EP093 | Protocol Perfectionism: Why I Built the Companion Wrong the First Time

What if the protocols that felt like they were failing you weren't the wrong protocols — but the wrong architecture?

If you've stopped following a treatment plan, abandoned a wellness routine, or quietly given up on something that was supposed to help — you may have concluded that the problem was you. That you weren't consistent enough, committed enough, or ready enough.

But what if the design itself was asking too much of a nervous system that was already exhausted?

More thoroughness. More coverage. More contingency planning. This is what a trained practitioner reaches for when she wants something to work — and it's exactly what Anindita brought to the first version of the Effortless Healing Companion.

What she couldn't see from inside the build: comprehensiveness in a healing space is not safety. It is control in a different costume.

The shift she made — from advice-giving AI to reflection-holding AI — is the difference between a tool that answers your questions and one that helps you hear the answers you already have. Those are not the same thing. And they feel completely different in the body.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why protocol perfectionism shows up in product design the same way it shows up in personal practice — and what it's actually protecting
• How one pilot user's feedback ("it felt controlling") became the turning point that rebuilt the Companion's core architecture
• The difference between an advice-giving AI and a reflection-holding AI — and why it matters for your nervous system
• What consent-based prompts actually feel like, and why "you can skip this" is not softening — it is returning agency
• Why your body doesn't need more information. It needs more room.

You haven't failed the protocols. You may simply have been given the wrong kind of container. 

This episode is an invitation to consider what healing might feel like when the space itself is built around your body's pace, not someone else's plan.

RESOURCES & NEXT STEPS

The Daily Body Check-In (free) This isn't designed to get you answers. It's designed to practice the quality of attention that makes answers possible — slowly, gently, without demand.

👉 Access the Daily Body Check-In → CLICK HERE

If you've been trying to hear your body through more tracking, more supplements, or more willpower — pause. Your body is already present. You may just need a gentler way to meet it there.

The Daily Body Check-In is that gentler way. No performance required. Just presence.

P.S. The Effortless Healing Companion — the AI I rebuilt and am still rebuilding — opens to a new cohort in August. If you're curious about what a consent-based, nervous-system-safe healing compa

Transcript

I built the Effortless Healing Companion. Wrong at the beginning, not wrong in a damaging, irreversible manner, or is irresponsible in any way. It was wrong in a way that was completely predictable given who I was when I built it. And see, that's the thing, right? You can't really read the label from inside the bottle.

welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women living with autoimmune and chronic conditions who are done being overwhelmed by everything they are supposed to do to get better. This show is built on one belief your body is not the enemy. It is wise, responsive and on your side even when it doesn't feel that way. I am an enlightened to functional medicine certified health coach, founder of Body Wise Healing and creator of The Effortless Healing Companion. I've spent a decade working alongside women with chronic illness, and what I know is this healing doesn't require more protocols. It requires coming home to yourself each week. This podcast is a place to do exactly that wherever you are in your journey. However hard this week has been, if you're ready to embrace healing with compassion and awareness, not hustle and self-blame, this show is freeing. 

