Your Body Is Talking. Here's Why You Stopped Listening.

If someone asked you right now what you want, could you answer without a five-second delay?

Not what you should want. Not what makes sense. Not what would be easiest for the room. What you actually, physically want.

For a lot of late-diagnosed ADHD women, that question is harder than it looks. And it's not a personality flaw. It's a body that learned, over a long time, to stop broadcasting.

This is week three of our month two series on self-trust. If you missed the first two, week one was the story of how I spent most of my life not knowing what I wanted and genuinely thinking I was just chill. Week two covered why self-trust erodes for late-diagnosed women specifically and introduced the Story vs Truth process. This week we're getting into the body.

A somatic yes and a somatic no are physical sensations that correspond to alignment or misalignment. When something is right for you, your body signals it one way. When it isn't, it signals it another.

I want to push back on something you'll find all over wellness spaces though: the idea that a yes always feels like expansion and a no always feels like contraction. That your gut clenches when something is off and your chest lifts when it's right.

Maybe. For some people.

For others, a yes is a quiet settling. A stillness. Warmth somewhere in the hands or chest. A breath that comes a little easier. And honestly? Sometimes a release [think: burp]. The body moves energy in whatever way it needs to.

A no might show up as flatness. A slight resistance in the throat. A restlessness in the legs. A flutter in the chest or belly that feels more like alarm than opening.

There is no universal body dictionary. Your only job is to figure out what your body specifically does, not what it's supposed to do, and definitely not to make it perform the right answer.

The practice begins with a calibration question. You ask your body something you already know the answer to, before you try to use this tool for anything that matters.

Something like: is it morning? Do I like olives? Am I in a relationship?

Pick something with a clear, already-decided, no-drama answer. A genuine yes or a genuine no.

Take one breath. Ask internally. And then just notice. Not analyze. Not interpret. Notice where attention lands in the body. Whether anything shifts, even slightly.

Try a yes first, then a no, and compare.

You might feel nothing the first few times. That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. Your body isn't used to being asked. It'll take some repetition before the channel opens back up. Give it a week of practice, not just a day.

This is where most ADHD women get tripped up, and understandably so!!

Anxiety and intuition can feel similar enough to confuse, especially when anxiety has been your baseline for a long time. Here's what I've noticed for myself and in clients:

Anxiety spirals. It's loud, future-focused, and wants you to run every terrible scenario out to the end. It lives mostly in the head. It has a what if quality and it wants you to act right now. It creates urgency.

Intuition tends to quietly flow. More present-tense. It shows up without a story attached. It's not trying to convince you of anything. It's just there, reporting. It is rarely urgent.

The most useful question I've found: is there a story running with this feeling?

Anxiety almost always brings one. Intuition, a lot of the time, doesn't bother.

One more distinction worth naming: anxiety shows up as a protective mechanism when some part of you perceives a threat. Intuition, coming from a more grounded place, doesn't need to protect you from anything because it already trusts your capacity to handle whatever comes.

This isn't an airtight system. Anxiety will absolutely borrow the body's signals and try to pass them off as wisdom. But noticing whether there's a spiral attached is a solid place to start.

If you can't tell the difference between your fear and your knowing, you stop trusting your internal data entirely. You start polling other people. You wait to see how the room feels before you decide how you feel. You lead with I don't know but or I guess I feel and over time, that loop becomes genuinely exhausting. Because it costs a lot of mental energy to maintain.

Learning your body's language is not soft, supplemental work. It is the infrastructure under every decision you'll ever make about your own life.

My own body was talking to me long before I understood what it was saying. The PCOS, the MCAS, the SIBO, the blood sugar stuff. None of that appeared overnight. There were signals for years. I just wasn't fluent enough to receive them. I was too busy overriding them.

That's not a failure of past me. It's what happens with a lifetime spent being told that your read on things is off.

You stop consulting the source.

Once a day, pick one low-stakes decision. Not should I leave my job. Something like: coffee or tea. Walk today or not. Call someone back now or wait until tomorrow.

Pause. One breath. Ask your body instead of your brain.

Notice what comes up. Don't override it immediately. And then follow it. Even when it's small. Especially when it's small.

The asking, receiving, and following through is the rep. That's what builds the track record. Your body starts to notice that you're actually listening. Then it starts speaking a little more clearly.

You're not doing this at the level of big life decisions yet. You're building the muscle somewhere the stakes are low enough to actually hear yourself.

This post is part of the free six-month self-coaching journey on the Victorious Coaching podcast. Month two is all about self-trust. Subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss week four.