I had a bathroom counter that looked like a health food store exploded on it.
Bottles everywhere. Magnesium, adaptogens, specific vitamins and amino acids, all the things the protocols said would speed healing of my injured body and brain. Then even increasing the amounts on some.
If a little is good, more will be better. More input, more healing. It felt responsible. It felt like I was doing everything right.
I was wrong.
Twenty Five Years of Training, and I Still Got It Wrong
I knew I wasn’t stumbling in the dark. I brought everything I had to my recovery. Twenty five plus years of clinical training, a background in medical laboratory science, and a deep respect for how the body actually heals. I was tracking my diet carefully, shifting toward anti-inflammatory foods, cutting things that created burden and adding things that genuinely supported tissue repair and brain recovery. That part was working. I could feel it working.
The supplement piece started out the same way, intentional and informed. But somewhere in the months of slow recovery, when progress felt invisible and I was desperate to accelerate it, the logic quietly shifted. What started as clinical discernment started to look more like accumulation. One more thing, one more protocol, one more bottle that promised to fill the gap.
That is the spiral nobody warns you about. Not reckless choices. Careful ones, stacked too high.
When More Becomes the Problem
Somewhere in that pile of bottles, I stopped feeling like myself. Not in a dramatic way at first. Just a flatness. No motivation to do absolutely anything. Not depressed, just meh, a feeling that didn’t match the day. A kind of internal static I couldn’t place. I chalked it up to recovery, to being tired, to feeling my age, which I hated, to absolutely anything. I kept taking the supplements because surely they weren’t the problem. They were supposed to be the solution.
Here’s the thing about being trained to trust protocols over instinct. It works right up until it doesn’t. I had spent decades as a scientist and a clinician, decades telling other people to listen to their bodies. And there I was, drowning my own body’s signal under a pile of capsules, convinced that more effort automatically meant more healing.
It doesn’t.
More is not a strategy. More is often just noise wearing the costume of diligence.
What Actually Broke the Spiral
What finally broke the spiral wasn’t a lab test or a new supplement. It was backing off. I started stripping things away one at a time and paying attention to what actually shifted when I did. Some things I dropped and felt nothing. Some things I dropped and felt lighter within days. That gap, between what I assumed was helping and what I could actually feel was helping, was the whole lesson.
Your body is always sending signals. The hard part was never hearing them. The hard part is the discernment piece, telling which ones are real information and which ones are just noise dressed up as something urgent.
How to Tell Signal From Noise
A few things I use now to tell the difference. A real signal tends to be specific and it tends to be consistent. It points to something. Noise tends to be vague, and it tends to multiply the more you feed it. If adding something makes you feel better for a day and then you need to add another thing to chase that same feeling, that is usually noise. If removing something makes a symptom quietly resolve and stay resolved, that is usually signal.
I also learned to ask a blunter question. Am I doing this because my body is asking for it, or because I am afraid of what happens if I stop?
Fear is loud. It is easy to mistake for instinct. But it isn’t the same thing.
The Real Work Is Discernment, Not More Effort
None of this means less effort or less care. It means more discernment. Midlife is full of people, protocols, and products insisting that more is always better. More supplements, more biohacks, more optimization. Almost none of them ask you to slow down long enough to notice what your body is actually telling you underneath all that input.
I did the slowing down. It cost me a rough stretch of feeling off in ways I couldn’t explain. It gave me back the ability to trust my own read on my own body, which is worth more than anything in that drawer ever was.
If you are in your own version of that bathroom counter right now, stacking more onto more onto more, hoping the next thing is the one that finally works, I would gently ask you to pause. Not to add anything else. Just to notice. What happens if you take one thing away and simply pay attention.
That is where discernment starts. Not in the doing. In the noticing.
If some part of you just went “yeah, that’s me,” trust that. That’s your body’s signal too. Set up a time to talk. I’ll help you find the noise.
With joy,
Dr. Leslie
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