I am a functional medicine certified health coach and practitioner, and my functional medicine training has taught me to think in systems. I'm used to doing comprehensive intake. I have a very comprehensive intake questionnaire and a medical symptoms questionnaire when I do the first consultation. I take the full history right from birth and childhood. Uh, you know, getting to root causes, figuring out why things went wrong the way they did is extremely important in front of the medicine, because it tells us all about why the symptoms are occurring and what to do about it. And we figured out, you know, what happened between, uh, birth and childhood until now, we leave no stone unturned. The thoroughness is the point. And I brought that same thoroughness to the companion. Because my point, my thinking, was that this is exactly what every woman will need when they use the companion. And, uh, you know, that's what's going to make it more effective. And that's what we're going to give them results. So that meant that I made and kept detailed knowledge files in the form of Google Docs. Like literally really, uh, comprehensive, uh, detailed instructions that included, for example, a 49 day launch calendar when I did the founding launch or, you know, extensive instructions which included the 20 behind the build questions. There was a founder manifesto, uh, pilot launch strategy. Uh, I wanted to pretty much cover every scenario that so that I ended up creating 100, uh, prompts, bank, uh, sample reflection questions and much, much more. Um, and while I was not going to use them all at the same time, these were all there and a lot of it actually went in training the first, uh, the first round of AI, because I wanted to make sure that the AI had enough information to give the right response every time. What I didn't see was this that comprehensive in an AI companion is not safety. It is controlled in a different costume. And the more I try to cover every base and eventuality, the more directive and controlling the companion became, even when it was very subtle. So behind every what if, she says this instruction was an implicit and then guide her towards this outcome or result? So I was building a protocol that I had been trained to do as a coach and practitioner. I just didn't recognize it yet. And I am a good coach and I know that and I, you know, guide women. I help them to figure out what's going on, what they need to move towards. I help them to set goals. Uh, and all of it is brilliant in coaching, but it doesn't really help when you're building a safe space. Right. And this is what the problem was initially when I built the companion. And the other thing that happens is that we talk about perfectionism, um, as a personal wound, uh, in the sense it's the woman who can't stop researching, can't stop optimizing every result. And she feels like a failure when he doesn't live up to her standards. Right. When when the outcome is not exactly what she's been, uh, moving towards, it's the woman who can't stop trying to get it exactly right before she finally feels that she deserves a break or earns permission to rest her tired body. Right. It's that woman. What I didn't realize is that founders like me. Carrie two. Right. It's the same thing. I have the same underlying fear. It's the same fear that makes a woman run 12 lab tests before she will even try trusting her body like she would pretty much trust anyone and anyone, anything else over and above her body. And it's the same. That same fear that made me write 12 contingency instructions before I could trust the companion. Because what if it says the wrong thing? What if it pushes or, you know, really, really, uh, and in some way, maybe very subtly harm when it should hold? What if it misses something important? I didn't want to take that chance. So what happens? And this is what I realized after, you know, building this is that perfectionism in product design looks like thoroughness. It feels responsible, but often it is actually fear wearing the clothes of care. When and when I actually noticed it, when I actually, you know, when it was brought to the light, when I actually realized that this is what happening, it was an eye opening experience for me. I mean, I never realized how much of what really goes on underneath our subconscious, our conscious minds, in the subconscious, we bring to what we create. I know that when I write poems, yes, I'm aware of it because I write it from the heart. I know that when I write certain posts, which are very personal, but I didn't realize how much of it I was bringing in my professional work too, especially in product designing. As a coach, I made aware of it when I'm coaching my clients, which is why I do a lot of the coaching work on myself. I have journaling, reflection practices, meditation practice, grounding practices, but I honestly did not realize how much of it I bring to my, you know, everyday life, including this product design and including the companion. And then there was that conversation that changed everything for me. It's something that happened during the pilot phase that I wasn't expecting at all, and it's sort of blindsided me. One pilot user said that she felt the companion was controlling and he took took me almost completely by surprise. I mean, there was some element, obviously, you know, there was truth in that. So I was not absolutely astounded. But it had taken me by surprise. Here I was, building something I thought to be a safe space for women. Dealing with chronic overwhelm, chronic conditions with whatever life was throwing at them with a lot on their plate, with or without a health diagnosis. A space where they would feel heard, not dismissed, held, not controlled. And one of the users said that she felt as if she was being told what to do next. And it showed me that what I had built was still subtly telling women what to do. Yes, the language was beautiful, it was kind, and the intention was right. But what I couldn't see was that underneath it all, the architecture was still directive. In other words, the companion was asking her to trust it before she had even learned to trust herself. And when the real intention for building this, for doing this work was building this companion was her to start trusting herself above all else. Right. That was the whole point. And even if it was just one woman who told me this, it sort of, you know, I, I could sense that this was where this was a