3The Body Keeps the Score

The next day was a good day. A really good day. Fawzooz woke to find his blood sugar at 138. He felt a quiet pride. He used the “timer technique” NourFi had suggested, setting it for focused thirty-minute work periods. It felt strange at first, but it worked. He finished Ronza’s proposal, ate the healthy lunch he had ordered in advance, and even went for a walk around the hotel, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin. For the first time in a long while he felt in control. He felt… capable.

That evening his phone rang. It was his wife, calling to discuss a logistical matter about the children’s school fees. The conversation began calmly, but soon drifted into familiar territory. The tone changed. There was an undercurrent of accusation, a hint of blame. Fawzooz felt the familiar knot tighten in his stomach. He ended the call as politely and quickly as he could, but the damage was done. The calm he had built all day evaporated. A wave of exhaustion washed over him, a deep, bone-weary exhaustion. Out of curiosity, he picked up his glucose meter. He pricked his finger, waited for the beep, and stared at the screen in disbelief.

“Your body never forgets. Every tension is a debt against your health.”

195. He felt a surge of anger and frustration. He hadn’t eaten anything for hours. He had done everything right today. How was this possible? He grabbed his phone. “NourFi, I don’t understand,” he wrote, his thumb jabbing the screen. “I ate perfectly today. I used the timer and finished my work. I even walked. But after one five-minute phone call with my wife, I feel awful and my blood sugar is 195. Why? It makes no sense.” NourFi: “Hello, Fawzooz. I hear the frustration in your words, and you have every right to feel it. What you’ve been through is not a failure. It’s the most important lesson of our whole journey.

You’ve been focusing on one source of fuel for your body: the food you eat. But your body has another, more powerful source of fuel: your emotions. Today you experienced, in real time, the undeniable connection between mind and body.”

NourFi’s Coaching Corner

The tiger in the room. Let’s talk about stress, Fawzooz. Not in a vague, abstract way, but as a real physical and chemical event inside your body. Your body is an ancient, wonderful machine designed for survival. It has a built-in alarm system called the “fight or flight” response. Thousands of years ago, when our ancestors saw a sabre-toothed tiger, this system flooded their bodies with two powerful hormones: adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline makes your heart pound and your senses sharpen. Cortisol, the “stress hormone”, does something very specific: it tells your liver to dump all its stored sugar (glucose) into your bloodstream.

Why? Because your body believes you need a huge, immediate burst of energy either to fight the tiger or to run for your life. Now, here is the most important part of this chapter: your body doesn’t know the difference between a sabre-toothed tiger and a stressful phone call. During that call, when you felt that familiar knot of tension, your brain sent exactly the same emergency signal. It screamed: “Tiger! Danger!” Your adrenal glands obeyed and flooded your system with cortisol. Your liver, doing its job perfectly, emptied sugar into your blood to prepare you for a battle that was only happening inside your soul.

That’s why your blood sugar rose to 195, even though you hadn’t eaten a single gram of sugar. Your body made its own sugar, driven by stress. Diabetes, high blood pressure, inflammation: these aren’t just diseases of diet. They are the physical scars of living in a chronic state of “fight or flight”. They are the score your body keeps, a record of every argument, every moment of worry, every night of poor sleep. The good news? Once you understand this, you gain a new level of control.

We can’t eliminate all the “tigers” in your life, but we can learn to calm your body’s alarm system. We can teach it that a phone call is just a phone call, not a matter of life and death. This is where our real work begins. Today’s task: a DBT-inspired task to start building the bridge between your mind and your body. The “body scan” task: for the next 24 hours, your only task is to become a curious observer of your body. Whenever you feel a strong emotion (anger, sadness, worry, even the “fizz” we discussed), I want you to do the following:

Stop. Stop what you’re doing for just 30 seconds.

Scan. Close your eyes if you can, and mentally scan your body

from head to toe.

Notice. Where do you physically feel that emotion? Is it tightness in

your chest? A knot in your stomach? Clenching in your jaw? Trembling in your hands?

Name it (don’t control it). Simply name the sensation to yourself. “Ah, there’s

tension in my shoulders.” Or “My heart is beating fast.” The goal isn’t to fix it or make it go away. The goal is simply to build awareness that your emotions aren’t just abstract thoughts in your head; they are real physical events. This is the first step in learning to regulate them.