Trauma Rewired

Rest and Recovery

Duration:: 1h 7m
Broadcast on:: 29 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

In a society that often equates our worth with productivity, focusing on rest and recovery can feel unsafe, potentially leading to increased stress in both our minds and bodies. By challenging the need to be constantly productive and redefining our relationship with rest, we can uncover a common theme: doing more doesn’t always equate to achieving more. Whether that is career success, finances, healing, etc. Actually, the opposite can be true: the more we rest, the more productive we are able to be. In today’s episode, Elisabeth and Jennifer invite entrepreneur, best-selling author, and mother of two, Kate Northrup, to discuss how crucial rest and recovery are for the success of our businesses, families, and overall well-being. They emphasize the importance of feeling safe when resting, especially for those who may not be accustomed to it due to past experiences with rest, or lack thereof, shaped by family or societal influences. Kate also touches on her frameworks discussed in her book Do Less, and how they can help reframe how we view rest.

It’s no wonder our society is burnt out and exhausted when we are constantly told that we aren’t doing enough, often pushing ourselves to the brink. It can feel like an uphill battle trying to keep up or excel, especially while exhausted. Collectively, our nervous systems are in need of a gentle touch, which requires rest, whether that is passive or active. So we want to give you a peek into the importance of priming your nervous system for rest and reframing how to incorporate rest into your life today.

Join us to learn about this and more! Topics discussed in this episode:

Why Kate Northrup wrote her book “Do Less”?
How sleep is crucial for emotional wellbeing
The lack of felt safety to rest in business
Passive rest vs. active rest
Tapping into the cyclical nature of being human
Kate’s regenerative farming metaphor for rest in life and business
What is Pareto’s principle and how Kate used it in her business
Kate’s Upward Cycle of Success framework
Toxic patriarchy and its influence on how the lack of rest is rewarded

Learn more about the Neuro-Somatic Intelligence Coaching program and sign up for the spring cohort now! https://www.neurosomaticintelligence.com

If you would like a sneak peak into Kate Northrup's principles, send her a DM on Instagram with the word “MELT” to receive a FREE guide: https://www.instagram.com/katenorthrup/

Visit Kate’s website to connect or learn more about her programs: https://katenorthrup.com/

Check out Kate’s podcast “Plenty” by visiting https://katenorthrup.com/plenty/

Contact us about private Rewire Neuro-Somatic Coaching: https://brainbased-wellness.com/rewire-private-neuro-somatic-coaching/

Get started training your nervous system with our FREE 2-week offer on the Brain Based Membership site: https://www.rewiretrial.com

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This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

Trauma Rewired podcast is intended to educate and inform but does not constitute medical, psychological or other professional advice or services. Always consult a qualified medical professional about your specific circumstances before making any decisions based on what you hear.

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If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, or in mental health crisis and you are in the United States you can 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If someone’s life is in danger, immediately call 911.

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We talk about general neuro-science and nervous system health, but you are unique. These are conversations for a wide audience. They are general recommendations and you are always advised to seek personal care for your unique outputs, trauma and needs.

We are not doctors or licensed medical professionals. We are certified neuro-somatic practitioners and nervous system health/embodiment coaches. We are not your doctor or medical professional and do not know you and your unique nervous system. This podcast is not a replacement for working with a professional.

