We cover:

1. Stability is built in the repetitive middle, and that middle can feel like pain.

2. A nervous-system approach to sameness, transitions, and the urge to burn it down.

3. How to titrate boredom so your life gets steadier without your body feeling trapped.

02:13 Crying on the Road Trip

03:18 When Life Feels Repeated

04:21 Why Boredom Feels Unsafe

06:05 Boredom Builds Your Future

06:58 Dopamine and Drama Loops

07:51 Four Practices to Try

08:54 Practice One Make Neutral Safe

09:34 Practice Two Rewrite Beliefs

10:31 Practice Three Add Healthy Novelty

10:58 Practice Four Titration and Somatics

Receive Support:

1. The 5-week Energy Management Program: Work Doesn’t Have to Cost All Your Energy
2. One-on-one somatic support for nervous-system-level patterns

Free Resources and Reports:

1. What if you're not the problem? Full report. Access the full report here: https://sheridanruth.com/what-if-youre-not-the-problem/
2. Burnout Is Weird PDF: 7 real stories of people who stopped trying to “fix themselves” and found steadiness in unexpected ways. click here
3. Read Somatic Intelligence for Success: Nervous system alignment to prevent burnout and leave an impact. Purchase here.
4. Regulation Your Nervous System At Work: Learn to regulate with practices you'll actually use. No need for more time, space or privacy. Download here.
5. Try the Burnout Prevention AI ChatBot: Soma helps you shift out of spirals, self-doubt, and stress-based decision-making—so you can lead from your most grounded, self-aware state. Access here.

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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.

  📍 I swear to God that bottom is like, oh, it's the most repulsive thing in the entire world. It makes you itch, it makes you, it makes me feel like my whole body needs to like run in every direction at once. And today I'm gonna tell you about how it recently made me cry.

📍 Today's episode is gonna help you navigate this feeling of boredom so that you can create more of what you want in your life, um, and relate to it in like a mature way that makes you feel really proud of yourself. Um. Get what you want done. I think bottom is one of the things that if most, most people were to embrace it, and I include myself in that, uh, more people who embrace boredom actually end up reaching their goals quicker.

Uh, so we're gonna be talking about it 'cause it's important because we, but this comes to you from a place where one time, uh, and there's many different variations of this story, but this one just felt like the most, I don't know. Poignant, if that's the word. Um, I was driving to a festival and I was super excited.

It's like a five day festival. I've taken time off of work to go early. I'm having so much, like I'm objectively having so much fun, right? 'cause like I stayed with friends prior and we're listening to music and we're in the Australian bush and it's dusty and it's beautiful and the gum trees and oh my God, it's so great.

Um, but I had to. Do some really meaningless or meaning like ugh, mundane tasks and on the way there. And so I'm privileged enough to be in the car in this beautiful place, full of this life where I get to just take five days off and go to a festival and dance and do workshops and yoga and all that stuff.

But I have to do these talks and like I literally am. Sitting in the passenger seat of the car with my laptop, tears running down my face because this sensation of boredom is so intense. Oh my God. And all I could do is just complete. I had to finish reading something and then tick a few boxes on something and then, oh my God.

And then there's been other times in my life where I'm so lucky to be in this beautiful, beautiful friendship group. Um, but I went home and I. Sitting first I noticed that I was procrastinating going to bed, and then I sat with the feelings in my body to help me figure out, okay, Sheridan, you gotta go to sleep.

And I found inside just so much sadness because this wonderful dinner that we'd had, it just felt like the conversations had been copied and pasted from the week before. And this is not depression. This is not a lack of love for my life. It's just this sensation of sameness that was pressing against my body because I would.

I like novelty, whether that be my A DHD or just, I don't know, my personality, Gemini rising, maybe. I don't know. I like things to be fun, and I've spent a lot of my life trying to avoid feeling boredom because I found it really uncomfortable. It's like unspent energy. Um, it, it, it sometimes feels like sadness.

And I think for a lot of us, especially if we carry a TR history of trauma or neurodivergent, there's this boredom that happens in the in-between all the transitions that can feel really physically painful. Our systems have learned to brace for change and that quietness can feel really uncomfortable.

And a part of us stays scanning and looping and looking for a spike, and then nothing spikes. And that feeling inside is new. And so maybe you scroll or you quit because there's that impulse that we have to protect ourself from what is uncomfortable. And if you haven't sat with boredom, most of us have not.

It's uncomfortable. And I think this is very important if you say that you want stability, if you want stability and steady income, something you can rely on, a niche that fits a routine that you can stick with. Stability is composed of many hours of that feeling of similarity that your system may not have like a map for, or it may equate.

