You’re at the GP for the headaches. The form on the clipboard has a box that says “reason for visit.” You wrote “headaches.” Underneath that there are four pages of questions about your mood, your sleep, your appetite, your stress levels.
You ticked all the moderate ones. Most of them you ticked because you didn’t want to seem like you were complaining about a one out of ten.
The doctor sees you. She’s read the form. She asks about the headaches. You tell her where they sit. How often. What you’ve tried. She nods, types, asks a few questions you didn’t expect - about your jaw, your shoulders, the way you sleep, what you do at the end of a working day.
Somewhere in the conversation she says the word “tension.” You agree, sort of. You say “I mean, work’s been busy.” She doesn’t push. She gives you a referral to a physio and asks if you’d like to come back in a fortnight.
You walk out of the surgery thinking that was a useful visit and also slightly wondering why you feel a bit caught out.
This article is about why.
What Australians Tell the GP, and What the Body Tells the GP
Australians do not, on the whole, walk into a GP visit and say “I’ve been quietly not okay for nine months.” Australians walk in and say “I’ve got these headaches” or “my back is playing up” or “I just want to check this thing on my arm.”
That’s not avoidance, exactly. It’s the way the conversation is allowed to start.
Behind a fair number of those visits, though, is a body doing what bodies do when the person inside them has been holding too much for too long without saying so. The tension headaches. The grinding jaw. The bowel that’s gone a bit twitchy. The shoulder that won’t release. The sleep that breaks at 3am and won’t come back. The chest that goes tight on the way home from work.
Bodies are bad at lying. That’s their job description, really. They run the maintenance program for the actual human, and the maintenance program responds to what’s actually going on inside the human, regardless of what the human has decided to say out loud.
If the human has been holding a load that doesn’t have a vocabulary, the body picks up the slack. It runs the cortisol that should have been spoken about. The shoulders that haven’t been let down stay up. The person gets woken at 3am because there’s a thing they need to address that the daylight version of them isn’t allowing onto the agenda.
The body doesn’t do this to punish. The body does it because nobody else is doing it.
What the Strategies Have Been Doing
You’ll have tried things. Most Australians who get to this point have. The magnesium supplements. The yoga app. The new pillow. The early bed time. The cutting back on coffee. The acupuncture. The “I’m going to walk more this year.” Some of them have helped a bit. Most have stopped helping after a fortnight.
That’s not a failure of those things. They’re working the level they work at, which is the conscious-and-physical level. The supplements address what they address. The pillow does what a pillow does.
The level the actual problem lives at is somewhere else.
About five per cent of what’s running in your head at any given moment is conscious - the planning, the to-do lists, the choosing of the pillow. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious. And the subconscious, in a lot of Australian adults who’ve been holding more than they’re saying, has its own ongoing project: keep it moving, don’t let on, get through.
That project sounds something like: Stay on top of it. Don’t complain. Pull your head in. Other people have it worse. You’ll be right.
It doesn’t run as language. It runs as the held tension in your jaw at 9pm, the chest that won’t quite open up on the drive home, the body that has, very politely, started writing you notes about it.
What the Method Reaches
The body is asking to release something. Releasing-into-the-body work treats the asking. It doesn’t address what’s making the body ask in the first place. Physio releases what the muscles are gripping; the muscles grip again because the instruction to grip wasn’t written at muscle level. Mindfulness asks the conscious mind to notice; the noticing doesn’t change what’s deploying the gripping underneath the noticing.
Inner Influencing works one level below the body. At the layer the body is taking its orders from. Updating that layer changes what the body is asked to do in the first place, which is a different kind of fix from any version of “tell the body to relax.”
Reaching the layer requires a specifically structured request - the subconscious does not respond to affirmations or to thinking, but it does respond to instructions that come in marked as instructions. The mark is a trigger phrase: “Purple Cow.” The phrase is strange because the strangeness is what flags it as not-noise. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
Notice whatever comes - even something faint. A shoulder that drops half an inch. A jaw that unclenches a notch. A breath that goes into a part of the chest that hadn’t been getting much air.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the held tension my body has been carrying for the things I haven’t quite said, the shoulders that won’t drop, the jaw that won’t relax, the breathing that runs shallow without my noticing, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that saying what I’m actually carrying would be making a fuss, that the body should be able to handle whatever’s not been said, that the load is mine alone to carry, and the inheritance of doing all this quietly because that’s what people like me do, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for my body to release what it’s been holding on my behalf, to relax in the places it’s been gripping, and to let me know what’s actually going on inside me before it has to write me a physical note about it, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Released
You may have felt something specific. A shoulder that dropped half an inch. A jaw that unclenched a notch. A breath that went into a part of the chest that hadn’t been getting much air. Whatever happened, even if it was barely a thing, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the body’s been taking instruction from.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less held tension in the place the body had been gripping, a slightly quieter version of the maintenance program.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the older instructions about coping, the early decisions about what you were allowed to feel out loud, the inheritance of carrying for the people you grew up watching. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australians have been listening to their bodies the way you listen to a smoke alarm - wait until it’s loud enough to be a problem. Bodies have been writing notes longer than that.
The notes are real.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.