Slowing down is not falling behind: Rest, nervous system healing & redefining success

We’ve been taught that speed equals success.

Move fast. Stay busy. Push through exhaustion.

And if you slow down? You’re falling behind.

But what if slowing down isn’t weakness, but wisdom?

In this episode of Thrive Like a Mother, Ebony shares a powerful reframe on rest, urgency, and what it really means to succeed as a woman and mother.

You’ll discover:

• How hustle culture keeps women stuck in survival mode
• Why your nervous system needs a slower pace to feel safe
• What it looks like to redefine success in different seasons of life

Through her personal journeys in pregnancy, motherhood, and entrepreneurship, Ebony explores how choosing presence over pressure creates space to heal, regulate, and truly thrive.

If you’ve been feeling exhausted, behind, or disconnected from yourself this conversation will feel like coming home.

Follow and chat with me on Instagram:

Podcast account - @thrivelikeamother.podcast

Personal account - @thrive.empowered

Sending you light and love always!

Transcript

Slowing Down As Wisdom

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Slowing down is not a weakness. It is wisdom. Hey Liv, I'm Ebony and welcome to Thrive Like a Mother. On this podcast, we're scared for our truth, but that fear is what fuels us to truly live. You're in the right place if you feel like you're stuck in survival mode and you're ready to step into who you were truly meant to be. I'll share resources and tools I use daily to help you in your journey towards a healthier mindset and to break the wheel of survival. The journey may not be easy, but you won't have to face it alone. I'm a mama of three healing day by day from past trauma, and I'm on a mission to build a life I've always dreamed of, but never thought was possible. So love, if you're ready to believe in what's possible, let's link arms and thrive together. Hey y'all, welcome back to Thrive Like a Mother. So today I want to talk about something, y'all, that honestly feels slightly rebellious in the world that we are living in right now. And that's slowing down. Y'all, it is honestly so odd to me that every single year there is like this, I don't want to say collective, right? But somewhere along the way, myself included, we were taught that speed, the speed in which you complete a goal, a task, a dream, the speed that you complete it in equals success. And that might be a millennial thing, y'all. I am turning 34 this year. And so that is just honestly the way the mindset that I grew up with is that you do it well, you do it 100 or 10%, and you do it quickly. That if we are moving fast, if we're staying busy, we're checking the boxes, if we are pushing through exhaustion and sickness, um, if we are staying strong through it all, then we are doing something right. And that if we slow down, that means that we're somehow falling behind. We're not on track, we're missing something, or we're like just not doing enough. But today I want to offer us a different perspective that really changed the way I have honestly started to move through my daily, through my work, through motherhood, and in my healing. And it's that slowing down is not falling behind, but it is actually an act of self-trust. And it's also an act of leadership. And this conversation, this is extremely important for us as women because there's so many of us who are carrying so many years of urgency within our bodies, and we carry it often without ever pausing to ask exactly where that urgency came from. And we don't talk enough about how deeply hustle culture has shaped us without us even asking, especially as women, especially as mothers. We have been conditioned to believe that rest is something that you have to earn. And you don't earn it until everything is done, which is insane because everything is never done, especially as a mother raising littles. There's no way that to-do list is ever ending. And sometimes that can feel a little bit intense. There's always another email, there's always another responsibility, something that needs to be done for your kids' class or homework, something, something always pulling us in a direction. And so that urgency it goes into default, right? Being busy starts to become part of our identity. And feeling exhausted as a mother, we start to feel like this is normal. This is just what motherhood is. And so over time, what I feel has happened to us is that our nervous systems have started to just adapt to being in this constant state of needing to do something. We are living in that survival mode that I talk about so often without without even realizing that we're in it. Our bodies are always staying alert and ready. Our minds are constantly racing and we start to disconnect from our own signals, right? Our hunger, when our bodies are telling us we're tired, our emotions, because slowing down has started to feel unsafe when it actually is something that brings us back to safety within ourselves. Because, like I said, when we when we're moving so fast, we're ignoring those signals, right? We stop listening to self. We stop noticing when we're tired, we stop noticing when we're having emotions of overwhelm. We're stopping, we're