372: Why You’re Too Tired to Chase Your Dreams (And How to Fix It)

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Courtney Townley 0:00
If you are tired of feeling exhausted, too exhausted to pursue the things that matter most to you, this episode today is for you.

Courtney Townley 0:09
In this episode, I am going to challenge you to reclaim what I call your hidden hours and transform from depleted to unstoppable in pursuit of your most extraordinary life.

Courtney Townley 0:22
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 into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:50
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast. My name is Courtney Townley, and I am the hostess of this show, and I’m so glad you’re here. I know there’s a lot of podcasts you could be listening to, and it never is lost on me that you chose to listen to this show. So thank you for being here.

Courtney Townley 1:05
And I want to start by saying that it is the start of a new year, and this time of year in my business as a health and self leadership coach, it is very normal for me to be onboarding a lot of new clients, and that has absolutely happened this week, and I’ve been having a lot of conversations with long standing clients about how they really want to be feeling at the end of 2025 I think it’s really important to get clarity around how we want to feel at the end of the year so we can reverse engineer what might need to happen in order to make that possible.

Courtney Townley 1:38
I will share with you that just some of the things that I’ve heard this week from my clients are things like, well, at the end of the year, I want to feel a lot more connected to my creativity and purpose, but I’m stuck in the daily grind of responsibilities, and I just don’t have time. Or I wish I felt more mentally sharp and focused, but I have brain fog and poor sleep is really getting in the way of me being able to accomplish that. I often hear that I want to feel more joy and spontaneity in my life, but I’m really weighed down by perfectionism and people pleasing. Maybe you’d love to have more peace around food and exercise, but you’re caught in the cycle of all or nothing, thinking, do any of these things sound familiar? Because these things come up a lot in the conversations that I have with my clients.

Courtney Townley 2:30
Here’s the deal, most people have these intentions of creating these things in their life, and they often think that just by gaining clarity around what they want and making some intentional choices during the active hours of the day is enough to move in that direction throughout the year, and that can absolutely help to create some positive change, but it won’t create change at the level that most Women are seeking. Why for a lot of reasons, when we are getting clarity one time and deciding on a few actions we’re going to take, we often lose focus of those things, because life is incredibly full and we have a lot going on in our world, and we get distracted really easily. So we simply lose focus of the things that we said were important to us at the start of the year.

Courtney Townley 3:27
Another reason we don’t stay the course with the things that we say matter to us is because we run low on resources. Decision fatigue, I always remind my clients, is a very real thing. We are making so many decisions in the day, and there are periods of the year where we are carrying more stress than usual, and we are having to make more decisions than usual, and that can make it really hard to lean into the things that we want to create for the year, because we’re simply low on resources. We also have a tendency to make other people a priority. So other people’s needs, other people’s emergencies, other people’s agendas, tend to take center stage of our days, and we also get very easily derailed by unexpected events. And so I want to share with you what I truly believe is such a game changer to help prevent all of those things from happening.

Courtney Townley 4:32
So the thing I’m about to introduce to you, and I’m sure it’s going to be reintroducing it to you, because this is not the first time you’ve heard it, but what I’m about to talk about truly can help you maintain your focus. It can help you better respect your resource availability so you’re not getting into a space of burnout. It can help you to prioritize your own needs and still show up for the people in your life who need you and. It can also help you to pivot back quickly when life throws you an unexpected curve ball. So what is that thing?

Courtney Townley 5:07
Well, it’s leveraging the quiet hours of the day before the day really begins, before you get into the meat of your day. And I think of the quiet hours as the hour like when we first get up in the morning and before we go to bed at night, those are incredible opportune times for you to review and remind yourself of what you wanted. They are great times of the day to help you plan in a way that respects your resource availability that puts the things that are most important to you at the top of your to do list, and those times of the day often are really great to help shift your mindset so you can pivot more easily when you find yourself derailed, so You can keep traveling in the direction of what you said you wanted.

Courtney Townley 6:05
Essentially, I’m talking about opening and closing your day with intention. And this is by no means the first time I’ve ever talked about this topic. I have done several podcasts about the power of starting and ending your day with intention. So what do I mean by intention? Well, opening your day unintentionally might look like waking up and immediately checking emails and social media and becoming very reactive right out of the gate because of those things. And I cannot tell you the number of clients who do this, they wake up and the very first thing they do is grab their phone and they start working or consuming information before they’ve done anything else in their day, versus spending the first few minutes of their day getting their head on straight, making sure they’re clear on their priorities, getting themselves motivated for the day ahead.

