Unmasking Perfectionism in Chronic Illness Recovery

This discourse is exclusively for you if you are going through a chronic illness and finding it difficult to come out of it because of your perfectionism. Due to your perfectionist nature, you are suffering from chronic illness. This is the revelation. You may not know that the reason for your chronic illness is perfectionism.

First of all, know that perfectionism leads to chronic illness—and understand how it leads to chronic illness. I will give you the mind, body, and energetic connection behind it. Once you reverse the response of your nervous system toward excellence and not perfectionism, things will change.

How Perfectionism Turns Into Illness

When you try to perfect things—whenever you do something to make it perfect—this means that you have a certain expectation about achieving the goal or fulfilling the goal in such a way that you cannot fail. When you expect something to happen in the future and you set a predetermined outcome, your brain and your nervous system take it very seriously.

When you take things seriously in this way, your attention becomes 100% fixed on reaching the goal. You go into 100% attention in fulfilling that goal. Now, see what happens in your body the moment you pay such total attention.

The Internal Mechanics of “100% Attention”

Try this now as a self-observation practice:

1. Fix your gaze on a single point in front of you.
2. Intentionally narrow your attention to that point as if the outcome depends on it.
3. While sustaining that total attention, notice what happens inside your body.

Pay attention for a few moments and watch what unfolds in your body when you are paying 100% attention to something. When you want to have the experience completely—when you are trying to achieve something perfectly—you are actually shifting into a hold position. Your nervous system goes on hold.

The Solar Plexus “Hold”

Bring your awareness to the solar plexus area (the soft space just below the sternum and above the navel). Observe that when you clamp down with 100% attention, this point subtly locks. This is the point where your nervous system takes the freeze mode when you are in hold.

“Hold” means you are not breathing. When you are not breathing naturally, your body shifts into excessive parasympathetic shutdown—a dorsal state. When this excessive dorsal state lasts for a long time, it leads to depression, and that depression leads to many kinds of chronic illness.

Depression is often accompanied by many other diseases you may already know intimately. You are suffering; you know what is happening in your body. Yet, ultimately you are not healing; your chronic illness is not getting healed.

The Way Out: Stop Perfecting Things

Perfectionism leads to a chronic illness of a nature that is undetectable by medical instruments or diagnosis. No one can easily intervene in this healing process because it is deep-rooted in your nervous system and subconscious mind.

When you want to perfect things, you hold your breath. Breath-holding leads to the freeze mode, and when the freeze mode persists, your body stops receiving the nutrition, oxygen, and subtle inputs it needs to produce energy. Your cells are not getting rejuvenated regularly. If you are not breathing in the moment, you are not keeping your body in rest and digest. Instead, you are toggling between shallow chest breathing and breath cessation.

In this state your:

• Muscles and musculoskeletal system,
• Nervous system,
• Digestive system,
• Cardiovascular system,
• Lymphatic and circulatory systems

…all move into a kind of suspended function. Your body is not working at its optimum capacity.

Common Chronic Outcomes

What follows is life stuckness and long-standing symptoms—most notably Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You feel fatigued all the time. You cannot perform or function in life like a normal human being. You may not even know when it started; perhaps you have lived like this for decades—always wanting to correct things, to perfect things, and unconsciously keeping the breath on hold.

When your career is not going well, when your boss is shouting, when you are unhappy in your job, you again take the hold response to deal with external events. If your spouse is not good with you, if you are not happy with your children, if family dynamics are tense, you try to perfect the relationship. Either you become deeply depressed or you become hyper-activated in an attempt to perfect things. Both extremes demand total attention, and total attention—untrained—turns into breath-holding and freeze.

Attention, Prana, and Depletion

Attention is the vehicle of prana and its charge from your center. Wherever attention goes, energy flows—and it grows. The work you are doing with 100% attention becomes externally excellent; you are perfecting it. But this also depletes your valuable breath.

When you fixate and hold, you slip into freeze. You are not breathing, and this cessation leads to multiple dysfunctions because the body needs continuous oxygen and smooth vagal tone to rejuvenate. Without diaphragmatic belly breathing, the system goes out of ventral vagal tone. With a defective breathing pattern, nothing moves in life.

