Your Cells Heard That

The witty, woo-woo, wildly scientific truth about what your body is listening to.

If you’ve been following my recent posts, you’ll know I’ve spent a few weeks being deliberately mysterious. I’ve told you your genes are not a life sentence, your immune system is a gossip, your heart is a jazz drummer and midlife is not a closing-down sale. Then things went full nature documentary: queen bees, your grandmother’s dinner and some very well-loved dogs.

What I haven’t done for you is join the dots. So put the kettle on. This is that bit.

(A quick, sensible word before we get giddy: none of this replaces your GP, your medication or anyone’s actual medical advice. Think of it as the stuff that sits alongside all that, the stuff that’s in your hands every single day.)

Your cells are eavesdropping. Right now.

Somewhere around 37 trillion cells in your body are listening to you as you read this.

They heard what you said to yourself in the mirror this morning. They felt the little spike of dread when you checked your phone before your feet hit the floor. They absorbed the coffee, the news headlines, and the eye-roll you gave your inbox.

Welcome to epigenetics, the science of how your life talks to your genes. “Epi” is Greek for “above”, so it literally means “above the gene”: a layer of instructions sitting on top of your DNA, responding to what you live through.

You are a renovation project that never finishes

Here’s the thing nobody told us at school: you are not the same person you were last year. Physically, I mean. Emotionally, you may still be the woman who cries at adverts (or is that just me!).

Your body is in constant demolition and rebuild, like an ambitious home renovation with no end date and a builder who never goes to the pub. Roughly speaking:

Your stomach lining refreshes every few days. Your skin replaces its outer layer every few weeks, so you are quite literally shedding old versions of yourself. Your red blood cells are a whole new batch every four months or so. Your liver renews itself over a year or two. Your skeleton gradually remodels itself over about a decade. Most brain cells stay with you for life, but the connections between them rewire constantly.

So whether you planned it or not, you’re growing a new stomach lining, fresh skin and a fair bit of new liver. (The liver would also appreciate a quieter Friday night now and then, but I’m definitely not here to judge.)

The real question is: what blueprint is your body using when it rebuilds?

The control panel you inherited

This is where “it runs in the family” gets less depressing.

Your genes themselves are fixed, bless ’em. But as cells are built and do their jobs, chemical tags attach to your DNA like Post-it notes, telling the machinery: switch this on, quieten that down, turn this up a bit. The best-known of these Post-it notes is called methylation. Another mouthful, I know. Epigenetics clearly didn’t want to be the only tongue-twister at the party.

My favourite proof of this lives in a beehive. A queen bee and a worker bee have identical DNA. One lives for years and runs the place; the other lives a few weeks. The difference is what each was fed as a larva: the future queen gets royal jelly, and that diet changes which genes get switched on. Same script. Completely different performance.

What influences those Post-it notes? Researchers are still untangling the detail, but the usual suspects keep turning up: what you eat, how you sleep, how you move, how stressed you are over the long haul, and the environment you live in.

It doesn’t mean you can think your way out of anything. It does mean your family history is a starting point, not a verdict. You inherited the panel. You get more say over the settings than most of us were ever told.

Everything you take in is information

Let’s do a quick, cheerful audit of your daily inputs. Not a lecture. A nosy look in the cupboards.

Food. Food isn’t just fuel, it’s information. Leafy greens, oily fish and colourful veg send your body a very different message from a steady diet of ultra-processed beige. Broccoli, kale and Brussels sprouts contain a compound called sulforaphane that researchers are studying precisely because of how it interacts with gene activity. Yes, the Brussels sprout is having its moment. Christmas dinner was right all along.

Your feed. Doom-scrolling and a constant stream of alarming news keep poking the brain’s alarm system, which releases cortisol, your main stress hormone. Cortisol is brilliant in short bursts; along with adrenaline, it’s what gets you out of the way of a runaway bus. On a constant drip, though, it’s linked to inflammation, disrupted hormones and faster wear and tear on the body.

Which means, and I want you to sit with this, your social media feed is a hormonal event. (I’m aware of the irony of saying that in a series of social media posts. Consider this one of the good ones.)

Your immune system, the gossip. This is also why you get the cold the minute you go on holiday. There’s a whole field of science, gloriously named psychoneuroimmunology, studying how the mind, the nervous system and the immune system talk to each other. Short bursts of stress, the body handles. Stress that never switches off wears it down, and sometimes when you finally stop, the body goes “right, NOW I’ll deal with that,” and down you go like a damp dishcloth.

What you wear. How you feel in your clothes affects your mood, and mood is chemistry. Comfortable clothes that let you breathe and move, colours that make you feel like yourself: this is the first conversation you have with the world each morning. Make it a nice one.

What you think. This is where it gets electric. Your nervous system is not great at telling the difference between an imagined threat and a real one. Which means your 3am worry spiral is, as far as your stress response is concerned, uncomfortably close to being chased by a bear.

The good news? It works the other way too. Moments of genuine warmth, connection and pleasure bring your feel-good chemistry along with them. You can, in a small but real way, bathe your cells in something better.

The conversation you’re having with your womb

This bit is close to my heart.

For fifteen years in Ireland I was known as “the baby lady.” Couples came to me from all over Ireland, Cornwall, France and even New York, often after years of trying. And what I saw, over and over, was bodies responding not just to needles, nutrition and reiki, but to hope, to fear, to guilt, and to the particularly cruel idea that fertility struggles are “her problem,” when it was always something two people were creating together.

If you have a womb, or had one, or are navigating what comes after, hear this: she is not a filing cabinet for disappointment. She is not a broken appliance. She is not a measure of your worth.

