Episode 398: A Vulnerable Deep Dive: How I’m Re-Patterning My Nervous System in Real Time
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
If you’ve ever felt like your nervous system is constantly jacked up and running on pressure, urgency, and adrenaline, this episode is a vulnerable deep dive into why that happens.
Erin is taking you inside what nervous system re-patterning and brain rewiring actually look like through the lens of a deadline-driven season where pushing harder led to getting sick and realizing she couldn’t keep forcing her way through anymore.
She explores how predictive patterns form, why hustle can “work” while still keeping your body stuck in fight-or-flight, and why true healing often requires writing yourself a permission slip.
In this episode:
The moment Erin realized she was teaching regulation from a completely FRIED nervous system
How subconscious “predictive patterns” lock you into stress and the same symptoms on repeat
The comment Erin’s integrator made that exposed how much pressure she was putting on herself
The uncomfortable choice Erin made that FINALLY interrupted the pattern and changed everything
Resources mentioned:
Join the waitlist for Manifest Your Health. Doors open in the spring!
Applications are now open for Funk’tional Nutrition Academy, our 14 month clinical mentorship + training program.
Apply to work with us 1:1 here.
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
OneSkin (Use code FUNK for 15% off your first purchase)
-
Forcing and pushing our way through things is our nervous system's way of attempting to create certainty. That's what your mind always wants— what's predictable, what is certain, and what it can control. And this is one of the ways we can feel almost like addicted to stress in the body. Without constant stress or constant urgency or forcing or pushing or pressure, it can feel like something's wrong. So we keep recalibrating back to the comfort zone. This is kind of what the nervous system does.
Welcome to The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K. Because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend, because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello out there, my friends. I recently wrote myself a permission slip to take some pressure off myself, and I've been doing this kind of a lot lately because I am in the process of shifting some long-held patterns that no longer feel like they are serving this current phase of my life and certainly not where I want to head.. And in order to do that, I have found that I actually have to permit myself to do that. So today this podcast is going to be an authenticity and honesty share. I shared with you guys a couple of weeks ago that I promised myself to write and create what was on my heart, not just what strategy tells me I must do.
And I know that we all learn through storytelling, so I believe that sharing my own stories sharing my own experience. By doing that, it really helps you guys navigate similar stuff and feel less alone in that stuff. I know that that is how I learn, through listening to other people talk about their situations and how they're getting themselves through sticky things. This is also going to be a modeled behavior share, because if I'm going to do something I haven't done before, generally speaking, it's helpful to have it modeled to me first, which is another reason that I want to share this with you, because I have a hunch that what I'm talking about, these nervous system patterns that I'm in the process of rewiring and repatterning, I have a hunch that many of you listening have similar, if not the same patterns that I do too. Anytime that I talk about ambition on this show, we get a lot of downloads. So I know that those of you who are listening are strivers, you are ambitious, you are high capacity people. Want to do a lot. And so if that's you, then I hope that this is going to be a good show for you.
So I just told you that I had to write myself a permission slip, but this is also your permission slip too. And also what I will say is that today feels like a little bit of a vulnerability share. I don't know if you can hear the shaking in my voice, but it's certainly there because I am letting you in to witness something that feels to me like failure, perceived failure, even though objectively and cognitively I know that it's not. My body, my nervous system, my mind are telling me a different story right now. So I have the 400th episode of this podcast coming up soon, and I polled Instagram. I did an ask me anything type of vibe because I want to dedicate a whole show to answering your questions for the 400th episode. This is not the 400th episode, by the way. It's coming soon.
And what so many of you guys said that you wanted to hear about and to learn about was brain rewiring. And we can certainly talk about the technicalities of brain rewiring. We can talk about the neuroscience behind brain rewiring, and I have a lot of shows on that already, and there's a lot more coming to you. But today's episode is what brain rewiring looks like in action. This is repatterning the nervous system in action, and I say repatterning on purpose. We all have these predictive patterns in our nervous system. The brain operates as a prediction machine. It's continuously anticipating sensory, motor, and cognitive outcomes, and it anticipates these things based on what has happened in the past, based on your past experiences.
