337: Summer Remix Series: The Stress Habit

Transcripts are auto-generated.

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.

Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always I know there are a million spaces in places where you could be right now. So the fact that you’re here, it means a lot and I’m so happy that you’re here.

Courtney Townley 0:42
In case you have not been listening to the Grace & Grit Podcast for a while, or maybe you’re listening to it for the first time, I want to let you know that the Grace and Grit Podcast is going on a short break for the summer of 2023 from producing new episodes.

Courtney Townley 0:58
Now that doesn’t mean there won’t be a weekly episode waiting for you here. What we are doing to support you through the summer is we are doing a summer remix series, which means we are taking some of our most popular themes, and some of our most highly listened to episodes from the past and re dropping them. So you absolutely have a ton of content available to you and a lot of support to help get you through the summer.

Courtney Townley 1:26
That being said, if you are looking to take what you learn here to a much deeper level and really integrate it into your life if you are looking to be a part of a robust community of women who are dedicated to developing their self-leadership skills. If you are looking for coaching support, I would invite you to consider joining us inside of our Rumble & Rise community. Rumble & Rise is an amazing incubator of support to help women lead themselves more powerfully in the health arena, and well beyond. So you can check out all the details of membership by going to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Membership is only open for a few days at the end of every month. But it is an option for you if you are looking to take a deeper dive this summer.

Courtney Townley 2:26
Otherwise, come back here each week and check out our summer remix series, which this episode today is absolutely a part of, I hope you enjoy it.

Courtney Townley 2:41
I’m actually really excited about today’s episode. I know I always say that. But I do typically pick topics I am very interested in, and things that I think will be relevant to the large majority of listeners. So the theme that I chose for today is the habit of stress.

Courtney Townley 2:57
Now on the last episode, which was titled three ways to infuse life back into your life, I shared with you that a few weeks ago, I took some time to myself about five days where I completely disconnected from all my responsibilities work, being a mother being a wife, all the things, and I went away, to reconnect with myself and just kind of spend some time with myself and get clear on where I was and where I wanted to go and what was in the way. And it was awesome. I highly recommend, even if you can go away somewhere nearby for 24 hours, do it. If especially if you’re feeling tired, in asleep can’t fix this kind of way.

Courtney Townley 3:46
Now, when I was on this trip, I got really strict with myself about where some of my gaps were. And I got very clear on some things I needed to re commit to. And some of those things. Were I shared in a social media post recently that I had been for months negotiating my early morning workout time, I kept telling myself it’s no big deal, that I’m not doing it first thing in the morning like I always have, I can just do it later in the day. But you know how that rolls. It never happens. I kept negotiating my way out of later in the day to to the point that I wasn’t moving my body and movement is so important to my mental sanity, and my physical feel goodness, I just I’ve always been a mover and when I don’t move enough, I don’t feel good. So I committed to getting back to my early morning workouts. I also fiercely committed to getting eight hours of sleep, because for the past few months I had really been negotiating my sleep for lots of reasons for work because we had some family crises happening.

Courtney Townley 4:58
And it just it You know, again, it’s easy to kind of build a habit out of that. So I set a bedtime, I have an alarm on my phone that goes off 30 minutes before I need to be in bed to kind of remind me to wind down. If I get to bed half an hour late, I have to actually set my alarm 30 minutes later in the morning, which I really don’t like to do. Because I’m an early morning person, it’s kind of like the time that I am my best self. So I don’t like to tap into those early morning hours because I got to bed late. And the other thing that I committed to was no work before 8am Because I being fully transparent here was getting up sometimes at four or five o’clock in the morning, and literally drinking some water, washing my face and coming into my office to work. And that started to feel very misaligned. Because I love my morning routine, when I feel kind of grounded and centered at the start of my day, which I don’t feel that way unless I have time with myself. My whole day is kind of discombobulated. So I knew that recommitting to sort of my the first part of my day being for me was really important. And here’s why I’m telling you all that.

