Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

When Life Gets Heavy– Slow Down, Drop Weight, & Adapt

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 111

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In this episode, Amanda shares a personal story about her shift from running to walking—and eventually walking with a weighted vest—and how this physical adaptation revealed powerful lessons about nervous system regulation, healing, and mental health. She explores what happens when the tools that once worked no longer serve us, why slowing down is often exactly what our bodies need, and how to adapt our regulation practices to match our current season of life. Whether you’re carrying too much or moving too fast, this episode invites you to move slower, carry less, and get curious about what’s next.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why we sometimes freeze when familiar coping tools disappear.
  • The science-backed benefits of walking for stress and brain processing.
  • Getting creative to find the "next best thing" for regulation when resources change (like losing access to sunlight in winter).
  • The powerful principle: If you want life to feel easier, move slower and decrease the weight.
  • Practical ways to apply this principle to reduce stress and overwhelm.

3 Takeaways:

  1. Adaptation is a key part of regulation.
  2. Slowing down isn’t failure—it’s often the medicine we need.
  3. "If you want life to feel easier, move slower and decrease the weight." 

Practical Application: This week, choose one area of your life where you're feeling pressure or stress and experiment with the formula: move slower, decrease the weight. Notice how your body responds, how your breathing changes, and how your thoughts shift.

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Amanda Armstrong  0:00  
Welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now, let's dive in. 

Amanda Armstrong  0:27  
Today. I want to share with you a little bit of a personal story that has been teaching me some really profound lessons about adaptation, nervous system regulation, and really it's about finding new tools when our old ones stop working or aren't available anymore, and I think that through this story, there are some really beautiful parallels here for mental health and healing that might resonate with many of you. So yesterday, I decided to jump on the bandwagon of going for walks while wearing a weighted vest. Now this might seem like a random fitness choice. What does it have to do with mental health? But there is a deeper story here that will provide context for what I will share in a handful of minutes that I hope resonates with your healing journey. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:18  
So for most of my life, I have been a runner. I don't think I have ever once turned to a friend and said, Hey, like I'm going to go for a walk later, or we should go for a walk while we chat. It was always want to go for a run. I was on my university's track and field team. I would run, and then I would lift really heavy things like 300 plus pounds, heavy things at one point, intense exercise was a huge part of my identity. It was my go to for stress relief, for mental clarity, physical well being. It was how I hung out with my friends, and a lot of that has changed in the last handful of years in my life. I moved so I lost a lot of my fitness community. I entered a season of growing tiny humans and a lot of the struggles and complications that came with that, but specifically for today, last year, I had an almost seven month battle with really terrible plantar fasciitis. For those of you who don't know what that is, it often creates a pain in your heel. And there were days when I had pain even walking, and I was on a very, very strict no running, no jumping, no impact, anything order from doctors. And when this injury happened, it completely disrupted the movement habits that I had settled into. And here's the thing, it didn't just stop me from running. I dropped my ex my consistent exercise habit entirely. I didn't replace running with lower impact cardio or strength training. It was like something went off in my brain. It was like, Well, if I can't run, I guess I can't do anything, which for me specifically, is actually pretty wild, because for the last two decades of my life, physical activity has played such a huge role. 