Courtney Townley 7:07
Another example of starting the day unintentionally might look like rushing through breakfast while multitasking and responding to work emergencies. So maybe you’re actually eating your breakfast as you’re checking your email. I’ve seen this happen many times. I’ve done it myself versus intentionally sitting down and mindfully eating a nutritious breakfast while also maybe reviewing your calendar and mentally preparing for key moments of your day. All right, so it’s not saying that you can’t multitask. I know sure we would all love to live a life where we’re only doing one thing at all times, but that isn’t a reality for most of us, but we can be intentional about the way we are multitasking. I’ll give you one more example of starting your day unintentionally. It might look like hitting the snooze button over and over and over again and to the point where you have to scramble to get up and you’re creating immediate chaos and stress in your day.

Courtney Townley 8:14
All of us can relate to that, but intentionally starting your day would look like rising at a consistent time and following a little bit of a morning structure that includes things that help you to really ground yourself for the day and become more resilient for the day ahead. But that is not how so many of us begin our day. So let me now give you a few examples of what it looks like to unintentionally close your day versus intentionally closing your day. So an unintentional closing to your day might look like working right up until the moment you go to bed. In fact, some of you might even fall asleep with your laptop top open, versus setting a really firm work cut off time so you’re practicing constraints with work, reviewing accomplishments and maybe planning tomorrow’s priorities that would be Wrapping up the day with intention, another example of unintentional closing to the day might look like scrolling through social media to the point of your eyes getting heavy and falling asleep with the phone in your hand, versus engaging with a very Calming and de stressing bedtime routine like journaling or reading or some light stretching, so you actually set yourself up for a better sleep cycle.

Courtney Townley 9:51
So with this in mind, I want to give you some really key practices for opening and closing your day with intention and these. Are not necessarily exclusively my practices. These are practices that I have witnessed my clients commit to time and time again, and when they are engaged with these practices, it is literally night and day in terms of how they’re living their life.

Courtney Townley 10:21
When they are engaged with the types of practices that I’m about to go over with you, they are less stressed. They are more intentional. They are living their life more in alignment with the things they want to be showing up for. And wouldn’t you know it, they’re finishing their year much more aligned with how they want to feel, because they didn’t just set an intention one time and make a few decisions about actions they did it day after day after day by baking those things into their morning and evening routines.

Courtney Townley 11:00
Some morning practices that I have found to be incredibly powerful, both in my own life and with my clients. I’m just going to give you two categories here for morning practices, energize and strategize. Now there’s a lot of things that can go into both of those camps, but if you think about it, when we wake up in the morning, we literally wake up because cortisol is rising right? That’s the chemistry that is happening in our body. Cortisol starts to elevate, to wake us up, make us alert and become productive in the day. So cortisol has a really great purpose in our life. I know it gets a bad rap, but it actually has some really important jobs, but we can also help to energize our day by engaging with things right away, like movement, intention and things that help to inspire us.

Courtney Townley 12:01
So I want to give you a few ideas for each of these things. So movement might look like stretching right to just kind of stretch out your muscles and your ligaments. It might look like exercise, an actual formal exercise session, or it might just look like some jumping jacks, or some light jogging in place, or just some dancing to get your blood flowing and to get things moving in the body, it might look like deep breath work. I consider breath work movement, and if you do it outside, even better, because then you’re getting the natural light in your eyes, which is so important to maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm and helping to support the chemistry of our body. So movement is a big one. Another big energizing strategy is setting intentions for the day.

Courtney Townley 12:55
Now one of the ways I encourage my own students to do this is by creating what I call a power statement. So a power statement is a really short, very easy to memorize, statement that reminds you about the person you are committed to showing up as. So I always encourage people to finish the statement as a woman standing fully in my power, I am a woman who, what? How do you show up in your day? How do you show up in your life? So something like a power statement can be really helpful, but so can you know simple things like deciding how you’re going to spend your time today, deciding how much time you’re going to spend on certain projects and commitments deciding where you are going to take time for yourself.

Courtney Townley 13:48
Ladies, we are terrible about doing this. We tend to wait for that time to show up, and it never shows up because we’re always cramming our life more full. So we have to be intentional about creating space for ourselves in the day, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to do that at the start of the day than it is midway through your day. And then inspiring yourself is also very energizing. We all kind of Garner inspiration from different things. So you may get inspiration from music, from podcasts, from certain books, maybe you read the Bible. I have lots of clients who do their Bible study in the morning, right? Like there’s all kinds of different ways that we can inspire ourselves, which I think of as a form of energizing. So once again, morning practice of energizing might include movement, intentions and inspiration, practices of those things, what you actually fill in for those things is totally up to you, because we’re all different people, and we all respond to things differently. So be willing to experiment with what energizes you. You first thing in the morning.

