This is not a framework I built and then applied. I lived it first. Every pillar of RAWSOME Foundations™ was forged inside a real life — mine. This 7 part series is the proof. Living proof. In every sense of those words.
Last week I wrote about Adaptability. About the gap between who the system says you are and who you actually are, and what gets built there. This week is about what it costs to live in that gap for too long without the conditions that allow a body to restore. And what it takes — slowly, honestly, imperfectly — to come back.
Content note: This article contains references to disordered eating, alcohol use, self-harm, and suicide. It is written from a place of survival and recovery, and shared because silence around these experiences helps no one. If anything here raises concern for you or someone you know, please reach out for support.
Australia:
Lifeline: 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 · beyondblue.org.au
Eating Disorders — Butterfly Foundation: 1800 33 4673 · butterfly.org.au
United Kingdom:
Samaritans: 116 123 · samaritans.org
Mind: 0300 123 3393 · mind.org.uk
Beat Eating Disorders: 0808 801 0677 · beateatingdisorders.org.uk
🟠 W is for Wellness
Wellness is not a product. It is not a morning routine or a supplement stack or a carefully curated relationship with a face cream. It is something far more fundamental — and far more demanding — than any of that. It is food. Water. Shelter. Someone to love, and someone who loves you in return. It is the physiological and environmental stability without which capacity cannot exist. And for a neurodistinct (those distinctly different) nervous system — one that processes more input, recovers more slowly, and responds more intensely to environmental and relational demands — its absence is not merely uncomfortable. It is determinative. Without wellness, nothing holds. What looks like disengagement, inconsistency, or overwhelm is often not a character problem. It is a system in depletion.
I know this because I depleted mine. Comprehensively. Over many years. And because the path back taught me everything I now know about what wellness actually is, and what it is for.
Let me show you what the absence of wellness infrastructure actually looks like. Not in a case study. In a pattern I see every single week in the families, educators, and systems I work with — and that I know from the inside of my own history.
A person says yes. They mean it completely. In the moment of saying yes, they are activated, hopeful, genuinely committed. And then the state shifts. The energy that was available when the yes was given is no longer available when the delivery is due. The overwhelm sets in. The task that felt manageable becomes impossible. The promise is not kept. And then — this is the part the system almost never addresses — the shame arrives. The person who couldn’t deliver carries that failure as evidence of their own inadequacy. The shame compounds the depletion. Which makes the next yes even less reliable. Which makes the next collapse even more certain. The cycle tightens.
The system calls this unreliability. Families call it disappointment. Educators call it noncompliance. The person calls it failure. What it actually is — every single time — is a wellness failure. A State layer problem. The person was not dishonest when they said yes. They were dysregulated. And a dysregulated nervous system cannot accurately assess its own capacity.
The yes was real. The capacity was not. And the gap between them is not a moral failing. It is a design problem.
What breaks the cycle is not willpower or better intentions. It is the practice of pausing before the yes — of witnessing honestly what the nervous system is actually doing in the moment of activation, before acting from it. That pause is what the wellness pillar makes possible. Not the absence of yes. The yes from a regulated state rather than a depleted one.
The story of my body is, in many ways, the story of misused and displaced energy. A neurodistinct nervous system running hot in the wrong directions — pouring its resources into hyper-vigilance, into masking, into the relentless scanning and calibrating and performing that survival in an unseen world requires — and running empty in the places that matter most. Hunger that registered as anxiety because the system was occupied elsewhere. Thirst that went unnoticed until it became a problem. The need to stop, to rest, to simply be — overridden again and again by the demands of an environment that had never been designed to accommodate a nervous system like mine.
The science behind this is precise. Polyvagal Theory tells us that the autonomic nervous system operates in a hierarchy — that perceived safety is the precondition for cognitive access, for connection, for the executive function that learning and working and relating all require. When the system detects threat — chronic, ambient, unrelenting threat of the kind that comes from years of being unseen, bullied, mislabelled, and mismedicated — it reallocates resources. Away from the prefrontal cortex and toward survival. Away from digestion, rest, and restoration, and toward vigilance and defence. The body does not distinguish between physical threat and the chronic social and systemic threat of a life spent in environments not designed to hold you. It responds to both the same way. And the accumulated cost — what the research calls allostatic load, the biological burden of chronic stress on the body’s regulatory systems — shows up eventually, whether you are paying attention or not.