And this could be past experiences of external stimulus, things happening outside of you, but also internal stimulus, your internal reaction. That can be thoughts. Feelings, body sensations. We think thoughts, and those thoughts elicit certain emotional reactions and feelings in our body. I love how Joe Dispenza says, thoughts are the language of the brain, feelings are the language of the body. So how we think and how we feel, those two things combined create our state of being. And our state of being can become a predictive pattern in the nervous system. And if you've repeated the same reactions so many times, then the body will just take over and it will pull you into a predictable future based on what happened in the past, how your body reacted in the past.
The word for this in neuroscience is automaticity. When you've done something so many times that it becomes an automatic response, and it usually is without any cognitive effort or awareness or thinking on your part. It's largely unconscious. Basically, the body now knows how to do it better than the mind. Essentially, we are forfeiting our free will for a set of automatic repetitive programs. This is what I mean by nervous system predictive patterns, how you have felt in the past will be more of a prediction of how you will feel in the future. How you behaved based on those feelings in the past will be more of a prediction of your behavior and actions in the future. That is, unless you intentionally, 1, become aware of that pattern, 2, interrupt that pattern, and 3, redirect and change that pattern.
So we have the ability to change these these predictive patterns, but it does require conscious awareness and effort on our part in order to do that. Okay, so hopefully you're starting to understand a little bit more about what these predictive patterns of the nervous system are. Now, last week with my practitioner team, we did a training on the upcoming Manifest Your Health app and membership because our one-on-one clients are gonna get access to it. So I really wanted our practitioners to have a clear understanding of what exactly it was. Our practitioners are phenomenal functional medicine practitioners, and I really wanted to explain and to showcase how we are using Manifest Your Health to go beyond functional medicine, because we know how to help our clients with the more obvious stressors. It's a big part of the work that we do. But what about the less obvious ones, the ones that our clients themselves aren't even necessarily aware of? Beliefs, suppressed emotions, and nervous system predictive patterns can keep you locked into the state of health that you're in. So what happens when the true root cause is deeper than the physical body? What happens if it's your mind, your own thoughts, your own beliefs that are keeping you pitched into a hypervigilant state? And what if that's the thing that's actually preventing your body from healing? So I explained all this, and this is really where Manifest Your Health comes in for our one-to-one clients and anybody else that's going to be accessing the membership.
And so I realize as I say this to you, it can feel a little esoteric or difficult to understand when I say things like, what happens when the true root cause is deeper than the physical body. That can feel a little out there. So today in this episode, I want to use a very specific example about predictive patterns and how they can show up in our lives, and also how they can influence how we feel physically. When our nervous system is jacked up, that influences how we feel physically, and then also what we can do to change them if they're leading to an outcome that we no longer desire. So I want to take this theory that I just mapped out and make it more practical for you to understand. So I'm gonna use myself as an example because I'm currently navigating this right now in real time. So here we go. It is story time.
So if you listen to the show or you follow along on Instagram with me, you know that I have been reimagining and recreating Manifest Your Health. And I have to set the stage a little bit here because today's show won't really land without this context. So Manifest Your Health is a neuroscience-backed membership that blends systems biology with nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring, and emotional release. And the goal is that you are able to reconnect with your body's natural ability to heal, because we all have it. Our bodies know how to heal. They know how to repair themselves. They know how to self-regulate. But there can be a lot of things that interrupt that process.
I created this program while I was in a year-long Stanford intensive founded by neurosurgeon and compassion expert Dr. James Doty. He actually passed away this past year. Super, super, super sad. So I created the program then, and since then I have run it 3 times as a live program with over 200 participants total. And those participants experienced a lot of things on the physical body— reduction in symptoms, way fewer flare cycles, less fear spirals about their health, consistent energy, feeling more in control of their health. So we saw some really profound things, but we also did a lot of interviews and surveys in the biggest feedback that we got is that people wanted more time with the content, more time with the curriculum. They wanted ongoing access.