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Okay welcome back everybody today we are here to talk about the importance of rest recovery rest and play with Kate Northrop. You've heard us say on here many times that rest is a revolution and for us it's the next horizon and we hear about how important rest is and how important it is to relax and enjoy the lives that we've built but often it's a lot easier said than done and so today we're diving into why rest is crucial the barriers to getting it and practical strategies to improve it welcome to trauma rewired the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system how trauma lives in the body and what you can do to heal I'm your co-host Jennifer Wallace I'm a neuro somatic psychedelic preparation and integration guide and I'm also an educator at the neuro somatic intelligence coaching certification and I'm your co-hosts with Kristoff founder brain based calm an online community for a nervous system help rehabilitation and resilience and I'm also the founder of the neuro somatic intelligence coaching certification and we are thrilled today to be joined by one of our participants in an SI the incredible Kate Northrop author of do less and a leading coach who helps ambitious people work less while having less stress and creating more abundance so I'd love for you to just tell us a little bit about yourself Kate and why this topic is so important to you like why did you write a whole book on doing less and helping people find more ease more rest yeah you know it's so funny like in this moment I'm just really noticing I'm kind of emotional which is so interesting and unusual at the beginning of a podcast but I think that like this is such a full circle moment because when I wrote do less it came out in 2019 of course I had heard of the nervous system I mean I'm here on planet earth I really didn't know what I know now I didn't know about how trauma lives in the body I didn't know about overworking patterns and trauma I didn't know about productivity as a trauma response I didn't know what you ladies know what you folks your whole thing is about and I remember my coach at the time raw goddess in the end of 2019 so my book had been out nine months I had written it you know it takes a long time for books to come out so I finished it at the end of 2018 no 2017 oh my god 2017 it's like a hundred years ago and she handed me this book called patriarchy stress disorder by dr. Valerie Rain and as my friend Megan Watterson says I just read the title of the book and like my heart fell out of my butt I was just like oh my god this is literally everything and it was like this whole it was like me seeing the matrix all of a sudden and realizing that the reason I wrote do less is because of the deeper trauma patterning in my own lineage and in woman kind but also humankind around productivity and basically running because we have been so programmed to be afraid to be still and to be afraid to feel and so what's so cool about that is well I am working on another book that actually directly incorporates it but in retrospect what I realized is my first book money a love story and my second book do less the curriculum that I teach in them so many of the exercises that I teach in them work because they actually do work to heal the nervous system I just didn't know that and so it's such a testament I think to the wisdom of our bodies that like those came through me as part of my own healing journey even though no one told me oh this is how you heal the nervous system productivity can very much be a trauma response obsession with achievement you know all of those things and so that's kind of the bigger picture of my own work around that but I will say just from a personal perspective you know I come from a long line of over working women and you know I watched my I watched my granny her granny's life motto was don't ask for a lighter pack ask for a stronger back and she was the oldest North American woman to ever climb to Mount Everest Basecamp at the age of 84 my mom spent most of her career just really in go mode my dad as well and all my whole family and so I wrote do less sort of as this healing manual for myself and hopefully for my daughters and hopefully to open up a possibility for more lives that are allowed to have people be instead of do I love that or in addition I'll say in addition yeah totally an addition is a great way to put it and I love that so much and can relate so much to coming from a lineage of workaholics who really just it was modeled so much and it becomes so deeply woven into our neural architecture into our nervous system to only feel safe with that level of productivity and I do want to talk a little bit about stress physiologically and the importance of rest from a physical and from a nervous system perspective because I think it helps people to understand and deconstruct some of that when you know kind of what's going on in the body and just like you were saying you know we used to think of trauma as this psychological phenomenon and now we know it's it's physiological it's experienced through the body through the nervous system and stress is a huge component of that experience is a root cause of disease and mental health decline and when we experience a stressor or threat our body's primary goal is our survival and its ancient kind of complicated and pretty brilliant way to do that is through our stress response system that mobilizes our resources it prepares us for action and it's adaptive but if it is occurring chronically that's a problem and so these responses these stress responses that happen in our body they are a necessary part of everyday life and we're not looking for a life without activation nervous system regulation isn't that flat line of being calm or Zen all the time but it's really that ability to modulate between these states to get activated when it's appropriate and then to be able to rest and recover and adapt but when we're facing that overwhelm all of the time we can't respond anymore to the stress there's no escape we're constantly suppressing and repressing our body's natural stress relief and regulation actions like movement or vocalization or crying or shaking these emotional responses that help us regulate and then we get stuck in states of hyper vigilance constantly scanning the environment or our relationships looking for threat and we're having that stress reaction over and over again inside of our body and it's just not meant to be long-term and I think too it's important for people to understand that like stress is stress our survival mind doesn't distinguish between social threat or a physical threat or doing this podcast or having a meeting our nervous system is just taking in all of this information all the time from our sensory systems about our external environment and our internal environment our balance our orientation knowing where our body is in space and if that information is unclear or blurry or inaccurate that's already enough to initiate a stress response because I might fall I might hurt myself I can't make an accurate prediction and then these signals all of the time are coming in through our nervous system making it up to our brainstem and then to our limbic system where they're interpreted by many different areas of the brain the amygdala working with the hypothalamus to turn our emotions into our physical experience when we start to have that fear response through the HPA axis and now we have all of these hormones adrenaline and cortisol moving through the body and if this keeps going all of the time and we're in that dysregulated state we talked about this in our burnout episode but just a little bit condensed so that people have this information as we dive into the the mindset and the beliefs and the cultural aspects when we have too much cortisol all of the time it keeps us in the state of high alert or a low grade survival response so it doesn't let the body shift back into a parasympathetic state and then it becomes really