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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them. Not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.
Hello, friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, I hope you are doing awesomely well.
I think we can all agree that we live in a hustle culture.
We wear busyness as a badge of honor.
And the crazy thing about that is it’s killing us.
And we’re still doing it.
Pushing hard and fast all the time is not ever gonna lead you to a healthy space. Because that’s not how the human body’s designed. The human body is designed to push, but only if it’s respected with an adequate amount of pausing. In fact, if you look at the nervous system, there’s two sides to the nervous system. There’s the sympathetic, and there’s the parasympathetic. And they are very different in nature. your sympathetic nervous system is what kind of gets you revved up to tackle a new challenge to get a lot done on your to do list to lean into difficult things. It is literally your fight or flight response.
The parasympathetic system on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. It’s your rest and digest state. It’s the things that we do to recover and regroup and realign ourselves. And both of these systems, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic system are awesome. And they are designed to allow you to lean into challenge and recover from the challenge. Both need to be nurtured. Unfortunately, in our modern day society, the only side that’s really being nurtured to the point of self destruction is the sympathetic nervous system, which is really like the sympathetic nervous system can be sort of explained like the gas pedal in a car.
It triggers the fight or flight response and it gives the body a burst of energy so that can respond to perceived dangers, like running from a bear or maybe pulling your hand off a hot stove. The parasympathetic nervous system acts like the brakes of the car. It promotes rest and digest and it calms the body down. After you’ve leaned in, you’ve leaned into a challenge after the danger has passed.
Examples of things that would nourish the parasympathetic nervous system are things like sleep, nutrition, connection with other people, spending time outside, reading a book, taking a bath. Basically, anything that is restorative in nature. And nearly every woman that I work with comes to me in a state of chronically pressing down the gas pedal. So they’re in a state of chronically activating the sympathetic nervous system, and rarely, if ever, using the brakes, which would be the rest and digest the simple the parasympathetic nervous system. In other words, women are pushing really hard, but rarely giving themselves adequate permission to pause.
Now, you might remember in Episode 186, which was the first episode in this month’s theme, I talked about acclimating. And I’ve used this word a lot over the years that I’ve been a coach, because I love the word acclimating acclimating is basically, where you have pushed yourself to higher ground, you have lean, leaned into growing your life in some way, you’ve applied a lot of effort. And then you kind of need some time to just hang out at that new elevation. To get yourself grounded, before pushing your life even higher. So acclimating in my opinion, is extending yourself the grace of resting, after you’ve made a push.
Some examples of this would be in my own life. When I go through a really big launch, in my business, I launch a new program, you know, we do something that’s kind of new, and required a lot of creative energy. Yeah, it’s just a period of intense pushing. I always plan after a launch for at least a few days of rest. Same thing with like having a child, right, a lot of women are referring this to the state after you give birth as the fourth trimester. And I love that. It’s like that, that period, after you’ve, you’ve basically built a human, where for the next, you know, six to 12 weeks, you’re gonna give yourself time to recover and rest, and really lean into the newness of becoming a mother. I even do this with international travel. I know that sounds weird, like international travel is not really a push. But if you think about it, biologically it is. Right?
If I travel internationally, if I go to Singapore, or Portugal, anywhere, that’s just you know, time zones away. It takes a lot of resources from my body to adapt to a new timezone a new climate, a new culture. And we all know how it feels to come home from an international trip. It’s exhausting. Right. So I usually pad my international travel with a little pausing on the other side, so I can reset myself and realign myself. So why don’t we extend ourselves the grace to pause more easily. So I think there’s a lot of reasons.
A lot of women make it mean that they’re lazy, that they aren’t serious about making change, that they’re going to let other people down, that the world will stop turning. It won’t. You can take a break and the world will still turn I promise. We think that all the value is in the doing. But as I’ve said so many times on this Podcast, your health is fortified in the recovery. In the parasympathetic nervous system when we’re nourishing that that’s what fortifies our health. The brain cashes out the immune system is nourished, the hormones reset, the muscles are repaired, our energy is restored. That’s where a lot of the magic from our efforts happens is in the recovery.
And even taking this outside the context of health. In my business, we’re I get my greatest ideas. And I actually can create the best value for my customers is not when I’m sitting in front of my computer screen racking my brain, and you know, staying up at all hours of the night to try to get something done. That is not where I am able to bring my best to the forefront. My best ideas, my best communication, my best productivity comes from a space of feeling rested. And often I’ll get my best ideas. When I’m in the shower, I’m walking my dog, I’m not doing anything work related.
