The Health Signals Women Are Trained to Ignore

A woman I know sat in her kitchen one morning with her chest hurting in a way it had not hurt before, and she made coffee. She thought about whether the pain was bad enough to call someone. She decided it probably was not. She took an aspirin. She got the kids ready for school. She drove them, came home, and went to a meeting. The chest pain stayed with her all day. By evening, when she finally went to urgent care because she could not ignore it anymore, she learned she had been having a heart attack since breakfast. She was forty-seven years old. She lived. The cardiologist told her later that women like her are the reason cardiac events kill more women than men. We do not call for help. We finish what we were doing first. 

I have been thinking about this story for months. Not because it is unusual, but because it is so common that almost every woman I tell it to nods slowly and offers a story of her own. The friend who had a stroke and drove herself to the hospital. The mother who walked around with a broken foot for three weeks. The colleague who had appendicitis and tried to push through a workday. The sister who ignored a lump for six months because she did not want to bother anyone with what was probably nothing. The pattern is so widespread that we have stopped seeing it as a pattern. We have started treating it as a personality trait. 

It is not a personality trait. It is the result of a lifetime of training that begins early and continues until something forces us to break it. Women are taught, in ways large and small, that our bodies are not to be listened to in the same way other people's bodies are. The training shows up in how our pain is treated by doctors, in how we are encouraged to push through symptoms, in how the medical research has been conducted on male bodies and then extrapolated to ours. By the time most of us are adults, we have learned to override our bodies as a default rather than as an exception. The overriding is so practiced that we no longer notice we are doing it. 

What the Training Looks Like 

The training begins in childhood. A girl who falls and scrapes her knee is told she is fine. A boy who falls and scrapes his knee is asked if he is hurt. The difference is small in any single instance and significant when repeated thousands of times across the years of childhood. Girls learn that their bodies are not to be fussed over. They learn that complaining is unattractive. They learn that the right response to physical discomfort is to keep going. 

The training intensifies at puberty. A girl whose periods are painful is told this is normal. A girl whose cramps make her vomit is told to take some ibuprofen. A girl who develops endometriosis, which affects roughly one in ten women, will wait an average of seven to ten years for a diagnosis, according to research published in the Journal of Endometriosis and Pelvic Pain Disorders. Seven to ten years of being told her pain is normal. Seven to ten years of learning to override the signal her body is sending her. By the time she is finally diagnosed, the overriding has become automatic. 

The training continues into adult medical encounters in ways that have been documented extensively. Studies from the National Institutes of Health have found that women presenting to emergency rooms with severe pain wait longer to receive pain medication than men with the same symptoms. Women reporting chest pain are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed or sent home with anxiety prescriptions. Women describing symptoms of autoimmune disease often see multiple doctors over years before receiving accurate diagnoses, with many being told initially that their symptoms are stress related. The system she encounters as an adult woman teaches her, over and over, that her descriptions of her own body are not fully credible. Eventually, she stops describing them. 

By the time most women are in their thirties and forties, the training has done its work. They override pain by default. They postpone doctor visits because they assume they will not be taken seriously. They minimize symptoms when they finally do go in, because they have learned that being a difficult patient produces worse outcomes than underreporting. They show up to appointments having already done the cultural work of dismissing their own bodies, so that the doctor only has to confirm what they have already decided, which is that whatever is happening is probably nothing. 

The Signals We Are Trained to Override 

There are particular signals that women learn to ignore more readily than others, and these are worth naming because the naming is the first step in beginning to listen. 

The first is fatigue. Women are tired in ways that should be alarming and that have been normalized so thoroughly that most women do not even register their own tiredness as a symptom. A 2023 survey published in the Journal of Women's Health found that nearly 70 percent of women between thirty and sixty reported persistent fatigue that affected their daily functioning. Of those women, fewer than 20 percent had discussed it with a doctor. The reason most often given was that they assumed the fatigue was normal for women their age, with their responsibilities, in their lives. Fatigue can be normal, and it can also be a signal of thyroid dysfunction, anemia, autoimmune disease, sleep disorders, depression, hormonal imbalance, and a long list of other conditions that respond to treatment. The fatigue being common does not mean it should not be investigated. 

The second is pain that comes and goes. Women learn to wait out pain that is not constant, on the theory that if it goes away, it must not have been serious. Intermittent pain in the abdomen, the chest, the head, the back, the joints can be a signal of conditions that benefit from early detection. Waiting until the pain becomes constant often means waiting until the condition has advanced. The intermittent nature of the pain is not evidence that the body is fine. It is information about what is happening, and the information deserves attention. 

The third is changes in the menstrual cycle. Heavier periods, more painful periods, longer periods, irregular cycles, spotting between periods, periods that suddenly stop or change pattern. All of these can be signals of conditions ranging from manageable to serious. Women learn to assume that menstrual changes are normal because menstruation itself is so often dismissed as normal misery. Significant changes in a cycle that has been stable are worth attention. They do not always indicate a problem. They sometimes do. 

The fourth is digestive symptoms that have become routine. Bloating, constipation, abdominal pain after eating, changes in bowel habits. Women often live with these symptoms for years, attributing them to stress, diet, or aging. Some of them are explained by these factors. Others are signals of conditions like celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, food intolerances, or ovarian cancer, which is famously difficult to detect early in part because its symptoms are nonspecific and easy to dismiss. The dismissal is not protective. It delays detection. 

