The first time I noticed my eczema flaring, I didn’t connect it to stress. I connected it to skincare, to weather, to everything except what was actually happening.

I changed my moisturiser, drank more water, googled “eczema triggers” and went down a rabbit hole about humidity and diet.

It genuinely did not occur to me that what was showing up on my skin had anything to do with what was happening in my life.

At that time, stress to me was something you could point to and say, “yes, that’s stress” and then deal with it.

What I’ve learned since, from my own body and from working with multiple clients across transitions and career changes: 

Your body is often telling the story of your stress before your mind finds the words – it’s whether we notice it or not.

Here’s the pattern I see consistently in my clients and myself.

• Sleep feels less restful and restorative so you wake up tired even after 7–8 hours.
• Exercise starts slipping and it feels like a discipline problem.
• Your mood and energy starts dropping so you blame it on a busy period. 
• You tell yourself it is something you’ll fix when things calm down… 

So you address them at the surface because nothing in your life has signalled yet that this is an impending crisis to solve.

But underneath, the body is already under strain. Cortisol has been running higher than it should, for longer than you’ve tracked.

Sleep deprivation and skipping the exercise just compounds it and prevents the nervous system the opportunity to reset it.

Without these in place, gradually, our immune system starts to dip which is why its often for illness to set in shortly after.

What I see in the second wave are essentially louder signals from the body.

Clients telling me they have ulcers, heart palpitations, eczema flares, acid reflux – all of which weren’t six months ago. 

Hence whenever a client mentions they’ve been sick recently, or that something has flared up, I ask the same question: did this happen during or just after a particularly stressful period? The answer is almost always yes.

Like me before, they hadn’t made the connection so they’d been treating the symptoms, not the source.

I want to be clear that this isn’t medical advice and I’m not a doctor. 

I think about this a lot because I was trying to address this for myself and also now in the context of the work I do helping driven, thoughtful and self-aware people show up well in different areas of their lives.

Physical breakdown often isn’t where the drift started. It’s evidence that something has been accumulating for longer than the person realised.

The sleep disruption, the reluctance to exercise, the fatigue that rest doesn’t fix – those are early signals. Mild enough to explain away hence we tend to ignore them.

By the time the eczema flares or the acid reflux comes, the body has been trying to get your attention for a while. It was just finally harder to ignore.

I learnt in my journey so far that these are valuable signals that I hadn’t learnt how to read.

The reframe that changed things for me was pretty simple. Instead of asking “what is causing this symptom,” I started asking “what has my body been carrying, and for how long?”

That second question helps me address what the real challenges are and at its root cause.

If you’ve been noticing something physical lately that feels unexplained – the bad sleep, the flagging energy, something that’s flared – it’s worth asking that question genuinely.

What have the past few months actually looked like? Where have you been pushing through something without really understanding the full cost?

The good news is that noticing is the beginning of something as that’s where the real work with yourself starts.