She is wired into your whole nervous system, though, so she deserves to hear something kinder than “my useless body.” Not because your words caused anything. Because you’ve been through enough, and you deserve kindness too.

If you’re on a fertility journey, the roughly three months before conception, while eggs are maturing, is a genuinely important window. What you eat, how you sleep and how you manage stress all shape the environment in which life begins. And that goes for both partners. Sperm take about the same time to develop, so this is a team sport, not a solo audition.

And here’s the bit that still gives me goosebumps. A baby girl is born with all her eggs already formed. So when your grandmother was pregnant with your mum, the egg that became you was already there. People conceived during the Dutch “Hunger Winter” of 1944 showed differences in how certain genes were tagged, still visible around 60 years later. We carry stories older than we are. None of this is about blame. It’s about wonder.

And for those of us in or past menopause: the conversation with your body doesn’t end here. It deepens. But if the inner monologue has become “I’m drying up, I’m invisible, I’m past it,” your body deserves a better script than that. Midlife is not a closing-down sale. What if the conversation became: “Thank you. You’ve carried me through everything. And we’re just getting started.”

A pain in the neck: where do your emotions live?

Ever had someone who’s a pain in the neck give you a pain in the neck? Been gutted? Heartbroken? Couldn’t stomach it? Absolutely pissed off?

Long before MRI scans, traditions from Chinese medicine to Ayurveda to Louise Hay mapped emotions onto the body. Roughly:

The lungs hold grief, the things we swallow instead of crying. The liver holds anger and resentment, all that filtering and processing. The kidneys and lower back hold fear. The bladder, well, see “pissed off” above. The gut holds worry, and science backs it up here: your gut has its own nervous system with over 100 million neurons, which is why anxiety so often shows up there first. The throat holds everything we can’t say. And the heart holds both joy and grief.

I want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty more than a neat story. Science doesn’t back a precise “this feeling causes that illness” map, and if something’s physically wrong, your GP comes first, every time. But the heart gives us a striking example of where the two worlds meet: “broken heart syndrome” (Takotsubo) is a real, medically recognised condition, where intense emotional stress temporarily affects how the heart pumps. Heartbreak is not always a metaphor.

So think of the map as an invitation to listen, not a diagnosis. The body whispers before it shouts. Which one just made you look suspiciously at your left shoulder?

Your heart is a jazz drummer

A healthy heart isn’t a metronome. The tiny variations between beats, called heart rate variability (HRV), tell us how flexible your nervous system is: how well it can rev up when needed and settle back down afterwards. Chronic stress, poor sleep and, sadly, alcohol all tend to flatten the rhythm.

And here’s the answer to the clue from my earlier post. The thing that shifts it, that’s cheaper than wine and doesn’t give you a headache?

Your breath.

Try the 4-7-8 breath: in through the nose for a count of four, hold for seven, out through the mouth for eight. Long, slow out-breaths are one of the simplest ways to tap the brakes on your stress response. Do a few rounds in the car, at your desk, or locked in the loo at a family christening. Nobody needs to know.

Small experiments, not rules

You don’t need to become a Buddhist monk, and none of this is a test you can fail. Think of these as small, kind experiments. Try one, notice how you feel, keep what works:

Breathe. A few rounds of 4-7-8, a few times a day. Especially before you open your emails.

Feel real gratitude. Not the performative Instagram kind. Fifteen seconds of genuinely feeling thankful for something, and noticing it in your body. It’s small, it’s free, and it’s linked with a calmer heart rhythm.

Move for joy, not punishment. Dance in your kitchen. Shake it out. Your body holds tension in its tissues, and movement helps let it go.

Hum. Humming gently stimulates the vagus nerve, a key part of your calming system. You are a biological instrument. Also, humming is very annoying to teenagers, so there are fringe benefits.

Touch. Remember the dogs? When a dog gazes at its owner, oxytocin rises in both of them, and just ten minutes of stroking a dog or cat has been shown to lower cortisol. A hug releases oxytocin too. So does a warm hand on your own heart, and the dogs definitely count. Don’t save self-compassion for when you’ve ‘earned’ it.

Get among the trees. Japanese research on “forest bathing” has found that time in nature can lower stress hormones and blood pressure and boost the immune cells that patrol for trouble. Trees are not an optional luxury. They’re free therapy with better parking.

Eat the colours. More things that grew in the ground, fewer things that were built in a factory.

Curate your feed. Unfollow anything that reliably makes you feel worse. Your cortisol will thank you. (Obviously keep following me.)

Mind the commentary. Notice what you say to yourself in the mirror, in the car, when you drop something. Would you say it to a friend? If not, try the friend version. It feels ridiculous for about a week, then it feels normal.

Start a new conversation

Every cell in your body is rebuilding, all the time. Not as a punishment for getting it wrong. As a conversation, and you get a say in it. Here are three things to tell your body, said slowly, ideally with a hand on your heart:

“My body is wise. She knows how to heal. I’ll get out of her way.”

“I am not my diagnosis. I am not my history. I am the conversation I choose today.”

“My body has carried me through everything. She is wise, she is worthy, and she is well.”

Science gave us the map. The older traditions gave us the compass. And you, my love, have always had the territory.

You’re not just made of stardust. You’re made of choices, conversations, the songs you play, the food you eat, and the thoughts you think before sleep.

The cells are always listening. Keep the conversation kind. 🧬

Love Denise xxx

If you run a group, a workplace or a room full of women who’d enjoy hearing this in person, I also give this as a talk. Get in touch at contact@healthandharmony.info