not noticing when something we're doing in our lives or an environment that we're in, we're not noticing when that no longer fits who we are in a season. And so, speed, it that constant speed of gotta keep going, gotta keep doing it pulls us out of our bodies and we stay stuck up here in our heads. We become more reactive instead of actually taking a moment to pause and respond, we start to push ahead instead of letting ourselves take that pause button. And the truth is, for me and for many women, you know, safety, like I said, it doesn't feel safe because slowing down, taking that moment to pause, what it does is it opens up opportunity and requires us to actually feel what we're feeling, to notice, to be present with what is actually happening on the inside of us. What is my nervous system? What are my cues? What are they telling me? And for some of us, slowing down, we open up that door and the opportunity to feel our emotions starts to bring up emotions we aren't exactly comfortable with, right? Like grief or fear or uncertainty, the unknown. We stay busy because not because we love it, but because it has become familiar. I'm gonna let us just sit with that for a moment. Staying busy has become familiar, and in that busyness, we allow ourselves to avoid that space to feel our emotions that make us human, that make us us individually unique. So here's here's something I'm gonna I want to throw throw at you today that I need you to hear loud and clear. Slowing down is not a weakness. It is wisdom, not a weakness. When we allow ourselves to slow down, we are giving ourselves not only the space to feel the emotions that we have to listen to our body's cues. The biggest thing is we are saying, trust myself enough to listen. You're saying, I'm willing to lead my life instead of letting that urgency lead me, letting that next thing that needs to be done lead me. You are choosing a sustainable pace. And when you do that, it doesn't always mean that you're like doing nothing. When I do want to preface that, it's not an extreme, right? Of going from the busy, busy, busy to, well, I'm just gonna sit here and do absolutely nothing. What it means is you get to be honest with yourself about doing what actually matters and what matters with intention. You allow that space when you allow yourself that space to be intentional about what matters to you in that moment on the daily, because it shifts. You might start your day off with a list and some of those things on there, they aren't matching what your body is telling you needs to actually happen. And so what happens is when you're honest with yourself, me included, this is something that I've been doing. When you're honest with yourself about what actually matters on the day-to day, it creates margins within your day that you thought you didn't have. When I talk about margins, I mean like time margins, right? So it gives you the space to breathe those things on your to-do list. It gives you a space to actually respond instead of just reacting. And when you slow down, something really powerful happens, y'all. And it gets me so excited. I have been uh going down this rabbit hole about nervous system regulation. And actually, last season on the Thor of Like a Mother podcast, I had a guest on um that really talked about nervous system regulation and like the sciencey thinks behind it. So I am absolutely gonna share that and link that in the show notes as well. If you want to get more into the science of nervous system regulation, back to nervous system regulation, right? That's the powerful thing that happens when you slow down. Your body starts to feel safer. Your mind starts to clear your decisions that you have to make throughout your day, they start to become more aligned. Because slowing down, you would think, well, if I slow down, I'm not going to get the things done. But what happens is it actually not only, I don't want to say it makes you more productive, but it makes you more present. Presence, presence is where the thriving begins. Being present in your body throughout the entire day, in each moment, being present. One of the biggest mindset shifts that I've had to make in redefining just what success looks like in slower seasons. Y'all know I have three babies. I have three babies. And what is so interesting to me is that in every single pregnancy that I've gone through, every single one was an opportunity for me to slow down because in being pregnant, I I want to say in my first one, I don't think I realized I had the option yet to slow down. But in my second pregnancy and third pregnancy, my body very clearly shouted to me almost slow down and choose intentional presence in this pregnancy. Because, you know, although nine months feels like a long time, it honestly, in the grand scheme of things, was not that long. It felt like, you know, one day I was fine y'all was pregnant, and next thing you know, here I am about to go into this delivery. Um, and for me, uh just sharing a bit of my story, I've had three c-sections. One definitely unplanned, definitely not the journey that I wanted. The second, same, same thing. Um, and then the last one, um, you know, very different in the way that I got to schedule that c-section. And so