Shifting From Perfectionism to Excellence

You do not need to perfect things. When you move toward perfection, intention tightens around outcomes, attention clamps, and energy drains. Desire to be highly ambitious in relationship, career, or health is not wrong—what harms you is the perfectionist way you carry that desire inside your nervous system.

Relationship Examples

Suppose you have a family. You want to impress each member by trying to make everyone happy. In the attempt to make everyone happy, you hold your breath. Test it yourself. You do this. You do not need me to point it out. In appearing nice, you suppress how you actually feel.

If someone is shouting, angry, or insulting at home, you try to appear unaffected—a perfect father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife. In the attempt to present that perfected image, you suppress the natural emotion that arises. You do not respond authentically. Suppressed fear or insult is taken by your body in freeze. This keeps life stagnant. You repeat this for decades until your nervous system learns the reactive pattern: hold, suppress, freeze.

Outwardly, the relationship may appear glamorous—no one fights; everyone looks harmonious—but it is not the truth. Often, this is maintenance of social status; you want to appear good to everyone. Understand: no one can make everyone happy all the time. Stop the attempt to keep anyone happy every time. Start being authentic.

Reverse the behavior:

• Say what you feel, when you feel, to the one you need to say it to.
• Do not hold your breath while doing so.
• You do not need to appear perfect or godlike.
• You are human. Stop behaving in a way that makes you ill.

If you are not healing from your chronic illness, it indicates you have not yet taken the initiative to change your responses. Even after reading this discourse, if you do not take the initiative, it means you are remaining comfortable with your illness.

Approval-Seeking and Soul Depletion

Perfectionism reflects in how you meet people: you try to impress, seek approval, and do what is liked by others instead of what frees your soul. When you live like this, you deplete the natural resources of your body. You lose instinctive urges and the high quality of electromagnetism in your field. You start functioning only in a limited way as a human being, not as a full-fledged authentic one.

Social Media Personas

Desire to be known and acknowledged through social media feeds perfectionism. You show off versions of yourself that are not real. You present yourself as always pleasing, never angry, never reactive—as if you were a monk. You are not a monk. You are a human being. You need to respond to situations and people. You cannot play dumb. The numbness in your brain and nervous system is freeze. You act indifferent to trolling or negativity, not because you are beyond it, but because your system cannot mobilize a response. That is the problem.

When Perfectionism Becomes OCD

Perfectionism often mutates into Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—keeping things in order, cleaning excessively, maintaining control. This can lead to arthritis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other brain-related health disorders later on.

Understand: cleanliness cannot be permanent. Anything left untouched will become dusty again. Do not spend extra energy keeping things perpetually spotless. Clean before use and after use, as needed. Do not make your house a museum or showroom where everything must remain super clean.

Become a minimalist: remove extra stuff. Minimalism reduces the cleaning load and protects your energy. Observe yourself when you get obsessed with cleaning—you will notice the breath goes on hold. That is the learned response.

Shift from perfection to excellence: excellence means continuous improvement. This relaxes the nervous system with the understanding that there is always scope to improve. You stop being over-judgmental of yourself. In truth, you have been the critic responsible for your illness through perfectionism.

The Perfectionist’s Communication Pattern

When you try to perfect your communication, you overthink before you speak. You run mental simulations about how others will take your words. You try to be gentle and decent so that people will like or approve of you. In this attempt, a lot of energy slips back into freeze.

And the paradox remains: people will behave as they behave regardless of your endless mental rehearsals. You waste energy in obsessive thought patterns. One thing leads to another, and you are never in the present—you are either in the past (trying to fix previous mistakes) or in the future (trying to perfect what has not yet happened). Your valuable attention leaves the now, and life energy drains.

When prana is blocked, blood circulation is constrained; when blood stagnates, the freeze mode deepens. The problem aggravates.

The Reset: Conscious Living

Instead of perfecting details that are not in your control, start focusing on conscious living. This begins with breath.

Conscious Breathing Restores Vagal Tone

When your breath is in control, your life is in control. “Control” here does not mean force; it means deactivating the learned freeze pattern. Your dorsal vagal tone has been over-recruited; you need to activate the ventral vagal tone—calmness, connection, and rejuvenation.