The fifth is mental and cognitive changes. Difficulty concentrating, memory lapses, mood changes, anxiety, depression. These can be the result of life circumstances, and they can also be signals of hormonal shifts, thyroid issues, vitamin deficiencies, neurological conditions, and the early stages of perimenopause, which can begin a decade before most women expect it to. Women often attribute cognitive changes to stress or aging and do not realize that medical investigation could identify treatable causes. 

Why the Overriding Has Costs 

The cost of overriding the body shows up in delayed diagnoses, in conditions that have progressed further than they would have if detected earlier, in chronic problems that began as acute problems that were not addressed. The cost shows up in the years that women lose to conditions that could have been managed if they had been named. It shows up in the deaths that come earlier than they needed to come, from heart disease and cancer and stroke and other conditions that respond better to early intervention than to late intervention. 

The cost also shows up in less measurable ways. The woman who has spent decades overriding her body often loses access to its quieter signals along with its louder ones. She does not notice when she is tired until she collapses. She does not notice when she is hungry until she is shaky. She does not notice when she needs to use the bathroom until it is urgent. The overriding generalizes. The body stops being a source of information and becomes an obstacle to be managed. 

There is also a relational cost. The woman who has been trained to dismiss her own body often dismisses other women's bodies in the same way, and is dismissed by them. The culture of women minimizing each other's symptoms is one of the harder dynamics to break, because we have all absorbed the training, and we apply it to each other without realizing we are doing it. The friend who tells you that your fatigue is normal because she is also tired is not being cruel. She is reflecting what she has learned about women's bodies, which is that they are supposed to be tired, and the tiredness is supposed to be borne. 

What Listening Looks Like 

Beginning to listen to your body, after years of being trained not to, is a slow practice rather than a sudden change. The first step is noticing what you have been overriding. Pay attention for a week. Notice when you push through fatigue, when you ignore a pain, when you talk yourself out of a symptom. Do not try to change the pattern yet. Just notice it. The noticing alone is a significant break from the automatic dismissal that most women practice. 

The second step is asking yourself, when you notice a symptom, what you would tell another woman if she described the same thing to you. If your sister told you she had been having chest pain for three days, what would you tell her to do? Most of us would tell her to go to the doctor. We extend a credibility to other women's bodies that we do not extend to our own. Catching this discrepancy is useful. The double standard is not protecting you. It is putting you at risk. 

The third step is going to the doctor before you are sure something is wrong. This is the hardest one, because women have been trained to feel embarrassed about taking up medical time for symptoms that might turn out to be nothing. The medical system has reinforced this training by making women feel like burdens when they show up with symptoms that are not yet diagnosed. The reframe that has helped many of the women I know is this. The doctor's job is to figure out whether something is wrong. Your job is to bring the symptoms in. You do not have to be sure. You do not have to have a diagnosis ready. You just have to show up and describe what you are noticing. The figuring out is what the doctor is for. 

The fourth step is being more specific than you think you need to be. Women often soften their descriptions of symptoms in medical settings, partly out of habit and partly because they have been trained to. If your pain is a seven, do not call it a four. If you have had a symptom for three months, do not say it has been a few weeks. If something is affecting your daily life, say so. The specifics matter. The doctor cannot give you appropriate care if you are softening the information. 

The fifth step is finding a doctor who actually listens. This is not always easy, and it sometimes requires switching providers, but it is one of the most important investments a woman can make in her health. A doctor who takes your descriptions seriously, who does not default to attributing symptoms to stress or anxiety, who asks follow-up questions rather than dismissing your concerns, is a doctor who can help you. A doctor who consistently makes you feel unheard is a doctor who is not serving you, regardless of how good his or her credentials are. You are allowed to find someone else. 

The Permission to Listen 

Underneath all of this is the question of permission. Most women have not been given permission to listen to their bodies in the way other people are allowed to listen to theirs. Granting yourself this permission is a small act of self-respect, and it is one that has to be practiced repeatedly because the cultural training pushes in the other direction. Every time you take a symptom seriously, you are pushing back against decades of being told that your symptoms do not warrant attention. The pushing back is uncomfortable. It is also necessary. 

The women I know who have learned to listen to their bodies describe the practice as one of the more transformative shifts in their lives. They catch things earlier. They get treated more effectively. They lose less time to conditions that would have escalated if ignored. They also report a kind of trust in themselves that they had not previously felt. The body that has been listened to becomes a source of guidance rather than a source of complaint. The relationship between the woman and her own body becomes collaborative rather than adversarial. 

This is what Bloom was built around, in part. The slow daily work of returning to yourself, of noticing what you have been overriding, of giving yourself permission to attend to your own experience without justifying it. Your body has been trying to tell you things for years. You have been trained not to listen. The retraining is possible, and the first step is simply to notice what you have been overriding. The noticing is enough to begin. 

The woman who had the heart attack in her kitchen is fine now. She told me that the experience changed her permanently. She does not override her body anymore. She does not finish what she is doing when something is wrong. She has had to relearn how to be a woman who takes her own physical signals seriously, and the relearning has been the work of years rather than days. But she is alive, and she is paying attention now, and she said that if there is anything she wishes she could tell other women, it is that they do not have to wait for a crisis to start listening. The listening can start now. The body has been waiting.