Courtney Townley 6:17
Recognizing my gaps recommitting to the things that I knew worked for me. Just a couple of weeks later, I feel like a completely different human. And because I feel so wildly different. I am even more aware of just how stressed I was. So now that I’m on the other side, I look back and see just how misaligned I really was. And I can see just how stressed I really was like I can’t, I knew I was stressed. But I can really see it now. And I consult with women almost daily, who are frustrated with their bodies and feel like their bodies are betraying them, because they’re not behaving the way they’re supposed to. Whatever that means, right. And I often hear from potential clients and clients, that they’ve tried everything to get their health under control and nothing works. Which is never true.

Courtney Townley 7:27
By the way, I’ve never found that someone has tried everything and nothing works. So of course, I ask a lot of pointed questions to try to better understand where their specific gaps are. And one of the questions that I always ask, is on a scale from one to 1010 being intense stress. How would you rate your current stress level? And surprisingly, the answer is often below five. Now, let’s be clear. These are women who are going 10,000 miles a minute. They have a to do list a mile long. They barely breathe while they’re talking to me. I often do my consults on Zoom. So I can see how tense they are. That their bodies are clearly shutting down in a lot of different ways, which is why they reached out to me in the first place. And yet, they don’t feel stressed.

Courtney Townley 8:33
So this used to perplex me. But after years of working with women, what I started to understand is that they have normalized stress to the point that they often aren’t even aware of just how stressed they are until they taste the other side. So today, I want to address the habit of stress that you may have developed without even realizing it. Because you too, may not feel stressed. So first, I want to make it clear that stress is actually a beautiful thing designed by nature, to keep us alive, make us stronger and make us more resilient. There’s a lot of benefits to temporary short lived stress. The problem is like so many things in modern day culture, we are abusing nature’s stress response. Stress is meant to be an on an off cycle. It’s sort of akin to pressing the gas pedal down to speed up to pass the car and then push on the brakes. slowed down again. So it’s an oscillation between pressing the gas pedal down and then using the brakes, pressing the gas pedal down and then using the brakes.

Courtney Townley 10:12
It’s a back and forth between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, you might remember these terms from like eighth grade biology. Sympathetic is your fight or flight response, you’re getting ready to fight or flee. So everything is amped up in your biology. And then the parasympathetic is your rest and digest system. It’s what allows you to recover from bouts of intense stress. So it’s really important that we have this give and take with intensity and rest. Because when we start living our life in a state of intensity all the time that there is a high price to pay for that. And most women that I know, are not in relationship with stress in that way, it’s not an on and off thing. It is a chronically pressing down the gas pedal state of being that most women are in. They never use the brakes. Or at least not for very long.

Courtney Townley 11:27
What I see a lot of women doing is living for months, years, decades, in a state of chronic stress. And then maybe they plan like a three day weekend or a seven day vacation with their family. And they think it’s all taken care of. They expected they expect that’s going to return them to wellness. And it’s just it doesn’t work like that. And look, it’s not entirely your fault that you have developed a habit of stress a habit of constantly pressing down the gas pedal, you’ve been conditioned to live like this. Sadly, our culture normalizes stress. It normalizes hustle, and busyness. It normalizes attaching worth to productivity, and accomplishment. Our culture normalizes being all things to all people all the time, especially if you’re a woman.

Courtney Townley 12:31
And let’s face it, ladies, there is no shortage of impossible standards that our culture conditions us to live up to. Be an incredible partner. Be an outstanding, infallible mother. Always make time for your friends. Always put other people’s crises before your own. Have an amazing career. Make sure you fit the ideal of what a woman is supposed to look like whatever the heck that is, all without breaking a sweat. Like just reading that makes me want to hyperventilate. Just recently, actually, when I was on this kind of solo vacation with myself, I started the book burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle. And I personally was so burnout, that I didn’t get past the first chapter. I couldn’t sit and focus on reading. So what I did is, when I came home, I actually downloaded the book on tape through audible to finish listening. And I’m so glad I did. It’s a phenomenal book. So burnout is by Emily, not Nagasaki and Amelia Nagasaki, their twin sisters. And holy cow, is that a rich book?

