MMS_ When Something Starts to Feel Off_Audio
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] It's the slow, subtle experience of a life that still looks right, but starting to feel like something is different on the inside.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are, wherever that is today. Whatever's running in the background, whatever you carried into this moment, it's welcome here. There's nothing to fix before we begin, and that's always important to remember. This month, I wanna explore something that doesn't get talked about honestly very often, and this isn't a dramatic version, not the burnout breakdown, not the identity crisis, not the moment that everything falls apart.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'm talking about something quieter than that, something that happens long before any of the burnout or the identity crisis happens. It's the slow, subtle experience of a life that still looks right, but starting to feel like something is [00:01:00] different on the inside. This month's theme is about being called and not chased.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And what that means, what I really want to sit with in these next few episodes, is the difference between living from something that genuinely fits and maintaining that simply just because we're expected to do it. I'm gonna say that again. I don't think that came out exactly how I wanted it to. It's the difference between living something that really fits who we are, what we want, like, down to our bones, or maintaining something that simply is something that's been expected of us, either by ourselves or those around us, something that we've curated maybe doesn't fit anymore.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that's not a comfortable thing to always look at. And I'm not here to make it dramatic or urgent either. I just... It deserves an honest conversation. So that's what we're gonna start talking about today. Here's what I find genuinely interesting about this particular experience and why I wanted to start here [00:02:00] with this episode before anything else.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Most of the time when something is wrong, there's evidence. Something happened, there's a reason, and it makes sense. But what we're talking about that, this isn't that. This is something subtler. It's a moment, sometimes a fleeting sensation or a lingering nagging, where everything looks good on paper, life is intact, our responsibilities are being met, nothing's really broken, and yet there's this quiet internal signal that something is shifting, and it doesn't announce itself dramatically.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It shows up in really ordinary moments. You might be driving somewhere familiar, a route that's been driven 100 times, and out of nowhere, there's just this feeling. It's not a thought exactly. It's just a feeling, like something underneath the surface quietly exhaled and released. Or it's a [00:03:00] Tuesday morning, and there's a cup of coffee.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You're sitting in the same chair, the same spot, the same routine that's worked out fine for years, and in one completely unremarkable moment, maybe mid-sip, something flickers. It's a quiet awareness that maybe this seat isn't the only seat where you could sit, that there are other options, other views that you could look at.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That habit of sitting here has always become so automatic that the question of whether to sit here stopped being asked a long time ago. It was on autopilot. Again, nothing's wrong, and yet something just got noticed. That's the feeling I'm talking about. That's what we wanna sit with a little bit in this episode.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that's the feeling I'm talking about. And the first thing that most people do with that feeling is talk themselves out of it because there's no good reason for it, because other people have it harder, or because this is what we've worked so hard for, planned for, or [00:04:00] hoped for. So the feeling gets filed under ungratefulness or overthinking or just a rough week, and life keeps moving.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I spent a lot of time doing that to myself. What I've come to understand through my own experience and through the work that I do is that feeling isn't a problem. It's not ingratitude. It's not weakness. It's actually the beginning of something. It's the nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's noticing before the mind has words for it, and that is what today is about. So what does this actually feel like, this experience? I wanna try to describe this honestly, not clinically, not neatly, just honestly. It's not loud. It doesn't show up with sirens or a clear message. It's more of a little low hum, a background noise that's easy to talk yourself out of because, [00:05:00] well, nothing's actually wrong.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Life is fine. Things keep moving. Sometimes it's heaviness that's hard to place. Not a sadness, not quite, just more weight than there used to be around something that used to feel really light. Sometimes it's going through the motions and then catching yourself doing it and then feeling vaguely weird that you noticed your motions for the first time instead of just being automatic.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And sometimes it's just a pause, a split second where something underneath gets a little bit of air, and then it closes back up, and the day continues. It's subtle. And I know this feeling. I know it personally, and I want to share something because I think this lands differently when it's real. I loved my medical practice, and I wanna be clear about that because I mean it, and I still miss it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And there are parts of it that I don't think I'll ever [00:06:00] stop fully missing. But for about ten years prior to leaving my medical practice, there was this thing running underneath it all, a nudge. It wasn't dramatic, it wasn't a crisis, just a nudge that kept coming back. And my husband and I had versions of this same conversation so many times that I lost count.