Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Is Being A Bitch The Cure To Chronic Illness?

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Hello EIClique! This week we're asking, is the secret to good health, being a bitch, actually?In a piece titled ‘“Be a bitch or develop an autoimmune disease”, Sheya Kurian writes, ‘The internet’s latest health theory isn’t backed by science, but its popularity reveals how many women are exhausted by their own pleasantness’. The theory is everywhere on TikTok and Instagram, posts and testimonials racking up hundreds of thousands of views argue that years of people-pleasing, conflict-avoidance, and suppressed anger eventually show up in the body as eczema, hives, flare-ups, you name it. As Kurian writes in the piece, no doctor is prescribing "stand up to your annoying coworker" as treatment, however, there's obviously a reason that so many women resonate with it as an idea: research does link chronic stress to inflammation and immune dysregulation, and women are disproportionately affected by autoimmune disease. What do we make of this latest internet craze? Listen and find out!We hope you enjoy, as always please rate, review, follow & share the show :) love ya, O,R,B. xxoxoxoxo“Be a bitch or develop an autoimmune disease” has a CTA for women Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Ruchera and I'm Anoni and this is everything in conversation. Your midweek dose of discourse. Remember if you want to take part in the conversation, just follow us on Instagram at Everything is Content Pod. That's where we share topics and ask for your thoughts. This week we're asking, can being a bitch cure chronic illness? So, is the secret to good health actually being a bitch? In a piece titled Be a Bitch or develop an autoimmune? disease, Shea Curian writes, the internet's latest health theory isn't backed by science, but its popularity reveals how many women are exhausted by their own pleasantness. The theory is everywhere on TikTok and Instagram, posts and testimonials racking up hundreds of thousands of views argue that years of people pleasing, conflict avoidance and suppressed anger

eventually show up in the body as exma, hives, flare-ups, you name it. As Curian writes in the piece, no doctor is prescribing. stand up to your annoying co-worker as treatment. However, there's obviously a reason that so many women resonate with it as an idea. And research does link chronic stress to inflammation and immune dysregulation and women are disproportionately affected by autoimmune disease. Although there are other problems as the framing viz into victim blaming, reducing complex illness to a personality flaw by posing the idea that women who are submissive or people pleases have caused their illness, which is rough territory for women who are already struggling to get taken seriously by doctors.

This is not the first theory of its kind and certainly won't be the last, but begs a question why women feel the need for a medical reason to justify being a bitch, which in this context is seemingly setting boundaries, advocating for yourself and not sending emails with no worries if not. Actually, shall we start on this, on the bitch of it all? We spoke about bimbo a couple of weeks ago. How do we feel about bitch being reclaimed and reframed in this way? I mean, without feeling it too deeply and interrogating the issues with the kind of isolation and individualization of chronic illness, which is definitely, definitely, definitely an issue and very thorny and not good.

I think if you take it in a superficial level, which I think with all of these kind of internet ideologies, you have to take them at a very shallow level, otherwise they fall apart or worse, become very offensive. I quite like it because I think we have, well, I on a personal level have slipped very much into this being more of the dominant ideology, you know, being in your villain era, being the main character, all that kind of stuff. The way I took that was the same thing as this, which is just advocating for yourself, just not doing the overly flowery emailing. And I've just slipped back into doing that. Like, all of my emails are just so couched in. me, don't worry about this. It's all good.

I can do it. And I hate it. I hate it. It just weighs so much time. I think just being decisive, assertive, kind and fair is a good way to live your life. But I think having a reminder like this, I find particularly helpful. So it's not the worst thing in the world for me. But as I say, once you get into thornier territory of having actual chronic illness and then somebody telling you,

honey, just be a bitch, you'll be good. Everything will be sorted. I think that's when you start to think, we need to not, we need to not do that. What about you guys? Yeah, I think it's the definition of bitch, which is the really interesting part because it's not, bitch you would think, the way that people say it with so much malice, you'd think, like, to be a bitch, to be like unkind, inject misery and pain and punishment into the world, every opportunity, which is often what people mean, but more often than not, I think people mean

woman, human woman, who sometimes hasn't even opened her mouth yet because of like historic, historic widespread top-down misogyny. So it becomes this like kind of useless but very weaponised term anyway. No matter what I do in life, someone can and well weaponise the term bitch against me. So I think it's not to be feared as a woman. And if we can even notice that it's being used to harm us but decide I'm not going to worry about occupying that space. Like I will worry only about being a bitch in my own definition. I will not be a bitch and I know I will not be a bitch, but I will not bother me if someone else thinks that I am a bitch because honestly the things that women do and are considered being a bitch

versus, you know, things that a man can do and be considered like a heartthrob, it doesn't even bear thinking about. So I think that's my line on it. Happy to reclaim it actually and certain times if someone thinks you're being a bitch, it means you're doing something right. And so I like that element. I'm again, when we medicalise the bitchiness and when we kind of get into potentially misinformation territory,