Courtney Townley 13:55
I mean, there’s so much packed in here, but the reason I’m mentioning it specifically right here is because they talk about what they call the human giver syndrome. And I’m just gonna read you a little snippet out of the book that I just think is so relevant to what we’re talking about here. It says this, Do you suffer from human giver syndrome. Symptoms include believing you have a moral obligation. That is you owe it to your partner, your family, the world or even yourself to be pretty happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others. Believing that failure to be pretty happy, calm, generous and attentive to others, makes you a failure as a person believing that your failure means that you deserve punishment, even going so far as to beat yourself up and believing these are not symptoms, but normal and true ideas I know a lot of women that have those symptoms. And when you stop to consider those standards, not only are they impossible standards, but they’re also standards that you might not even be interested in pursuing. And I would argue that a lot of women, in their truth aren’t necessarily interested in pursuing.

Courtney Townley 15:26
But the challenge is that most women are never slowing down enough to actually ask themselves, what they want the standards for their life to be. Like, do you want to spend the rest of your life chasing those last 10 pounds? Is that your standard for life, because that’s what popular culture tells you it should be? Do you want the standard for your life to be constantly chasing youth and never embracing the aging process, because that’s what popular culture conditions you to believe they would love you to have that standard, there’s a lot of money to be made by pushing those standards. Without knowing your own standards for living, you borrow someone else’s standards, even though they don’t fit. And they don’t make you feel good. And quite frankly, they cause a lot of stress.

Courtney Townley 16:28
So a few years ago, I went to Portugal, it was literally one of my favorite trips of my life. A good friend of mine from about 20 years ago, is from the Azores Islands. And she invited me to come over for a week before I went to Lisbon to train with Ido portal. And the first night I got there, she was having a party in a really spectacular location for her birthday. And I was so excited to be there on her birthday. Like what a cool thing. What she failed to tell me before the trip was the she wanted everybody to wear white to this party.

Courtney Townley 17:11
Now, I don’t even own white because I can’t keep it clean. Like white to me is a magnet for disaster. So I just don’t even have white in my closet. But had I known I probably would have gone out and gotten something that I could wear comfortably to this party. So I told her I said oh gosh, like I had no idea. She’s like, no worries, you can wear something of mine. Well, that sounds lovely. So kind, except we have radically different bodies. We she’s so much smaller than I am. And nothing I tried on actually fit. So the one thing that did fit barely fit. It didn’t look good on me. I didn’t like it. But I I wore it because that was kind of the standard, right. And that’s what was available to me. And I had packed something that was appropriate. And all night long. I can’t tell you how uncomfortable I was. Right?

Courtney Townley 18:12
I didn’t feel good and what I was wearing, I was constantly adjusting it. And I’m telling you all of this because I feel like that’s very similar to what it feels like when you adopt somebody else’s standards for your life. Right. It’s like you kind of try to believe that should feel good. But it really doesn’t. So when you live by the standards that someone else has for your life, or someone else’s pushing on your life, and you’re simultaneously treating your body like it owes you something even though you don’t give it the support it needs. Cortisol runs rampant through your system, and you become a hot frustrated mess. Because you’re doing everything right Damn it right. But by whose standards are you doing everything right? If they were your own, I bet things would be working a lot better.