And the people that did the program twice back to back that spent more time with it really got the best results. So that is why I knew that we needed to, or I desired to turn it into a membership because my goal is to get people as, you know, the biggest, best results, obviously. So I've been in the process of restructuring and rescoping the program. I created a 5-phase system. Some people just do better following a specific framework. So I created that framework. I added in additional phases, the foundations to really preframe and support all of the work that we're doing. I'm also recreating and updating some of the content because more research has come out, more science, more things have come out, you know, and I wanna weave that into the mix.
And I'm creating even more resources and daily practices more meditations, more nervous system regulation techniques that you guys can practice every single day. We're also, I swear there's a point to me telling you all of this. We're also building an app because we really wanted people to have easy access to this. We all pick up our phones and my desire is that this app is on your home screen. And when you pick up your phone, rather than going into Instagram or TikTok or email or something that's actually gonna probably dysregulate your nervous system, you have the little icon there and you can boop, go into a nervous system regulation app instead. And so everything is going to live within an app. And I actually just— this is totally an aside and actually not relevant to today's show, but I'm going to say it anyway. I worked with a business coach who was also like business coach slash shaman slash healer.
He was like very cool, like super, super, super how I do business. He was like looking at the Akashic records and the whole nine, and this is years ago, I would guess 3 to 4 years ago. And he told me that this program— this is before I even built the program— he's like, this is going to be an app and it's going to be bigger than your current business is now. That was his like prediction. So we'll see what happens. But I knew that the app was coming for a long time, and obviously building an app is like kind of a big deal. So Abby, my number 2, had to research app companies. We had to like actually build the app, design the app, design the aesthetic of the app.
We had to re-scope the messaging in the marketing for Manifest Your Health, created a whole new sales page. The reason that I'm telling you all of this is I want to drive home the point that this is a sizable amount of work. I have a friend who's a writer and she's like, this is like writing a book but also building a business at the same time. My business advisor was like, are are you sure you want to do this right now? This is a huge undertaking. We finally got you out of the weeds. This is going to put you right back in the weeds. So all of my friends, my close people, my advisors, they were advising. They were like, this is major.
And so I knew going into it, it was a behemoth-size project. But I've taken on other behemoth-size projects before, and I've just been able to go heads down and plow my way through it. And that's what I kept saying. I just need to go heads down and get this done. I can bang it out. I can do I've done it before. I can do it again. So I set the deadline, I set the launch date based on this very pressurized pattern of being able to bulldoze my way through things.
And so I was doing all of this, building all of this, planning all of this, writing all of this, creating all of the content in addition to my day-to-day job. So my day-to-day job is running a team in an organization, having leadership meetings, hiring new team members, teaching classes, for F&A, doing the weekly podcast, creating social media content, and then also like my life. You know, my daughter runs cross-country, so we had meets, we have basketball games. They're always like right smack dab in the middle of the workday. So it's not like this was the only thing I had to focus on. I was doing this in addition to like my job and my life. And so that created a situation where I started to feel like there was something always hanging over my head, so I could never really fully relax or rest. Even when I was like sitting on the couch watching a show or reading a book, I always felt like I should be doing something else.
No matter what I was doing, I wasn't fully present because I'm like, gotta get to Manifest Your Health, gotta get to the modules, gotta get to the videos, gotta record the stuff. So it created this environment where every moment that I was doing something else I was telling myself a story that it was actually time that I should be spending working on this new project. And I'll be honest with you, that's a little bit of entrepreneurship in a nutshell. Like, you kind of always feel like you're like behind the 8-ball a little bit, but I've found ways to turn this off in the past and it got like really ramped up.
