When Your Body Feels Off, Start Here
This is the exact process I use with patients and coaching clients when early changes show up.
Welcome to the Healthy Aging Newsletter, a free publication translating trustworthy medical research into simple habits to age well, free of chronic disease. I’m Dr. Ashori, a family medicine doctor turned health coach.
When someone comes to me and says, ‘Nothing is wrong, but something feels off,’ I don’t immediately start a barrage of tests. Instead, I rely on my process to uncover a less obvious cause.
Step 1: Write Down What’s Happening
I feel flat in the afternoon and feel I have nothing left for my family by the end of the day.
Before any healing can take place, you must understand what’s going on. The process starts with writing down exactly what you’re experiencing.
My body feels slower and pushing it feels like it’s going to break.
Don’t jump straight to analyzing what you think you’re experiencing. You have to be really specific.
Step 2: Write the Story Your Mind Is Telling
Once my client has written down exactly what they are experiencing, we have a solid, undeniable symptom on paper.
Now I ask, “What do you think this means?” I want to know the story my patient is telling themselves. There’s not right or wrong. It’s whatever their mind is flashing on the screen.
I’m aging.
This is a classic one. And some people will tell this story from their 30s well into their 60s.
My hormones are off.
Back by popular demand, we are in the hormone treatment era of medicine.
I think something really serious is going on.
This is the catastrophizing of the ego-identified mind. And it takes on many forms.
Step 3: Look for the Imbalance, Not the Diagnosis
We’ve been taught for decades that the body is either healthy or unhealthy. And if unhealthy, there must be a diagnosis hiding somewhere. With that diagnosis, we can offer the right treatment. And, voila!
But it rarely works out that way.
An imbalance is when your body loses its natural ability to reset. It has many built-in buffers for things like sleep, stress, recovery, or food.
Sleep buffer
Stress buffer
Nutrition buffer
Blood sugar buffer
Recovery buffer
A buffer is what gives your body room to absorb damage and self-repair. It’s your shock-absorber.
We switch from, “What’s my diagnosis?” to, “Where has my buffer gotten too weak?”
Step 4: Try One Small Experiment for One Week
So, what are you supposed to do?
First, you have to let go of any story you have been telling yourself about your condition. This is especially critical when it has affected major parts of your life.
For fatigue, chronic pain, insomnia, and bloating, this will take a lot of mental presence to dissociate from that mind-made story.
Make ONE Change
What you can put that energy into instead is: one change, for one week.
You will keep the same diet, same routine, same workouts, same work schedule.
But you might add a 10-minute walk in the morning or after dinner. Your goal isn’t to improve things or fix anything.
We are looking for the right information. We’re looking for clean, unadulterated data that we can use to problem-solve in the next step.
Step 5: Let Your Body Answer
You’ve made the consistent change without any expectations. Now we ask, “Are things better, same, worse?”
Answer this question from a place of no guessing, interpretations, or projecting into the future.
Better?
Same?
Worse?
Not dramatically better. Not cured. Just different.
This step matters because it shifts authority away from fear, Google, and assumptions, and puts it back where it belongs. In your body.
If things are a little better, that tells us something. If nothing changed, that also tells us something. If things worsened, that’s information too.
This is where healthy aging actually begins. Not with one-line answers, but with learning how to hear what your body is saying and respond intelligently, one-step-at-a-time.
Why This Process is Different
We take the person with all of their fears, worries, and doubts and give them the power to be in charge of their health again.
One small change - the right change - done long enough will deliver the result you’ve been after. And that result is no longer clouded by fear and catastrophizing.
It’s not meant to be a treatment, a diagnosis, or a full overhaul of your lifestyle. This is the way you welcome positive change into your life.
Most people were never taught how to respond when their body changes. They were only taught how to react when something is wrong
The healthy aging process I come back to with my patients is about what to do when your body starts whispering, instead of waiting until it has to shout.
Mini FAQ
Q: Can this replace medical care or testing?
No. This process helps you decide how to respond before jumping straight to fear or overtesting.
If there are red flags, concerning symptoms, or clear signs of disease, medical evaluation should come first. This process is for the large gray zone where something feels off, but nothing is clearly wrong.
Q: What if my symptoms don’t improve at all?
That’s still a useful result. But it’s rare that a change in your lifestyle would have no result whatsoever. This is something I dive into more to make sure there is no block somewhere in your perception and thinking.
If a small, specific change doesn’t change anything, it tells us that the issue likely lies elsewhere, or that the buffer you targeted wasn’t the one you need to target.
Q: What if things get worse?
That’s helpful as well.
Worsening symptoms after a small, controlled experiment is the signal you needed. It tells us to change direction and take note of what system was negatively affected. Ignoring that information or pushing harder is usually what leads to bigger problems later.
Q: Why not change multiple things at once to get faster results?
Because changing everything at once creates noise.
When too many variables move at the same time, you lose the ability to understand what actually helped or hurt. One small change gives you clean feedback and identifies one, single sustainable change you can maintain.
Q: How long should someone use this process?
As long as needed.
This isn’t a program you complete. It’s meant to be a strategy to become more intune with your body. Over time, people get faster at recognizing which buffer needs support and what kind of change tends to help.
Q: How do I know if this is right for me?
People who are generally healthy and doing most things right, but are starting to notice subtle changes in energy, sleep, recovery, mood, or weight.
It’s especially helpful for those in their 30s to 50s who don’t feel sick, but don’t feel quite like themselves either.
This is a really elegant framework, and I love that it gives people something clinically accurate to do in the gray zone between “I’m fine” and “I’m clearly sick.”
As a physician-scientist, the “buffer” concept is exactly how I think about early drift: most bodies can absorb sleep debt, stress, glycemic swings, and under-recovery, until the margin quietly narrows and you start feeling “off.” Shifting from diagnosis-hunting to which buffer is underpowered (sleep, stress, nutrition/blood sugar, recovery) is a far more actionable first pass.
Your “one change for one week” rule is also underrated science: it’s basically an N-of-1 experiment with clean signal. When people change five variables at once, they get noise, not insight and they end up attributing causality to the last thing they tried.
The only nuance I’d add for readers is your own guardrail: this process is fantastic when symptoms are subtle and stable, but it should sit alongside a clear “red flag” threshold (new/worsening chest pain, syncope, focal neuro symptoms, GI bleeding, rapid weight loss, fevers/night sweats, etc.) where evaluation comes first.
This is exactly what folks need! I love how the buffer framework shifts the focus from chasing diagnoses to actually understanding where your system is strained. I've used similiar approaches with paitents dealing with chronic fatigue, and yeah the one-change-at-a-time method is key. The tricky part is getting people comfy with that level of self-observation when they've been trained to just seek external validation.