The Stress/Cancer Connection

How Crisis Gave Way to a New Framework for Personal Growth

My GP's words hung in the air like a weight I couldn't quite grasp: "We've found elevated cancer markers." They were 185 instead of the normal average of 36.

I sat there, in that sterile NHS consultation room, and felt my carefully constructed collapse. For someone who'd spent over two decades helping others heal, from elite athletes to clients with complex chronic conditions. I felt like a complete fraud. How could I have missed this?

When Your Body Refuses to Be Ignored

The months leading up to that appointment should have been filled with warning signs I recognised. After all, I'd built my entire career on reading the subtle languages of the body and mind. But like so many high achievers, I had become an expert at pushing through, at normalising the constant hum of low-level stress that had become my normal life.

My family had just been uprooted from a property we'd called home for sixteen years, a place where we had invested not just money, but countless hours of energy and emotional currency. We had to close a family business. The life we had built was dissolving, and I was holding it together with sheer determination and what I now recognise as chronic, unrelenting stress.

My body tried to tell me. The fatigue that sleep couldn't touch. The tension that had become so familiar I barely noticed it anymore. The sense that I was moving through life slightly disconnected, as if watching myself from a distance. But I did what so many of us do, I told myself it was temporary, that once things settled down, I would feel better.

And then I couldn't ignore it any more.

The Dreaded Two-Week Pathway 

The NHS two-week cancer pathway is designed for speed when cancer is suspected. Those fourteen days stretched on and on, each test, each scan, each phone call carrying the weight of possibility. Would they find something? How advanced would it be? What would this mean for our family?

In those suspended weeks, something shifted. When you are facing the possibility that your time might be more finite than you'd imagined, you start asking different questions. Not "What do I need to do?" but "What have I been missing?"

The final results came back clear—no cancer. The relief was profound, overwhelming. But it was accompanied by a realisation equally powerful: this was a warning I couldn't ignore. My body had essentially staged an intervention, and now it had my full attention.

The Question I Couldn't Stop Asking

As a health & wellbeing strategist, I had always asked "why?" Why did strain happen? Why did some people develop chronic conditions while others didn't? Why did symptoms appear without obvious physical cause?

Now I was asking that question about myself, but with new urgency: Why had my body responded to stress in such a dramatic way? And more importantly, how many others were walking the same path I had been on, not recognising the danger until their bodies forced them to stop?

I spent years studying human movement, breathwork, energy work, mindfulness, psychology, trauma-informed care, and somatics. I tried countless approaches in my own wellness journey, coaches, courses, books & therapies. Some helped temporarily, but nothing created the fundamental shift I was seeking. Nothing helped me move past my limiting beliefs permanently.

Lying in bed during those anxious weeks, I realised something crucial: we were treating symptoms, not addressing the underlying frameworks that create them. We were giving people tools without helping them see the invisible structures their minds use to filter reality, the very structures that generate stress, anxiety, perfectionism, and burnout in the first place.

The Student Becomes the Teacher

After receiving the all-clear, I made a commitment: I would not return to the way things were. I would not ignore this wake-up call.

But where to begin? I'd already explored so many avenues. What was I missing?

The answer emerged gradually, like a photograph developing. It wasn't about adding more techniques or strategies. It was about understanding something more fundamental, the way our minds construct our experience of reality itself.

I began to see patterns everywhere. The high-achieving client who couldn't shake imposter syndrome, despite remarkable success. The business owner who felt like a fraud at her own awards ceremony. The countless people living outwardly successful lives while quietly drowning in anxiety, perfectionism, and the exhausting weight of other people's expectations.

They weren't broken. They weren't weak. They were simply operating within invisible frameworks, inherited beliefs, adopted standards, filtered perceptions which were never truly theirs to begin with.

Five Truths That Changed My Life

Through deep research, personal excavation, and synthesis of everything I had learned across disciplines, I began to identify five core truths about how we experience life and reality. Truths that, once understood experientially rather than just intellectually, change everything:

Our minds filter reality rather than reveal it directly. We think we see the world as it is, but we are actually seeing it through layers of belief, emotion, and history. Understanding this creates space for questioning the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible for us.

Complex systems defy simple causality. Life is nott a simple chain of cause and effect. When we try to force linear solutions onto complex problems, we create rigidity and frustration. When we work with life's complexity, we rediscover our genuine agency.