difficult to sleep or to rest that just doesn't feel safe and it's this chemical or hormonal obstacle to rest and when we have that we that's what's called adrenal sensitivity too much cortisol all of the time and then that leads to those health outcomes like diabetes or muscle weakness osteoporosis and then over time we can also lose our ability to produce cortisol because our system doesn't have the resources for that and then we can move into adrenal burnout or fatigue so that's when the adrenal glands can't keep creating cortisol we don't have the resources anymore and then we start to move into an adrenaline response so now instead of having cortisol in our system all the time we're actually running on adrenaline and that pushes us into an even higher level of hyper vigilance a heightened level of survival because adrenaline is our short-term survival hormone and so you get a big inflammatory response that can lead to autoimmune lots of disease state in the body and it pushes your system into this strained level and there's a very high stress level all of the time and then eventually we move into full-blown adrenal burnout where our system can't produce adrenaline either and that's when it's going to flip us into chronic fatigue where we don't have the energy to keep going because our metabolism is in a deficit our cortisol production is in a deficit our adrenaline production is in a deficit so there's really nothing left in our body to create energy on demand and so you're left in this constant state of fatigue or glaze like you just can't have the energy to do anything anymore and that's when we really move into that deep burnout and illness chronic sleep disturbances can be such a big problem for so many reasons to like there's an importance of rest is what I'm learning is that I need to rest a little bit throughout the day so that at the end of the day I'm not just looking to totally offload my entire day and have this big expectation of like oh and now I'm gonna go to sleep and so what I really think about too because from the burnout and functional freeze conversation one of the things that came up for us was that a lot of times we can engage in activities that we think may be restful or refueling but actually it depletes us a little bit more as we go on and I really think about for rest being my new horizon I really think about the integration that I lose when I don't get a good night's sleep and like how that really has big effects on like on my cognitive health and and really even my emotional well-being the next day and like when we think about after we work out and we intentionally stress our bodies to like weight training or aerobic activity and then we need rest time on the back end of that so that we don't harm ourselves any further so we don't like we don't get injured and so it's that same that's that integration that gives us that positive adaptation and resilience that also happens when we sleep and that slowing down that needs to happen and so like for some of the cognitive health when we sleep part of our brain's integration process is coming up with solutions that that we might have for some potentially complex problems in our lives and for anyone who suffered with insomnia or maybe moms that don't sleep you know for those first couple of years of their children's lives is also who I think of and I was diagnosed with insomnia at a pretty early age and I know how difficult it is after many nights of sleep to not be able to come out of the brain fog for the emotional piece to have more rumination on more negative thoughts versus positive experiences that I'm having and sleep is crucial for memory consolidation for learning and you know the brain also relieves itself of like many toxins throughout the night and I think for the for the emotional piece that recalling of negative experiences it also drives depression it like I'm drives depression and even an increase in mood swings and I definitely have experienced that on top of like it can get hard to parse out like what's complex trauma what's insomnia what's my neurodivergence and it just becomes this like overwhelming piece of like wow this is pretty overwhelming so I'm interested to know Kate from your perspective what comes up for you when we talk about rest and recovery and like what it's been like in your journey and and how you came into the place of rest and recovery serves my business it serves my relationships well what happened is I'm glad you brought up new motherhood for me I was the total achiever type academic pressure early success in business yada yada yada and then I got pregnant with my first daughter and I have never been so tired in my life and people kept saying oh just wait until the second trimester you'll have this huge energy burst but that never happened and I was sleeping like 14 hours a day it was very bizarre to have been such a physically mentally capable person and suddenly be taken out and then my daughter was born I had quite a traumatic experience with her birth and then she was really sick so the first year of her life that it just continued and and she had severe eczema and sometimes would be waking up every night you know every 10 minutes screaming and and scratching herself and like her sheets were bloody all the time I mean it was like this was not what was on the literature in terms of motherhood like everyone else it's like it's like a horror movie at my house and I couldn't sleep I had severe postpartum insomnia and it was the first time in my life that I had a problem that I couldn't overcome by being smarter or more capable or working harder none of the usual solutions that I had worked and yet a year into my daughter's first year of life so we sat with our accountant and we looked at our numbers and despite having worked less than half the amount I had ever worked in my adult life that year we had made more money than we ever had before and our income source was our business so it wasn't like there was some other this was like if I wasn't working you know there wasn't me and my husband running together and it was such a light bulb moment for me because while I would not go through that year again if you paid me it was awful I thought huh that's so interesting I have been working my entire adult life as though the number of hours and the amount of effort is the most important thing and actually what ended up happening and I you know there's there's so many changes that happen in the maternal brain and obviously nervous system all connected but I had become instantly focused on only what mattered because the survival of my child depended on it and I had zero fucks to give and zero energy for anything extraneous nothing and as a result that ended up being a very good business strategy and I thought wow okay so if I could make more money than ever before working less than half the amount while completely distracted you know not distracted but while completely devoted to keeping this baby alive and like vaguely staying sane and on some days that was not that was debatable like in terms of my mental health really suffered I thought well maybe during less difficult years there could be some things that I could point to or look back at and research as effective strategies and I'm you know I'm happy to walk through what some of those were but that was my own experience really realizing oh more is not necessarily always better and it was my own body and my daughter's body that brought me home to that truth and I'm so grateful because nothing teaches us a lesson like an embodied experience Wow yeah that is really inspiring for me to hear about as I'm like in this own place of my own place of navigating not doing more all of the time and just allowing the seeds that are planted some space and air to breathe and grow and what a beautiful example of that from your experience and I do think it's really the most powerful experiences we have are those experiential times where that's enough to start to shift the paradigm inside of us and be like oh