Today I’m talking about something I see constantly in women who are overwhelmed, emotionally reactive, anxious, or stuck in survival mode: the inability to slow down and be alone with themselves.

So many of us are constantly doing. Working, parenting, helping everyone else, consuming self-help, listening to podcasts, journaling, trying to improve ourselves, trying to stay productive — and while none of those things are bad, eventually we lose our connection to ourselves.

In this episode, I’m talking about:

1. Why constant doing can keep us emotionally dysregulated
2. What emotional reactivity actually is
3. How fear of feeling keeps us stuck in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn
4. Why silence feels uncomfortable for so many women
5. The importance of emotional safety and nervous system regulation
6. How to build the ability to feel emotions without becoming consumed by them
7. Small ways to slow down and reconnect with yourself throughout your day

This episode is a reminder that healing is not always about doing more. Sometimes it’s about creating enough space to finally hear yourself again.

Key Takeaways

1. Emotional reactivity isn’t just about outward behaviour — it’s when emotions are running your internal experience.
2. Many women stay busy because being alone with themselves feels unsafe.
3. Constant input and productivity can disconnect us from our bodies and nervous systems.
4. Fear of emotion creates chronic fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses.
5. Emotional safety is something we can build over time.
6. Small moments of silence and grounding matter more than you think.
7. Healing is not about white-knuckling your way through life.

Quotes From This Episode

“All of your life is not a doing problem. It’s a being problem.”

“The more emotionally safe you feel, the more able you are to allow emotion.”

“If everything you do is designed to get rid of emotion, you’re going to live in fear.”

“We live in a society that is perpetually inputting into us — and we never give ourselves space to release it.”

“Silence is a skill. Being alone with yourself is a skill.”

Call to Action

If this episode resonated with you and you’re realizing how much of your life has been spent in survival mode, I’d love to support you.

You can book a free discovery call at:

👉 amandahess.ca/bookacall

Together, we can look at what’s keeping you emotionally stuck, how to create more emotional safety, and whether coaching is the right next step for you.

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

Hey, my friends.

Okay, listen.

Today I am going to be sharing something off the cuff with you.

And it's something that I notice when I'm talking to somebody that hasn't been working with me for very long or that I don't work with yet.

And today we're just going to talk about the power of silence, the power of being more quiet, the power of slowing things down.

So one of the things that happens is when we're stressed, when we are doing a lot of things, when we are the kind of person that is highly motivated, right?

This is honestly the type of person that would maybe quantify themselves as being type A, being on top of things.

That being said, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're that person either, because I have coached women who have had more expansive time that have a lot of time at their disposal.

But in either case, what I see is I see women ultimately feel filling their day with a lot of things that they are doing.

So they will be going from thing to thing to thing in their life.

They will be getting up in the morning, they will be hitting the gym, they will be working, they will be dropping their kids places, they will be on different boards.

They will be doing fun and interesting things in their home.

They are doers.

And I will even see this with somebody when they're doing a lot of self help, where they'll be listening to podcasts and they'll be journaling and they'll be doing gratitude and they will just be in this place where they're doing, doing, doing, doing, doing okay, and it's not wrong and it's not bad.

But whether you are the kind of person that is just doing all of these productive, I'll put that in air quotes, things, or you are the person that is genuinely busy doing things, or you're even the type of person where you feel bad and when you feel bad, you get yourself to try and do different modalities to feel better if you're in that space in any way.

One thing that I notice that I talk about a lot is how much time you're spending alone, how much time you're spending alone, how much time you're spending in silence.

I remember years ago when I first started in coaching and My coach said to me, amanda, what if you drove your car and you didn't listen to anything?

And I just looked at her like she had grown three heads.

The idea of letting my brain be able to talk to me when I am feeling.

Feeling so dysregulated all the time sounded horrific.

It sounded terrible.

I never wanted to do that.

So I just vividly remember this coaching call that I had with her where she encouraged me to be alone with myself.

And I just have seen over and over again women really not being able to do that.

And I want to speak to that today, and I want to talk about why it's important that you learn how to do it.

When we don't know how to be alone with our brain, with our body, with our thoughts, with our breath, with just the world alone, when we don't allow ourselves to do that, we will inevitably be emotionally reactive.

That can look a lot of different ways.

A lot of times when I say to somebody, emotionally reactive, what they think I'm saying is, oh, I'm reactive to the other people that are around me.

