The Stress That Won't Leave (And Why Self-Care Isn't Fixing It)
Prefer to listen?
Here’s the Podcast!
Ready to get into it?
It's Monday morning. You hit snooze four times, maybe ten. You take your shower, brush your teeth, do the things. By the time you're in the parking lot, you're circling the block. You showed up five minutes early and now you're sitting there like, I cannot walk in one minute sooner than I have to.
Nothing dramatic happened. There's no crisis, no deadline you've blown. It's just that you don't want to be there. And the fact that you can't explain it makes it worse.
That's the kind of stress I want to talk about. Not the loud kind. The ambient kind. The one that doesn't come with a clear cause and so it never quite comes with a clear solution.
The Problem With Treating Symptoms
You know something's off, so you do what you're supposed to do. You wake up earlier. You go to the gym. You journal. You plan a trip. It works, for a minute. Then it comes back.
It comes back because you've been treating the symptoms, not the source. Managing stress is not the same thing as addressing where it's coming from. And until you get to the source, the signal is just going to keep returning.
Think of it like turning off a smoke alarm because the beeping is annoying. You can silence the noise. That doesn't mean there's no fire.
Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You Something
In Human Design, you have nine energy centres. Each one, when it's carrying too much, generates a specific kind of noise that eventually moves up through the body and speaks through your head center. Those looping thoughts are messages, and each one points back to something specific.
A few examples:
If you're waking up exhausted asking, why am I always so tired? That's your sacral, your life force energy centre, telling you something is draining it.
If the thought running on loop is, what am I even supposed to be doing with my life? That's your G centre, your identity centre, not looking for a new job. Looking for direction. Looking for you.
If the pressure is, I can't fall behind, I need to keep moving, tinged with what other people will think if you don't? That's your will centre or ego, probably amplified by the energy of people around you.
That last one is personal. I have an open will centre, which means I take in the energy of people with defined wills and amplify it. Someone else's confident five becomes my overwhelming twelve. For a long time I just thought I was anxious. Thought I needed to move faster, do more, prove something. But it wasn't mine to carry. Knowing that, actually understanding the source of it, that's what started to shift things.
One Tool That Actually Helps
One of the most effective things I come back to consistently is EFT tapping. It works by tapping on specific meridian points on the body while staying with the actual feeling, not bypassing it, not rushing to replace it with positive affirmations. You sit with what's heavy and tap through it.
The key is leaning into the negative first. Think of it like chipping away at a block of ice with an ice pick. At first it feels like nothing's happening. Then it cracks. Once the intensity drops, you can run a second round tapping in something more neutral, something true that feels a little lighter.
The compound effect of doing this regularly is real. Feelings that used to sit at a six start coming up less. And you create enough stillness to actually hear what's underneath them.
The body keeps the score on the gap between who you actually are and how you've been living. It keeps sending signals. The question is whether you're listening to what they're actually saying.
Listen to the Full Episode
This post is based on Season 3, Episode 1 of Worthy of Wealth. In this episode, I walk through:
Why the low-grade, ambient kind of stress is the hardest to name and the most important to address
A breakdown of all nine Human Design centres and what it sounds like when each one is overwhelmed
Why your head centre is the spokesperson for every other centre (and how to use that to trace stress back to its actual source)
A full walkthrough of EFT tapping, including the exact sequence and how to work through a session
Why you have to lean into the negative feeling first before you can actually clear it
Listen Now:
What's Next?
If the stress that won't leave is pointing to something deeper, like not knowing who you are or what you actually want next, there are two places to start.
If you're figuring out who you are and what you're here to do, The Rewrite is my 10-week private coaching experience. We use Human Design, NLP, and somatic work to help you understand what's been running your decisions, clear the conditioning in the way, and start moving from a place of real self-knowledge.
If you already know your direction and you're ready to build something around it, let's talk about Purpose to Profit, my 16-week program for building a business that works with your energy.
About the Author:
Matalya Onuoha is a Human Design Strategist, Founder of Rewrite Coaching, and creator of The CLARITY to PROSPERITY Framework™. She helps women turn their purpose into profitable businesses using Human Design, NLP, and somatic techniques. Host of the Worthy of Wealth podcast.