Amanda Armstrong  3:06  
And let's now fast forward to, I don't know, about two or three months ago, my foot is healed, and I am starting to feel really, really fed up with not having a consistent movement practice in my life, but I am also now navigating a high risk pregnancy where higher impact exercises like running still aren't recommended. And I just had kind of an honest moment with myself, and it was like, Well, look, if you can't do that, then what can you do? And where I decided to start was I committed to this two mile kind of out and back trail that's near my house, because I just I had to do something. And the good news is, is that most mornings, almost all mornings, in the last couple months, I have woken up, gotten my shoes on, gotten my butt out the door and gone on this two mile walk. And I have to admit here that I have actually previously had an opinion that walking for exercise was just a waste of time. It was too slow. It's not intense enough. My nervous system is wired for that runner's high for pushing limits. But what I have learned is that the reality is that walking is actually one of the best and most biologically aligned types of movement that we need as humans, and the research on walking and mental health is actually pretty remarkable as well. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:42  
Did you know that a 20 minute walk in nature can decrease cortisol levels by 10% that's rad, or that the rhythmic, bilateral movement that happens when we walk helps our brain process emotional information. So there's really fascinating research showing. That the left right movement patterns of walking actually helps our brain process traumatic memories and stressful experiences. And this is why therapies like EMDR, which uses bilateral stimulation, can be really effective for trauma and walking naturally creates a similar bilateral stimulation that helps our brain integrate these experiences. It's like giving our nervous system a chance to file away all of the inputs and stressors that we're constantly taking in. And as someone who lived with anxiety for years, I was drawn to the intensity of running partly because it matched the intensity of my internal state. When you're anxious, there is often this urgency, this feeling of needing to move fast, to do more running, lifting, really heavy weights matched that energy for me. But in healing, sometimes what we need isn't to match our dysregulated state, but instead to gently guide it towards something different. And it turns out that I have really benefited from my morning walks in ways that I didn't expect over the last couple months. There are many, many mornings when I can sense and feel that my body is genuinely grateful for movement that isn't so intense. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:26  
I should also share that for a long time, I wasn't just a runner from a fitness standpoint, and if you've been listening to the podcast for a while now, this isn't new news for you, but for many, years, I basically lived every arena of my life at a full sprint. I took 22 units of grad school while working two jobs. I decided to take on a part time CrossFit coaching job while working full time at Google, and eventually, I actually started my business while still coaching part time and working full time at Google. I said yes to more when I was already squeezing into every minute of my day and on and on and on. It was full speed all the time, and that pace of living, in part, is what contributed to my high functioning anxiety, eventually crashing into depression, into total burnout and adrenal fatigue. My system was constantly activated, constantly in that sympathetic yellow zone of fight or flight that we've talked about in so many previous episodes. And that is just not sustainable endlessly. 

Amanda Armstrong  7:38  
So back to this slower pace of my morning walks, they really have become a time when my mind gets to wander, when it gets to think more curiously or creatively about things that are happening in my life, about ways to run my business or my home, to show up in my relationships. I get to pet many of my neighbor's dogs on my walk, which is a huge glimmer and joy for me. I have had an opportunity to greet so many people with a smile every morning. There are so many wonderful things that I experience while walking that I simply didn't when running. And the same goes for slowing down and being more present in my everyday life as well. My pace in general has just considerably shifted over the last five or six years. And one more thing about walking is that it actually creates what neuroscientists call a quote, default mode network state in the brain, which is a relaxed but alert state where creativity and insight can more naturally emerge, which is a stark contrast to the way that our brain operates when we are in a more hyper vigilant, goal focused, tunnel vision state that can happen when we are always too busy or always pushing really hard. 

Amanda Armstrong  9:07  
So coming back to yesterday's walk with a weighted vest, where does the weighted vest come in? So while yes, there are many mornings that the slower pace movement really, really serves me, I am also finding lately that I have been feeling a little bit itchy for some of the intensity that running and heavier lifting gave me. And while walking the other day, the thought or question dropped into my mind like, Okay, well, how could I make these walks more challenging? And my old personal training brain immediately parroted, well, if you want to make things harder, you move faster, or you add load. That's something that I used to say as a crossfit coach and a strength and conditioning coach all the time, we make things more challenging, because in those arenas, the goal was usually to make things more challenging. You make things harder by moving faster. Faster or adding load. And when it comes to my morning walks, I don't think I can walk any faster without chafing my inner thighs into oblivion, so I opted for adding load, and I ordered a weighted vest. I could make walking heavier with a weighted vest. And like I said, I'm only a couple days in, but it feels fun. And what I know also about weighted walking is that it's going to benefit my bone density. It's going to help improve posture. It's something that is safe for my current pregnancy. It's also going to keep my body more ready to go backpacking again as soon as I feel healed enough postpartum. 