what happened for me is that I was able to allow myself to be present in my pregnancy and knowing that the delivery, sure, it was not going to be necessarily the delivery I would have hoped for and prayed for and wanted. But especially in my final pregnancy with Hermione, my final C-section, it allowed me, even though it's still one of the scariest things I've ever gone through, it allowed me to be present, to slow down. And when they were born, when they were here, that presence that I allowed myself throughout my pregnancy, it started to carry over into how I allowed myself to be present with my babies when they were here. So instead of feeling like, oh my gosh, my baby's here. I need to get back into the things of doing, especially in America. You know, as mothers, we there's so many times where a mom, me especially, personal experience, we don't get as much time. You know, if you're in the workforce, you don't get as much time, sometimes not any time at all, to be present with your babies after you are expected to start to show up again in the workforce. And so what happened for me is being present along my pregnancy and you know, through my delivery, I started to learn how to continue that presence in places that I could control. And so, in the business that I was building, or even in the podcast, you guys know that season three for me, I took many breaks during that time because I was choosing presence and choosing not to need to feel the need to move the needle, to do the things just because I needed to keep momentum. I knew that I needed to be true and honest with the pace that I needed to go at and the presence that I wanted to have during that time with my babies. And so I share all that to say that success is not always about the growth or the momentum, right? Sometimes it looks like taking time to rest. Sometimes it looks like taking time to heal. Sometimes it looks like maintaining where you're at and being okay where you're at instead of saying I need to continue to expand. There are those seasons for building, there are seasons for attending, and there are seasons for resting the soil. Me bringing in my gardening here, garden season is almost here, y'all. So, but there are seasons for certain things in your life, and none of those seasons, not the season for building, not the season for tending, not the season that we're in right now for resting the soil, none of those seasons mean that you are behind in any way because they're necessary. They are meant to remind you that you are alive, you are here, and that responding to your reality and being honest with yourself about where you are and what season you're in, you need to respond to that with care. Right? Not just honesty, but also care, grace, love. So before we close today, we're gonna take a moment, a pause, a place to land. So wherever you are, I invite you to take this pause with me. I want you to take a slow breath in through your nose, hold it for a few seconds and exhale through your mouth, let your shoulders draw, unclench your jaw, and just breathe. So here's a reflection that I want to leave you with today. In today's episode. Where in my life am I being asked to slow down, not to quit, right? Because slow and yell is not quitting. Not to quit, but to listen. And remember, you don't have to force an answer right now. Just sit with it, notice what comes up for you. Y'all, your body, a lot of the times, knows exactly what the answer to that question is a long time before your mind does. Start to listen to her. She is powerful. So, as we wrap up today, I want you to remember this as you leave. You do not need to be more worthy. You are worthy exactly as you are. Your accomplishments and you know, your tasks that you complete throughout the day. Do not go into like this little bank that says how worthy you are. You already are worthy because God made you. And you don't need to move faster to be enough, to be doing enough. You are truly allowed, and I'm gonna say this, you are the only one also who knows what peace is going to support your mental health, your physical health, and your nervous system. No one else has to trust you, love. And you're allowed to honor those slower seasons without the guilt. Bring in the grace, please. We are a lot harder, and I've been saying this a lot of a lot of my um friends, we are a lot harder on ourselves than anyone else in this world, oftentimes. That voice be loud, y'all, in the back. But slowing down, slowing down allows you to lower the volume on that voice that is telling you that you're falling, you're gonna fall behind because you slow down. Because you're not slowing down is coming back home to yourself, checking back in with self, trusting yourself. So thank you for taking the time today to slow down with me. And I will meet you right back here next week, where we will just continue to keep returning back to ourselves, anchoring right here at home. One intentional moment at a time. Thank you so much for listening, love. If anything in today's episode resonated with you, share it with your bestie or share it on social media and tag me so we can chat about it. As always, sending you light and love, and remember you are worthy, you are enough, and you deserve to thrive.