I am losing control of my mouth or I'm being passive aggressive or whatever else might be happening.

That's actually not what being emotionally reactive is.

Being emotionally reactive means that your emotions are really running the show.

So they are controlling the thoughts, they are controlling the actions, they are controlling everything.

And we don't have any real ability to balance that out.

So this will happen when you're feeling a ton of anxiety.

This will happen when your brain just won't shut up in the middle of the night, right?

This is when this is happening, happening.

And what I notice is that when I say to somebody in those moments, what are you doing?

Almost always they're telling me the things that they're doing to try and get rid of the emotion.

So this is the first part of this problem, right?

If everything we do is designed to get rid of emotion, we are going to be in a very bad place.

It is just going to create an experience for you where you feel afraid all the time.

You're just gonna have a ton of fear because you are afraid of how you're going to feel.

So some of you are gonna be able to label that as anxiety.

Some of you might not even be able to label it with a feeling.

I know I've got clients that talk about how that feels in their head, that it just feels like pressure that they can't get rid of.

At the end of the day, though, what it is, is it's a fear of feeling.

And when we are afraid of feeling, we will be in a fear response.

So a fear response is like a stress response.

It's fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

A fear response is u ultimately your brain and body showing up without your conscious effort trying to keep you safe and alive.

That's what it's trying to do.

And that's very useful if we are in a truly fearful situation where our physical safety or even our emotional safety is at risk.

However, in our day to day life, our emotional safety, our mental safety, our physical safety even to an extent is something that is not as at risk as our brain likes to think.

And when I really look at it, I'm looking at somebody who is maybe afraid of feeling lonely, is maybe afraid of feeling embarrassed, is maybe afraid of feeling ashamed, sad.

There's so many other emotions that we are not wanting to feel because potentially things have happened to us.

And when we felt that way, it has felt so difficult and so hard and we feel as if we got stuck there and we couldn't get out, that it was something that was so just life altering in some way that we want to avoid it at all costs.

So it makes sense that when that feeling comes up again that our brain identifies it as a real danger, a real threat.

Where I work with people on this is we want to look at how do I move through that experience and find a different way of being with emotion.

Because if we don't want to feel that fear all the time, if we want that fear to be reduced, if we want to be able to feel emotionally and mentally free, to be able to put things down, if we want that experience, what we truly need to be able to do is we need to be able to go out in the world and experience whatever's happening and not internalize it and not brace against it and not be in this fearful place of fight, flight, freeze fawn all the time.

If we're in fight, flight, freeze fawn all the time, what we don't realize is that it actually makes us primed for more fight, flight, freeze fun.

The more we experience it, the more we create it without meaning to.

Because there's nothing really to be afraid of.

There's nothing really to be afraid of.

This is just your day to day life.

This is just the undulating nature of emotion.

There is nothing going really wrong here.

And even if you are going through something that is emotionally difficult, we still want to be able to start building up emotional safety.

When I'm working with Someone.

One of the big things we're talking about and looking at is creating emotional safety.

The more emotionally safe you feel, the more able you will be to allow emotion.

The more you allow emotion, the more you will become unafraid of emotion because you will become a master of your emotions.

That doesn't mean that we' completely in control of what we feel, but we are able to navigate the experience in an empowered way and we are able to get through emotions faster and with more ease when they are difficult or challenging.

When you are in this Fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

Fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

When we're in this fearful state because we are afraid of what we are going to feel, we are afraid of what we are going to experience.

We are afraid of how and whether or not we can handle something, we ultimately have to somehow interrupt that pattern.

And the best way that I know how to interrupt the pattern is to slow down.

Your brain is going to tell you to speed up.

It is going to start pumping adrenaline into your system.

Fear is going to show up.

And then when we're feeling that fear, if we just blindly follow it, we start experiencing reactions that we don't want to have and that starts creating results that we don't want to have.

So if I'm perpetually feeling fearful about what's happening at work, let's say, then what's going to happen is I'm going to be thinking about it all the time.

It's going to take up so much space in my brain.

I'm going to be up at night worrying about it.

I'm not going to be sleeping.

I'm going to be getting to work, and I'm going to be very tense and defensive.

I'm going to go home.

I'm not going to be able to be present or active with my family.

And this is going to snowball and this is the experience.

The same thing can happen in your marriage where maybe there has been infidelity.