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Standing in the bathroom. It was always in the bathroom. I think it's the only place we could have privacy at work, but it was. We didn't do anything else either. We were just talking. But anyway, and it was me saying this out loud that I just wanted to quit, even though I loved my medical practice, even though it made absolutely no sense to him or me, 'cause we both went through medical school and, and residency together, and he knew how hard I worked for it, but he couldn't understand exactly what it was.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was just unhappy. So periodically, probably once a month, I would just be so upset and so sad and so frustrated, and I just wanted to quit. And [00:07:00] here's what took me a long, long time to understand. It wasn't medicine. It wasn't my patients. It was never my patients. It wasn't even the people around me. It was the state of medicine, the way something I had given so much of myself was slowly changing into something I didn't recognize anymore.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: More computer screens, more checkboxes, more voices telling me how to practice that was out of integrity, and less room for the part that actually mattered, which was just being present with the person in front of me. And I felt like I had too many bosses. Insurance companies. I was now an employee instead of the boss of my own stuff.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And, and even now, the patients are starting to become bossy and questioning my, my decision-making capacity. And yes, that helped me think a little further and think more deeply, and giving the patient more autonomy to ask those questions is important. [00:08:00] But it also was questioning my integrity and my education.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And now all of a sudden, there was less room for the part that actually mattered, and that was having an open conversation with a patient 'cause there was less time. So I felt like I had too many bosses and not enough space to actually do the thing that I spent my entire career building. Thirty years.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But I kept explaining it away for years. And that's the experience. Not the breakdown, not the revelation, just a quiet signal that kept showing up in the margins of every day, the ordinary days, waiting for me to stop dismissing it. So here's where it gets interesting, because most people don't ignore the feeling out of laziness or denial or even fear.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not really The mind dismisses it because that is literally what the mind is designed to do. [00:09:00] The brain's entire job, its primary function, is to keep things stable, predictable, safe. It's a constant, and I mean constantly. It's working to confirm what it already believes to be true about the world and about our future, about who we are, and what life is supposed to look like.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So when a quiet internal signal shows up that doesn't match the existing story, the brain doesn't go, "Oh, that's interesting. Let's explore that." Oh, no. It goes, "No, that doesn't fit. File it somewhere else." And then the brain gets very creative about how it does that. It becomes logic. It starts thinking, "Nope, I'm just tired.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: No, it's a hard season. Other people have so much worse. That's what I was working for, so I should be grateful." And here's the thing, [00:10:00] some of that might even be true. The tiredness is real, the gratitude is real, and none of that is wrong. But what's also happening is that the brain is doing its job almost too well.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's protecting the identity that we've already built in, the version of our story that makes sense, the life that was planned, the thing we worked toward, the thing that was expected. But here's what the brain understands that we sometimes don't consciously acknowledge. If that feeling is real, then something might need to change, and change is uncertain, and uncertain is uncomfortable, and uncomfortable is something the nervous system is always, always trying to move away from.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So the feeling gets explained away, it gets minimized, it gets tucked back in. And not because, again, something is wrong with the person who's having the [00:11:00] feeling, but because the brain is doing exactly what it learned to do. I dismissed that nudge for almost a decade. A decade. And I wasn't in denial. I wasn't weak.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was functioning at a very high level in a lot of ways. I just had a very well-trained brain that was incredibly good at finding reasons to maintain the status quo, until it ran out of convincing reasons, and that is usually where things start to shift. So let's talk about what's actually happening underneath all of this, because I think this is the part that changes everything when it really lands.