So I've long made fun of the gummies as supplements trend. It's kind of like adults taking candy and calling it health. Until I realized that it's the only way my husband will actually consistently take supplements. Every day. He takes Organifi's creatine, cherry chews, and Organifi's chilajit gummies, which is super mineral, rich with fulvic acid and humic acids. But my personal favorite, and I do take them every day, is the Happy Drops. They're yummy little lemon gummies that are made with ginger, Gotu cola and Passion flower, all of which are shown to have positive effects on mood and emotional well being. Plus it has saffron, which is shown to help your brain modulate its levels of serotonin. And I do notice a difference in my mood when I am taking these gummies every day, even if they do taste like candy. So if you're excited to try Happy Drops or you're just sick of taking your supplements in pill form, you want to get in on the gummy action, head to organifi.com/FUNK that's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com/funk and you can save 20% off your order with that code FUNK.
If you struggle with fatigue, headaches, muscle cramps, you might not be getting enough sodium. This might surprise you, but if you eat a primarily whole foods diet, it shouldn't. According to the FDA, 70% of sodium in the american diet comes from processed foods. So if you reduce or eliminate processed foods from your diet strong recommend you may also be reducing essential sodium. Yes, so sodium is essential. It's not an optional mineral. Since I eat a whole foods diet, I heavily salt my foods with sea salt. I also drink LMNT, a tasty and salty electrolyte mix daily. Right now LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase. That's eight single serving packets for free with any drink mix purchase. It's a great way to try all the different flavors and you can get yours at drinklmnt.com/funk this deal is only available through this link so you have to go to D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com/FUNK. LMNT offers a no questions asked refunds so you can try it totally risk free.
So again, there was no true respite. There was no true downtime. Even when I was like off the clock, my nervous system was still revved up. I guess that's a good way to say it. My nervous system never felt like it was off the clock. Like my mind was always focused and thinking about what I should be doing and how much more I had left to do. And so another thing that was going on here is I had announced these timelines to the whole team. As one does, right? And when I know that somebody is waiting on me or expecting something of me, I feel a lot of internal pressure. And to be crystal clear, my team is never putting pressure on me. My team is not putting the pressure on me. But when I know my team is waiting on something from me, I feel pressure.
I create that pressure. Myself. This is like a me v. me thing, you know? It's like a me and me. And even Abby, my integrator, who has like picked up on this pattern of me, has said to me like, you know, you're the boss here, right? Like, you're the CEO. You get to say no whenever you want to. And I remember years ago, Scott saying this to me, hey, you're the one driving this train. You're the only one that can slow it down.
And I understand those concepts cognitively. I get it logically, logistically, in my head. I'm like, yep, I know that. I know that to be true. But my body does not experience that as truth, if that makes any sense. I feel like my body's like, well, we started this thing, so we just have to keep pushing through no matter what. So I created so much pressure for myself with this timeline with this deadline that I like literally got a sinus infection. I recorded a whole episode about it through Christmas and right after Christmas I took 2 weeks out of office.
Now, most founders and CEOs take 2 weeks out of office to have an actual vacation, to have actual downtime, to have time off, to rest, to recoup, to get ready for the year ahead. January is usually a pretty big time, especially in the health and wellness space. So most people take that time off to actually rest and restore themselves. And I took that time off out of office to work on Manifest Your Health. So I bulldozed through my holiday break with a cold. So I started getting a cold the day after Christmas and I'm like, I just need to rest. And I knew that. I remember saying that out loud to my friend and to my husband.
I'm like, I know I just need to rest. And I didn't heed the message. I was like, but I got this deadline, got to do it. And so I bulldozed through the cold and force myself to uphold this deadline for myself. And I remember one weekend Scott and Hattie went up to Maine to ski and I stayed home, and I was so sick that weekend. I stayed home, and this is before I knew I had a sinus infection. I was like, I feel bad, and I just was horizontal on the couch literally from Friday to Sunday night. And rather than just like sleep or rest or like watch Bravo, I was creating slide decks for Manifest Your Health so that I could hit this timeline, the timeline that I had set for myself, to be clear, right? So again, I know this is a me thing, and I know that this is an internal pattern because I'm the one setting the timelines, I'm the one setting the expectations.
