Permission to Pause: The Neuroscience of Restoring Clarity and Creativity

You’ve scheduled the workouts, the morning routine, the family time, but what about the space in between? In this episode, Robyn White unpacks the neuroscience of pausing, including the Default Mode Network, the NIH’s memory research, and Dr. Kristin Neff’s work on emotional flatlining. You’ll meet Claire, an executive and mom whose perfectly organized life left her exhausted and disconnected, and hear how small, intentional pauses transformed her clarity, creativity, and energy.

Learn practical, science-backed pause practices, take away your weekly permission slip, and discover why pausing isn’t a break from leadership  - it’s how you lead yourself best.

Transcript

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You are listening to The Boss Yourself First podcast, season three, episode eight. What if the smartest thing you do this week is nothing? Discover how strategic pauses can restore your clarity, boost your creativity, and reawaken your energy.

Welcome my friends to the Boss Yourself First podcast. I'm your host, Robyn White, and I have to start today with a commitment, kind of a confession, and a commitment. Anyway, I've heard from my team that I need to do a better job of inviting you into my life. I love learning and teaching, and I slip into that really easily, and it's my joy, it's my jam.

And my goals for the podcast are to choose topics that are relevant to your world. Valuable for your growth and add a little new science and experience backed learning. But my team tells me that I need to offer more insight into who is [00:01:00] talking to you. And that takes me a little bit more out of my comfort zone, but I have to eat the food.

I'm dishing out and I know, and you know, growth happens in the discomfort zone. And I have done this, a little bit with my monthly newsletter for my email list. It's called The Shade House Letters. Please subscribe if you haven't, but, I'm told that's not enough. So my commitment to you is to not only present myself as a coach and a teacher, but also human.

And I assure you, I am so very human. Honestly, the things we unpack here on the podcast are areas where not only my clients have needed extra support, but I also have needed to process and do, and sometimes continue to do the work. Today's topic is one that can be really challenging for me. I'll introduce you to my client in a minute that we'll call Claire, but I'll also share with [00:02:00] you that I can.

Easily get wrapped up in a cadence of busyness that makes this permission so hard to prioritize. Let me introduce you to Claire and I'll share some of my personal practices as well. Okay. Imagine with me a calendar so beautifully organized. It could be an Instagram post. Every meeting, every workout, every dinner plan was perfectly in place.

This was Claire. This is her life. I actually saw her calendar. She shared it with me, and it is truly beautiful. It is so color coded, and it just looks lovely. But she came in, she's a busy mom executive also, and the kind of color coded calendar that makes you just go, wow. At least for me, because that's not my natural state of being, I have to really work for structure.

But hers was gorgeous and on paper she had it all. Career success loving partner, two great kids, beautiful house, lovely wardrobe, always looks super put together. She had a morning ritual of [00:03:00] yoga, wisdom reading and journaling, and an evening wind down of skincare journaling and the occasional pedicure.

I saw it, it was all on her calendar, but when she came to our coaching session, she said, I don't understand it. I'm doing all the right things, but I'm still exhausted. I have brain fog most afternoons, and I , I just feel kind of flat. So I asked her, what do you enjoy about your life right now? And she smiled, and you could see a little bit of a shift in her energy.

And she said, I love my kids. I love my partner, I love my home, I love my clothes, my wardrobe, all wonderful things, but I noticed a little something. So I shifted the question just a little bit, and I asked her, what are you doing that you enjoy? And there was silence. And that silence was telling. Claire loved what she had, but she didn't necessarily love the constant doing it took to maintain it.

Her life looked full and I mean, on paper, like I said, super full, but [00:04:00] she was not feeling filled, and that's where we begin exploring today's theme. Permission to Pause and why Giving your brain unstructured space might be the most strategic move you make this year. All right. Some of you just felt challenged.

Some of you might go, okay, yeah, that's not for me. Stay tuned. I think you'll find something for you, whichever area of that spectrum you fall on. All right, so high achievers, which I think many of my listeners are, many of my clients are. High achievers, you hear pause, and you think, stop being productive.

That's what pausing means. I'm gonna stop being productive. But neuroscience paints a very different picture. And you know, I love to dive into a little bit. I really enjoy it and I hope you enjoy it too. And we're gonna talk about the default mode network called the DMN.

Think of the DMN as your backstage crew. I have a background in drama and I always thought the backstage crew was some of the most fun to be had because I felt like that was kind of the theater magic.

Well. [00:05:00] That's your DMN. When you're focused, your brain's task mode is center stage handling to-do list solving problems. But when you step away from the active work, think about being on a stage. The spotlight goes down, the backstage crew comes alive. Here's what it does when it's doing its theater magic.

