Shownotes
Are you constantly running on empty, even after a full night’s sleep?
In this episode, we dive deep into the root causes of burnout and chronic stress—your nervous system—and how it impacts your ability to make decisions and build a sustainable business. If you find yourself overworking or delaying big decisions because you feel exhausted, this episode will help you understand why that’s happening and what you can do about it.
You’ll discover the key signs that your nervous system is out of balance and how that’s affecting your productivity and decision-making.
By the end of this episode, you'll:
- Learn how to recognize the stress responses (fight, flight, or freeze) that may be holding you back.
- Understand the impact of neurotransmitters and hormones on your business growth and personal well-being.
- Gain actionable insights on how to develop a more agile and resilient nervous system to enhance your productivity and decision-making.
Next Recommended episode:
182: Regulated Leadership: 3 Daily Habits to Prevent Burnout and Boost Creativity
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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.
Transcripts
Do you ever find yourself running on empty, even if you've rested for a full night, or you delay really big decisions and you feel like you are in this endless loop of overworking. Perhaps you wake up tired, but the thought of resting seems impossible because your to do list is waiting.
It's not about needing to push through.
This is happening because you are doing something that is challenging. You're building a business. You have a legacy and you're probably juggling all the other parts of life too. And your nervous system hasn't learned to be as resilient and adaptive as you need it to be to prevent chronic stress and burnout and overwhelm.
However, you can develop that capacity. And in today's episode, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do that. The main point of this episode is to give you some things to look for, which tell you that you are not in an agile and resilient nervous system. What that actually means to look at the neurotransmitters and hormones that affect us and help you see how you could become more agile.
You can take this deeper. When you look at Getting my book somatic intelligence for success or joining me in group or one on one coaching called the Academy I'll show them all about that at the end of the episode. But for now, I'm gonna elaborate on what I've said so far so For the sake of analogy and simplicity.
We're gonna think of your nervous system as a car don't love Thinking about something organic like your body as something as mechanic as a car, but I think it helps us learn So we're gonna go with it So when your car is working really well and everything is running smoothly, you can feel the engine kind of running at a steady pace.
You kind of like you're cruising. You can, if you're in a manual car, if anyone's driven a manual car, I know that they're not very, they're not very around lately because they're all switching to hybrid and electric. But in a manual car, you can shift gears. And shifting gears in this analogy means you can kind of go through flow from different decisions to others.
You feel like you can engage in one type of work and then another, but in this car, imagine like your car, like it kind of like hits this traffic jam and you, and you notice that it's It's experiencing stress because of the traffic jam, there's an obstacle, but apart from that, the engine starts like heating up and you're like, no, no, baby, you got this.
Like we can do this, but your car is just like, ah, no, like I'm not going anywhere. Uh, you can feel it working underneath you. It's overworking, it's burning through energy and you can feel that it's like getting hotter and, and it's kind of creating more tension in that system. So this is what's happening when your nervous system goes into a survival mode instead of moving through the traffic jam with a lot of ease and clarity and grace.
So your nervous system, the car starts working harder and just kind of burning energy and but it's not moving anyway. It's just kind of staying in place. When that stress comes over, when you hit in that obstacle and we're going to a stress response, your nervous system will enter one of three main stress responses.
There is a fourth, uh, we can look at that in a different episode, but, and inside of the academy and my book, but fight, flight or freeze are the three main nervous system stress responses. If you've heard these before, just flick forward like three minutes. These responses are designed to protect you in moments of danger.
But our nervous system lags in its understanding of the world, meaning that it's a primal system, it's the oldest part of our body, and it's responding to the world based on the information it has from our ancestors literally hundreds of years ago. Now society moves really quickly, so our nervous system hasn't developed the understanding of what is dangerous.
What is actually dangerous versus what it thinks is dangerous. So these stress responses can get triggered by imagined threats, such as the fear of failure, or just overwhelm of your to do list. Your life isn't at threat, but your body perceives it to be. Therefore it activates these stress responses. In the flight response, you may have heard about it before, but it's kind of.
You know you're in it if you feel restless, you struggle to rest, you feel like you're like kind of pushing, you're like doing lots of things, you're flicking between tabs, you have a thousand tabs open, you're trying to get things done quickly, you're trying to eat quickly, you feel really scattered, you might like make really quick decisions, you feel like you have to respond to that email really quickly, you get really impatient with things, you want everything to happen now, that includes like, I want my business to be really big now.
Then we have the Um, sorry, that was, yeah, then we have the, sorry, that was the fight response. So the fight response, you get this. So in the fight response, you might get restless and agitated, you might get frustrated and you feel like push forward, like fight for it. You try to get everything done, you try to like get your to do list done, and you end up feeling really scattered.