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That feeling, that low hum, that quiet pause, that thing that keeps showing up in the margins, that isn't just emotional. It isn't just psychological This is a very real, very physical process happening in the body. The nervous system is not passive. It's not sitting quietly waiting for the [00:12:00] mind to make a decision and then going along with it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's actively, constantly scanning, processing information, and registering signals, and communicating all of that upward to the brain, often before the conscious thought even enters the picture. There's actually a term for this. It's called interoception, the brain's ability to sense internal state of the body, and it's remarkably intelligent.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It picks up on things. It shifts energy, subtle mismatches between what's expected and what's actually being experienced long before the conscious mind has organized it into a coherent thought. So that feeling in the car, that pause over a cup of coffee, that quiet exhale that happens for no reason in the middle of an ordinary moment, that's the nervous system communicating.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It isn't random. It isn't irrational. It isn't something to override or outsmart. [00:13:00] It's data. And as a physician, I spent years being trained to trust data, to look at what the body was presenting and take it seriously, not to dismiss a signal just because it didn't fit a neat diagnosis. And yet, when it came to my own internal signals, I overrode them with logic for years, which is honestly a little embarrassing to admit out loud because it's true.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The body knew something was shifting long before I was willing to sit with it, long before I had the language for it, and long before I could have told you what it meant. It just kept sending the signal quietly, consistently, and in the only language it had. So let me slow down for a second because there's something worth really understanding here.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: When this quiet signal shows up, the one that doesn't have a name yet, the one that gets explained away [00:14:00] before it gets heard, something very specific is happening in the body. The nervous system operates on two channels. There's one that most people are familiar with. That's the activated state, the stress response, the one that shows up when something is urgent or threatening.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Your heart rate goes up. Your breath becomes shallow. Your mind sharpens and narrows. But there's another channel, a quieter one, and this is the one I wanna talk about. This is where the nervous system starts to register a mismatch. Not a threat or a crisis, but a slow, subtle, internal inconsistency between we-- who we have been and something that's trying to shift.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it doesn't sound an alarm. It doesn't... It's just- Something dim, like something's slightly wrong, a little less energy than we expected, a little more effort required for things that used to feel effortless. Maybe it's a background hum that isn't quite [00:15:00] discomfort, but it isn't ease either. This is the nervous system flagging something the conscious mind hasn't caught up to yet.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not malfunction, not breakdown. The body's still doing something incredibly sophisticated. It's registering information and trying to surface it in the only way available, and that's through feeling. Think about that morning coffee moment. Nothing externally changed. The cup is the same. The chair is the same.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The routine is intact. And yet, something flickered, something noticed, and that flicker isn't noise. That flicker is a signal. The nervous system doesn't generate feelings randomly, folks. It generates them in response to information, and sometimes the most important information it's holding is something the mind isn't ready to look at directly yet.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So it whispers through a [00:16:00] pause in the car, through a moment of unexpected heaviness, through a split second of distance in the middle of something that's supposed to feel good. This isn't something being wrong with the wiring. It's the wiring working exactly as it should, carrying a message that hasn't been opened yet.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once that lands, the feeling stops being something to manage and starts being something worth listening to. So here's where I want to offer a reframe. I want to be careful with this because I don't want it to sound like a bumper sticker. This isn't about thinking positive. It isn't about reframing discomfort into gratitude or deciding to see the bright side.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's not what this is. This is something quieter than that, and honestly, more useful. For most of us, when an uncomfortable feeling shows up, the internal relationship with it immediately to find a [00:17:00] resolution. How do I make this stop? What's wrong? How do I fix it? What does this mean, and how quickly can I figure it out, so I can move on?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because the mind wants to close the loop fast, and what that means in practice is that the feeling never actually gets heard. It gets managed or analyzed or argued with or explained away. And then it comes back because it was never answered the first time. It was just silenced temporarily. And the shift that I wanna suggest, and I say suggest very intentionally, is moving from fixing this feeling to asking yourself What is this feeling?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I think the easiest way to understand what this shift actually feels like is through something completely ordinary. So think about the picture that's been hanging on the wall for the same spot in your home, maybe for decades. [00:18:00] It just becomes part of the background, so long ago it stopped being seen.