It consolidates what you've learned. It connects seemingly unrelated ideas, helps you see patterns and connections, helps you reflect on your experiences. And imagines future scenarios. So here's the science of what's happening when you give your brain a pause, the DMN, the backstage crew kicks into organization mode, connection mode, even helping you process emotions.

The National Institute of Health found that when you take short breaks. Your brain actually replays what you've just learned. Strengthening memory and improving performance. We've talked about neuroplasticity before, w hen the DMN is at work, it is [00:06:00] using the same neural pathways as you used when you were actually doing the initial learning of that material.

Without those pauses though, the work gets delayed and often shows up as racing thoughts, right when you're trying to fall asleep. This is me, or at least it was me. I have been doing this work and it is improving. So my husband Mike, still laughs every time he is drifting off.

And I want to chat about all these thoughts that are catapulting in my brain. And if you didn't already know this, I am a talk to thinker. I like to process by talking out loud. And what I've found is that because I've been very intentional about prioritizing sleep of late, if I have pauses blocked into my day, unstructured time for thoughts to bounce around my brain, cooperates with my body so that when I lay down it quiets and lets me sleep.

There's also an emotional side effect of never pausing. If we don't give ourselves this kind of intentional downtime. The brain [00:07:00] and the body adapt in ways that can look like peace but aren't.

Think about what Claire said. She felt flat, right? Dr. Kristen Neff has done some research in this area, about self-compassion and emotional regulation. She's shown that many women after prolonged exhaustion think about that filled calendar, these women slip into what she calls emotional flat lining.

 I'm gonna say that again. Emotional flat lining. It's not actually rest, it's the nervous system. Conserving energy by blunting, the highs and lows on the outside. You look calm. Inside you're running on a dimmer switch because low power mode is on your nervous system is trying to conserve enough energy just to keep going.

 Emotional flatlining, I think that is such an interesting expression. I'll probably be doing more research on it, and of course that means I'll be sharing it with you, but for now, let's continue to apply it to this permission to pause. That's the danger. Without a true pause, we [00:08:00] mistake emotional shutdown for emotional balance.

Tricky. Right. Over time, this flatlining costs us creativity, connection, and genuine satisfaction. The pause we're talking about today keeps you out of that shutdown and brings you back into your full range thinking clearly creating freely leading with energy. So our approach here is twofold.

Recognizing that pausing is not a productivity loss, it's a brain upgrade. My friends, I say that with love. And second, understanding that without it, we risk settling for not overwhelmed instead of feeling fully alive. You feel fine, not amazing. One of my clients has been talking recently about having the value of vibrancy.

 We are not anywhere close to it. When we are not pausing, we're settling for not overwhelmed. So let's transition into the second principle. Adjust back to Claire. , So she started small because that's how [00:09:00] we keep from getting overwhelmed and that's how we make things doable.

I hope you've caught onto that as we have worked through this season of permission, that we always have a small start just to get going, to build momentum. So for Claire, that looked like five minutes of nothing, which I'm talking small, right? But remember her, there's no nothing space on her calendar.

So five minutes of nothing after her midday meeting. No phone, not even guided meditation, no email. Just sitting with her tea and letting her mind drift. That was kind of my, my invitation, my coach challenge to her five minutes of nothing. So week one, and we would check back in each week. Week one, she said she felt awkward.

She kept thinking about what she should be doing. I always tell my clients, and I'm telling you. Watch out for shoulds when you feel like, oh, I should do this. I want you to catch it, grab hold of it and really look at it. Notice it. So that was her experience. Week one, five minutes and she couldn't [00:10:00] erase the thoughts or eradicate the thoughts of what she needed, should be doing.

It's only five minutes. Week two, still five minutes, but something shifted. She said she found herself walking into her afternoon meetings, fresher. More alert even with some new ideas. The brain fog that had been hitting hard about 3:00 PM was a little quieter, a little less noticeable. The fog was not so dense.

So science backs it up. Let's think about what was happening here. The DMN network, that default mode network, was activated just in those five minutes. It gave her brain the unstructured time it needed to process and integrate, just like in the study we talked about, her mind was rehearsing, it was refining and making her sharper for what came next. It was a five minute break guys, but from there we added a little bit bigger adjustment. We started with weekly, so once a week, a 30 [00:11:00] minute unscheduled block. And just so you know, the next step was a daily unscheduled block.

30 minutes. And she didn't have to be just sitting, staring into space. The parameters were, again, no phone, no email, , not even listening to a podcast, as valuable as those are, but nothing, no music even. She chose to walk. She kind of developed a little routine for herself and she chose to walk in a park just her and her thoughts, her amazing brain and the occasional squirrel.