maybe there's something else totally possible and just total side note I really to your daughter so much I was also born with eczema all over so I feel that it's still how my system communicates to me sometimes when my stress load is too high and as you were talking about that beautiful shift in your business I was thinking to it is a place where I'm navigating in my own life and how it's a real deconstruction and it's a challenge coming from a complex trauma background because so much of the patterning that happens for someone with developmental trauma is to be in the state of hyper vigilance all the time there's real changes to our brain our amygdala actually changes in size and we're perceiving more more sensitive our alarm detector is more sensitive to threat we have less ability to put on that parasympathetic break less vagal tone and there's just this felt sense inside of the body a lot of times that it's not safe rest is with this really vulnerable state and there's a letting go of control and a certain amount of presence and our brains are just so primed for that threat that there is a huge component of this that's continuously working with my nervous system to create that felt sense of safety inside and then to starting to work with regulating the HPA axis because then as I'm perceiving threat all the time now I do have that adrenaline and cortisol which is going to keep me in a more of a high alert keep triggering the F responses in my body and then inside it feels like I need to run I need to fight and so navigating that I think it's it's so important to have the cognitive shifts and then couple it with practical tools strategies to work directly with the nervous system and start to repattern that at that neurological level because that deep nervous system pattern just like you were talking about about seeing the trauma patterns that have been driving your behavior it really comes out everywhere right it impacts us physically but also emotionally and cognitively changes our relationships how we show up at work and so it's such a layered topic to to dive into for sure when I think of the lack of safety to rest in business I really think about the the podcast actually and Kate what you were going back to one one of the things that we learned here as we were experiencing so much growth with trauma rewired it felt like we needed to deliver and deliver and deliver and deliver and keep delivering and delivering and and depleting ourselves and we learned I think it was we learned in season two we took like a 12-week break and we experienced massive growth and we were like oh my god we're not really even doing anything and it goes back to the seeds being planted and it was like oh now we've learned and now we actually take two breaks a year because we're like let's capitalize on the rest and the growth because there's a matrix there like you're talking about this like matrix that you can finally get this measurable experience of like when you step out of it and you're like oh I've been playing the wrong game I've been programmed into a game that's not letting me win and as soon as you can start to unplug from that a little bit and then you get into like these new awarenesses of like oh that's not real what is real to my success my growth is resting and pulling away from this and then it serves our regulation as we've come to learn just really serves the podcast and I think one of the things that happens in our world is a lot of sensory overload and it's it's pretty unavoidable once we leave our homes and and even when we're in our homes like there's so many different types of rest that we need we need that cognitive and mental rest which for me that comes in times of like silence or maybe some gentle music grounding being in nature and there's this idea of emotional rest and I think self-care can fall into that getting into emotional expression and practices being witnessed feeling heard feeling seen because it's the opposite Elizabeth what you were just talking about with the hyper vigilance that hyper vigilance is so draining and so taxing on the body and causing so much activation that then leading also into social rest people go to social media thinking that like oh I'll get social connection I'll get the rest that I need with social media so activating and really leads to more deprivation and and then of course we have the physical rest that we all need and passive and active is our different components of physical rest and that could be like napping or stretching and once again like we talked about in the burnout sometimes I engage in things that I think are going to be restful like nature but they actually demand a little bit more from me and what I found so supportive is a consistent regulation practice because I envision this boat this little canoe of mine that's totally full of water and that water is my sleep debt and so if I can use regulation practices throughout the day I'm emptying the water in the boat whereas like I really deeply desire a full night's rest and for people who have ADHD or any other neuro type of neurodivergence the the research is showing that the sleep deprivation that occurs in neurodivergent people is even higher than the neurotypical individuals because there's delays in circadian rhythm and there's changes in melatonin production and that's like a crucial chemical that our body needs for healthy sleep but there's also an increased likelihood of of someone with a neurodivergence having a medication and medication induced sleep issues maybe someone's on a stimulant or a psychotropic medication that's commonly prescribed and those don't really support the success in non-disturbed sleep cycle and I definitely relate to the lack of feeling safe when I lay in bed at night and so Kate what about for you? Well I really want to speak to the seasons and cycles because what was such a game changer for me was understanding similar you know not dissimilar to when I discovered the majesty of the nervous system I tapped into our innate seasonality and cyclicality as humans around that same time that I discovered that we had made more money but I had worked less at that same time I got my period back after 13 months of postpartum experience and I got really obsessed with tracking it and I got obsessed with or just like compelled in a beautiful way to start researching everything about the menstrual cycle, lunar cycles, biodynamic farming, I was just fully like whoa we're not supposed to be the same all of the time and that felt like this massive awakening which is ironic because literally my mom raised me with this information but I just was not available for it until I was 33 postpartum and that just is what it is right we're ready when we're ready it takes as long as it takes but what was so fascinating per I love this example of you taking this 12-week break and your podcast growing even more because what we know is that we as humans are animals which means we are nature we don't hang out in nature we don't need to connect with nature we are nature and so the same principles that govern trees and flowers and squirrels and grass and weather patterns like they govern our bodies as well which is why grounding practices and all the data around you know earthing and being out in nature we are instantly activating a parasympathetic response obviously it's more nuanced than that but like going home literally to accessing the outdoors even if it's just a little sliver of light through an open window like that is our true nature and so when I started to look at okay well if I had a beautiful rose I wouldn't be like bashing it or berating it for not being in bloom all year long roses have a season we know that they have a season there's a season for planting there's a season for for sprouting there's a season for being a little blossom there's a season for being in full bloom and then there's a season for going back to seed and there and there is a season for the pause and then I started learning about regenerative agriculture and the