Conscious breathing re-trains respiratory centers for rhythmicity. The involuntary brainstem function should keep breath continuous—not a single moment of stoppage. But you have lived in hold for years, trapped in the thinking brain instead of the acting organism. The left hemisphere has dominated. We restore balance through long, slow, deep, complete exhalations, preferably through the mouth in the training phase.

Over days and weeks, this reactivates parasympathetic ventral breathing and returns the body to rest-and-digest. The freeze softens.

Recovery Timeline

If you have been a perfectionist for 40–50 years, give yourself 12–18 months for a full reset. This is not a delay; this is a deep healing. Start today and you will be relieved progressively.

The Breathing Technique: Exact Instructions

Posture

• Sit upright on a chair or cushion, or stand tall with soft knees.
• Release the jaw, soften the tongue, relax the shoulders.
• Place one hand lightly on the lower belly to feel movement.

Inhale

• Inhale slowly through the nose for a gentle count—start with 4 counts.
• Let the breath drop down; feel the lower belly widen.
• Keep the solar plexus soft—do not let it lock.

Exhale (Primary Focus)

• Exhale through the mouth, long, slow, deep, and complete—double the inhale count.
  • For example, inhale 4, exhale 8.
• Exhale as if fogging a mirror: quiet, steady stream.
• Let the diaphragm ascend fully; the belly deflates at the end.

Completion

• Pause for only a natural fraction of a second—do not hold or brace.
• Begin the next gentle inhale.

Progression

• Over days, increase to 6:12, 8:16, 10:20, or 12:24—only as comfort allows.
• Quality over quantity: smoothness trumps length.

Daily Rhythm

• Practice 100 conscious exhalations across the day during the first 30 days.
• Then keep the principle active 24/7: whenever you notice holding, soften the solar plexus and lengthen the exhale.

Physiological Effects

• Long exhalation promotes vasodilation, improves cellular oxygen uptake, and restores energy production.
• Over time, this resolves the freeze reflex underlying perfectionism and returns you to flow.

Conscious Eating: Step-by-Step

Eating is an extension of breathing. Conscious eating calms the nervous system, restores digestive fire, and rebuilds energy.

Step 1: Eat Only When Hungry

Do not eat because it is “time” (breakfast, lunch, dinner). That is perfectionist conditioning. Your body’s needs change moment to moment. Wait for true hunger:

• A warm, fiery sensation in the stomach,
• Audible rumbling,
• A clear, embodied signal.

Step 2: Eat What the Body Wants Now

You need not follow a fixed menu. If the body wants fresh fruit, a simple vegetable, a light snack, tea, coffee—or a complete meal—honor this moment’s requirement. Keep simple, wholesome options available.

Step 3: Engage All Senses Before the First Bite

• See the food and appreciate its colors and form.
• Smell its aroma.
• If appropriate, feel its texture with your fingertips.
• Let the senses wake up appetite and digestive enzymes.

Step 4: Small Morsels Only

Take a small morsel (about the size of the first knuckle of your thumb). This calibrates quantity and encourages mindful chewing.

Step 5: Saliva Is the First Digestive

Fifty percent of digestion begins in the mouth. Chew until the food turns into a soft, soupy paste. Let saliva predigest it. Only then swallow. This supports downstream absorption and assimilation.

Step 6: Keep the Belly Moving

While eating, keep the lower belly relaxed and subtly mobile. If needed, weave in long exhalations through the nose between mouthfuls (or gentle mouth exhalations if appropriate). This maintains vagal tone and prevents freeze during meals.

Step 7: Learn the Two Burps

• First burp: signals that food has reached the stomach and the upper valve opened—not a sign of fullness. Continue eating slowly if hunger remains.
• Second burp: indicates the stomach is near capacity and begins to pass a portion into the small intestine. Stop eating here. Even one extra bite can congest the stomach.

Step 8: Respect Quantity

Do not finish the entire plate out of habit. Eat only what the body requires now. Leave some empty space; digestion likes spaciousness.

Step 9: Conscious Drinking

Water should also meet saliva first. Sip, hold in the mouth, mix with saliva until it becomes a soft, jelly-like liquid—then swallow. Avoid gulping. This enhances hydration and mineral assimilation.

Expected Outcomes Over 100 Days

• Gradual reduction of excess body fat and water retention,
• Stronger muscles and better tone,
• Better digestive fire and elimination,
• Systematic burn-off of accumulated toxicity,
• Noticeable clarity and sustained energy.

