Six steps for helping your body settle when it has been on alert for too long, with room on every page to write down what you notice as it does.
Your copy is ready.
Download the first practice ↓Two pages. Print it if you can — the second page is a log you write on.
Most of the people who find their way to me were doing perfectly well until fairly recently. Then something shifted, whether that was a move, an illness, or simply a year that asked more of them than they had to give, and their body never quite came back down from it afterward. Sleep stops being restful. Foods that were fine for decades stop being fine. There is a low, steady sense of being braced against something that is hard to point to, and the tests that get ordered keep coming back unremarkable.
It is worth saying plainly that a clear result does not mean nothing is happening to you. More often it means that whatever is happening was not the thing the test was designed to look for.
A body that has been on alert for a long time gets practiced at staying on alert, and that is a genuine physical pattern rather than a matter of attitude or effort. The encouraging part is that it is something you can work on directly, at home, in fairly small daily amounts, while the larger question of what set it off is still being sorted out.
That is what this workbook is for.
Each step asks for a few minutes a day rather than hours of it, so that you can fit the work around the life you are already living instead of rearranging that life first.
The writing is where most of the value comes from. Keeping track of what you tried, how your body responded, and whether it still held a week later turns a vague sense of things into something you can actually look at.
Each one tells you the reasoning behind it and not only the instruction, so that you can adapt it to your own circumstances rather than following a cookie-cutter protocol.
Bringing your body out of a threat state on purpose, in a few minutes, under ordinary conditions rather than in a crisis. This is the shortest step in the book and the one that does the most work, which is why it begins on the first day and keeps running underneath everything else.
Finding out what your own pattern actually looks like rather than what you assume it looks like. It starts with the body, because your body registers things well before your thinking catches up, and that gap is where most of the leverage turns out to be.
Understanding where the pattern was learned, and putting words to the rules you were handed a long time ago, so that you can decide which of them you actually still want to be following.
Taking the thoughts that keep the alarm ringing and checking them against evidence, instead of believing them by default because they happen to arrive in your own voice.
Getting on speaking terms with the part of you that took on the job of protecting you, rather than treating it as the problem and trying to override it. This is the step people tend to arrive at skeptical and leave differently.
Building a week that gives your nervous system repeated physical evidence that things are all right. It comes last because it needs the other five in place first, and because how you pace it matters considerably more than how much of it you do.
The edition
Printed in full color throughout, on white paper, because a workbook you are going to be living in for six weeks should not look like a photocopy of one.
Your body will not do repair work while it believes it is in danger. That is not a figure of speech, and it is not a comment on your character.
Dr. Diana Stafford, MD, is a board-certified physician working in functional and integrative medicine, with a clinical focus on gut health and environmental exposures. She helps clients nationwide through video consults and programs, and is known online as The Detox Doc.
She works from mechanism and evidence rather than from a cookie-cutter protocol. When a result comes back clean, she treats that as a question the test was not able to answer rather than as an answer about the person in front of her, and she keeps looking until something explains what they are genuinely experiencing. In a field where a great deal gets sold, she is careful about which claims actually hold up.
She has appeared on 30+ podcasts, summits and broadcast programs including ABC 33/40. She and Andrew have written five books together, including Conquering Mold. The Calm Body is the fifth.
Andrew Stafford came to this work from the reader’s side of chronic illness. Years of navigating gut disease, mold exposure, and a body stuck on high alert taught him firsthand how much harder every protocol feels when the nervous system never gets to power down.
Today he builds AI-powered software and systems for small businesses through his company, Your AI Group, and he brought both sides of that story to The Calm Body, shaping the workbook so the practices stay simple to actually do.
The full workbook is available now in full-color paperback. The first practice is still free if you would rather begin there.
Your copy is ready.
Download the first practice ↓Two pages. Print it if you can — the second page is a log you write on.