And I also know that I set tighter deadlines and expectations for myself than I would ever expect somebody else to uphold. So I feel like I have witnessed myself give a lot of people a lot of grace that I disallow myself. And so I am becoming aware of these patterns, and it feels like these patterns have been around forever, for as long as I can remember. And so remember how I said earlier, we think thoughts, and those thoughts elicit certain emotional reactions and feelings in our body. How we think, How we feel creates our state of being, and our state of being can become a predictive pattern in the nervous system. This is my predictive pattern because I've repeated this reaction so many times that my body just like runs it without me. It's automatic. It is my automatic response.
The body is just running the show. So my mind can say one thing, but my nervous system's like, nope, this is what we're doing. And what I'm seeing now and what I can share with you is this pattern, this predictive pattern of my nervous system has been keeping me really locked into this pressurized and even sometimes fight or flight response. And I perpetuate this. So I set big demands on myself and I work from pressure. So I'm continuously recreating this feeling. This experience because it's the norm for me. I'm like, this is what it's supposed to feel like because this is what it always has felt like.
So I just keep recreating more and more and more of that. By the way, if you're listening and you're like, this is me, if this sounds like you, I want to let you in on something because hopefully this can create an opportunity for self-compassion. Forcing and pushing our way through things is our nervous system's way of attempting to create Certainty. That's what your mind always wants. What's predictable, what is certain, and what it can control. Because control creates a sense of safety. Now, it's a false sense of safety because we're never really truly in control of anything, but it feels like safety nevertheless. And this is one of the ways we can feel almost like addicted to stress in the body.
Without constant stress or constant urgency or forcing or pushing or pressure, it can feel like something's wrong. So we keep recalibrating back to the comfort zone. This is kind of what the nervous system does. So again, if this is you, if you feel like, oh my gosh, everything she's describing is me, offer yourself some compassion right now and know that it's your brain's way of attempting to keep you safe. But, and also, if you, if I, if we continue on with this pattern, We will continue to create the same situation in our bodies, in our health, and also in our life. And here's the thing, I don't want this pattern in my life anymore. Like, I feel pretty complete with it. I'm moving into a phase of my work, my career, my life where I don't wanna operate from pressure anymore.
I've been desiring to work more from a place of freedom and expansion and creativity. And less from a place of pressure and deadline and constriction. There's been some big shifts in me personally, and I've kind of low-key spoken into them a little bit from a work-life balance perspective, and maybe some of my priorities are shifting. And I'm observing myself growing in different ways and evolving into some different things, but still in some ways operating on the old system. So it's like my system is trying to update and upgrade, but there's parts of me that are still running the old operating system. And this is one of those places that I discovered I'm still trying to operate on the old system. And I actually caught myself in a pattern of saying, well, once I finish this next big project, then I can operate from the new system. So once I build the new team, this is what I was saying, like through 2024 and a lot of 2025.
Once I build the new team, then I can blah, blah, blah. Once I'm through this hiring process, then I can step into this next version of myself. Once I'm done building out the new Manifest Your Health, then I can. And what I realized with like such sudden clarity that I'm always going to create a new reason to stay locked into this pattern. It. Like, there will always be something else to keep me locked in here, to keep my nervous system defaulting to the old norm, the trusted familiar, unless I change it. So recently, at the time of recording— this was last week— I was writing and I was creating the nervous system modules for Manifest Your Health because there's like a whole section that is fully dedicated to the nervous system. And these modules are all brand new.
They are from scratch, and they're really based on current neuroscience. And so it's a pretty heavy lift. There's a lot of research, there's a lot of writing, there's a lot of editing, there's a lot. And I had created a very specific deadline for these nervous system modules, and I was actively working on them. And as I was actively working on the nervous system modules I realized that my nervous system was fucking fried. And here's the deal. I really, really, really believe that the energy with which we create a thing impacts the outcome and the energy of that thing. So if I create something from a certain energy, you're the recipient, the receiver, the consumer, you're going to receive that energy.