metaphors for how we run businesses are so ripe and rich and fertile and one thing and you're talking about passive rest versus active rest for those of us who do have a history of trauma and quite frankly like I don't really know with anybody he doesn't so it's for those of us who are human listening to this podcast one thing that I've noticed is that just as you were talking about Jennifer just resting is not necessarily immediately available because being still can actually activate our hyper vigilance and it doesn't necessarily feel safe and I know I've been through many many periods of time in my life where that was the case and I wish I had known what I know now but I know it now so it's good and the piece that really like I have brought in is this idea of planting cover crops so for regenerative farmers they know that the most important element in the success of their crops of the fertility of what they're growing is the quality of the soil specifically the top soil the humus and the real word of human and humus is the same and it means of the ground and so I just love anything etymology and anything that can really remind us of the truth so I think a lot about our nervous system regulation as our own soil and our ability to access the richness of our lived experience as like an increased fertility in our soil and what regenerative farmers know is that there's a season to plant cover crops and cover crops are things that you are planting that are you are not going to sell but the act of growing them so they're not going to market they're not cash crops but the act of growing them actually nutrients and regenerates the soil so for me as an entrepreneur and what I love to share is for people who have businesses or just really it's really anybody it doesn't have to be just entrepreneurs to think about what are the cover crops in our life what are those times when we're doing something that actually does allow our brain to go into a different state allows our body to go into a different state where we're not trying to monetize it and it actually is providing the benefits of active rest and re-nutrienting our bodies re-nutrienting our soil to improve our soil quality so you know I have a friend who does a lot of knitting she doesn't sell her knitting her she makes money a totally different way right coloring with my kids doing different like stretching techniques like what are I mean other people call this hobbies I really you know I know so many achievement-oriented people who just really don't have any hobbies and then they get excited about a hobby and then they try to turn it into a business which is fine but it really then is no longer a cover crop then it's activating a whole other part of ourselves and I love making money I think there's so much value in that it's I think it could be sacred and I love to think about cover crops in our life as a way to bring in active rest that's deeply regulating that also allows us to wind down so that maybe more passive rest is more accessible later I'm so excited to share with people our newest offering me too we get so many requests for in-person events and here it is we're doing it yes so if you are ready to join the first ever trauma rewired retreat and escape to the tranquil beauty of North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains you are going to love this four-day immersive nervous system rewire yeah we Jen and I are going to both be there guiding everyone through daily nervous system practices somatic movements neuro somatic meditations emotional processing and then we'll also have fun and play together too we're going to be hiking and swimming in the river and just spending really precious time in community and we've joined forces with two incredible ladies that run the nature of mind body and they are experienced nature guides and therapists they're trauma informed licensed therapists who have also been through the neuro somatic intelligence coaching certification so join us for a rejuvenating retreat to reflect recharge rewire and rediscover your inner balance reserve your spot today we're keeping this intimate so spaces will go fast so go to rewire retreat.org to book today and really embark on this journey of self-discovery through working with your nervous system and being in nature and community. We can't wait to see y'all there. I love that so much Jennifer and I have been talking a lot with each other just about it's not just about taking things away but bringing things into that restore and replenish one of the things that has been really great for me in this season is I've been working a lot with like my voice and singing and doing vocal activation and it gets to be just for me it's not like something that I'm going to do to create a course on or it's just this it has become quite spiritual and it has this huge impact on the health of my nervous system and working with my vocal cords but finding more things like that that are just for the experience for the being in it and the creativity I think it's really really really really important and you mentioned a bit go to when you were talking about the time with your daughter that there were strategies or things that you saw in terms of the business. Would you speak to that a little bit about some of the things that you saw? Well okay there's so many things but first I want to just say and I'm sure you've talked about this before on previous episodes but I want to highlight that there was something you said Jennifer to really get that when we are dysregulated and overworking and exhausting ourselves as a trauma response there are specific oppressive systems that really benefit from that and for some of my people it's very activating in a good way like it kind of lights this fire in their belly to feel like oh rest is actually revolutionary so maybe I actually can do this to dismantle within myself these structures and systems that actually do keep people disempowered so I wanted to say that because it's like a bigger it's yes it's very personal but it's also macro and I believe we can all really contribute to that on a micro level and so with that the two things that I want to point to are number one because I had zero time and zero energy I had no ability to focus on anything that was not absolutely necessary in that first year of parenthood and that sucked but it was such a gift because it helped me to by accident really apply Pareto's principle and Pareto's principle says that 20 percent of our actions will cause 80 percent of our results and I think actually if you do the math on a lot of businesses or a lot of workplaces it's actually closer to five percent of what we do actually creates 95 percent of the results so if you think about for you two at you know these podcast episodes and like devoting yourself and pouring your hearts and your presence into them and the way this show has taken off right people are connecting to the resonance and the magnetism of presence in you too versus and obviously the depth of knowledge and incredible research that goes into it that level of magnetism and depth is available because you are taking those periods of rest both active and passive and it allows the podcast to be part of that 20 percent or 15 percent or five whatever that then leads to all these results and I'm sure if you broke down the data you would be able to find that if you look at all the marketing efforts for your various aspects of your business and your various revenue streams the podcast is actually incredibly high leverage and makes sense to double down on and then you could do the assessment and do the analysis and really eliminate I mean I know nothing about your two businesses but for most people I know including myself there's a lot we could just literally stop doing and so after that first year when I kind of like could pull my head above the water and and things weren't so like emergent all the time I did do an analysis and I looked at okay if I look at all my biggest wins in business you know getting my first