Impermanence is fundamental to existence. Everything changes. Resisting this truth creates suffering. Embracing it creates resilience, adaptability, and freedom from the perfectionism that says things must be a certain way.

Consciousness and meaning are deeply intertwined. Success that disconnects us from meaning isn't really success. When we align with what genuinely matters to us, not what we've been told should matter, everything shifts.

We are fundamentally relational beings. We don't exist in isolation. The quality of our relationships,with ourselves, others, and the world determines the quality of our lives. Connection isn't a luxury; it is essential.

These weren't just intellectual concepts. They were experiential truths I was living into, and they were transforming everything, my stress levels, my sense of self, my relationships, my work, my health.

From Personal Crisis to the Core Truths System

The framework I created for myself became what I now call the Core Truths System, a transformational approach for individuals, groups, and organisations seeking a more truthful, aligned way of living and working.

Unlike traditional coaching that asks you to change using a set template, this system works to excavate the qualities that already exist within you. It brings deeper meaning to your purpose and vision by aligning them with your expanded core values. It releases the invisible frameworks your unconscious mind holds that limit your potential.

I no longer feel the weight of sadness, disappointment, or shame that once accompanied my days. I don't wake up anxious about living up to expectations, either mine or anyone else's. 

The constant low-level stress that I had normalised for so many years has dissolved.

This isn't about positive thinking or forcing yourself into someone else's version of success. It's about uncovering who you really are beneath all the layers of conditioning, expectation, and adopted belief. It's about creating a life that feels like coming home to yourself.

The Ripple Effect

When you fundamentally shift how you understand yourself and reality, everything changes. Your relationships deepen because you're no longer performing or protecting. Opportunities appear because you are finally clear about what you actually want. Your health improves because you are no longer running on stress hormones and borrowed definitions of success.

But perhaps most importantly, you become a different kind of presence in the world, for your family, your team, your community. You model what is  possible when someone stops living from external templates and starts living from inner truth.

This is why I'm so passionate about this work now. Yes, it saved my life in a very real sense. But more than that, it revealed what I believe is the missing piece in health, performance, and personal development: the recognition that we must address the perceptual frameworks themselves, not just the symptoms they create.

Your Own Wake-Up Call

You don't need a cancer scare to begin this journey. In fact, I hope you won't wait for your body to force your hand the way mine did.

The signs are there if you are willing to see them: The exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. The success that feels hollow. The sense that you're living someone else's life. The relationships that feel strained. The constant questioning of whether you're "enough." The feeling that you're always one step away from being exposed as a fraud.

These aren't character flaws. They are merely symptoms of operating within frameworks that don't truly fit you.

The Core Truths System exists because I needed it, and because I've seen how desperately others need it too. It's built from the convergence of neuroscience, philosophical wisdom, somatic practice, and psychological insight, but more importantly, it's built from lived experience of transformation.

An Invitation

I share this story not to say "look what I overcame" but to say "look what's possible." To say that a crisis, while painful, can be the doorway to the most profound growth. To say that the life you are living right now doesn't have to be the one you're living a year from now.

If you're reading this and something resonates, if you feel that glimmer of recognition, that sense of "yes, this is what I've been missing"—I want you to know: transformation is possible. Not the superficial kind that looks good on social media, but the deep, embodied kind that changes how you experience every moment of your life.

You don't have to wait for a health crisis to give yourself permission to question everything and rebuild from a foundation of truth. You can start any time.

Because success without self-trust is just performance. Achievement without alignment is exhausting. And a life lived to meet external expectations is not really your life at all.

The revolution I am quietly starting with the Core Truths System is simply this: What if we all had permission to live as ourselves, fully? What if we all understood the filters we're seeing through? What if we could release the invisible frameworks limiting our potential?

That cancer scare was the worst and best thing that happened to me. It broke me open,and what emerged was finally, genuinely, me.

Nicole Brûlé-Walker is a wellbeing strategist, coach, and founder of the Core Truths System. With 25+ years of experience spanning elite athletic therapy, trauma-informed care, and personal transformation, she works internationally to help individuals and organisations move from borrowed definitions of success to soul-aligned living. Based in the North East of England, she believes that real success is nothing without self-trust.