And is it insane for me to teach you about the nervous system and how to caretake it and how to rewire it from a place of a fried, frazzled, burnt-out nervous system? Yeah, that's insane. I don't want that. You don't want that. And I don't want you to receive that energy. I felt so dysregulated at the time. And it, you know, it's a combination of a lot of different things. What's happening collectively, just everything going on, you know, trying to manage a huge new project in addition to the day-to-day stuff. There was things at home that were kind of pulling my attention and my focus, the pressure that I was putting on myself to perform.
My daughter was also home with the flu for 7 days straight, and then I started to feel run down. And honestly, I knew, I like looked around, I went for a walk, walk. Remember the other week we were talking about boredom, and when you allow yourself to be bored, then you can see new possibilities. Your brain works in different ways. It stops looping on itself. It opens up to new pathways, new ways of thinking. So I went on a walk without headphones, without listening to anything, and I allowed myself to be bored. And this is where the message came in so loud and so clear, and it was like, if you don't get off of this hamster wheel, you're gonna get sick.
Like, this is how it works. You can't fight your body. Like, how many times have I learned this lesson? How many times have I taught this lesson? You cannot fight your body. The body always knows. The body always knows what's up. The body always knows the medicine that you need. Every single time I create and teach a course or a workshop or a new topic or a new concept I always have to learn it deeper myself, which is like really, really cool. It never feels cool in the moment.
It actually sucks. I'm like, fuck this again. But that is part of mastery. I think it's like the universe is like, oh, cute, you want to teach this? Okay, cool, cool, cool. Let's just make sure that you really, really know this. You really understand this. You really, really, really embody this.. And what's so interesting to me, and I do think that this is cool looking back, when I first created Manifest Your Health, I went through this like little blip of a health situation.
And it didn't feel like a little blip at the time. It felt scary. But then when I taught it two more subsequent times, same deal. I had like a little blip every single time I taught it. And the way that I see it, the way that I choose to see it, is that it's like spiraling down to get deeper medicine so that I can spiral back up. I can receive the medicine myself, and then I have even more to share on the other side of it. I can meet myself at deeper places each and every time this happens, and then I'm better equipped to serve you, to help you, to meet you at those places. I can speak into those places because I've been there..
And on my walk, I realized this, and I realized that if I rush through this, if I rush through this process, if I force my way through this, I am going to miss all of the medicine. And I also knew that if I pushed through these messages that my nervous system was sending me, my body would only speak louder. The body knows and it speaks to you. And if you don't listen, it starts to speak louder.. And if you don't listen to that, eventually it's going to yell. And I have done been there before. I don't need my body to scream at me anymore before I can learn the lesson. You dig?
If you're anything like me, your skin needs a little extra TLC this time of year. I love my outdoor walks, but the cold weather makes my skin wicked dry and kind of inflamed. So that's why I've been sticking with OneSkin certified safe for sensitive skin. OneSkin products are free from over 1500 harsh or irritating ingredients and their patented OS1 peptide has been validated in five different clinical studies. It targets the root cause of wrinkles and loss of elasticity. OneSkin just launched their limited edition holiday set including a nightly rewind gift set which adds the perfect touch of luxury to your gift list. Featuring their best selling face moisturizer, their brand new peptide lip mask which I love and a sculpting gua Sha tool. For a limited time, try OneSkin for 15% off using code FUNK. oneskin.co/funk After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent ya.
Okay, so I had the realization, and then what, right? It's like, so we can have this epiphany moment, we can have this eureka, we can really understand the messages coming from inside the goes, and then what? Because if you don't do something different, you will repeat the old pattern. You will recalibrate back to the old familiar. And so what you have to do is something different. Action is what crystallizes change. You have to take a new action. What would the new version of you that didn't have old predictive nervous system pattern do? And so my new action was to tell my team, it was to tell my team that we are pushing this off.