Courtney Townley 19:09
So not living life by your own standards creates a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress. And cortisol is an awesomely powerful hormone in that it readies you for action. It engages your system to flee or fight the dangers in your midst. Regardless if those dangers are real or imagined. So even if you’re just conjuring up all of these possible dangers in your head because you’re not managing your own thinking, or you’re replaying dangerous from the past. Your brain doesn’t know the difference. It thinks it’s all happening in reality. So cortisol is just flooding your system. If you’re always amping up your system

Courtney Townley 20:00
And saturating your system with cortisol and never completing the cycle of calming your system down and unloading that cortisol, you stay in the stress response chronically, which eventually breaks your body down in a whole lot of ways. Because remember, hormones are like dominoes, you tip one over, and it kind of creates this cascade of hormonal consequences. So when one hormone is affected by something, it affects all the hormones. So you start experiencing things like you’re not sleeping so great, maybe you’re having a hard time getting to sleep, maybe you’re not staying asleep. You notice like you’re not pooping, well, like maybe you only poop every few days or every few weeks, you get highly reactive to little things. Your body stores fat really easily, your blood pressure increases, maybe your PMS intensifies. If you’re still having periods. Maybe your skin breaks out or you get headaches, your body gets inflamed in weird ways. So like, you start getting pain and old injuries, like an old shoulder injury from high school, or you’re on your knee from an old ski accident. But you tell yourself, you don’t feel stressed. I’m gonna say that again. You don’t feel stress. And that is the problem. And that is the solution. Hear me out.

Courtney Townley 21:39
One of the biggest challenges we face in improving our relationship with stress is that most people are not feeling their stress. They’re eating their stress, they’re drinking their stress, they’re chopping their stress. They’re overworking to avoid stress, they’re not flexing their stress. In other words, most people are denying avoiding and resisting their stress. Which ends up causing even more stress. Because think about it, right, like if I’m, if I’m eating every time I’m stressed, and let’s face it, nobody eats broccoli when they’re stressed. No, we go for like the trifecta of sugar, salt and fat, right. So if I eat something sugary, fatty and salty every time I’m stressed. There’s a lot of consequences to that. And it creates more stress in my system, because nutritional stress is a very real thing. Or let’s just say that every time I’m stressed at work, I get on social media and I scroll.

Courtney Townley 22:56
Well, how many of you actually get off of social media scrolling and feel awesome. Like you just want to go out and conquer the world? Most people don’t. Most people get off social media, and they just feel like, Oh, I’m so not worthy, right, I’m not living up to all these impossible standards that I mentioned before. And so we’re essentially avoiding stress by doing something that creates even more stress. So not only have we created a habit of being in a state of chronic stress, but we’ve also created a habit out of not processing stress, and not dealing with our stressors. So if you have a stressful day at work, pour some wine, right? Have a glass of wine, take the edge off. Will you do that night after night after night, not only are you creating more physical stress in your body, but you haven’t even processed the stress that originally caused the wind pouring. And you think you’re going to be motivated, inspired and kind of creative creatively thinking and problem solving to go deal with the stress at work? Of course not. So you’re not processing stress, and you’re not dealing with a stressor.

Courtney Townley 24:22
Maybe you have a problem in your relationship. You’re not communicating well with your spouse or your partner or a friend. So every time you interact with this person, instead of dealing with the problem, you go eat chocolate, because eating chocolate feels so much better than dealing with stress temporarily. But there’s a long term consequence to eating chocolate every time you feel stressed. And again, you’re not really dealing with the stressor. You’re not dealing with the problem in the relationship. So Again, we’ve created a habit out of stress. And we’ve created a habit out of not processing stress, and not dealing with the stress. So one habit feeds into the next. And here’s the thing, when we’re avoiding and resisting and denying our stress by reaching for kind of like short term pleasures, the wine, the chocolate, things of that nature, that stress is slow to accumulate, right?

