Episode 6: The Nervous System Side of Exhaustion

What do you do when you’re putting in the effort… but not seeing the results yet? Whether it’s your health, your weight, your business or something else you’re trying to change, it’s easy to interpret “hard” as a sign that it isn’t working. In this episode, I’m exploring a different possibility: maybe hard doesn’t mean wrong. Maybe it simply means you’re doing something new. And when both changing and staying where you are feel hard, there may be a better question to ask: Which hard is taking me somewhere I actually want to go?

Have you ever started the day with every intention of taking care of yourself? Maybe getting a workout in, going for a walk, eating well, getting a few things done and then everybody suddenly needs something from you? That happened to me recently. And none of the things that came up were necessarily a big deal. They were just life. Things that needed attention, people I care about, things I could easily take care of. But I noticed how quickly the things I had planned for myself became negotiable. And it got me thinking about how often we do this, particularly as women. We take care of things. We’re capable. We help. We adjust. And somehow we keep bumping ourselves off our own list. So in this episode, I’m talking about what it actually means to take care of yourself when you have a full life and people genuinely do need things from you. Because maybe taking care of yourself first doesn’t mean you always have to come first. Maybe it just means you don’t always have to be the one who comes last.

A client of mine recently had a week where the scale didn’t move after having some pretty epic results through our work together. It didn’t budge… at all. Not up. Not down. I could see she felt a little disappointment in herself, and immediately, her mind went to the food she’d had during the week before our conversation. There had been a road trip. A planned treat meal. A few things outside her normal routine. So naturally, those became the obvious suspects. Except when I heard what she had eaten, the math didn’t quite math for me. So I started asking about the rest of her week. There had been anticipation and stress leading up to a solo road trip. Her car broke down and needed to be towed. She was sleeping away from home and outside her normal routine. She was navigating family dynamics. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she also had a potentially stressful conversation with a surgeon about her health. None of these things seemed particularly remarkable to her. Because this is life. And I think that’s especially true for strong, independent, high-functioning women. We handle things. We figure them out. We move on. But our bodies are along for the entire ride, recording every encounter, fluctuation of temperature, blood pressure, glucose spikes and crashes. That’s what I explore in this episode. Because when the scale doesn’t move, we’ve been conditioned to look at what we ate or how much we exercised. But our bodies aren’t calculators. Sleep, stress, digestion, hydration, inflammation, changes in routine, emotional load, movement, rest are all part of the environment our body is responding to. It’s constantly adjusting and recalibrating for us. So instead of looking at the scale and deciding whether you had a “good” week or a “bad” week, I want to offer you a different question: What did my body have to process this week, beyond food? That question may tell you far more than the number on the scale ever could. 🎥 Watch the video or listen to the episode above. And if this made you think of someone who is eating less, exercising more, tracking everything and wondering why her body still isn’t responding the way she thinks it should, send this her way. There is so much more going on inside our complex human bodies than calories in and calories out.Big love, XO

What if you gave yourself four months? Not four months of perfection. Not four months of restriction, obsession or putting your life on hold. But four months of really going ALL IN on yourself. We can spend years feeling frustrated with our bodies, our weight, our health, our finances, our relationships and/or our careers, while never really giving ourselves a focused period of time, with patience and consistency, to actually get there. Then, we find ourselves right in the middle of the second half of life. Our bodies are changing. Our hormones are changing. The things that worked at 30 don’t necessarily work the same way they do now. We think we have time. The idea is on our radar and, hell, maybe even on our goal list. But somehow life keeps coming at us and the world keeps spinning faster (or so it seems). I’ve come to understand that two seemingly very unsexy things get us results, and often faster than we realize, even though it doesn’t always feel that way while we’re in it: Time and consistency. They may not be sexy, but they are two of the surest paths to success. In this episode, I’m talking about what it actually means to go ALL IN for four months, why that doesn’t mean being perfect, and just how much can change when you stop starting and stopping and truly commit to supporting yourself. Because four months is going to pass anyway. The question is: where could you be on the other side of them? Watch or listen below. And I’d love to know: if you went ALL IN on yourself for the next four months, what would you most want to be different?

What if calming down isn’t always what your nervous system needs? After a day of feeling irritated, pulled in too many directions, and frustrated with myself, I put on a pair of boxing gloves and started moving. And everything shifted. My mood, energy and feelings all got an upgrade in literally minutes. In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between suppressing what feel like are often unwanted emotions, and actually moving it through the body. We explore why sometimes regulation looks less like deep breathing and more like shaking, walking, lifting, punching, dancing, or letting yourself feel what’s there. Because the goal isn’t to be calm all the time. It’s to have more capacity to move through what life brings.