We are pushing the deadline. I need to give myself more space to create. And honestly, that felt extremely vulnerable. I do not like letting people down. I do not like disappointing people, and I do not like coming short of my own expectations and being witnessed in that. That's the worst one for me. Having somebody witness me in my own self-perceived failure makes me feel like I'm going to come undone. So for me to say out loud to my team, I can't do this, this is actually too much for me right now, I feel like I'm falling short of my own expectations, and I feel like I am being seen.
And that felt really, really, really hard and really scary and really awful. I— like I said, I felt like I was going to come undone. But I also knew that I had to make this choice. I had to do this. It's like that trending audio that I've seen on Instagram: break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow. Like, this was the break the pattern today. And if I didn't do it, I knew that the loop would I would continue to run. So I knew that this was the action that I had to take.
I was really, really, really, really scared. And what happened when I communicated that is nothing. Nobody cared. They were so supportive, you know. And it was actually really, really healing and cathartic for me to go through that experience because these are some of my core wounds, right? You know, I set expectations so high for myself that when I inevitably fall short, I feel a failure. I feel like failing. So I have recreated that feeling of failure in my body a lot. And again, I know outside looking in, nobody would look at this and be like, that's failure.
What I feel and what you see, horse of a different color. Okay. And we all have core wounds. That's a thing. We're all walking around with some wounding. We're humans. It's like part of the experience, you know? And it, it doesn't have to be that deep. I say that, you know, sometimes obviously core wounds really like are that deep.
But I think when we talk about inner work, it can feel so hard and heavy and cumbersome and even like burdensome and like, ugh. So I want to bring a little bit of levity and a little bit of lightness into this conversation too, because sometimes inner work in healing core wounds looks like witnessing ourselves in our own patterns and then making a different choice. And that different choice can be pretty effing uncomfortable because it's different, you know? But sometimes it's just having a hard conversation or being willing to be witnessed in your vulnerability. That can be part of repatterning the nervous system too. So my new action to lock all of this in was to say out loud, "Hey, I can't do this," and then uphold that. For myself. So I decided for myself to take the timeline and take the pressure off of myself, knowing and trusting that things will get done. Things will get done when they're supposed to.
I always create what needs to be created. And part of this work, part of this lesson, is moving into trust— trust in myself, trust in the divine plan. Maybe the universe has a bigger plan for this than I even know about. What I also know to be true is that the nervous system is intimately connected to what we manifest, what we call in, what we can hold, what we can feel safe having, what we feel safe receiving. The nervous system is like a portalway into our manifestations. I recently read this quote: a regulated body attracts greater timelines than hustle ever could. And I love that. I love that so much.
But the tricky part about it for me is that I have evidence that hustle actually does work pretty well. I have evidence that working from pressure actually gets good results. So like, big yikes, right? So now what I need to do is prove to myself that I can get the same results, if not better, from a regulated place because the way that I was running shit before doesn't feel good anymore. And I wanna be really clear that none of this is about shaming my former self, my former behaviors, my former patterns. I'm saying that part out loud because I need you to hear that for yourself too. This is not a shame game. Shame does not beget positive change, like ever. And I'm absolutely not shaming my former self.
I'm actually really, really grateful to my former self, and I'm grateful for my former behaviors and my former patterns because they got me exactly where I am today. I'm very, very grateful for that. I just also have to recognize when I'm ready to change and give myself permission to do that and be able to look back and say, just because it worked for me then does not mean it needs to work for me now. Like, I used to be able to do it like this, but I don't desire to do it like this anymore, and I can't do it like that anymore. And of course I can't. Of course I can't do it like that anymore because my circumstances have changed. And what I realized is that I was putting the same internal expectations on myself even though the external situations had changed. And I'm saying that part out loud too because I want you to hear that, because where in your life, could you potentially be doing the very same thing? Because aren't we so good at that? So back when I was a solopreneur, when I was a lone wolf, when I didn't have anybody to answer to, when all I had to worry about was me, when I didn't have to lead and guide a team, when I didn't have the responsibility of 7 other salaries on my shoulders, when there wasn't as many moving pieces and moving parts to the organization, of course I could go heads down and bang something out and set a tough deadline for myself and hit that tough deadline.