Courtney Townley 25:31
The consequences of those types of stressors is slow to accumulate. But eventually, it does accumulate. And there is a compound effect of a lot of tiny decisions to not cope with stress. And that compound effect is that we feel like hell, right? There’s eventually a day where we wake up, and we’re like, Oh, I am not feeling so good. Right? Or how did I gain this extra 10 pounds? Or why do I just not feel energetic to go do anything? How did this happen? is a question I hear a lot of women asking themselves, what happened through a series of a lot of seemingly small decisions. And then here’s the worst part. When we don’t feel good, we want to feel better, and we want to feel better fast. And the diet industry is ready and waiting to target your pain, and basically sell you something to feel better quick. So you sign up for some diet that asks you to overhaul your life overnight, maybe you drastically cut your calories, or you remove an entire food group, you sign up for some kind of aggressive training program, like maybe you sign up for like a five day a week boot camp when you haven’t been doing anything. Or maybe you go to some kind of extreme tactic like intermittent fasting, or ketogenic dieting, or something of that nature, which in a system that is already stressed, you’re adding more stress, and you’re not dealing with the real problems, which is that you never were feeling stressed to begin with, you weren’t processing the emotion, and you weren’t really dealing with what was causing the stress in the first place. So this becomes a very big soupy mess pretty quickly. And, you know, it’s, it’s challenging for the reason that we also live at a time where we’ve normalized sugar and alcohol consumption. We have normalized a life of disconnect from ourselves and from even other people, right?

Courtney Townley 27:50
We disconnect from ourselves by never spending time with ourselves by never being inquisitive. By never really trying to understand why we do the things we do. And we disconnect from others. Because command technology makes it so easy to never leave your house. You could spend your entire life in front of a computer and still survive, because you could order your groceries online. Right, you could still talk to your family through through the internet. Not I’m not saying that, that’s what I’m recommending. But this creates disconnect from people from ourselves. And then you throw in something like a pandemic like COVID, which is even more disconnected because we’re being isolated and separated and all the things. And we have also normalized, not really taking responsibility for any of it. And here’s what I mean by that. We’ve normalized, quick fixes. we’ve normalized, sort of you know, that the, the drinking the wine when you’re stressed and, and all of the extreme measures you could take when you’re not feeling good. And we’ve kind of normalized not managing our own minds. And what I mean by that specifically, is I hear women saying things like, Well, I don’t understand why she can do it and get away with it. But I can’t. Life is too short for me not to drink wine every night or eat whatever I eat. Now, you obviously need to set the standards for your life. Right? Like that’s your job. That’s your work.

Courtney Townley 29:30
And if you’re living in alignment with those standards, good for you. A lot of people aren’t right and a lot of people aren’t eating the chocolate because they feel like life is too short. They’re eating the chocolate because they don’t want to deal with the reality of their life. There is a big difference.

Courtney Townley 29:50
So how do you know you’ve made a habit out of stress? Well, some some signals. These are not all of them, but some things you might want to look for Are is, are things like how comfortable? Are you spending time alone? How comfortable? Are you not doing anything? I’ll tell you some of the most stressed out people I’ve ever worked with. Those are not even options. like spending time alone. Hell no. And not doing something is like the most painful thing I could ever ask them to do. And to me, those are big, red flags of stress. Also, if your body’s breaking down, right, your body is sending you all kinds of signals that things are off kilter, that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. I bet that could be directly linked to stress on some level. I’ve never seen it not true. And again, stress comes in a lot of forms, right? It’s not just mental stress, nutritional stress, the stress of too much or too little exercise, the stress of not enough sleep. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways that stress impacts us.

Courtney Townley 31:03
Another signal that you might be, might have made a habit out of stress is you feel unworthy, if you aren’t constantly proving accomplishing or serving. So let’s talk about kind of breaking the habit of being in a state of chronic stress. And the first step in this is you have got to start noticing how stress shows up in your body. Most people it’s like from the neck down, they’re completely disconnected because they made a habit out of that. And that disconnection is costing a lot. It sounds terrible, that I’m inviting you to feel your stress. But you have to feel your stress where in your body do you feel stress? How do you respond to life when you’re stressed? How does stress show up for you? It’s important to start familiarizing with yourself with that. Because the disconnection from that is why I think so many women say on feel stressed, because they’ve normalized a high level of stress.