I grew up in a house where food was present but not always received. My mum worked. My step-dad was in and out with dance teaching in regional areas. The evenings though, had structure — They both cooked, and sometimes my brother and I cooked from scratch when we were old enough. Lasagne, soups, stews, cakes, proper food made with care, understanding and the want to share when mum came home. My dads mother (remember Granny Pat from the R foundations? She’d cooked for us as family for years when things were difficult with finding time. Those evening meals were a form of love as much as nourishment. A ritual of making and feeding that I learned early and have never lost. But the days then were different. Packaged. Sugar-loaded. The 1990s. A neurodivergent boy who didn’t register hunger until the evening structure gave his body permission to need something — who moved through the hours between meals not because he chose to but because the right signals simply weren’t breaking through.
My brother was blonde and masculine and played local Aussie rules football. Girls fawned. One of them told me, directly, that my brother was better looking than I was. I was a gay teenager in the ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ 1990s, in ballet, trying to be thin enough for dance and visible enough for a world that had a very specific idea of what a desirable male body looked like — and I was never going to fit that template. I want to say something clearly here, because it matters: looking right and feeling right are two very different things. The body can perform wellness long after it has stopped experiencing it. I learned that performance early. And it cost me more than I knew at the time.
My mum was writing her psychology honours thesis on adolescent body image during those years. I sat in Year 8 (aged 14) and filled in her survey. The researcher and the subject, in the same house, the gap between the data and the reality invisible to both of us. She was studying the very thing her son was living. She was doing her best with what she could see. She always does – I chose often (by masking) not to show what she needed see.
At twenty-two I was taken by ambulance to a regional hospital during the interval of a our local performance. I had eaten watermelon and peppermints throughout the day. Nothing else. Then I had performed. And then I had wondered, with genuine bewilderment, why I was hyperventilating in the wings. I was in hospital for one hour. Then I discharged myself and performed the second act.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is not a story about stubbornness or dedication or the show going on. It is a story about a nervous system so thoroughly disconnected from its own body’s signals that it could register medical emergency as an inconvenient interruption and return to the stage before the curtain had barely come down. The interoception — the internal body awareness that tells a person they are hungry, thirsty, exhausted, in distress — was simply not working as it should. Not through neglect. Through neurology. And through years of training a body to perform regardless of what it was privately experiencing.
Anxiety had arrived with a clinical name at eighteen. Swift. Certain. And then, not long after, the misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder — a framework imposed on a neurodistinct nervous system by a medical system working from the outside in. The medications that followed were not calibrated for a system like mine. They did not stabilise. They destabilised further. And there came a point — in the particular darkness that accumulates when the body, the mind, the diagnosis, and the medication have all compounded into something that cannot be held alone — when I attempted to overdose. When the crisis peaked, I drove into a tree.
I name that plainly because silence around these moments is part of what keeps people isolated inside their own. The system had failed me — not through malice but through the particular blindness of institutions that categorise from the outside what can only be understood from the inside. My nervous system had reached the limit of what it could carry without adequate support or accurate understanding. That is not weakness. It is what happens when the conditions of wellness are absent for long enough, and when the structures meant to restore them cause further harm instead.
The years that followed were not clean. Recovery is not linear, and I want to resist the temptation to write it as though it was. Alcohol crept in — socially at first, then nightly, the nervous system finding in it a chemical version of the regulation it could not otherwise access. At thirty-six I left a job in a complex school because I was vomiting every morning before work, with a bleeding oesophagus. The body had stopped making quiet requests. It was issuing demands. Loud, physical, impossible to ignore. The stress load had accumulated to the point where the body was destroying itself to be heard.
There is a clinical name for what was happening — allostatic overload, the point at which the body’s regulatory systems can no longer compensate for the chronic burden they have been carrying. But I did not need a clinical name to understand it. I needed to stop. And to begin, for the first time in a coherent and sustained way, the work of building the conditions that would allow my body to restore.
