Worry. Procrastination. Perfectionism. Over-delivering.

Signs your nervous system is seeking safety in the familiar: scarcity, hustle, and proving your worth.

If you’ve ever felt success trigger self-sabotage or burnout… this episode is for you.

Inside, I share the 5 questions (from page 132 of Somatic Intelligence for Success) that will help you expand your capacity for visibility, abundance, and support—without collapse.

Listen now. 13 minutes.

Recommended next episode:

Burnout, Body Image & the Nervous System: Why Self-Hate Isn’t a Sustainable Strategy for Results

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This podcast explores the intersection of sales, money, and business success, offering entrepreneurial insights on overcoming the inner critic, burnout, and the unique challenges of ADHD and autoimmune conditions, while integrating polyvagal theory, Ayurveda, coaching, resilience, regulation, and trauma healing to support holistic growth and thriving in both life and business.

  📍 Your body will always choose a familiar discomfort over an unfamiliar comfort. 📍 For my clients, this often means spending money. As fast as you can make it, especially when you start making more for others, it means kind of pausing or kind of stagnating in their work when things start going really well, meaning you're anxious or you're numb, or you're negative, or you spend a lot of time complaining or planning.

And a lot of this comes back to something which we call learning to expand your nervous system capacity for success. It's essentially how could I make success, better things, better than I could have possibly even imagined, feel really safe so that I'm not self-sabotaging. In today's episode, we're going to go into the practice that I recommend for clients.

When things are going well, you're ready for them to go from better, but you kind of find yourself like going back to where you were, as far as like you're complaining. You're anxious, you've run out of money, et cetera.

I follow two characters inside of my book, somatic Intelligence for Success, called Debbie and Emily and I wrote about their experience, which mirrors that of many clients. I wrote. Debbie's negativity made it hard for her to finish work. She felt overwhelmed. She never finished her week's sulu list and she sense stressed creeping back to the level it was in her corporate job days.

She was dying to just do nothing and social media told her to listen to her body and relax, which meant things didn't get done at work, and the growth of her business was beginning to stagnate. Emily was struggling to find the energy, excitement, and passion she'd had when she started. I. She just wanted to go shopping 'cause of this disconnection.

She ended up postponing her big meetings, investing less in her personal development, and indulging more in buying clothes and food, which she ended feeling guilty about. She also struggled to feel motivated and she came to coaching thinking, what's the point?

As Debbie and Emily sat down for the class, the projected displayed a question that caught their attention. Why do smart and healthy people self-sabotage? They both felt a twinge of curiosity thinking. Have I been self-sabotaging too?

These are signs that we have encountered what we, what I like to call the nervous systems upper limit. It's essentially the understanding that our brain and body, we feel safer in things that are comfortable and we're all kind of built. This is very nuanced. There's science to support it. There's also criticisms of this theory.

Happy to make a separate podcast on the science behind it. I'm not gonna go deeper into that in here. It's also inside of my book if you wanna dive a little deeper, but. This nervous system. Upper limit refers to the amount of pleasure, safety, abundance and joy that your body feels that it is safe to receive.

This means your body is wide to prioritize the familiar, because that's what it perceives as safe. When you experience more pleasure or abundance, such as money or recognition, then you're used to your body can kind of reject that or avoid it or sabotage it by reducing other areas of your life to maintain balance.

This happens because your nervous system recognizes the law of duality. Which is for every experience of bliss or abundance, there is potential for the opposite pain or scarcity. For example, perhaps in the past you had a great job that was unexpectedly taken away due to circumstances beyond your control, leaving your body a little bit unsettled about what success means, or maybe deeply rooted as a baby.

You experienced a moment of connection with your mom and she pulled away before you were really ready. Meaning that your body has kind of adopted this understanding of I never quite get satiated and things are taken away before I'm ready. Sometimes it's upper limit manifests as you getting bored or engaging in behaviors that diminish what you've worked hard to achieve.

Procrastination, perfectionism, spending sprees, sometimes even physical ailments like migraines or autoimmune issues. It's like your nervous system wants to push you back into the zone of scarcity or dis dissatisfaction because it doesn't want to receive this abundance. A lot of people will try to address this through mindset work or therapy, which is really helpful sometimes.

But because this is a body-based pattern embedded inside your body, inside your nervous system, we need to use this somatic approach as well and teach your body that it's safe to receive and keep this abundance by consistently affirming that this new level of safety and connection is okay, and your nervous system can adapt and allow you to experience more ease and flow in your life.