Courtney Townley 32:14
So I’ve used this in a prior Podcast, this analogy, but early on in my career, a mentor of mine, we were talking about inflammation. And she used the analogy of a pebble of stone and a boulder, when talking about how inflammation kind of gets in the system. And I want to use it here in terms of this conversation of stress, because I think it’s so relevant. So stress, your body is always aware of its stress level. And if you’re listening, you’re paying attention, you’re in close communication with your body, you will recognize when the pebbles are being thrown. And what I mean by a pebble or you know, when your body is telling you, hey, like something’s off kilter, we need to address this thing. So maybe you had a rough night asleep, that would be a pebble, maybe your period was just a little rougher than usual. That would be a pebble. Maybe you just notice you’re getting more reactive. That’s a pebble. But what most people do when pebbles get thrown in the stress round, they ignore them. Right?

Courtney Townley 33:19
They either do things that make them feel better temporarily, like the eating and the drinking and the Netflix thing. Or they just completely, right don’t don’t make time to recognize what’s going on. So then, stress says, okay, she’s not listening. My body is obviously being affected. So we need to talk louder. We need to let her let it be known that this stress needs to be dealt with. So income the stones, right, and the stones might be the maybe headaches get a little more intense, maybe you start getting migraines. Maybe your periods are consistently rough. You can’t remember the last night you had a good night’s sleep. You kind of feel lackluster, about life, and you can’t figure out why your body hurts all the time. Right. And these are again, we’re just scraping the surface with things. There’s so many things that could be a stone. And still, humans have an incredible pain threshold. Those things are happening. And they still don’t listen. They still don’t slow down. They still don’t change their ways or address the stress. And so, income the boulders, right. And these are the long term consequences of chronic stress. Heart disease, metabolic challenges, autoimmune disorders, things that are just not so easy to bounce back from. So we have got to build awareness As practices to re familiarize ourselves with our body, what stress feels like in the body and really catch stress when it’s a pebble, so we can avoid the boulders? And then we’ve got to get really curious about what triggered it. Right?

Courtney Townley 35:23
What triggered the stress? How are you going to deal with that stress? Because often those things don’t go away on their own, right, they’re gonna still be there for you tomorrow. So get curious about what triggers stress for you. And then experiment with ways of processing stress. So when you recognize that you are feeling stress in your body, it’s really important that you start learning how to process stress in ways that don’t cause more stress. So eating when you’re stressed, is going to cause more stress. Like if you’re especially if you’re eating things that don’t serve your body, right? That’s going to cause more stress. If you’re good jumping on social media, every time you’re feeling stressed at work, it’s gonna cause more stress.

Courtney Townley 36:19
So can you go for a walk? Can you just take one minute, 60 seconds and do some deep breathing? Can you call a friend? Can you go pet your dog, go connect with somebody at lunchtime. Right? start experimenting with other ways of processing stress once you start recognizing it. And I say experiment, because what works for me to process stress might be a little different for you. But I will say this movement is a powerful agent for processing stress to the body for completing that stress cycle. And the in the burnout book that I mentioned, they talk a lot about this in the in the very first part of the book, that completing the cycle means that you did get the stress out of your nervous system. And movement is magical at doing that. So kind of in summary, I want you to hear this, it is so worth your while to establish awareness practices, things that reconnect you with your body, with your internal landscape, and can really encourage you to get honest about what’s going on in your life. And a lot of women never make time for this, because it seems so easy, right?

Courtney Townley 37:36
And it doesn’t get you anything outward, right away. So for me sitting for 10 minutes to meditate in the morning. Sometimes when I’m busy, it just seems like it’s a luxury, it’s something I can just pass up. But what you slowly start to realize over time is making just creating those 10 minutes and doing that practice every day is what allows you to be a better problem solver, and allows you to respond to your stress rather than react to it. So awareness practices are a really big deal. Also, I hope you consider the standards you want for your life, like what are the standards that you want to live by in your life. Because if you don’t identify and get clear on that you’re going to constantly be influenced by other people’s standards, by cultural standards. And I think we all know that those aren’t always a wonderful thing. Right?