Amanda Armstrong  10:38  
So one of the things here is the part of fitness, part of healing, part of life is knowing when to scale back, to lift less, to move slower, and also to have the insight for when we have the capacity to do more, to lift heavier, to build resilience for our future. And I share this story as context for two really important things that I want to talk about today when it comes to mental health and your nervous system regulation. And the first is that when the things you used to do aren't options anymore, when the tools that used to work seem to stop working, don't do what I initially did, and replace it with nothing when old ways or tools aren't an option, get creative. Ask yourself, what's the next best thing? What are other regulation tools or practices that can step in right now? And this applies to so many aspects of mental health and nervous system regulation, maybe the therapist that you loved moved away. Maybe the medication that worked for years isn't effective now. Maybe the relationship that was your primary support system has changed. And I was reminded of this recently during a Q and A inside the regulated living membership community where someone asked, quote, I find that sitting outside in the sun is a huge way to proactively and even reactively regulate my nervous system. In spring and summer months, this resource is readily available to me, but in winter months, sadly, it's not. Do you have any suggestions for people who use sunlight as a tool in their toolkit but don't have it during winter? Do I just have to accept that it's not available to me? And this is such a great question, because the reality is our regulation tools and resources, they're not static. They change with seasons. They change with life circumstances, with our own evolution as humans. The key is to identify the elements of what made that resource work for you, and then find creative alternatives when they aren't as available for someone missing sunlight as a regulation tool we might explore. Was it the warmth? Could you try a heating pad, a warm bath, an infrared sauna? Was it the bright light? Could you supplement with a happy light, or brightening your indoor environment. Was it being in nature? Okay, go outside. Just wear a coat. Was it the vitamin D? Okay? Go outside and also consider supplementing vitamin D. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:10  
The principle here is that our regulation toolkit needs to be diverse and adaptable. We need multiple ways to feel safe, grounded and connected, and when some of those primary ways shift or change, what can we do instead? What's the next best thing? And the second thing that I want to touch on, that my personal story set us up for, is that personal training principle I mentioned that quote, If you want to make it harder, move faster or add weight. But here's the thing, most of you are not listening to a podcast like mine because you want or need your daily life to be harder. Many of you are already carrying too much. You're already moving too fast and feeling overwhelmed by the weight and the pace of it all. So I want to flip this principle if you want life to feel easier, move slower and decrease the weight. This is such a simple formula, but it's so powerful, and it can also be really, really hard to put into practice in your daily life, given certain circumstances, or even just your nervous system's default to gravitate towards more, towards faster. When we're feeling overwhelmed or dysregulated, one of the first things that happens is we speed up our thoughts, race our breathing quickens. Our movements become more hurried. We take on more, say yes to more, pile more onto our already full plates. For me, it was always on this mindset of, well, if I just get done more now, if I just do this all really fast right now, then I can rest. But there was always. Is more to add. And even if there wasn't naturally more to add because of the state of my system, I would have found more to add because the rest actually was uncomfortable. And we do this. So many of you listening do this, and yet what we often need most is to slow down, is to deliberately set down some of the weight that we are carrying and slowing down could look a million different ways. It could be taking three deep breaths before responding in a conversation, building buffer time between meetings or your commitments, committing to having a weekend where there's nothing on the schedule. 

Amanda Armstrong  15:48  
It could be setting a timer to pause for 60 seconds before immediately switching tasks, walking more slowly, washing your dishes more slowly, paying attention to your feet on the ground or the temperature of the water running over your hands. It could be speaking at a more measured pace. Similarly, decreasing the weight in your life can look a million different ways, saying no to additional commitments, delegating tasks that aren't essential for you to do personally, maybe just letting some things go undone. Go to bed without wiping down the counter. I think you'll probably survive. Try it, test it, setting boundaries around your time and your energy. Maybe it's releasing the weight of relationships that are constantly draining you or challenging, the weight that perfectionism brings and embracing just a good enough mentality. 

Amanda Armstrong  16:43  
What's beautiful about this approach is that it also works both proactively and reactively. So when you notice yourself starting to feel overwhelmed, you can immediately implement this formula. I'm overwhelmed. My stress bucket is full. I'm getting pushed down on that nervous system ladder. What can I do right now to slow down or set down weight? You can also do this more proactively. When you are planning your days or your weeks. You can build in more spaciousness and carefully consider what weight is actually yours to carry. And what I love about both of these lessons is that they honor the reality that we're constantly evolving. Our bodies change our life circumstances change our nervous system adapts and has different needs at different times and sometimes, like in my case, with switching from running to this weighted walking, we find that the adaptation actually opens up new benefits that we couldn't have anticipated. 