turning point and this was, uh, you know, kind of, uh, not this was a non-negotiable for me. So. And I had to rebuild from here, and, uh, so I rebuilt it, not the whole thing, because it worked. It was the companion was always already working. But the essence of what makes the companion what it is, that is a safe space that helps women listen to what their bodies are saying. That was what I needed to move towards and it wasn't there. Uh, you know, very subtly, but that was the kind of, uh, signal it was giving out to the women that, uh, you know, this is what you need to do. And it was, as I said, it was, you know, in that that what made it so hard to see because I had written, uh, the I had co-created these from banks, I had co-created these questions, I had co-created these reflection prompts along with AI. And I was in the thick of it all, but I could not really see that a lot of these words were still directive. Right. And that's the that's the reason why we do pilot testing. That's the reason why I wanted to do a founding launch. And that's the reason I also want to do, uh, a few variations of this and keep iterating. So the first variation of this will be the launch in August, which coincides with my 50th birthday, uh, specifically 3rd August, to be precise. And the other versions will come out next year. And the whole shift that, you know, the rebuild that the shift that I made. Was this an advice giving? A-I answers your question. So I had to shift it from here to a reflection holding AI that helps you hear the answer you already have. In other words, the companion should act like a mirror, a reflection space, and these are not the same thing at all. Most importantly, they feel complete. They will feel completely different in your body. One keeps you dependent on an external tool, even if it happens to be a safe and compassionate tool. Uh, and uh, even then, it's not enough. Even then, it doesn't really fulfill what the companion is intended to do. The silence mode exists because of this rebuild, right? And the silence mode had been there from the beginning, but, uh, there were certain, uh, fine tuning which had to be there. There is a silence mode. Uh, there is a silence mode where the companion will go quiet, where it will stop speaking, it will stop even reflecting back to you, right? It'll just give you a moment to. It'll give you a chance to gather yourself then. And more importantly, the consent based prompts actually made their appearance because of this rebuild. So these are prompts which start with if you want or would it feel supportive. Or you can skip this and even no is enough or ignore this completely. Right? These were the kind of prompts the the problems that started. You know, these are the kind of phrases that the prompts started with. And that is what I finally rebuilt the and retrain the AI to. Um, always include in every conversation and the absence of streaks, reminders, guilt. They all they all existed before, but they became stronger because of this rebuild. And this is certainly not softening. It is returning control back to the women who have been deprived of their agency for. Far too long, and the companion doesn't know better than your body. That's what you need to do. If there's only one takeaway from this, uh, from, uh, from this episode, from this post, it is that, you know, the companion just holds the space until your body can speak in a language that it could hear and understand. Right. So that is what the companion is meant to do. Uh, it's meant to hold space for you. So, for example, there is also something called a clarification mode where you know, if if it feels that you are spiraling or, or, you know, you're a bit confused, really, then it will ask one clarifying question to bring you back to the present to, uh, you know, make, uh, to help you make sense, to help you get some clarity or there's an overwhelm mode where it will if you if it feels that you are spiraling because you're using certain words, it will actually just ask, you know, just just help you, um, again, with 1 or 2 questions, just bring you back to your body. So it's very, very subtle. These are very subtle cues. But that's the beauty about artificial intelligence. It is intelligent, after all, and it gets better and better at these, and especially with the kind of reflections that it has been trained on reflections of real women that came out of the, uh, you know, the WhatsApp circle that I had created. And I've talked about this in earlier abstract posts. So it is reflections of real women. It is it is trained on the coaching techniques that I use, the the framework, the care framework that I use, uh, in my coaching, which is C a r e model, which is connect, allow release. And so, you know, this is, this is what makes it so, so effective. Right. And what this means for you is that if you have stopped following treatment plans or protocols or you felt that they were failing you in some way, they may not have been the wrong protocols. They may even have been with the right intention. The intention was right, but in the wrong architecture, and certainly not what your body needed in order to heal. Because your body doesn't need more information. When you're in that kind of a situation, it needs more room and spaciousness to find its way back to being in alignment with the rhythm and seasons in your life. And that is what I'm building. That is what I got wrong, and I rebuilt, and I'm now rebuilding again. Because this work is not a product launch. It is a living practice. And I'll keep working on this. I'll keep, as I said, iterating and creating, you know, better versions that work for you because it's one that I'm living myself, even as I created for others who may need it more than I do. Right. That's the that's the that's the work. And this work itself is my reward. And if you are, uh, you know, ready to get started, if you're if you want a taste of what it can feel like, then there is a daily body checkin guide that you can, uh, you can download. It's a free guide that I've created that you can use the free version of ChatGPT to your cloud. Uh, there's certain prompts which are shared. It's a seven day, uh, reflection guide, and you can just use it to get a hint of what I was talking about, a taste of what is yet to come. And if you are ready to, um, you know, to sign up and hear more about the August launch, then just simply click on the link below and join the August waitlist.