I get a bit like, oh, shall we not go too far down this road? But I do like the idea that I think a lot of people would feel immediately better, less stressed and therefore healthier if they were comfortable with being disliked and thought of as a bitch because truly, whatever you do, they will think that. Yeah, this is a very pink pussy hat 2016, white feminism taken at all. But in this context, being a bitch is essentially just being a man. It's asserting yourself the way that a man feels comfortable doing. It's being assertive, it's being clipped, it's saying what you want, saying no, all of those things.

And so while I get, I do not mind trying to dilute the impact of the word bitch through trying to change what it means in our eyes. If someone says it to us, it doesn't feel as hurtful and harmful. I think sometimes in the wrong hands, when we bring a word back in and we've seen this quite a lot, sometimes with reclaiming, all it does is give people license to use it in a mean and incorrect way. So sometimes it's useful on a personal level, but I think it doesn't actually necessarily take the harm out of the word. And any time I ever hear a man calling a woman a bitch, the way it makes me feel is crazy. So I always flip and flop about reclaiming language in this way

because I think that it can then in the hands of the wrong people, they just think, oh, well, I'll use that as well. And it doesn't fall in the same way. But yes, back to the idea. So we had a few messages and a lot of people felt like you guys, Like there is, there is some positivity to this. And it definitely is truth to this. Like we understand now about cortisol and stress and like how that impacts us. But we had a mess from Jess that reads, I have an autoimmune thyroid disease and it's taken a long time to get

over the thought of it being some sort of personal moral failing. And it's taken years to come to terms of that and accept how my body works and they simply cannot do the things that other people can. I think it's a really dangerous idea to think that I could have avoided becoming unwell if I'd made different choices or chosen to live my life differently. Can't get behind this at all. I have chronic illness because it runs in my family, not because I wasn't assertive enough. And I think a lot of the language that is around this is like do this so that you don't become chronically ill, do this to prevent chronic illness. But a lot of people living with chronic illness are obviously like, I couldn't have done this to correct it. But then again, on the viral

reel, which we shared on our Instagram, which is linked in the piece that is literally just sort of like almost like Pac-Man game with text over the top that says exactly that. this be a bitch who'll get an autoimmune disease. There were kind of testimonials from women going, do you know what, I did anecdotally managed to reduce my levels of whatever through stopping people pleasing. So I guess it's not a one-size-fits-all, but that we have to remember chronic illness. I'm sure you can alleviate some symptoms through holistic measures, but it is also just your body doing whatever your body's doing. And I think that we do have to be careful not to veer into ableism as the piece points out. Yeah and also just even the term chronic illness is such an umbrella

term for so many different things. So to even say that there is this thing that can circumvent, help alleviate chronic illness is such a bizarre framing because it's such a vague term. There are so many different examples and so many different experiences of what that means. So I think I don't love the pairing of the two things. It's quite in a way, Mimi. It's like the way you find videos for Vines saying something like Vines that cured my mental illness, it feels like it has that kind of lexicon and it's quite like lighthearted, but I do, I can understand people being really frustrated with it, to be honest, because the kind of, the kind, it's not joking, but it is kind of medicalizing something that it doesn't really have the credence

to do. And I think you can either see it from a very funny, Mimi way, but I can totally appreciate that if you have chronic illness and you see this, you're like, honey like I am spending a fortune on xyz I'm barely scraping by don't fucking tell me to be a bitch which ironically is quite you know quite on par with what this whole sentiment is trying to tell you to do it's true isn't it it's like what you're saying about it being memeable and it's like everything has to be memeable because it's just less snappy to be like well chronic stress has a potentially disabling impact on physical health like it's just not as juicy it's not as you couldn't put that on a little Pac-Man iconography