book published these various like higher income spikes these moments of increased visibility that allowed our platform to grow things like that and I looked at what had directly contributed to those things it was only two kinds of tasks for me one was connecting with people and two was creating content and so I was like if I look at my calendar and I want everyone listening to do this no matter what your career if you are a stay-at-home parent this still applies there are 20% of the things that I do that create 80% of the connection with my children they do not include like having perfect birthday parties or like you know like we do so much shit that doesn't matter and so for everyone listening identifying an area of your life that you would like to enhance and look at what are all the tasks that I do in this area what are my biggest wins in this area and then draw a line from the things that are your biggest wins to the task that directly results in that win and then take a line and cross out all the other tasks that are not identified and you'll find you have a lot more time available but here's what's so important about the work that's discussed here in the work at NSI and all of the work you do then it's like yeah oh these are cognitively I can know that I can eliminate 80% of the tasks but I feel freaking unsafe when I do that and so that's where then we do that deeper work of learning to find safety in our bodies because no amount of items checked off on a to-do list is ever going to ultimately make you feel safe complete and whole or successful so that was thing number one and so 80/20 role most people have heard of it but the question is are you using it and then the thing number two that made a huge difference for me is beginning to see my month seasonally and cyclically and my projects in our company seasonally and cyclically so because we live in a patriarchy and we are you know the focus is on that which is visible is valuable we forget that actually in the year here on planet earth we have a springtime and a summertime which is the seasons of visible growth and external expression so beautiful that's the solar that's the masculine that's the young we also have the seasons of autumn and winter which are the times for the invisible the stuff that you really can't see that is equally as valuable and necessary in order to have a fertile vibrant spring and summer we must have the season where everything's falling off the trees where it's a little sad where it's kind of dark and then we need the season of winter where it's just still and great and I started to see how in my business I had hyper focused on spring and summer activities and had not given credence or time to autumn and winter activities and I created something I call the upward cycle of success where I named each of those periods of time for a business so the springtime energy is emergence time of new beginnings the summertime energy is visibility the time of launching the time of being out there the autumn energy is the time of culmination crossing teas dotting eyes doing analytics tidying things up gathering your nuts so you can go into hibernation which I like to call the fertile void and that time where you know my first pregnancy also really taught me in the first trimester of a pregnancy you don't really look like you're pregnant and in our culture you're not supposed to tell anybody however you have made every single organ of a human body so it looks like nothing is happening but during that time I was like my mind is completely blown in this period of time I have like made a liver and made a heart and I didn't have to put it on my to-do list or think about it at all and in fact if you ask me how to do it I would have no idea and that was just this incredible example of how the wisdom of nature really knows and we need to follow the lead of the wisdom of nature of the blueprint of our bodies as opposed to trying to overlay this false linear idea of constant growth and constant production and so I really started to work with not only on a more micro level my own menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle to guide what was going to be the energy I was going to lead with in any given week then also to really look at the macro of my company and say okay we've got spring and summer energy down we're never gonna we're so programmed for that like we don't need to worry about it it's the autumn and the winter energy that we need to build in time for so we actually really shifted the way we do project management to build in those times and and as a result I just it's like keeps getting better and better we just keep doing fewer things and making more money it freaking blows my mind it is it's amazing and it's I love that you're talking about this seasonal aspect of just the way that we lived I mean it's biological in us that when autumn comes down we would start slowing down and making the preparations as you said dotting the eyes and crossing the T's like things are about to slow down are we prepared for the death are we prepared for this this total stopping of things and like I really learned so much that you talked about gardening and planting earlier and like I just learned about cover crops from my own garden and implementing them and I love growing things and I learned so much I'm so inspired by watching my plants grow by how they come into their full self-expression only to completely go dormant and we don't really know what is gonna happen in the next season I find that like so exciting and you kind of just spoke to so many things that I want to speak back to so I'm going to try and get through my notes but like you talked about you know in the doing of less and in this is such a big lesson for me right now is saying no to things that actually sometimes I really enjoy because when I think of where is the fuel burning for this thing that I'm doing that I actually really love but my body is saying no my body is saying no I'm continuing to say yes and though so I had to like kind of evaluate some things and take some real stock and like how do I spend my days and where am I out of alignment that I'm really coming up against the inability to rest and this doing more that's kind of keeping me out of my lane out of my genius actually like I'm burning out in ways that I could be conserving that fuel for where I really serve in my highest then for me I really love communications I love education I really love you know art is one of the ways that I'm learning how to rewire my own plays and like ceramics and pottery and creating things that are really for no monetization like y'all are saying it's just for me to go in and relax and somehow I'm doing better than ever by engaging in those things and you said something I think so important that which is visual is valuable and I think that speaks so much to like mindset and over well it really speaks to the pulling away from the soma from the somatic journey from embodiment and from listening to our bodies and like I was saying like my body was saying no in so many ways but I couldn't hear it because of the the cognitive mess the the beliefs even that were going on like I had all these core beliefs around the way that I was supposed to show up either the way that like my work was supposed to look my body was supposed to look or what it looked like to be successful were core beliefs that I had developed these neuro tags around that were not even applicable to the life that I live right now as Jennifer in her 47th year of expression it was like this old stuff of watching my mom over work over train over everything and her life and being being really programmed and that and then like my my brain's way of interpreting sensory data was so different is so different from the way that my mom's does and then like living in this false reality of the programming and it really came to me it hit me pretty hard recently my mom was in town and I was sharing with her for the first time in my life I'm really coming into the understanding