I have a practice inside of the book that is incredibly helpful. It's called the expansion practice, but what's more important is actually. Mm, not more important. But my favorite part of it, and the one that I wanna share with you today is the preparation for it, which is the why. You are probably engaging inside of this type of work, and you've done like therapy work, regulatory work, you killed a trauma, you understand different parts of yourself, and.

You your why is that deep personal reason that's been fueling your motivation up until now? It's not just a motivator. It's like the core of your purpose. It gives meaning to everything you do. It's the reason that you have energy to wake up in the morning.

Your why also creates this ease and certainty flow. It's clear, it's aligned. You feel like you're doing something. Worth doing. And a lot of people come to my work having pursued work through unhealthy mechanisms. So it's like, we spoke about this in another podcast episode where we talk about burnout in the body, kind of go into wanting to support your body and be healthy.

But you go in with an understanding of like, I don't know, maybe if I'm fat, I'm not loved. So you're like, oh, I'll be really skinny. Then I'll be loved. Sometimes you go into our work and our career thinking that if I can heal or support burnout in other people, that I can also heal and support it from where I was before.

Or if I fix this in the world and somehow I alleviate that part of me that is suffering and that type of mission driven purpose is incredibly beautiful and noble. However, it. Will often push you too far into burnout, and unless you integrate a new why, you'll struggle to find the motivation and energy to do your work after you've begun regulating.

So I'm gonna give you a 3, 4, 5 step practice to identify. These are reflections to identify a new why and. Take your time going through them. The book will also help you do it, but let me run through them. Number one, what problem do I need? What problem or need do I feel passionate about solving through my business?

And why does it matter to this? To me personally? This is gonna help you identify the personal connection and sense of purpose behind the work that you're doing, and I want you to reflect on it from a. Different place. If you've done this before you started doing a lot of this health self-development work.

Reflect on this from a new place. Reflect on your experiences, your values, or injustices that motivate you to create change. Number two, how do I want my business to impact the lives of my clients and customers? And what change do I hope to see as a result of my work? This is very much deeply as the long, more connected to the long term impact.

When I picture myself five years from now, what do I want my life and business to look like? How will it align with my core values and long-term vision? By visualizing your future, you're going to clarify how your business goal align with your personal values and the lifestyle aspirations and your vision for your life.

So we're marrying. What's my business gonna do with what do I need? And then what challenges or setbacks have I faced in life that have shaped my desire to build this business? And how do these experiences fuel my motivation and resilience? This is gonna help you uncover how past experiences are actually driving your entrepreneurial goals, and you get to then decide how much of that you want to include and what is healthy for you.

The last one is, if I could no longer run my business tomorrow, what would I feel I've left behind in the world? What legacy do I want to create through my work? This will go beyond financial success or daily operations. This is. Really important to return to because it is what gives you longer term energy.

This is a large, it's something bigger than you and all so many studies show us that when we are committed to something bigger than us, we experience more fulfillment. It's also what's gonna help you understand that. You know, no matter what happens with the next launch or the next interview, the next phone call, your success is beyond what is happening today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this quarter, this financial year.

It is long term, so it's safe to take your time and do it properly. Then you can expand into something new. You can teach your body how to feel safe, having more success, to be better than anything your ancestors has ever done. Anything you've ever experienced that you can turn around and be like, wow, my life is really freaking great.

I've been practicing this a lot. I wrote this. I practice it a lot when I was writing my book, and I was like, oh, I've achieved everything that I wanted to do. Um. What's next or how do I make it feel safe to receive the fact that I've done this? I've been practicing it lately. Just, I was literally crying yesterday morning 'cause I was like, wow, like my life is so much better than I thought it could have been.

And I was making a vision board and I was trying to figure out like what to put on my vision board with some friends. And I was just like, you know what, no. I'm gonna put space to be surprised because. Life tends to show me that it can be better than my small little mind could possibly imagine. So let's leave space for that, and that is what helps us expand and increase our capacity to receive.

Anyway, there's bigger practices inside of the book, but that's enough for you to, I think, let me know how you go with it. And I really recommend if you wanna go deeper inside of this. Understanding of how, when we go through with fear-based motivations where it can actually hurt us, I would recommend that you have a look at the episode. Called body image and the burnout, body image and the nervous system. I'll make sure it's linked down below in the show notes.