I Thought I Was Just Bad at Rest.

I Thought I Was Just Bad at Rest.

It Turned Out My Body Had Been Trying to Tell Me Something for Years.

I've watched my sister navigate some of the hardest seasons of her life: cancer, mold toxicity, histamine issues, SIBO, and come out the other side more knowledgeable about her own body than most doctors she'd ever seen. She became the kind of person who doesn't just manage symptoms. She hunts them down, names them, and addresses the root.

And for the last year, she kept telling me: " Get tested for SIBO. Do the breath test."

I kept putting it off.

I had reasons. Good ones, I thought. I was doing other tests, blood panels, stool tests, food sensitivities, etc. I tried a low FODMAP diet for a while last summer. And besides, I had a built-in explanation for almost everything I was feeling. Ten years ago, I had been diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus. And when you carry that diagnosis, it becomes very easy to file almost anything under that tab.

Tired? Epstein-Barr.

Foggy? Epstein-Barr.

Not quite yourself? Epstein-Barr.

It's a convenient story. And it wasn't entirely wrong. But it wasn't entirely right either.

The Symptoms I Decided Were Normal

Here's the thing about symptoms that accumulate slowly, over years: you stop experiencing them as problems. They become your baseline. Your personality. Your just how I am.

I was sleeping ten hours a night. Some days, twelve, add in the naps and half my life was unconscious. And I had decided that was just what I needed. Except I would wake up and not feel rested. I'd drag through the morning, hit a wall by afternoon, chalk it up to a full schedule, push through, and do it again.

The energy wasn't crashing dramatically the way a full Epstein-Barr flare hits, that will knock me completely flat, bedridden and non-functional for days.

This was different. More like a dull ache. A dimness. Like the lights were always turned down thirty percent and I couldn't find the switch.

Then there was the bloating. Looking three months pregnant after a simple, healthy meal. Distended, uncomfortable, confused because I was doing everything right and my body was responding like I'd done something wrong. I did food sensitivity testing. Some things came back mildly elevated, eggs, almonds, coconut, things I was eating every single day, sometimes stacked together in the same meal. So I adjusted. I eliminated. I adapted. And I never stopped to ask whether the sensitivities themselves were a symptom of something larger.

There was joint pain too. Ankles, knees, hips, shoulders. I'm 45. I stay active. I take care of myself. And I was hurting often enough that I'd started quietly wondering whether this was just aging. Whether this was just the deal now.

I don't actually believe that. But the wondering was loud.

Could it be perimenopause?

My mother went through menopause in her early 40s, so that was worth looking at. My hormones had been inconsistent, testosterone close to zero twice in the last five years, progesterone all over the place. I chased that thread too and it helped some.

Underneath all of it was this feeling of being almost depressed without actually being depressed. You know what I mean? Something is genuinely off. The color has drained out of things a little. Your affect is low. But logically you know you are not depressed. You have no reason to be depressed. And so you walk around confused by your own interior experience, wondering if you're making it up.

That one is disorienting in a particular way. Because it makes you question your own perception.

And when every test comes back saying you're mostly fine, when every route you take leads back to there's not really a big deal here, you start to wonder whether something is wrong with you for insisting that something is wrong.

That's a lonely place to be.

The Relief of Finally Having an Answer

When I finally listened to my sister and did the breath test, the results came back positive. Both hydrogen and methane SIBO.

And what I felt wasn't dread. It wasn't overwhelm.

It was relief.

Strange, specific, almost embarrassing relief. Because there was something there. Something real. Something with a name and a clear path of action. I wasn't inventing it. I wasn't creating it out of stress or sensitivity or hypochondria. My body had been trying to tell me something, for years and it finally had the vocabulary to make me hear it.

What SIBO Actually Is

SIBO stands for Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth. The simple version: bacteria that belong in your large intestine have migrated into your small intestine, where they don't belong. There, they ferment, produce gas, and trigger a cascade of effects that go far beyond digestion.

Bloating. Brain fog. Inconsistent energy. Mood disruption. Sleep that doesn't restore. Joint inflammation. And the big ah-ha was being reminded that the gut directly impacts your ability to produce sex hormones and the neurotransmitters that regulate how you feel. Serotonin. Dopamine. Norepinephrine.

When the gut is struggling, the whole system feels it.

Which meant that some of what I had been calling stress, or aging, or just how I am, had a physiological address I hadn't found yet.

