Think about motion sickness. Whether you're below deck on a boat or reading in the backseat of a car, the mechanism is the same. Your inner ear feels movement, but your eyes see something stable—a cabin wall, the book in your lap. Those signals don't match. Your brain can't make sense of it, so it interprets the confusion as a threat. The output is nausea and dizziness.

Ever step off a treadmill or one of those moving walkways at the airport? For a few seconds, the ground feels like it's still moving even though you're standing still. Your brain expected one thing and got another. That brief disorientation is what happens when signals don't line up.

My chronic low back pain was my brain using tension in my back to try to stabilize what my balance system couldn't clearly sense. Within days of starting my drills, my back pain was reduced and is now completely gone. When my brain started getting clearer signals, it didn't need to create that protective pain anymore.

The confusion of mismatched signals keeps your system on edge. The good news is that this can be retrained. When we give the brain clear, accurate information through small, targeted exercises, it begins to feel safe again. And when the brain feels safer, the symptoms begin to quiet.

The Threat Bucket: Why Everything Adds Up

Think of your nervous system as having a bucket. It collects inputs throughout the day.

Physical pain or old injuries. Poor sleep. Stress. Sensory overload. Inflammation. Unresolved emotions. Blood sugar crashes.

Each one adds to the load. When the bucket overflows, symptoms spill out.

That's why chronic pain, Long COVID, migraines, ADHD symptoms, and emotional overwhelm can all feel connected. They often are. They're different outputs from the same overloaded system.

Your symptoms are real. Your system is just working with a bucket that's too full.

Why There's Hope

Your brain can relearn safety.

The nervous system is adaptive. It changes based on the information it receives. That means you can influence it by giving your brain clearer, more accurate sensory input.

When you do targeted work—specific eye movements, balance exercises, breathwork, controlled movement—you help recalibrate the systems that feed information to your brain. The input gets clearer. The interpretation shifts. The threat bucket starts to empty. The output quiets down.

This doesn't take years. The nervous system adapts quickly when it gets the right input. People often feel a shift in a single session—less pain, better clarity, a sense of ease they haven't felt in a long time.

What to Do Next

You don't have to keep living in pain.

Your nervous system is working with outdated or confusing information. When we update that information—when we help your brain predict safety instead of threat—things change.

If you've been dealing with chronic pain, post-viral symptoms, or a body that doesn't feel like yours anymore, there are practical ways to retrain your nervous system, not through pushing harder, but through giving your brain what it actually needs to feel safe.

I work with people online where we test this in real time. You feel the difference as it happens. When the input changes, the output follows.

Be grateful that the your pain's in your head. It's why we can actually do something about it.

Warmly,



Kathy Taylor
read my bio

Your pain is all in your head.

I don't mean that it's just your imagination. I mean literally pain is produced in your brain. It happens there.

The good news is that if your brain learned to create pain to protect you, it can learn to dial it back down.

When the Pain Doesn't Make Sense

She was so tired of being in pain.

She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to not be in pain. It had become the background noise of her life — always humming, always present.  She had tried all kinds of specialists and modalities--and everything to avoid surgery, but nothing held. Nobody could even tell her what was wrong.

“If nothing’s wrong, why does it still hurt?”

Maybe you’ve asked the same question. You’ve done the tests, followed the advice, tried to stay positive — and still, something in your body keeps sounding the alarm.

It happens more often than most people realize. The pattern is familiar: pain without clear cause, symptoms that move around, fatigue that doesn’t make sense. It can feel random, mysterious, even unfair. But it isn’t random at all.

There’s a reason the pain won’t let go — and it starts with how your brain and body communicate.

Pain isn't always pointing to damage. Sometimes it's pointing to a nervous system that hasn't learned it's safe to turn the alarm off. Yes, the pain is real. But if it's no longer about injury, it means the brain's protection has gotten stuck in the ON position.



The Body as a Communication System

Pain is a message from your brain. Not a mistake—a communication.

Your brain's job is to keep you alive. To do that, it's constantly asking: Am I safe right now?

It answers that question by collecting information. What are my eyes seeing? What's my balance system telling me? Where is my body in space? What's my heart rate? How's my breathing?

All that data comes in, gets interpreted, and your brain produces an output—a response designed to protect you.

That output might be pain, muscle tension, fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, inflammation or anxiety. These aren't separate problems. They're all protective outputs from the same system.

Here's the basic model: Input, interpretation, output.

When your brain gets clear, matching information from all your senses, it interprets the situation as safe. The output is calm, ease, no alarm--no pain. This is a regulated nervous system.

When the input is conflicting or unclear, your brain interprets that as a potential threat so it creates pain to protect you.

It's important to understand that your brain is predictive. It makes its best guess based on past experience and the current information it's getting. If that info is similar to other times where things have gone wrong (you've gotten injured, someone scared you) it will err on the side of caution. It will predict a threat even when there isn't any.

When Your Brain Gets Mixed Signals

Sometimes pain, fatigue, or dizziness isn't about damage at all—it's about confusion.

Your brain is constantly taking in information from your body to decide if you're safe. It listens to what you see, how your balance feels, how your body moves, and what's happening inside you. Most of the time, all of that information lines up—and your brain feels confident.

But when those signals don't quite match, your brain gets uncertain. It can't tell exactly where you are in space or whether you're steady—and that uncertainty feels like danger.

When that happens, your brain does what it's designed to do: it protects you. And one of the ways it protects you is through pain. Or tension. Or fatigue. Or brain fog.

It's like a smoke alarm that goes off because it smells burnt toast. There's no fire, but the alarm is still real—and loud.