Courtney Townley 38:35
In fact, they rarely feel authentic to us. So what feels authentic to you. And make sure that the decisions you make are filtered through those standards. I hope you’re inspired to slowly start eliminating the things that don’t fit those standards and start with the easy stuff, right? We want to make winning easy at first. So let’s just say that one of the standards for my life, and this is a standard for my life is I want to be an inspiration. I’ve always had this standard like from as far back as I can remember, I don’t know where it came from. It’s just always been a part of who I am. I want to inspire people to be great humans, right, and to live their best lives and to sort of lean into what’s possible for their life. And if I feel like hell, that’s not really possible. So when you know, friends of mine want to stay out late drinking on a Friday night. I can I do consider that. How am I going to wake up tomorrow? Right?

Courtney Townley 39:43
So start with easy stuff because we want to make easing with winning easy. And then make a plan for how you’re going to show up each day to live in alignment with those standards. I’m such a fan of planning and not for productivity reasons. Although Oh, yes, I definitely get more done in less time when I’m organized. But the real reason I love planning is because it gives me kind of a platform to look at my behavior through. Right. So when I make a plan, based on who I want to be in the world, and how I want to show up tomorrow, when my vision is strong, and, you know, I feel really clear about what I want for my life. The next day, when I start negotiating those plans, and reacting to things around me and not following through, I get such an incredible opportunity to learn about myself. And so I would encourage you to really look at planning as an opportunity to learn about yourself, because you won’t always follow through. Right, you’re not you’re not perfect, you’re not supposed to be in fact, if you were you would miss a very big education on yourself.

Courtney Townley 41:04
So we make a plan, we execute to the best of our ability. We look at where we didn’t follow through closely and ask ourselves some good questions like, was my strategy not good? Was I not managing my thinking? Was I not managing my emotions? Like, why did I not follow through? Look at that with curiosity, not judgment, it’s always curiosity. And then you get to rework tomorrow. Because now you know better. I’m not saying you’re gonna do perfectly tomorrow, but you’re probably gonna do better than you did today, if you actually took the time to reassess. So in closing, I just want to say, you can absolutely maintain the habit of chronic stress. But I hope you don’t, because it is a slow death. It’s not getting you anything good. It’s costing you a lot. And I know that this episode, I don’t make it super sexy, to to improve your relationship with stress, because it requires feeling your stress and asking it some good questions. And, you know, leaning into the work of managing your life a little differently, and none of that necessarily feels good or is easy. But it is so worth it.

Courtney Townley 42:35
So if you’re a woman who listens to this, and you’re like, man, there’s so lands and I’m just so I’m struggling with this, you really should consider joining me inside of Rumble & Rise. I know we did a commercial earlier in the episode, so I’m not going to expand on it too much here. But I can tell you that Rumble & Rise is a space where women really lean into self-leadership and take full responsibility for the lives that they’re living. They set the standards for what they want. They make plans each day for how they’re going to show up. They stay very curious about where their gaps are. And they recommit every single day to doing a little bit better, not for me, not for anyone other really than themselves. Because when they show up fully for themselves, everybody benefits, right?

Courtney Townley 43:35
Their kids, their partners, the people they work with, when you’re good to you, the world is a better place. And that’s really what Rumble & Rise is is helping women to be kinder to themselves. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the Grace and Grit Podcast. I hope there was something in here that allows you to travel forward with a little bit more ease and grace.

Courtney Townley 44:06
And again, if you’re looking for a higher level of support I would really encourage you to check out are Rumble & Rise membership community. Once again, you can check out that community and all that it entails by heading on over to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Have a wonderful week and I hope I’ll see you again next time take care.

Courtney Townley 44:35
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.