I tested positive for two types. Hydrogen and methane.

And when I started reading about what that actually meant , not just medically, but metaphorically, I had to put my phone down and sit with it for a while.

The Push-Pull Biology

Hydrogen-producing bacteria tend to speed things up.

Methane-producing archaea tend to slow things down.

One side of my gut was pushing, accelerating, driving forward.

The other side was saying: slow down. pause. not yet.

I've spent the last 5 years actively practicing the art of slowing down. It does not come naturally. I am someone who wants to race to the finish, get it done, be efficient, move. And I have been slowly, imperfectly learning that this is not the best way for my entire system to function. That I need to process. To really be in something before rushing past it.

It even shows up in how I share information. I'll learn something new, get excited, and immediately want to broadcast it , before it's fully landed in me. Before I've actually integrated it. I'm learning to slow that down too. To let things sink before I speak them.

Hence, actually, the time I've taken with this particular blog.

So sitting with the metaphor of these two biological forces, one speeding up, one slowing down, both living inside me, in literal conflict, felt uncomfortably familiar.

But here's something I found facintating.

The methane-producing organisms aren't bacteria at all. They're archaea.

Some of the oldest living organisms on Earth. They predate almost everything. They have survived mass extinctions, atmospheric shifts, billions of years of planetary change. And they do it not by accelerating or pushing harder but by slowing down. Conserving. Pausing. Integrating.

They don't override the environment.

They survive by learning to move with it.

And there they were, these ancient, patient, extraordinarily resilient organisms, living in my gut, producing exactly the signal my body uses to say slow down, while I had spent years treating that signal as an obstacle. As something to push through on the way to the next thing.

Carl Jung wrote about the shadow, the parts of ourselves we've pushed beneath the surface because they didn't fit the identity we were building. For a long time, the part of me that needed to rest, to slow down, to integrate rather than accelerate ,that was a shadow part. I didn't trust it. I treated it like weakness dressed up as need.

The archaea were living that truth in my body while I was busy overriding it everywhere else.

The Gut and the Brain Are Always Talking

One of the things this process cracked open was how constant the conversation between the gut and the brain actually is. Bidirectional. Continuous. This isn't woo — it's biology.

What happens in your gut influences your mood, your anxiety, your focus, your sleep, your hormone production. And what you're carrying emotionally, the chronic urgency, the years of override, the pressure you've normalized, influences your gut right back.

The conversation never stops. The question is whether you're a participant in it, or just receiving the memos after the fact.

Some of what I had been calling stress had a physiological address. Some of what I was managing physically had an emotional root. It was never gut or brain.

It was always gut and brain.

And mine had been trying to negotiate something for a long time, while I kept showing up to the table with the same offer: I hear you. But not yet.

And If We're Honest — This Isn't Just About Digestion

I think a lot of us have a version of this story. Not necessarily SIBO. But the broader arc — the slow normalization of symptoms, the accumulation of adjustments, the quiet adaptation to a pace or a pressure that was never actually sustainable.

We get very good at functioning. And we mistake functioning for flourishing.

Here's what most people miss: the body is not neutral.

It is not a vehicle you drive until the engine light comes on. It is in constant communication with every system you have , emotional, cognitive, relational. It keeps a record, even when you're not paying attention. And at some point, it finds a way to be heard.

Maybe not through SIBO. But through something.

So wherever you're standing, the question is the same:

• Where have you normalized something that was never actually normal?

• What have you adapted to, built routines around, not because it was healthy, but because it was familiar?

• Where are the oldest, most patient parts of you quietly asking for something different?

And are you listening?

The most surprising part of this whole journey wasn't discovering I had SIBO.

It was discovering how much I had quietly decided was normal and realizing how much energy I had been spending every single day managing a problem I'd stopped calling a problem.

Not everything that slows you down is an obstacle.

Sometimes it's the wisest part of you asking to be heard.

This is the first of at least three blogs documenting this journey from start to wherever it ends up taking me. More coming soon.

If this landed somewhere real, I'd love to hear from you. Just hit reply to the email from this blog or find me on socials.

And if you're a leader, an educator, a coach, or someone who has been running on empty long enough that it just feels like your personality now, the work we do at MotivAction® was built for exactly this.

Visit us at MotivAction.academy to learn more.

Written with the support of AI.