What I understand now — and what a decade of sitting with neurodistinct clients and their families as a counsellor confirmed — is that wellness for a nervous system like mine is not about achieving a state and maintaining it. It is about designing the conditions that allow the system to restore itself. Daily. Not as a crisis response. As maintenance. Because a system like mine, running without those conditions, will always trend toward depletion. The direction is not neutral. It requires active, deliberate, honest design.
I no longer drink alcohol unless I am out with a group, and then it is one. What fills the glass instead is water — 2.5 litres a day, measured and intentional, the body receiving what it needs in the quantities it needs. Sugar free cordial. Espresso. The relationship with food has become one of the most significant acts of self-relationship in my life. Breakfast at eight in the morning — but only because I have learned that my body needs to have been moving for a few hours before it is ready to eat. That is not a preference. That is interoception finally understood and accommodated. The body telling me what it needs, and me having learned, at last, to listen.
During COVID, Eoghan and I grew our own food. We were fortunate to have a home with an acre of space for it — a small polytunnel, raised beds, the particular satisfaction of eating what you have tended from seed. Something about growing your own food restores a relationship with nourishment that the modern food environment actively disrupts. The hands in the soil. The patience of growth. The eating of something that you watched emerge from the ground. It is sensory and grounding and regulated in ways I will return to more fully in next week’s pillar — but as a wellness practice, it changed something fundamental in how I understood the relationship between body, environment, and food.
I also ran garden clubs in he schools I worked in — focused on vegetables and soup days, children learning to grow and cook and eat together. Students who arrived dysregulated, who struggled to engage with formal learning, who were hungry in ways that had nothing to do with food, sitting in a garden and tending something and then eating what they grew. The nervous system, given dirt and growth and a meal made with their own hands, finding its way toward something that looked remarkably like regulation. Capacity before behaviour. Always. The body first. Then everything else.
Ive said often: you’re either a butterfly chasing the sun or a moth chasing the moon. I am a moth. I always have been. The world makes more sense to me when it is quiet — when the demands and the noise and the brightness of the day have settled, and there is space to think and feel and be without the constant negotiation that waking life requires. The nervous system that spent years scanning for threat in loud, crowded, unpredictable environments finds its coherence in the hours when those things have gone still. I rise at six. But I do not begin work until ten. Those four hours between waking and working belong to the body and the self — to the garden walk, to the quiet of the time upon sunrise, to the gradual unhurried arrival into the day. My prime time is between ten and two. Four hours of genuine peak capacity — focused, very productive, fully alive with the kind of thinking that good work requires. After two, the descent toward restoration begins. I no longer pretend otherwise.
The restless legs that have been part of my nights for as long as I can remember — another co-occurring piece of the neurodivergent picture, the body that cannot fully still itself even in the hours designed for rest — are part of the nightly negotiation. Before bed I snap freeze my legs in cold water until I can no longer feel them. Then I sleep. The body, given the right input at the right moment, finds its way toward stillness. That particular practice lives at the intersection of wellness and the sensory world — and it belongs more fully in next week’s pillar. But I name it here because it is also a wellness story. The body that once had no reliable path to rest has found one. Built from necessity. Designed around the nervous system that actually exists.
Wellness, as I understand and practice it now, is the regulatory infrastructure of human capacity. It is not an outcome. It is the precondition. You cannot build relationships from a depleted body. You cannot adapt from a dysregulated nervous system. You cannot organise, or be mindful, or find empowerment, when the most basic conditions of a human life are not in place. The RAWSOME™ framework places W third — after Relationships built the relational ground and Adaptability demonstrated what could be built within it — because without it, none of what follows can be sustained.
For neurodivergent individuals in particular, wellness is not supportive. It is determinative. Behaviour, attention, and executive function are not fixed traits. They are state-dependent expressions of a regulated or dysregulated nervous system. Change the state. Change the capacity. Everything else follows.
The boy who ate watermelon and peppermints and performed anyway is still in me. But he is no longer running the show. The man who tends his garden at dawn, who drinks his 2.5 litres, who eats breakfast when the body is ready and not before, who slows at two and lets the afternoon belong to restoration — that man built his wellness from the wreckage of not having it. Not elegantly. Not quickly. But honestly, and with the particular conviction of someone who knows exactly what the alternative costs.
That is W. Wellness. And I am living proof that it is never too late to build it.
🌻 J.