Courtney Townley 15:02
The second thing I mentioned about morning practices was strategize. Strategizing is simply planning your day in a way that respects your goals and your resources and your goals, of course, hopefully are tied to your value system, right? So strategizing your day to align with the things that you care about the most. I have so many people spend time talking to me about what they say is important to them, but when we actually look at their calendar, none of those things are showing up. So your calendar is really telling us what is most important to you right now, what you are spending the most time on. So if your calendar is not matching what you say is important to you, there’s a lot of integrity pain there.

Courtney Townley 15:56
So strategizing is really about aligning those two things, aligning my schedule with what I say is most important to me, and when we take a little bit of time at the start of the day to organize our day, we are in such a better position to respect our resource availability. How much energy do you actually have to spend today? How much mental bandwidth Do you have, right? How much energy like these things matter? Because what I see so frequently is women overextending themselves in all of those areas, having very low resource availability, but then planning their days as if they have endless supplies of resources, and then they wonder why they’re not feeling successful. It’s just poor planning. But I also think strategizing helps us to honor our chronotype.

Courtney Townley 16:53
Not everybody is alert and energized and feeling their best and most creative first thing in the morning. For some people, that’s at night. But when you take time to strategize your day, you can decide on what tasks and what activities that demand the most resources. Where in the day should those be put? Well, hopefully at a place where a part of the day where you have a lot of resource availability. For some of you, that’s going to be at night. For some of you, it’s going to be first thing in the morning. For some of you, it’s going to be the middle of the day. But when you start strategizing your day in a way that honors your nervous system, you tend to be so much more productive, and you tend to avoid burnout a lot more easily.

Courtney Townley 17:44
All right, let’s talk about a few practices for evening that can really help us to reclaim some of our energy, our time, our mental bandwidth, so we can go after the things that are really important to us. So again, I just broke this into two categories. Evening practices include debriefing and decompressing. Those are two that I have, two practices that I have found to be incredibly supportive of women living a day that feels in alignment with what they want. So debriefing is literally taking time to do three things, reviewing.

Courtney Townley 18:28
Number one, how you lived your day. So how did you show up today, right? How did you show up in your day? Did you follow through with the things that you said you would do if not? Why not? Do you like your reasons. And we enter that exercise, of course, with a lot of curiosity, not judgment, and it gives us an opportunity to reorganize ourselves for the next day so we can feel even more successful. Because inevitably, when we look at our day, I don’t always look back at my day and say, Gosh, Courtney, you did everything you said you would do, and you did it perfectly, and you did it exactly the way you wanted to. No but when I look back on my day and I see that I committed too much energy to certain areas, which took energy away from other areas, and that didn’t feel good to me, it gives me an opportunity to reorganize myself for tomorrow, so I’m not consistently making that same mistake, and I don’t see a lot of people engaging with this part of organizing themselves. A lot of women I work with are awesome at organizing at the start of the day, but then they never take time out to reassess how they actually showed up, but that’s where all the learning happens. That’s where all the recalibrating happens.

Courtney Townley 19:51
And another part of debriefing, of course, is, well, I shouldn’t say, of course, but something that I include in my debrief, and I encourage a lot of my clients, to do. Yeah, is consider your victories for the day. Where did you win? What did you do? Awesomely. Well, I always challenge myself to write down at least three, and they can’t ever be the same things. So I’m constantly challenging myself every day to look for my wins, because it keeps me excited about life. When I don’t look for my wins, I’m not so excited about getting up the next day, so I look for my victories. I also look for my lessons, which I already mentioned, and I also look for gateways of gratitude, right, things that just I’m really grateful for in my day.

Courtney Townley 20:37
So for me, and it doesn’t have to look this way for you, but this is just something I do. I have a little journal by my bed, and every day I write three wins, three lessons, three things I’m grateful for. And it again, it just helps me to stay fired up about my life. The second part of the evening practice is that decompression, because I said earlier that in the morning, cortisol is rising well in the evening, cortisol is hopefully dropping, and we are starting to ignite melatonin to help us get into a sleep state. But that process happening is largely dependent on what you’re doing at night. So does your evening routine, if you even have one, involve a lot of screen time? Are you looking at computers and TVs and iPads and phones right before you go to bed? Because if so, you’re actually stimulating cortisol. You’re not stimulating melatonin, and that can really disrupt your sleep cycle. Are you spending a lot of time on things in general that are stressful right before bed? You’re trying to solve big work problems. You’re trying to solve big family problems. Probably not the best time to do problem solving.

