no idea why.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because nobody ever told them that the anxiety they're feeling might belong to the person sitting across from them.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: That the heaviness they took home from work might be their colleagues and not their own.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: That the dread they woke up with this morning might be their partner's fear that they just absorbed in the middle of the night.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you start asking this question consistently, you begin to build a very different relationship with your own emotional experience.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You stop treating every feeling as evidence of something wrong with you.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You start being able to say, this landed on me and it's not mine to carry.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then at the end of the day before you go to sleep, take two minutes and ask yourself one more question.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: What am I carrying right now that doesn't actually belong to me?
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Name it, and then consciously put it down.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not by analyzing or trying to resolve it.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just by acknowledging clearly, this is not mine, and I'm choosing to leave it here.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because your body can only begin to process what it is actually holding, and it has been holding far more than a chair for a long time.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's recap what we talked about today.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Highly sensitive and empathetic women don't just notice other people's emotions.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their brains mirroring response means those emotions land in the body with real physiological weight.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time, this started as a survival response to an unpredictable emotional environment, and it never got switched off.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The interruption is two questions.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: One in the moment was I okay before this and one at the end of the day.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: What am I carrying that was never a mine?
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emotions you've been carrying that were never yours to begin with have been shaping your body's experience for a long time.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Identifying which ones are yours and which ones your symptoms are actually responding to is where this starts to change.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I developed the free chat GPT prompt in the show notes for that specifically.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It connects your physical symptoms to the emotional patterns underneath them in 30 seconds.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes, make sure you get it while it's free.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.