Amanda Armstrong  17:45  
The slower pace has given me access to more creativity and presence that I was missing before. The added weight gives me a different kind of strength. And so I am curious, and I want to invite you to take just a moment and reflect what are the tools and resources that might have changed for you recently? What adaptations have you had to make in your regulation strategies, or what adaptations could you benefit from making in your regulation strategies? Have you discovered any unexpected benefits from these changes? Are you in a season of your life where you actually have more capacity than normal? Okay, cool. What can I take on? What can I do now that's going to help me build some strength and some resiliency to handle future challenges, or are you in a season of life that feels so heavy and so hard?

Amanda Armstrong  18:48  
Okay, what can you do to move slower? What can you do to do less? And I think that's one of the most powerful things about the work that we do with our clients is so often when you are in it, you've got that tunnel vision. You're like, I can't I can't do anything differently, and I can't put anything down. And usually it's through our stress bucket assessment and then the following stress bucket Edit process that we do with our clients that we're able to hold this safe space for them to look at all of the things that they're doing and then mirror that against their core values, and without fail, every single time at least a few things become available, to do less of to do slower or to put down entirely. 

Amanda Armstrong  19:38  
So before we wrap up today, I want to leave you with a simple practice to try. This week, I invite you to pick one area of your life where you are feeling pressure or stress and experiment with that formula, move slower or decrease the weight. This might be an actual. Physical physical activity like literally walking more slowly or more mindfully, it might be more of a metaphorical application, slowing down your decision making process, or setting down the weight of trying to please everybody around you. Notice what happens when you give yourself this permission. Notice how your body responds. Notice how your breathing changes, notice how your thoughts shift. And in this I want to offer an echoed reminder that I give often here, which is regulation isn't about being perfectly calm all the time. It is about having the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining a sense of safety and agency. Sometimes that means finding new tools when old ones aren't available. Sometimes that means intentionally going against our habitual patterns of speeding up and taking on more. And sometimes it might even mean going against habitual patterns of moving slow not taking on enough, and so just offering today's conversation as a moment for you to just reflect, where do you need to maybe be more adaptable, where what season are you in a season of being able to take on more? What could that look like in a way that's going to benefit you in the long run of your healing journey? Or are you in a season that feels like too much, and how can we slow down and put down and make more space? 

Amanda Armstrong  21:28  
All right, bringing it all together. Today's three takeaways. 

Amanda Armstrong  21:33  
Number one, adaptation is a key part of regulation when your familiar tools or routines no longer work, whether it's due to injury, life circumstance, seasonal shifts, your nervous system doesn't need you to give up. It needs you to adapt. Healing is about evolving your toolkit to fit the season that you're in, not trying to force old tools to keep working. 

Amanda Armstrong  21:57  
Number two, slowing down isn't failure, it's often the exact medicine we need, because many of us are wired to match our internal chaos with external intensity. But true healing often comes from doing the opposite, slower, more intentional movement, like walking, can calm the nervous system, can support creativity and can give your body a chance to integrate, rather than just brace for what's next. 

Amanda Armstrong  22:28  
And number three is, if you want life to feel easier, move slower and decrease the weight. This simple formula, if you will, offers a powerful antidote to overwhelm, deliberately slowing your pace and reducing your load creates space for your nervous system to regulate, to integrate, especially when anxiety has you rushing to take on more. 

Amanda Armstrong  23:01  
All right, friend, that is it as always. Thank you for being here, for courageously stepping into your healing in this way. If you heard something on today's episode that benefited you, this is an invitation for you to share it, to send it, put it on social media, because what resonates with you, I can guarantee, is going to resonate with someone else, and you are my greatest asset in helping to bring these conversations, these tools, these practices, to more people who need them. Thanks for being here, and until next week, I am sending hope and healing your way. 

Amanda Armstrong  23:37  
Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

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