So because this is a sort of health, not sort of it is a health focused Podcast, I want you to consider for a moment, what does true health mean to you. And I hope if you’ve been a listener to this Podcast for any length of time, you’re thinking of health on a much bigger platform than just weight loss or how you look or what kind of clothes you can wear. What does true health mean to you, and I would invite you to maybe start considering that true health is a balance of those systems. Right? Have the fight or flight and the rest and digest.
Just like health is about it’s not just physical health, health is mental health, spiritual health, physical health. There’s a lot of components to it. I would also encourage you to think about what success means to you. Because knowing what success means to you very well may help you to slow down a little bit, get a little bit more rest, and spend a little bit more time with the people that you love without feeling guilty. When was the last time you really stop to consider what success really means to you? And in different areas of your life? What does success mean to you financially? What does success mean to you in relationships? What does success mean to you with your health? If it’s been a while, I’d like to encourage you to take a few minutes to really consider it. Why? For the reason that I just mentioned.
Knowing what success means to you, really will help you to grant yourself the permission to slow down. And to get a little bit more rest and to spend a bit more time with the people that you truly love without the guilt. That has most definitely been the case for me. Because achieving success in one isolated area of my life is not I realized upon closer inspection is not how I define success.
Here’s what I mean by that. Making more money in my business. By sacrificing time with my family is not my definition of success. Achieving my leanest physique by spending countless hours in the gym, and having to be accountable to every single bite of food that goes in my mouth. 365 days a year is not my definition of success. Living life so fast and furiously, that I run myself into the ground and fail to really experience any of it is not my definition of success.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love making money. I love feeling strong and vibrant. I love digging my heels in and accomplishing goals. But success. I have found by asking myself some very pointed questions is more than those things. Success to me is making money and spending time with my family and friends. Six Success to me is taking excellent care of myself and having enough time and energy to say yes to adventures and other interests. Success to me is crushing my goals and not feeling exhausted and depleted on the other side of accomplishing them.
What I found for me and why I’m sharing this with you today is that success is the balance between the push and the pause. If I only push if I only chase personal input professional goals without pausing. Which means for me, it means spending time restoring, reflecting, adventuring and loving hard on my people. I won’t feel successful, that I know for sure. And I see this so much in my clients.
A very large majority of my clientele is women who have achieved incredible success in areas of their life, career, family, hobbies and pursuits and sacrifice their health along the way to achieving those things. So I’m sharing this with you today with the hopes that you will extend yourself more permission in the weeks and months and certainly in the year ahead. 2020s, right around the corner, to rest and restore without the guilt. Because really extending yourself the grace to pause is not self indulgent, it is not selfish, it is not lazy. Pausing, is what allows you to push without breaking. So you can really savor the sweetness of your success.
Now a lot of women say to me, you know, Courtney, I don’t really know when to push and when to pause? And my answer to that is yes, you do. And here’s the harder truth is you’re the only person who knows whether you should be pushing, or whether you should be pausing. But to clearly answer that question for yourself, you have to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you’re pushing, and simultaneously feeling really depleted, just feeling kind of congested in your body, like your systems are just kind of sluggish. If you’re feeling heavy, mentally and physically, you’re getting sick all the time. You’re having a really hard time focusing, you’re super reactive. You, my friend, are getting a lot of red flags that you need to pause.
On the flip side, if you’re managing your total stress load, like you’re really putting in some effort to get good sleep at night, and you’re feeding yourself well. Right? And you don’t have like too many crazy things happening in your life. You’re in a great position to push. But I would still ask yourself, what do I need to be doing to support the push? So what I mean by that is as a mover, right, I’ve gone through periods of my life where I have trained very intensively. And when I’m in a period of training on a higher level, I’ve learned the hard way, as many of you listening have that if I do not honor that higher demand of my physiology with adequate rest. I’m going to get into a heap of trouble. More expectation of my physiology, when I perform at a higher level physically, I need to honor my system with more recovery, not less, but more.
And I would argue that this is kind of a law of nature in terms of any time in your life, you’re really leaning into a push. You’re up leveling your business in some way. You’re working through a relationship challenge. You’re demanding more from yourself physically. You’re challenging yourself in some new way. You must simultaneously ask yourself what you can be doing to support the push. Because pushing, imagine like pushing, I always see that vision of like pushing the boulder up the hill. Right? That’s kind of what the change process feels like sometimes. And when you’re changing in any area of your life, pushing a boulder up a hill demands a lot of resources from your body.
