The Real Reason You Don’t Feel Quite Right

Why do we feel off?
Because the body responds to survival signals, but modern life overrides, redirects, and confuses those signals. This post explores how our signals get shaped, overridden, and sometimes shut down in modern life.

When your alarm goes off on a cold, dark morning, it cuts across a system designed to wake with the sun. Your internal clock runs on light and dark, not schedules, yet most of us ignore that signal every single day.

As a hypnotherapist, I sit with people as they try to reconnect with their bodies, to hear and interpret the messages the body sends – to follow instincts which sometimes feel like symptoms. I’m starting to see there’s a difference between believing we’re following instincts and actually feeling them.

We’re surrounded by information telling us what’s right, so even when we try to follow our intuition and go with what our body needs, we’re often following something learned, not something felt.

In parenting, I notice this constantly. We talk about natural parenting as if it’s instinctive, yet we spend hours reading to make sure we’re doing it correctly. The body expects closeness, contact, shared sleep and rhythm. But modern life has routines, equipment, screens and advice.

Why we misread our instincts

We talk about the mind as having a conscious and an unconscious. The conscious is the part we’re aware of, but much of what drives us sits outside of that awareness.

Within this, we can think about three different influences.

The personal unconscious – this includes our own experiences. For example, the memories we’re not actively thinking about, the patterns we repeat, and the habits we learned early in life.

The social unconscious – the beliefs we absorb from the world around us. Ideas about how we should behave, what’s acceptable and what’s “normal” – often taken on from parents, teachers, and the culture we grow up in.

And the biological unconscious – what we might more simply call instinct. The part of us that was never taught. For example, the instinct to breathe without thinking or the cry of a baby when they’re put down.

These layers aren’t separate in real life, they overlap constantly. But in the world we live in now, it is difficult to tell which is which. You may have learned behaviour that feels like instinct, and when the biological unconscious interrupts modern life, we have countless systems and solutions to suppress the signals.

Influential figures in psychology try to describe what sits beneath conscious awareness.

 

Carl Jung

Carl Jung spoke about the unconscious as containing both a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. The personal unconscious holds our experiences that were once conscious but now out of awareness. The collective unconscious, he suggested, is something we’re born with, made up of shared human patterns or archetypes, which he described as “ancient or archaic images”.

Freud

Freud approached it differently, describing the mind in terms of the id, ego, and superego, where instinct and drive sit within the id.

He described the mind as made up of three parts: the id, ego, and superego.

The id is present from birth. It drives our most basic urges, things like hunger, comfort, and survival. Its focus is immediate need not consequences.

The ego develops in early childhood as we begin to interact with the real world. It works across both conscious and unconscious processes, helping us respond to reality and balancing the demands of the id with what is possible or appropriate.

The superego develops later, as we absorb ideas and beliefs from the people and environments around us, parents, teachers, and society. It reflects what we learn is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, and it also operates across both conscious and unconscious levels.

Together, these parts describe a system where instinct, experience, and social learning are constantly interacting.

 Why instinct doesn’t feel clear anymore

What we’ve learned, in a world full of systems, routines, and solutions that override the body’s original signals can determine what we perceive as instinct.

The world around us has changed, but the human body hasn’t. The signals we feel still come from a time when we had to wait, search, and work for the next meal, as food availability shifted depending on the season, weather, and conditions.

In that environment, these signals helped guide survival. They pointed us towards energy when it was available and helped us respond to what the body needed.

But the environment we live in now is very different. Food is always available, and much of it is deliberately engineered to stimulate the brain’s reward pathways, creating quick bursts of pleasure that encourage us to keep eating, even when the body doesn’t need more energy.

So we find ourselves in a position where what feels like instinct is no longer easy to recognise. The same signals are there, but they’re shaped, redirected, and often overridden by the environment around us. Food makes this easy to see, but the same pattern runs through many of the signals we feel.

It’s not that we’re getting it wrong – the body responds in the same way it always has, but in a world that no longer matches it.

The body isn’t wrong – it’s responding to a world that no longer matches it.

The Prefrontal Cortex

This becomes easier to understand when we consider the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in regulating behaviour, decision making, and social responses. It is one of the last areas of the brain to develop, and is not fully mature until around the age of 25 – 30.

Because of this, its lived experience shapes its development. The beliefs of those around us, how others treat us, and the environments we grow up in all play a role in how this system functions.

At the same time, the body continuously sends signals – cues related to hunger, rest, connection, safety. The prefrontal cortex listens to these signals and helps us interpret them and decide how to respond.

In a world that is closely aligned with our biology, those responses support balance. But in a modern environment, where we override or redirect many of our signals the system becomes harder to navigate.

This helps explain why younger people, whose regulatory systems are still developing, can feel particularly overwhelmed or act in ways that seem confusing or self-defeating.

Rather than asking whether a behaviour is right or wrong, we might ask instead, what is the message? and are we supporting the need with our response and environment?

 

 How experience shapes our responses

Whichever way we look at it, many models point to the same idea, that we are born with a system designed to support survival, and that system develops in response to the environment we grow up in. The body’s signals don’t change, but how we interpret and respond to them does.

Life experiences can either support those signals or pull us away from them. When the environment is unpredictable, overwhelming, or doesn’t meet our needs, the system adapts. When we don’t fully meet our core needs, the body becomes more vigilant, more sensitive to threat, and more focused on survival.

We don’t just respond to the moment. Over time, the brain learns from repeated patterns, building expectations about what is safe, what works, and what doesn’t. The body continues to send signals, but the way we respond to them reflects what we’ve learned.

Food is a simple example. The body signals a need for energy, but in a modern environment where availability, cost, and convenience shape our options, we respond to what is familiar rather than what the body needs.

We can see the same pattern early in life. A baby’s cry is a signal, a way of communicating need and maintaining closeness and safety. When an attachment figure hears the signal and meets the need, the system settles. When this doesn’t happen, the body adapts. The signal may quieten, not because the need has gone, but because the system moves to a different survival mechanism – shut down.

These adaptations are how the system learns to survive in what it perceives as harsh conditions. But over time, it becomes harder for us to recognise the original signals.

Learned Helplessness

When the body adapts to an environment where needs are not consistently met, the pattern continues into adulthood. Over time, this can shape how we feel about ourselves, how much control we believe we have, and how we respond to the world around us. When the system has learned that its signals don’t lead to change, it takes more resilience to act, even when change is possible.

Part of the hypnotherapy process is understanding the signals again. Recognising what the body needs, and how experiences over time shaped, redirected, or overrode the original messages.

Many of the struggles people experience in adulthood are a tension between the body’s signals and the beliefs and patterns created by the environment around them. When these don’t align, it can leave us with a sense that something isn’t quite right, even if we can’t explain why.

In my therapy work, rather than helping people override the signals from their body, I create space to help my clients reconnect with the signals and respond to them differently. From there, a sense of movement, choice, and possibility can return.

 

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