And you are trying to rebuild the marriage.

You are trying to figure out a way through this, either inside or outside of the relationship.

And fear keeps showing up.

What if I'm not good enough?

What if I'm not the right person?

What if I'm not attractive?

What if I somehow miss something?

What if this is my fault?

How do I stop that from happening next time?

The next thing you know, it's all you're thinking about.

You can't focus on the other relationships that are burned bringing you happiness.

You can't be there with your kids.

You're not present at work.

This is how this shows up.

So what I know to be true is when somebody is in this state, we need to increase the amount of alone time and silent time you have with yourself.

That doesn't mean that we just let our brain just think all by itself, because that is a dumpster fire.

We don't do that.

But instead, we need to start growing our ability to be with ourselves and notice the feelings in the body, be able to breathe through them, Let the wave of emotion come all the way through and find our center, find our groundedness.

What I tend to say to my clients is that when you're in the middle of a really painful emotional experience and you're trying to allow and process emotion, you've got about 10% control, maybe a little more.

Depends on how regulated you are that day, depends on the intensity.

But if it's very, very intense, you are going to be on the ride and you're just not going to have a ton of control other than to get yourself through it.

What we don't realize is that what we're doing outside of those experiences has a massive impact.

So if we take time to be alone, to be silent, to be nourishing with our thoughts, to drop into our body, to breathe to ground, if we do this regularly, outside of the times when we feel triggered, outside of the times when we're feeling extreme emotion, we will start building a capacity for being able to be alone with ourself.

So this can start really small.

We're talking about taking a few deep breaths in the bathroom.

Breathing in for three, holding for three, blowing out audibly for three.

You can do it with me here.

Hold.

Blow out.

Noticing how your nervous system drops in, right?

We could do that every time we went to the bathroom.

If you did that every time you went to the bathroom every day, it would have an impact on your ability to emotionally recover.

It would have an impact on the intensity of the emotion that you experience.

All of your life is not a doing problem, okay?

It's a being problem.

We have to learn how to be.

We live in a society that is so full of different problems.

We live in a society that is so full of input, that is perpetually inputting, perpetually going into your brain and stimulating you and giving you this, and giving you this, and giving you this and giving you this.

We live in this society that does this.

Ultimately, what we want to be able to start doing is releasing it, letting it go, putting it down.

If we keep adding to the pile, if we keep listening to Podcasts and trainings and doing this and gratitude and yada yada and do do, do, do, do, do do do do with no space in between.

What happens is we don't give ourselves that ability to mentally and emotionally rest.

We can't just do this when we sleep.

And in fact, a lot of you probably experience that you don't sleep.

So we have to start bringing that in.

We have to start adding that in.

So what I want to leave you with today is understanding that I need to create silence and alone time in my life.

I need to find ways to drop into my body during those times.

They can be small, miniature experiences.

They don't need to be these big long windows.

If you do this day after day, time after time.

If you continue to do this throughout your day, you are add to your ability to be alone with yourself.

You start shoring up the skill as you increase the skill and the capacity.

When emotionally difficult things do happen, you have that ability to drop into your body, number one.

Number two, it will happen less because it will actually grow your emotional capacity.

And so it will happen much less frequently for you.

These things work together.

The thing that you want to remember is that you're moving against your biology.

You're moving against what you would typically do for your yourself.

So therefore, it is needing to be intentional.

We need to be scheduling it.

We need to be reminding ourselves of it.

We are building a habit.

We are building a core skill, something that allows you to have a little bit more space.

So the next time you're feeling very activated, I want you to think about when's the last time that I rested, when's the last time that I took time for myself, when was the last time I was alone with my brain and do I feel safe doing that?

And if the answer is no, I want you to know that coaching can be very helpful for this.

This is something that you don't need to white knuckle your way through.

That is not required.

This is something that we don't get taught in school.

Our parents don't teach us this.

This is something you can learn.

And if that is something you're interested in, I want to encourage you to go sign up for a free Discovery call.

You can go to amandahest ca bookacall and we can talk this through.

We can look at what's happening, what needs to happen, what is going to change for you when you do it, and we can look at the real process to get you there.

And then we can talk about whether or not coaching would be the right thing for you.

All right, my friends, this is what I've got for you.

I hope you have the most incredible day, and I will see you here next time.

Bye.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care, friend.