So I do, you know, I do appreciate that the science does chime with the stress and the labor of constantly doing things you don't want to do and don't have the capacity to do and being amenable and agreeable against your own wishes does equal chronic stress, which does have that, you know, I'm not an immunologist, I'm not an expert, but that is just tried, tested, proven medical science. But then having to repackage that as something that can be girlified is, I think, what makes this quite frustrating thing. I mean, I was reading on the NHS informed website. Like in very plain terms, stress is that fight or flight responds. It releases cortisol, it suppress our immune system and it interferes with our digestion and can also have blood pressure. So we know all of that and a lot of people don't take stress seriously, especially I want to say women, not just though because we aren't being bitchy enough or aren't being kind of like self-assured enough, but because we do live in a punishingly profit and greed-driven capitalist world. The majority of people are basically working for survival, so that six or seven billionaires can have a nice time burning down the world,

which is the stressful part of being alive. And I don't think being a bitch is going to help that, you know, those causations of people, people's bodies and brains breaking down. But on an interpersonal level, I really do chime with. I want women to not worry about being unlikable. Nothing in my life has given me more pleasure or freedom or liberation. And I think I'm quite nice. and I think people quite like me, but I have just hung up the need to be liked and the need

to alter my own behaviour because I live within my own value system. I mean, it's sort of what we talked about with them, with stoicism. It is what can I control? And sometimes you can control how much energy you're outputting to accommodate other people that really just don't care if you live or die. Okay, bear with me whilst I work through a stream of consciousness pattern recognition that got triggered when you said galification. because what I realized then was,

I think this is born from, everything being a meme is born from, I'm just a girl. And I'm just a girl was born from women feeling exhausted and feeling like whatever, let's just enjoy girlhood because we were kind of stripped of it. As children, we were sexualized, as adults were treated like this.

So we're going to have this thing called girl dinner where we do this like low effort meal where we don't have to cook. We're going to just do girl mass because we're exhausted. And it's like it's all actually kind of the same thing. But at the same time, it's actually because it's so infantilizing. And at the time,

I actually was a big defender of the girl thing. So I thought, you know what? Just let women have fun. And then I've obviously moved away from the male robins of it all. And I've gone, actually we shouldn't let ourselves just do whatever. We have got to kind of keep our head screwed on.

Because I think we are harming each other in small and big ways. By going through with this, like we only want to engage in things that have this sort of pink bow wrapped around it. And we're really allowing the way that, social media has fucked with our attention spans to mean that we are engaging in discourse on this kind of sparkly level where everything is unicorns and rainbows and very serious at the same time, but packaged in a way that we can absorb. But at the same time, the reason that the capacity that we have to engage these things, the reason that is because there is so little medical research

into women's health, there is so little information, there is so little funding, like it's so hard to get an NHS appointment. Like, this is not happened in a vacuum. It's the exact thing. This, the reason that we consume media like this is a symptom of the fact that women take on the lion's share of the mental load in any given situation that we are just doing more in general life, that we are the gender who has paid less. You know, there's so many things to it and what's, it's hard because I think it does remind me a bit of this kind of like pink feminism thing where it's like, actually, no, let's talk to each other on a really intellectual level. Let's be really serious. Let's engage beyond sort of like the meme.

but I understand where and how it stemmed from. But I do think that they're, you know that I love misinformation, not on purpose, but I do spread it quite a lot. But I do think that we, you know, I want to kind of get back to a place where we are taking each other seriously because I think that it sometimes, it's good for like ideas spreading. And I do think it gets people thinking and maybe it will actually have like a really good trickle down effect. But then at the same time, it's just ripe for people being like, oh, well, women are just,

you know, ridiculous. kind of thing. Was that, did that form a thought that in the end? No, that was really smart. That was really smart on how these buzzy trends and these kind of like sparkly terms means that more people are discussing it, but our discussions are so animal pellet level. It's like low grade food that we're consuming and we're digesting and we're talking about, but these issues are so serious. Everything you said was really on the money. I completely agree. And it's such a basic point. but people have said it before. I think with issues to do with men such as, you know, the loneliness,

loneliness epidemic, all of the kind of issues that they're facing with mental health, there is no sense that that would ever be memed or turned into a buzz phrase that is just silly and boyy and any of that kind of stuff. And I don't mean to make that comparison to be flippen. I'm just very seriously treating it with the seriousness that we're talking about, which is chronic illness is not that funny. All of these things are not that funny. It's understandable.