that I do have an ADD ADHD and sensory processing deficits in in general however that wants to be defined and I went to her and I was like this is how I'm seeing myself and she said oh I totally relate to all of that as well and I was like you do and she was like yeah and I was like a pause it really blew my mind that my whole life I had been monitoring my successes mostly my failures on my mom's neuro divergences and her trauma responses that I was never going to be able to live up to and I really had to stop and think like wow my autonomy has suffered in relation to the way that I've learned how to relate which is false false for her and it relieved me and so much in that moment to say like I'm sovereign I can cut myself away from this and how can I gave me clarity on how my mom's patterns had been set up and it gave me an empathy towards her that I really don't know that I'd had before and this new desire to support her healing in another way that detached me from her patterns it was a huge shift for me for both of us I think it's been a huge shift for both of us it really it's helped us move on in another way to to be able to kind of chip away at some of the nuances of our relationship that has kept us in maladaptive patterns that's so beautiful and also like a really clear like I can see almost like the wiring and the firing as you're talking that's like past intergenerationally and there was something you spoke to Kate that I I wanted to talk a little bit about because I think it's really important which is the deconstruction of systems of oppression that are inside of us and that we do perpetuate when we stay in these cycles and that there is you know Adrian Marie Brown's work on this was a huge inspiration for me and really reframing looking at rest as an act of rebellion and I would love to just hear more of your thoughts on that because I love to talk about it yeah you know I of course learned about the way beliefs live in our in our brains and nervous systems from you and one of the things that I love to have people ask in my programs is when we're looking at limiting beliefs for example my productivity determines my worth could be a limiting belief so when we look at that we love to have people ask the question who benefits from me believing this you know and it's like oh white capitalist toxic patriarch you know and just as a reminder that does not exist outside of us I mean it does and it also exists inside of us so I think for me it's been really helpful to not see the problem as external and instead really work with or in addition to really work with okay what are the ways that that programming lives in me and I have two little girls they're six and eight and so it's very present how I live is modeling and literally ingraining their nervous systems with what is safe and what is not safe and you know just this one simple simple example I have a real like my default is to do too much I wrote do less because I need it and so I have this little daughter she's so headstrong she's amazing and I was describing to her a week that we're gonna have this summer and I was like it's gonna be so fun we're gonna be on this road trip and we're gonna visit this person and this person then we're gonna go over here and then we're gonna do this and I was like so excited and I look at her little face and she just started to cry and I was like oh my gosh what's going on and she goes mama it's too much it's too much it sounds like too much that sounds really tiring and she's in kindergarten so I was like oh my gosh okay great so out of all those things that I listed what would you what sounds like the one you would want to do and she told me and so we're focusing on that because I'm really realizing I don't want to sweep them up in my trauma response doing I don't want that to be what they imprint as this is what's required to be a good woman this is what's required to be a good friend this is I have to stay on some kind of treadmill sprinting in order to stay relevant or sit you know I mean it's like ugh and so I think we can undo the patterning and and dismantle the systems in in small seemingly insignificant moments like deciding your summer place it doesn't always have to you know just lying down on the floor in the middle of your workday for five minutes or doing a neuro tool is a revolutionary act and just the fact that it gives us space between stimulus and response to be able to choose how am I gonna be in this moment that is every single time we do that we are calling our power back that is our I mean the way I think of it I don't know what your frameworks are but I see that as my connection with the divine I see that as my connection with source with a capital S and every time I do it it's like a little prayer and I just can feel you know and I do it too like on behalf of my grandmothers who didn't have that they didn't know this stuff this was not available this information was not available and in very different ways they lived trapped in their own paradigms it was a different time and it's like I see very directly the ways that we do heal seven generations forward and seven generations back when we interrupt in ourselves the patterning and when we have the courage to say like what might be possible is there something else available here and I'm somebody who loves to put my attention and focus to the degree that I can on building out new possibilities as opposed to railing against the systems that exist like like okay well the best way for me to dismantle a system is to unravel it in myself and to dream into what else could be birthed so that's an invitation for all of us on where we want to put our attention as well I love that I really love so much what you said because I think I'm one of these people as I've gone along the programming and and busting out through some of this matrix that I'm really someone who likes to buck the system I'm someone who wants to go against yeah what's happening out there and it's like every time I can just find this little way to do that and for me that was like I was so happy this is so small maybe but like I was so happy when gray and silver hair became popular and people started coloring their hair I was like I'm I'm done I can just be natural now and like that was such a relief for me because and there's nothing against coloring your hair like for full self-expression everybody out there listening do whatever you want to do but for me I was coloring my hair like every couple of weeks it was just this something I could not keep up with and I was like why am I doing this oh my god it's too much else could you do with that too exactly and I feel so much freer in my body I feel so much like it boosted my confidence to be myself in a way that was also going against some beauty standards that I tried living up to for so long and I love what you said about just laying down in the floor and taking a nap for five minutes out of the day like you know we call it visual reset in the NSI world but like I've got a sleep mask right next to my desk right here because for if I've got five 10 maybe 20 minutes out of the day I'm just gonna lay down with my sleep mask put on some beats something soothing maybe a meditation I might even if it's okay like depending on the temperature go outside and lay down on the ground for 20 minutes and like do nothing and that's one of the ways that I sort of empty my bucket out as I move throughout the day and like I love to play little nap roulette if I've got the space in my day it's like I've got a few hours here like what could happen like what could happen could I fall asleep for hours and it happened to me yesterday I fell asleep for two two-hour blocks I literally I fell asleep for two hours and nap related I heard the pressure cooker go off I got up I turned that off and I went back to bed for another two hours and it was like I really realized the sleep debt that I'm in for all of the times that I was just churning and burning and keeping up and back to the performance like my worth