Don’t Medicate the Messenger

Reframing Symptoms as Information

Made with Midjourney AI with the prompt “reframing symptoms as information.”

We've been taught to treat anxiety and depression as problems to solve. But what if that's exactly backwards? What if your symptoms aren't the disease — they're the message? This essay is an invitation to stop fighting your experience and start listening to it. For parents, for clients, for anyone who has ever felt haunted by their own inner life.

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There’s a 70/ 30 rule every therapist is told to follow. Attend to your client with about 70 percent of your conscious mind on their story, their body language and general demeanor. Devote the remaining 30 percent to your own experience — to how your body and mind respond to the experience of the person in front of you.

Lately, as I’ve sat with clients, I’ve noticed an error message, a blinking red light, a warning bell, on the periphery of my conscious mind. Something about the standard contemporary approach to mental health is wrong. As a mind-body therapist whose chief focus is helping clients become receptive to the information of their experience, I honed in on my own ringing and blinking alarm as information worthy of my investigation.

The standard approach to mental health asks clinicians to identify the symptoms of a mental health episode. Depression. Anxiety. Grief. These are markers of what’s dysfunctional, and therefore warrant diagnosis. In order to complete a therapy note — necessary if I want insurance to compensate me for time — I need to list what’s wrong with the client. Contemporary mental healthcare says these are problems to be solved, malfunctions to be corrected.

In session after session, my nervous system kept throwing the alert: this approach is wrong. When I looked directly at my discomfort, I realized I feel I’m doing my clients a disservice by pathologizing their experience. The symptoms are not the disease. They are information. They are the system’s way of alerting that something is misaligned. Body and mind are communicating. The question is not how to silence the alarm. The question is what the alarm is trying to say.

Consider a carbon monoxide detector in your home. When it goes off, you don’t turn it off because it’s annoying. You pay attention. You investigate. You ask: what is this alerting me to? Because the alarm itself isn’t the problem. The alarm is the messenger. The same is true of anxiety and depression and all their associated discomfort, the symptoms we have learned to fear and fight. They are messengers. They are information about something in your system that needs attention.

A recent course of about ten sessions with a client is what brought this understanding to the fore. He came to me with intense anxiety. It shaped his days, interrupted his sleep, made him feel like something was fundamentally broken. We did not start by trying to eliminate the anxiety. We got curious about it. We sat with it. And over time, what emerged was this: his anxiety intensified specifically when he had something he wanted to say to someone but did not feel equipped to have the difficult conversation. The anxiety was not random. It was not a neurochemical accident. It was his body and mind telling him that something important was unspoken, that something needed to be addressed. The anxiety was information about relational misalignment, about his own integrity being compromised by silence.

Once we understood that, everything shifted. His relationship to the anxiety changed. It was no longer an enemy. It was a teacher. And from that place of curiosity rather than resistance, real healing work could begin. He could address what the anxiety was pointing to. He could learn to speak truth. And as he did, the anxiety began to abate—not because we medicated it away, or white-knuckled through willpower. It resolved because we addressed what it was signaling.

This same reframe has transformed how I parent. I have a son who is a rule follower, whose nervous system is attuned to what is expected of him. I began noticing that he carried what might be labeled as anxiety—worry, rumination, vigilance. I did not want to pathologize my nine-year-old, to tell him something was wrong with him, to diagnose him for the sake of diagnosis.

Instead, I got curious alongside him. I said: it sounds like you are feeling a lot of worry in your body. Where is that worry coming from? What is it trying to tell you? What do you need to feel more settled? And in asking those questions, I am modeling something essential: that uncomfortable sensations are not problems to be eliminated. They are information to be understood. Your body has wisdom and your system talking to you. Listen.

This is where yoga therapy deepens the work. On the mat, we practice sitting with discomfort, noticing sensation without needing it to go away. We practice remaining curious about what we are experiencing rather than reactive or defensive. We learn that we can be present with something difficult, that it will pass, and that the willingness to stay with it without resistance actually allows the sensation to transform. That is not just a physical practice. That is a fundamental reorientation to how we relate to our own experience—to anxiety, to depression, to all the ways our bodies and minds alert us to what needs attention.

Of course, there are cases of intense psychopathology—mania, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depressive episodes—where symptoms are so intense that they require direct management. These are real. These matter. And yet, even in these cases, the underlying thesis holds: symptoms are information about something profoundly misaligned in the system.

Emerging research by Christopher Palmer on ketogenic diet interventions has shown that mania, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder can move into remission when we address underlying systemic dysfunction—in this case, metabolic and neurochemical imbalance. Even in the most severe presentations, when we ask what the symptom is signaling rather than simply silencing it, we open pathways to genuine healing.

So what changes when we shift from pathology-focused assessment to curiosity-first assessment? Everything. A client comes in hunched, depressive, jittering with anxiety, fully convinced that something is fundamentally wrong with them. When I introduce the idea that their body and mind are so wise that they are teaching them something important, and that our work together is to listen carefully to what they are trying to communicate, something shifts. Their shoulders drop. Their relationship to themselves transforms. They move from fighting their own experience to investigating it.

But the shift requires a practical tool. I notice that clients often say to me, “I am depressed” or “I am an anxious person.” When I hear this, I pause and say: let us look at the language. How is that language itself informing your experience?

What if instead of saying to yourself, I am an anxious person, you said to yourself, I have experienced anxiety, and today I am working on finding my way through it. Today I am working on creating a new relationship to my experience. Today I am working on letting my anxiety be information that can teach me about what I need.

This simple language shift can inform an entire mental shift about how we relate to our experience. We move from fixed identity to active process. From pathology to agency. From I am this to I have experienced this, and today I am working on shifting this.

From that place of curiosity and active engagement, real work can happen. Not weeks of symptom suppression. Ten sessions of fundamental reorientation. That is the gift of curiosity.

This is available to all of us—clinicians, parents, anyone inhabiting a body that sometimes sends signals we do not want to receive. The invitation is the same: stop treating the symptom as the enemy. Instead, treat it as a messenger and get curious about what it is trying to tell you. Sit with the discomfort without needing it to disappear. Notice the language you are using about yourself, and choose language that reflects process, rather than fixed identity. Discover what becomes possible when you listen rather than fight the wisdom of your lifelong partner: You.