You probably also experience like irritable bowel syndrome, you might have diarrhea, you might like tense your jaw, you might have tension in your back. Um, maybe it's really difficult for you to stay asleep or you wake off and you're just like, got to take on the day and you can't really like rest. Then we have the flight response, which is your nervous system saying, run away from this.
This is really hard. So you might tend to avoid doing things. So there's like that one task on your to do list that you just like keep putting off. and you distract yourself with shiny objects. I'm going to do this class. I'm going to do that. I'm going to have this conversation with my friend. Maybe you create drama in your relationships.
You're like, there's so much I have to process, but really, like, it wasn't that deep. I love you. It wasn't that deep. We got to move on. Um, Um, maybe you just feel really like checked out and scattered and you really struggle to focus. You have a thousand tabs open. This one can be very similar to ADHD symptoms, but, and when you regulate your nervous system, you experience less ADHD symptoms.
And also if you actually have been diagnosed with ADHD, you'll notice that as you work on your ADHD and your dopamine regulation, you'll experience less of these. So we, we work with them together. Both. Influence each other. Then we have the freeze response. So this is where you feel like just stuck, just paralyzed.
You shut down emotionally. Things feel heavy. It's really difficult for you to wake up in the morning. Maybe you just don't feel motivated. You just feel like a lot of resistance. There's brain fog. It feels like you're kind of like going through the motions. You don't feel like there's vibrant energy running through you.
There's no inspiration. And this is such a subtle stress response, very common in people prone to depression, but it's one of the more, it's really important to recognize because it will hinder your business growth. It will hinder your growth in life. So the common thread in all of these responses is that when stress is present, your body is in survival mode, which means your brain is not receiving the energy and activation in the ways that it needs to do something as special and as challenging as building a business.
When you are stressed, your body releases cortisol. This is the primary stress hormone. In short bursts, we love cortisol. Love it. It gets us up in the morning. It gives us motivation. We are into it. Good energy. But when we have too much of it for too long, it takes energy away from your prefrontal cortex.
Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that makes really great decisions. It can plan, it is creative, it can solve problems really well, it can be analytical and strategic, it can It can, it's like the part of you that feels like really abundant about life as well. Right? So when we're in survival mode, we make rash decisions based on fear and stress, or we delay making appropriate decisions when we are regulated and we're acting from our prefrontal cortex, we're just really intelligent and we feel confident and we feel embodied and we're like, yeah, this is it.
You're less susceptible to when we put manipulative marketing as well.
So. Going back to that gear thing, what we're trying to do is we're kind of like get the car to chill out. It's not the great, greatest words, but To practice finding embodied safety, not understanding that you're safe and that your car is working, but embodied safety. So practically this might look like, I had a situation with a client literally yesterday and we learned a, embodiment practice in the form of a meditation that she uses when she does in person client facing work because she felt like her tendency is to rush a lot and she's always had a lot to do.
So she's managed that and she's always planned really effectively and she's gotten a lot of things done and that's been really helpful. But now that we've been working together and she has this Thriving business. So she doesn't actually need to feel stressed about things all the time. She doesn't need to run around and like do all of these things all the time.
There's a part of her that is struggling to adapt to that and understand that they can go slower, that she can be soft and she would feel really energetically depleted, really tired after client facing work. And it was because she was getting scattered. She was talking a lot. She was giving them a lot of her energy.
So we learned this embodiment practice to pull her awareness back down into her legs, back down into her body, to create a sense of embodied safety so that the part of her that is used to working really hard could witness that that was possible and soften and ease this tension. And we let it be there.
And that's very healing for it without getting rid of it. And. Then practically, tangibly, she would, she started setting up days off and really practicing the skill of actually resting in those days and finding a deeper rest and automating a lot of the systems in her business so that she doesn't have to work so hard and do so much admin.
And all of these things really need to work together for it to be effective. You cannot do one or the other just at once. There's an episode that I go into, um, it'll be number probably 186 and also inside of my book where I talk about why you can't just do one all of the other. And if somebody is telling you that it's just one, just nervous system regulation, just inner work and just, uh, like systems and practical stuff, it's not, it's not just that.
They all have to work with each other and they have to be influenced by each other so that they are effective for you and your body. This is what I teach inside of the Academy. How to bring it all together, how to regulate your nervous system so you can stop feeling overwhelmed, and how to be the leader that can lead with groundedness, with ease, with creativity, with confidence, without burning out, so that you can enjoy your life.
Make sure that you've listened to episode number 182, three daily habits to prevent burnout and boost creativity. It's becoming one of my most popular episodes. It's very tangible, very practical. You can start using it today and be more of that version of yourself that can hold this business and that can share your work with the world and leave an impact.
Continue practicing that. I'll see you in that episode. 182.