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And then one day, for no particular reason, the eyes land on it differently, and the thought that surfaces genuinely surprising. It's like, "How long have I had that? Do I even still like it?" When nothing's changed, the picture didn't move, but something in your awareness may have. Or the broken door jam, the one that's been slightly off for years, walked past it a thousand times, filed it under, "It's fine.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Whatever. It's not a priority." And then one day, it's suddenly irritating enough in a way that feels almost unreasonable, like it became impossible to ignore overnight. It didn't change overnight. The tolerance for it did. And that's not a small thing. That's actually the nervous system saying, "We're done accommodating this one."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: In both of these moments, the picture, the door jam, the cup of coffee [00:19:00] in that same chair, they all have something in common. They're not crises. They're not revelations. They're just moments where something that's been running on automatic paused long enough to get noticed, and that's the shift. What if it isn't a problem?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: What if it was just information that hasn't been fully received yet? Again, I spent years treating my own internal signals like they were inconvenient interruptions to an otherwise functional life. And what I've learned, slowly, imperfectly, and sometimes reluctantly, is that the signals that feel the most inconvenient are often the ones carrying the most important information.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not because something is broken, not because everything needs dismantled, but because something inside is growing. And growth doesn't always feel comfortable at first. [00:20:00] It feels like something is off, even when nothing is wrong. And there may come a point, maybe not today, maybe not soon, where looking back on the moment like that, a quiet, ordinary moment of noticing, feels like beginning of something that's actually important and matters.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This is the part of the episode where I usually feel the urge to give people a little something to do, and I'm gonna resist that today because I think what this particular conversation actually calls for is less doing and more sitting just for a moment If something in this episode created even the smallest flicker of recognition, I'd invite staying with one question, not answering it, not analyzing it, just let it exist for a little while.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Is there a signal that's been showing up that [00:21:00] keeps getting explained away? That's it. I want you to ask yourself, is there a signal that's been showing up for you that keeps getting explained away? No pressure to know what it means, no timeline to figure it out, just an honest acknowledgement that it's there.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Sometimes the most important shift isn't what gets done differently, it's what finally gets something heard. And I want to share something before we close today, something I don't say lightly. The hardest thing I've ever done was to leave my medical practice. Not because I didn't love it, 'cause I did, deeply, but because my identity was so completely woven into everything it represented, the training, the years, the lifestyle, the life that my husband and I had built together, the way we protected that life intentionally so that we could raise our children.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It [00:22:00] was all very neat, very deliberate, and very me, until it couldn't be anymore. And underneath all that neatness, I was bleeding away quietly, slowly, in ways I couldn't fully name yet. Just a growing unhappiness that I kept filing under other things. And when I finally made the decision to step away, I won't pretend it went the way that I imagined it would.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It did not, and life rarely cooperates with the version we plan. But what it did give me was bandwidth I didn't know I was going to need, because not long after that, my husband was diagnosed with cancer and has since passed. And because I had listened to those signals, because I had finally stopped explaining them away, I had the time and the presence and the capacity to be with him during the most difficult season of our lives.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It didn't turn out the way I hoped, but it [00:23:00] turned out the way it needed to. And I have thought more about that more times than I can count. What would've happened if I had kept dismissing that signal? If I kept filing it under ungratefulness or overthinking or just a rough season? I don't say this to make the signal sound magical or dramatic.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I say it because sometimes the thing that feels like it's asking too much of you is actually making room for something you can't see yet. That's what this episode was really about. Not fixing anything, not having answers, just learning to stop dismissing the thing that keeps showing up. Because there is a reason.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And next week we're going to go a little deeper because once that feeling gets acknowledged, the next thing that tends to surface is the pressure behind it. The weight of a life that looks right from the outside and what actually is costing us to keep maintaining it. That's episode two [00:24:00] in this series.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if today resonated, I think that one's going to land somewhere real. Thank you for spending this time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