With discomfort or even lack of safety. So when we find ourselves in the routines of sameness, such as having the same dinner with the same group of friends weeks on ends in a way that nourishes and makes really deep relationships in a way that nothing else can, or repeating the same task so that your business can operate, you can see kind of the compound effect of your actions and see the success.

Even those, those things bull us towards our goals. It can feel like deprivation, especially if our early experiences of stability were unstable or conditional. And so once again, this boredom becomes a threat. But I think the bottom is the training ground for the future that we. Can create ourselves the future that we say that you want.

Studying something important and mastering it is many hours of sameness. Saving money is this repetition of not buying something. Mastering a skill is just doing it many times. Staying in the same job long enough to be trusted is just the same day over and over again. Staying in a niche long enough so that people begin to know your name and can recommend you to your friends so that you don't have to think so much about marketing means that you have to stay in it instead of reinventing it.

And the depth of friendships, like I said, means that you have to do the same thing I. So border tolerance is a part of self-regulation. When we can experience low simulation states without panic, we buy ourselves access to delayed rewards. There's a circuitry in our brain that lights up when we anticipate novelty, and it's very efficient.

And sometimes people might say, this is like a dopamine addiction. When we rely on novelty to moderate our stress, that quiet feels like withdrawal. And particularly if you have chronic stress, trauma or neurodivergence, your baseline arousal might be higher. Meaning that, um, it's not that downshifting isn't easy, it's like literally just you haven't had a chance to practice that and you're looking for higher sensory experiences.

Uh, we have a really good podcast on managing hyperfocus. If this is of interest of you and you find yourself really struggling with transitions and um. Finishing things, I think, uh, anyway, so I think another useful thing before I get into other blah. Okay. I have two practices I wanna share with you.

Actually, no. Probably more like four. We'll see how we go. I have four practices I think that I wanna share with you, and I'm also gonna invite you into my course, which is called work Doesn't Have to Cost all your energy. Boredom is one of the ways of fighting. Boredom is one of the ways that we burn ourselves out.

Um, but before I share with you those somatic practices that can help you navigate boredom, uh, I just wanna name the work of Dr. Scott Lyons. I think. He does a really great job talking about the body's relationship with stimulation and stress, and I think he has a book called Addicted to Drama. I haven't read it, but I learned a lot from him in other like lecture based things, uh, when I was doing my certification within Body Lab.

And yeah, I think his framing of like letting energy move without adding to it, um, was really helpful for me. I think that's in the book Anyway, I recommend addiction to Drama by Dr. Scott Lyons is really good. Anyway, come back to the practice. So what do we do about this? First of all, we just gotta make neutrality really easy and.

Like safe. So pick a moment in your day, whether it is you washing your coffee, coffee cup, or the last couple of minutes of your day while you're brushing your teeth, and just do the same thing that you always do and just notice this is what sameness feels like as a sensation. I did this the same. I do this the same time.

Inside my body there are sensations. This is the same sensation as yesterday. And just notice and clock it and just say, okay. Sameness sensation safe, which is helping your body and brain get on the same board that this is a part of the experience. Then practice having looking at your beliefs around boredom or safe.

So just your homework going home is like to write in one page. Don't double think this. Don't edit it. Just like get it out. Sameness equals. Sameness equals sameness equals sameness equals maybe I wrote this down once and it was like, I'm invisible. I'm wasting time, I'm stuck. All of those beliefs might be really helpful in some context, but they're not gonna be helpful when we need to do the same thing in order to get where we want.

But if we can put them outside, we can just, like, sometimes that's just enough to stop choosing them and stop believing them. Um, sometimes you can. Not argue with the belief, but try to find data for the opposite. So like maybe then you'll be let go deeper into belief practice. We can do this inside of the course, or you can do this inside of one-on-one.

Work with me, any other therapist who have practice. Number three is find novelty. So we're not saying that we're sacrificing novelty, but finding both. So looking at how, how can I bring sameness into a week this my life this week, and how can I bring novelty in? Um. And like really focusing on that and like saturating yourself in novelty in ways that are really helpful.

New music, new recipe, new walk, different cafe, I don't know. Um, and then making sure that you're doing sameness in other ways. And then titration, so. Leaning into that energy, adjusting yourself to that connection and that sensation, and then leaning back out, these somatic practices, orienting, titrating, um, letting energy move through.

You are something that we cover in depth inside of my course. Work doesn't have to cost all of your energy.

I think I'm gonna share. I think that's enough for today. Um, I will say, I'm not saying that you need to grit your teeth through monotony. It's just holding the middle ground so that you can choose novelty and choose sameness in a way that nourishes you and gets you more of what you want. Okay. Thanks for listening.

I'll speak with you soon. I.