Of course I could do that. But now there's a lot of other things and a lot of other parts of the business that require my attention and my energy and my input. And my life requires different things from me and my body does. And so I cannot hold myself to the same standards that I did 10 years ago or even 5 years ago. That's insane. Like if somebody came to me and explained this, I would be giving them this advice. But isn't it just so interesting? That we have such a difficult time giving ourselves the same grace that we allow other people? Isn't it so interesting that we have a difficult time taking our own medicine, taking the advice that we give to other people? Maybe, just maybe, it's time that we start doing more of that. Now, if you have a history of pushing, overriding your limits, and grinding through everything, part of your work, your medicine, your repatterning practice might be to slow down.
We have to teach ourselves how to not operate from adrenaline all the time, how to not just hustle and rush through everything. We have to reset those predictive patterns in our nervous system. On the flip side of this, I do want to speak into this for a quick second. On the flip side of this, if you have a history of under-coping, if you tend to avoid, check out, or under-challenge yourself, part of your work, your medicine, your patterning, repatterning practice might be to gently lean in and edge yourself a little bit further each and every time. No matter where we're at, part of growing and evolving is stretching our capacity to be slightly temporarily uncomfortable. Growth happens in the stretch zone. So my stretch zone actually looked like saying, hey, I gotta slow down, I gotta pump the brakes, I gotta do less, and I have to communicate this to people. I have to be witnessed in saying that.
That was my growth edge, that was my discomfort. Maybe yours looks a little bit different. And I know that I'm talking about taking pressure off of myself here. But sometimes pressure can be very good and very useful. When we give ourselves or others deadlines, it can bake in external accountability that some of us might need. So it's not always a bad thing. Pressure is not always bad. But what I'm trying to notice for myself is, where does this pattern feel useful and supportive? And where does this pattern feel like it's creating unnecessary and, quite frankly, unuseful pressure? How can I observe when I'm in that situation And then what can I do to change that situation? That is the work.
That is the practice there. It's the awareness and then making a new choice based on the awareness. Remember, action is what crystallizes change. We're not just journaling about this stuff. We're taking the words off the page and out into the world with us as well. So to bring this all full circle, And to connect this episode back to your health, these kind of patterns are the things that keep you locked into a hypervigilant state, that keep your nervous system cranked, that disallow true rest and restoration of your body. And over time, this is what leads to symptoms and to problems. So it might look like coming down with every single cold that goes around.
It might look like perpetual inflammation. It might look like chronic fatigue. It might look like autoimmunity. So much of the work that we do in Manifest Your Health is what I call self-data mining. We get to know ourselves better. We observe our own patterns and behaviors and the beliefs and programs and thought loops and emotions that continue to drive them. Once we're aware of them, we can do the work to re-pattern and rewire these things, and then the symptoms calm down, and then the condition can go into remission because the body always knows. The body's always speaking, and when we have the tools to listen and let the body guide, then there really is no need for the body to yell louder.
So I really, really hope that this episode supports you in some way, shape, or form. Always love hearing feedback from podcast episodes and how they land with you and how they connect. So you can DM me and my team on Instagram to share that. Love, love seeing your reflections there. And Manifest Your Health, it is coming out. It is coming out. When is TBD. It will most likely be this spring.
I would love to say it's gonna be an April launch date, but just stay tuned. Get yourself on the waitlist. We'll let you know first and foremost there. Keep tuning back into the podcast cuz I'll keep you updated there. But thanks for listening to my story. It felt good to speak it out loud. I think this was part of my process, and in doing so, I hope that it helps you with yours. Check you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.