Minimalism, Cleaning, and Energy Preservation

Stop over-cleaning. Clean as needed and before use. Reduce possessions so maintaining order does not cost your health. Each time you feel the compulsion to clean, scan the solar plexus:

• If it is tight, soften it.
• Take one long exhale.
• Choose a simple, functional action instead of a marathon.

This is how you reclaim energy from OCD tendencies. Excellence—not perfection—keeps the space livable without draining your life force.

Communication Without Freeze

Before conversations, do two long exhalations. During the exchange:

• Keep your belly soft.
• Speak authentically without rehearsing ten versions in your head.
• Let your tone be clear and kind—but real.

You cannot control how others will respond. You can only maintain your nervous system’s integrity. Authenticity restores flow; approval-seeking restores freeze.

Time Orientation: Return to the Present

Perfectionism lives in the past and future: fix the past, perfect the future. Conscious living returns you to now. Use the breath to re-enter the present:

• Notice the impulse to mentally rehearse.
• Soften the solar plexus.
• Exhale long and smooth.
• Act from what is true this moment.

Present-moment action heals prana circulation. As prana flows, blood flows. As blood flows, freeze thaws.

Instinctive Living and the End of Over-Planning

The most important thing: stop being a perfectionist and start living. Live instinctively. Instinct is the brain’s primitive, reliable guidance I teach in the Phoenix Project and in Health Projects. It is directly connected to doing things imperfectly and changing your response to life.

If something is dirty, let it be dirty for a while; begin the meaningful task your energy calls you to do now. You do not need to assign a time and a goal to every activity. Follow your energy. Your energy will tell you what to do and when to do it. You do not need to do everything you planned from the mind. Do what you feel to do when you feel to do it. That is flow.

When you do this, blood purifies, and illnesses connected to the subtle body and cellular system begin to heal over time.

Daily Protocol: Putting It All Together

1. Breath Baseline (All Day):
   • Keep the solar plexus soft.
   • Whenever you notice holding, melt it with one long exhale.
   • Aim for 100 conscious exhalations sprinkled through the day for the first 30 days; then make it your default.
2. Formal Breath Practice (2–4 sets/day):
   • 5–10 minutes per set.
   • Start at 4:8 (inhale:exhale) and progress gently.
   • Never strain; smooth is supreme.
3. Conscious Eating (Every Meal):
   • Eat only when truly hungry.
   • Small morsels; 50% mouth digestion with saliva.
   • Stop at the second burp.
4. Conscious Drinking (All Fluids):
   • Sip, mix with saliva, swallow.
   • Avoid large, fast gulps.
5. Minimalist Action (Daily):
   • Remove one non-essential item from your environment.
   • Clean only what is being used or is about to be used.
6. Authentic Speech (Every Interaction):
   • Two long exhalations before important conversations.
   • Speak truthfully and directly without bracing.
7. Social Media Hygiene (Weekly Review):
   • Notice any “perfect persona” patterns.
   • Replace a show-off post with a real, modest share—or silence.
8. Self-Check (Nightly):
   • Where did I hold my breath today?
   • Where did I choose excellence over perfection?
   • One breath, one sentence of authenticity, one minimalist act—celebrate them.

What to Expect Over Time

• Weeks 1–4: noticeable softening of freeze, better sleep, fewer compulsions to over-clean or over-plan, more spontaneous movement and emotion.
• Months 2–3: digestion strengthens, energy stabilizes, mood lifts, relationships feel less performative, communication simplifies.
• Months 4–6: chronic symptoms begin to unravel; the body remembers rhythmic breathing even under stress; excellence becomes a natural attitude.
• Months 12–18 (for long-term perfectionists): deep reset of nervous system defaults, sustainable flow, instinct-led daily life, resilience to stress without slipping into hold.

Remember: this is not forced “relaxation.” It is the restoration of your organism’s natural rhythm—breath first, then blood, then prana, then life.

Start taking actions now. You do not need to perfect your healing. You need to begin, repeat, and allow improvement. Shift from the image of being perfect to the reality of being alive.

If you need my specific consulting, my specific guidance, then email my team and they will guide you further on how to go about changing the pathways that you have created.

Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thank you.