So one day she said about halfway through her walk, the solution to a really hard client problem, she said it just surfaced. It was weird, she wasn't even trying to think about it. It just, all of a sudden there it bubbled up and that is that DMN Magic. And here's something important. Remember how I said pausing during the day, also quiets the DMN at night?

There is data to back this up. My friends, people who never give the DMN downtime [00:12:00] often experience it kicking into overdrive at bedtime. Like I mentioned before, fuel those racing thoughts and delaying your sleep. So those of you out there who are having trouble falling asleep, I want you to think about this.

Think about, did I have a little bit of downtime today? Did I give myself that space so that I can be sleeping now? Well, Claire noticed that on evenings after her walk, she fell asleep faster and slept deeper. And I can testify to this myself. I shared with you earlier, I'm prioritizing my sleep because it has been a struggle in the last couple years.

And this is part of the work I'm doing is having this unstructured block of time during the day really does help. Alright, let's move into the third principle, which is act. So what does this look like for you? How do you, like Claire, put this into practice and act? With this permission, I'm gonna invite you to try daily micro pauses.

Five minutes. Five minutes between tasks. No agenda, no screens. Don't [00:13:00] overlook this gang. No screens. Seriously, I talked about this in my monthly newsletter for my email subscribers. Lighted screens do have an effect on our brains. Yes, even Kindle. Please include no screens in your pause. action. Two, try a weekly white space.

Start with weeks, then maybe work up to daily. . Go at your own pace. If you only have five minutes a day for the next five months, do it. Make it happen. But if you see results from it, and I think you will. Try it. Try it. Especially if it's affecting your sleep. Try getting this bigger chunks of time.

Start weekly work towards daily. Then here's one more piece that I would love for you to practice. It's a little tricky sometimes. I know. Give yourself language to protect the pause and practice it so when someone needs an answer, now create space to pause and reflect. Say things like, let me take a moment.

Now, I'll get back to you. I just need to process this for a minute. Can I have 30 minutes and I'll circle back? [00:14:00] Just having the language. That's the permission piece, gang. You're giving yourself permission and you're verbalizing it. That's part of it. Remember, I always tell you, your brain's always listening to it is part of the practice.

You're telling others, but you're also telling yourself. I can take a moment and it's okay. All right. Those are your action steps. So let me tell you why they work. You let your DMN process integrate and connect ideas in the background. By giving it the space, you prevent the overactivity of the DMN from hijacking your bedtime, and you create space for clarity, creativity, and emotional regulation.

Alright, let's check in one more time on Claire. A few weeks later, she'd been practicing the daily , block of time for almost a month, and she told me I thought five minutes of nothing would make me crazy. But here I am with 30 minutes and I look forward to it. I'm clearer, I'm less snappy with my family, and I've had some of my best ideas [00:15:00] in the middle of my walks.

3:00 PM Slump, she said, almost gone. Evenings lighter and her family even noticed she was smiling more. Claire didn't give up her routine. She kept her rituals, her workouts, her work performance, but by weaving in the real pause, she started loving not just what she had, but what she was doing to have it.

 Okay, here's your permission slip for this week. I give myself permission to pause without guilt. Knowing it's where my clarity, my creativity, and my leadership strength are renewed. Write out this one gang. Put it where you can see it. I have permission to pause without guilt because I'm renewing my clarity, my creativity, and my leadership.

This is where it happens. Keep it visible. Let it remind you that pausing is not stepping out of the race. It's letting your brain and body breathe so you can show up fully when it matters. Remember, in the season of permission, [00:16:00] this isn't about doing less of what matters. It's about doing it from a place of a alignment, clarity, and strength.

And that's what I want for you, all right, my friends. Listen, if this episode on Permission to Pause has been a nudge that you needed. Let's keep the conversation going. You can hop on my email list for weekly encouragement and practical self-leadership tools. The link is in the show notes.

If you haven't yet, grab a copy of my book, three Permissions. It's where I share the full framework we've been walking through this season, along with some stories, some of my journey, some of my clients', tools, and a lot of heart, and for my fellow readers. Don't forget, we've got the Boss Yourself first Book club.

The BYF book club is actually what it's called on Fable, where we dig deeper into some of these ideas. And I love that interaction. I love the opportunity to hear your thoughts and your questions that we can unpack together. And finally, if this podcast is part of your growth toolkit, you can help me keep it going.

There's a link in the show notes where you can make a one time or a [00:17:00] monthly contribution. Every bit helps me bring you more conversations like this. Hey, thanks for spending time with me. Until next week, give yourself permission to pause, see what opens up. Take care.