And I get that these ideas spread very quickly because of this. And I think that is cool. That's like an interesting thing. But it's also interesting to see the gender imbalance when it comes to how quickly and easily with brevity and seriousness we treat male issues in comparison. And I don't know why we've got ourselves into a space. where we believe the only way to have these serious conversations is to turn them into sparkly little gel pens that we pass around in class to then kind of Trojan horse the seriousness

of them. It's quite depressing. I don't know how we've got here. And I know that's a super, that's a super bleak take on it, but I think it's also that and the good parts of it too. Quickly on that, you're so right. If men were disproportionately impacted by autoimmune diseases, we would have headlines saying there is a male autoimmune crisis. It wouldn't be a little meme. Such a good point. And also like the research that goes into boldness and erections compared to what goes into endometriosis, like it is, it's across the board inequality and it is just not funny.

It also reminds me separately, and this isn't so gendered, but like a lot of people are adopting medicalised terms, neurological terms, people are adopting terms like going non-verbal or stimming or things related to neurodivergent habits and behaviours to account for just like commonly occurring behaviours in the non-autistic non-neurodivergent population. And I do think it's kind of that freewheeling adoption of medical terms that does land us in some trouble because at certain point people then talk about like, God, my immune system or my nervous system is shot. And it's like, these things do mean something.

and they mean a lot to the people that are seeking diagnosis, seeking treatment. I think we do have to make sure that we know what we're talking about. And I was reading a lot about this idea that women experience stress more acutely, differently to men, our bodies, our hormonal makeups, you know, I was reading scientific studies, which were not memeable, they were not fun, they were really difficult to follow as a non-sciancy person, but like stress reactivity and regulation is different in men and women. Their theories about evolution, there are theories that we have different priorities because of that evolution that when men are stressed, they're more likely to engage in fight or flight,

and then that this, they can kind of escape from either of those things. They can close the loop, but women adopt a tend and befriend response to stress. So when we're stressed, even then we can slip into these patterns of trying to care our way out of it, which is time consuming and emotionally draining. And I don't understand biology of it, but it just shows, you know, people are studying the amygdala in women, but it's just so underfunded that you just end up with a lot more questions and not that many answers, but it's fascinating. There's so much there that is not so easily repackaged and it's just not as fun and I do loathe that the delivery system of information is now snappy headline, memeable. We had a message from Francis that reads,

I'm working on assertiveness in therapy at the moment and the notes in my course say that those who are more assertive are less likely to be depressed and have better health outcomes, not suggesting that being assertive will cure chronic conditions, obviously, but maybe there is something to be discussed in the way assertive women are labelled bitches. What I find really interesting in the piece is this for women, this is another thing that we should be looking at, is like why do we feel the need to have a medicalized reason to do the things that we need to do,

aka say no to someone to create a boundary, to do like really healthy normal things that humans should be able to do, but women need to be able to say, if I don't do this, it's like going to have a direct impact on my health. We should be able to just do that anyway, but we can't. There's so many instances in life thinking about sexual violence against women. No is never enough.

You need to have another reason. You have to have a boyfriend. You have to have an out. Like for our own safety, we are taught, trained, socialised to find things that mean more than no in every single like situation. And so I think that this actually is a really interesting case study in the way that like, even though yes it's true doing these things can improve your mental health can improve the

way that you move through the world it's like that we shouldn't need that clarification we shouldn't have to have a medicalization just to be able to assert ourselves and I think that is the most damning part of it is that everyone's accepting it and the reason I guess that women are latching onto it it's like oh great I can now yes I can say that actually because I've got a really good reason I can back it up and there's evidence and there's there's a real like massive unimpeachable reason that I have to do this rather than it just being like, no, absolutely, you should be able to just say what you think, when you think, no, walk out the door, set a boundary, whatever, it's your life, your body, your rules. That's not good enough because

you're a woman. We're like maybe we're like offering things up on a plate. Is it good enough? I tell you that actually can make me really sick. Will you then? Is that okay? That's kind of what it feels like. We also got a message from Hayden who said, I don't think it's victim blaming people with chronic illness or invalidating their experience as long as claims aren't overstated. But I think it is important to learn about the long-term impact of chronic stress and high cortisol as someone with fertility issues trying to reduce stress and manage a hormone imbalance p-cost, which is worsened by stress. We need a holistic approach to women's health and physical and mental health so they're completely interwoven. But I wouldn't want to overstate causality.

I think that is a very fair message and I think that is exactly the place that I land on as well, which is really at the heart of this are some very serious issues that need to be taken, taken seriously, treated seriously and more than anything researched heavily. Thank you so much for listening. For all of your opinions and takes on this topic, we love being in conversation with you all. Remember to go back and listen to our last episode with the illustrious and talented author, Annie Lord. We'll see you as always on Friday. Bye. Bye.