was how much I was producing and and I I was really burned out I really couldn't I was getting to a time where like I really couldn't produce anymore and so a couple of the other things that have really helped me as I've invested in block blue light I love that company I love their glasses I've got a full spectrum table lamp that I use at night to read in like that has helped me so much because I have a visual deficit in my nervous system and that visual deficit is causing threat in my nervous system day just as the day goes on so between the visual reset and the block blue light my eye fatigue has gone down so much that's helping me rest and it's helping me stay productive in the ways that I feel good about being productive yeah and you know what's really important to know as well is that the data does not actually show that more hours worked equals better results so I just want to be really clear about like taking four hours of our day to you know fill some of the sleep deficit is actually the best use of our time because what we see in the data is that when we are well rested as you said our cognitive abilities our creativity our ability to integrate memory and create connections between seemingly disconnected like we are superheroes when we are well rested and three hours working when you are well rested could very easily take you like 12 hours when you're exhausted so just to be super clear this idea that oh I'll sleep when I'm dead or it's a good idea to sacrifice sleep or rest in order to get things done is scientifically inaccurate it doesn't work I would just love to dip into what you were talking about there like it's not necessarily true that the more we do the more benefit we get and we've talked a lot about entrepreneurship but I also think that applies to our healing practices and I think so many people come in with this idea of like I probably because they're in a lot of pain and and experiencing a lot of symptoms that are pretty severe and they want to get better fast with very natural to want that but people will go with that same mindset and that same urgency and dysregulation into their own healing practices where it's like doing more doing more doing bigger things and the thing is the nervous system that's coming into all those healing practices is not well-resourced and it doesn't have the capacity to positively adapt to that much different stimulus and stress and so we have people like doing cold plunges and saunas and intermittent fasting and all of these things can be really beneficial but you have to have a nervous system that has is well-resourced enough and has enough capacity to be resilient and adapt to that stress to get the positive benefit and so I think something important to talk about with listeners too is that there is a minimum effective dose for all of the stuff whether it's cognitive work or work in our business or work in our healing practices and every nervous system is so unique and different we really have to be able to assess and reassess what's working for our nervous system and to know that so much of the time especially when we're talking about healing trauma it's about moving at the pace of our nervous system in a way that it can respond and adapt and sometimes these little things like Jennifer was talking about doing the visual reset or doing some grounding or just these little practical things can start to build up and increase capacity so that then we can do these more you know hermetic stressor type things that are exposing ourselves to a little bit of stress for adaptation but that same principle kind of applies that we it's not always best to do more and more and more and we'll still be depleting ourselves I mean I never want to say never because obviously black and white thinking is also a trauma response but it is rarely better to do more and more and more it's depleting self-care can be so depleting like totally I find myself sometimes like my self-care routine is too much like I I'm doing to I like and I used to go outside of my house for some of my self-care I used to cold plunge and sauna and do all that but it was like it was not helping me when I really looked at like what I do and what I get back from it those are not two things that were helping me in fact I got myself a sauna blanket from a company and I get so much more benefits by doing that in my house at night on my own time than having to like pay a membership make sure that I do that make sure I'm active in that it was like it was just so depleting now I just love a warm bath and like it's so much simpler and I think with self-care we can make it really complicated and I think with healing too back to the rapid fixes that our culture and society likes and like trauma healing is in a rapid process and like the nature of trauma if the nature of trauma is too much too fast we go into our healing or into our healing with our same way with the nervous system that it can't handle too much too fast then we just we re-traumatize ourselves with our healing and I think that that can happen in business in work when we're suddenly like okay well you know I heard this podcast and people say to do less or whatever and then it can actually really kick up a lot of fear patterning and stress patterning that's unnecessary which is why I love cover crops so you can quote-unquote stay busy but you can do active rest right it's not busy but it's active rest like I remember I had a coach who I adore and I think this was a great assignment but she assigned to me it was many years ago long before I knew any of this stuff to sit in a room for an hour and do nothing it was it was brutal it was brutal and if I knew now what I know then I would have taken that in smaller doses yeah I know I mean I have a lot of clients and myself too same thing like we hear all the stuff about meditation is so great and and it is it does have great benefits and we have to dose it appropriately and a nervous system that's in a state of dysregulation having all these intense feelings and stress hormones it can be really activating to try to sit still to even to feel the internal sensations of your body too much too fast all of this can really be overwhelming and so it's about yeah calibrating at that right dose or finding other ways like you said cover crops or kind of moving meditations mindfulness while you're doing other things so that our system has the ability to get some movement to get some regulation and practice being present in the moment getting out of those racing thought loops without I'm going to sit in this room I have everything that I'm feeling get turned up really loud and try to then shame myself for not being able to do it okay I would love to know a little more like where can people find you if they want to work with you more any closing thoughts yeah so you can come find me on instagram at kate northrup is a great place and if you want sort of like a initial taste of some of the principles and more description of them you can just send me a DM that only has the word melt and I'll send you a guide called the pressure relief kit that's free which just has some of my favorite practices for immediately relieving pressure without anything externally needing to change so and then kate northrup.com is my website I have a podcast called plenty which is about accessing money and time abundance and I will say closing thoughts would just be that you know our worth is not determined by our productivity and we really are infinitely inherently worthy and we could never do anything to undo that amen thank you kate thanks for joining us thank you so much it was an absolute pleasure this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice we often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners this podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice if you are in the united states and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger please call 911 for specific services relating to mental health please see the full disclaimer in the show notes