If we can supply our body with adequate nutrition, adequate rest, adequate hydration, keep our mindset in check, move our body not too much, but definitely not too little. Pushing. We will have so much more endurance in the push and we won’t feel so are depleted on the other side. But I know you’ve all experienced this, I know I have where I push so hard. And I am not honoring the needs of the push, I’m not honoring the things that will help me push more gracefully. I can knock myself out in a bad way, right where I get to the other side, and I am trashed, I’m sick. It takes me weeks to get back on my feet. I did that for years, until I just realized, okay, this is clearly not working, there must be a better way. And you know, the biggest thing that had to shift for me around that is my mindset. My mindset that if I take a little time to care for myself, the world is not going to self combust. Everyone will figure it out. The world will still spend, the sun will still rise and set. And I will feel better.
So, when you are considering, should I push? Should I pause? Decide. And realize that whatever decision you make, you can always make another decision to course correct if it turns out to be the wrong decision. Right.
But sometimes we have to be willing to just decide to move in a direction and then reconsider and reevaluate is that taking me in the direction I intended to go? And right now, I want you to kind of ask yourself in my life in general, right now, am I pushing? Or am I pausing? And if you’re pushing, or you’re pausing? Do you like your reasons for doing so? Because again, at the end of the day, that is a question only you can answer? Do I like my reasons for pushing so hard? Do I like my reasons for giving myself permission to pause. That’s how you decide which one you should be doing? Are you satisfied with your reasons, and if you are, keep doing what you’re doing. But please remember that periods of intense pushing, of pushing your life to higher ground should always be followed by periods of pausing. Right.
I always use the example of Olympic athletes or any athlete, it doesn’t have to be an Olympic athlete, any athlete knows. periodization is the basically the training model that athletes use to make sure that they have a pause on the opposite side of an intense pushing period. So you can’t ask an athlete to perform at optimal levels, 365 days a year, that would be insane. Right. But you can bet when someone’s getting ready for the Olympics, they are pushing hard. They get themselves into peak condition. They compete in their sport. Hopefully they get a gold. But even if they don’t, right, it’s it’s just such an intense period. And on the other side, you think when they go home, they’re pushing as hard as they did before the event, no way. They’re doing a lot of active recovery. And they’re really trying to nurture and honor that parasympathetic nervous system. Think about the way our school system is set up in the US, right?
We have periods of pushing and periods of pausing. I mean, our kids get like two to three months off of school in the summer. And that’s so great. In a lot of ways. It’s hard in a lot of ways do but let’s focus on the great part of it. It gives our kids a chance to really recover from the pushing during the school year. And I know I already mentioned childbirth, but I’m really attached to this one because I did not do this. Well. I had a child, right gave birth and immediately went back to training clients at 4am Like within a couple of weeks. And it is really no surprise that that first year of motherhood was total hell for me, because I never gave myself permission to pause after such an amazingly transformational experience but also a physically demanding experience for the human body.
If you are someone who is priding yourself on always pushing, I would really question the state of your health because we cannot attain a great state of health if we’re always pushing and never pausing. So know when you’re pushing So you can honor with adequate pausing. I hope that makes sense. All right, my friends, that’s all I have for you today. I hope it was helpful. I know a lot of you can relate right to having that gas pedal pressed down all the time. And then wondering why you feel so jacked up, right? You’re wired but tired. Your body just feels like it’s it’s probably putting on weight very easily. You’re feeling reactive all the time. Right? That those are all symptoms of that chronically pressed down gas pedal. So maybe maybe the answer and I know a lot of women don’t like hearing this. They want to know what they can do. To feel better. Right? And a lot of times the answer is stop doing so much. Okay, give me any answer, Courtney, but that one, no one wants to hear that. Because slowing down sometimes is the hardest thing of all. But what an awesome thing.
You get to recover and heal and improve your health by slowing down. Something to consider.
If you enjoy what you heard here today, and you are a fan of the Grace & Grit Podcast and you would like to see it stay in production, I would really appreciate it if you would head on over to iTunes and rate and review the show. That seems like such a simple thing. And I know for years I never rated or reviewed anything. But once I became a podcaster I started to recognize my own consumer behavior. And I definitely look at reviews before I dedicate 30 minutes or an hour of my time to listening to something. So by you leaving a review you are helping to get more ears on the show. It’ll take you less than two minutes and it goes a long way in helping to support us. So thank you in advance for doing that. And I really hope I’ll see you back here next week. Take care.
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.