Courtney Townley 21:57
Number one, you’re not doing your best thinking late at night. For most people, they’re tired, but we also are stressing ourselves out, elevating cortisol, which, like I said before, is disrupting sleep. So taking time to experiment with what really helps you to decompress at night. Reading is a huge decompressor. For me, I can’t read personal development books or books related to work at night because it engages my brain too much. But I love to read mystery novels. I read a lot of fiction at night because it just kind of lets me shut off and follow a storyline. I like to take baths. I don’t take baths every night, but when I’m feeling especially stressed, baths can really help me to decompress. I have a sauna bag. I think I shared that on the podcast last year.

Courtney Townley 22:47
Last winter, I bought a sauna bag. It’s like a sleeping bag that has these stones and this heating system. So you’re basically like in a sauna, but you’re in a bag so you sweat like crazy. For me, it is very decompressing. I know for some people, it can stimulate them, which is why I say you need to experiment. For some people, it’s gentle movement. Some people at least listening to sleep stories. There’s all kinds of ways we can decompress. But are you taking time at the end of your day to debrief and decompress, and if so, what does that look like for you? Now, before we close out this episode today, I do want to give you a couple of other considerations, the first one being that different seasons will will inspire you to cultivate different routines in terms of how you’re opening and closing your day.

Courtney Townley 23:44
So in the summer, I’m getting up a lot earlier than I am in the winter, and I feel more inspired to get outside first thing in the morning than I do in the winter. And I don’t know what those seasonal changes might be for you, but I think it’s really important to respect the need for flexibility with how we open and close our days based on the seasons. The other thing is, like I said this earlier, but I just want to repeat it here, respecting your chronotype, so just recognizing where you tend to do your best work in the day, and making sure that when you take time to strategize your day, you’re taking that into consideration, and when you get up and when you go to bed is entirely up to you, But my hope is you’re at least giving yourself enough time to rest and restore so even if you go to bed at two o’clock in the morning, I hope you are able to give yourself that seven to eight hours of sleep before you get up and tackle the next day.

Courtney Townley 24:58
And the last thing I want to say in. Sort of this other consideration space is when I when I talk to women about morning and evening routines, and they do live with other people. So whether they have roommates or housemates, or they live with friends or they have a family, often, one of the things that they push back on is I don’t want to inconvenience other people with my routine, and I really, truly have found that that’s just a story we’re telling ourselves. Very few people are disrupted by you taking some intentional time for yourself first thing in the morning and before you go to bed. So it’s something that we kind of have a story about. But if you really check yourself on it, are people truly bothered by you taking that time? And if they are, it might be interesting for you to investigate. Why? Right?

Courtney Townley 25:59
Because you would hope that the people who love and adore you want you to do the things that help you to be your best self so you can be in the best relationship with those people as possible. So when people are blocking things that you think are really important for your own self care, I think that is definitely something to examine. So I hope this was helpful.

Courtney Townley 26:24
I want to close out this episode by telling you that if you are someone who is listening to this, and you’re like, Yeah, you know, I have had periods in my life where I’ve been very intentional about how I opened and closed my day, and that really helped me. And I want to get back to it. Or you’re someone listening to this, and you’re like, Yeah, this makes so much sense, but I’ve never done that. I want to let you know that inside of my Rumble and Rise community in the month of January, which we are now in, starting next week, so we’d be starting around, I think it’s the, let’s see 10, 11, the 12th of January, for two weeks, I’m running a challenge inside of my Facebook group for that community, we’re running a challenge all around this. So we are specifically doing a challenge around refining and or developing morning and evening routines.

Courtney Townley 27:19
If you want a little support with helping you to do that, plus you get so much other support and so many other opportunities to learn by being a member of that space. You can just head on over to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Once again, that’s graceandgrit.com/readytorumble, and you can read all about the perks that your membership gives you, but I’m mentioning the membership right now because of this challenge that we are doing on this very topic in the month of January.

Courtney Townley 27:52
So that is it, my friends. I hope this was helpful in some way. I always love hearing from you. You can either drop a comment below this video, if you’re watching it on YouTube, you can always send me an email Courtney@graceandgrit.com and or you could always leave a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to podcasts from. I cannot tell you how important that is to the growth of podcasts, and with the vast sea of podcasts now available. I know it’s challenging for listeners to pause and rate and review a show, but again, if you have the time and you enjoy the show, I highly encourage you to do it, because it really helps us out. I will see you again in just a couple of weeks. Until then, take excellent care of yourself and I will see you very soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 28:48
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.