When Life Gets in the Way of Healing

In this episode, Amanda gets candid about what regulated living actually looks like when life gets hard — including the sleep deprivation, the skipped workouts, and the very human experience of teaching what you're currently struggling to practice. She walks through the two things that keep her grounded in chaotic seasons: flexibility and context. She also shares her five domains of healing and the Daily Five as a framework for strategic, adaptable healing that meets you where you actually are.

3 Takeaways:

1. Flexibility is a healing skill. When one foundation slips, pivot to what's accessible. Doing less well is still doing something.
2. Your symptoms make sense given the load. Context isn't an excuse — it's accurate information that guides you back to what you need.
3. Healing is strategic. The six domains of healing give you a map so that when life gets chaotic, you know where to look instead of trying harder at everything at once.

CLICK HERE for the full show notes, resources, and 3 tangible takeaways!

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Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Website: https://www.regulatedliving.com/podcast

Email: amanda@regulatedliving.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 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. Today is going to be a pretty candid reality check, I think, for you, for me, in just how messy healing looks like sometimes. So a few days ago, I was thinking about the last few episodes here on the podcast on sleep anxiety. And I'm preparing one for next week on the value of morning sunlight, which is another simple daily habit that can have measurable ripple effects to support your physiology and emotional regulation. And in the middle of all of this, I caught myself thinking, like, oh man, I feel like such a hypocrite. I feel like such a hypocrite sometimes preparing these podcasts right now, talking about why sleep or sunlight matters, how important it is to have a consistent wake up time or eat breakfast that gives you enough calories and balances your blood sugar and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When so much of that is falling through the cracks in my life right now. To give you some context, for the last four or five weeks, two of my kids have basically played wake up tag team all night long. Oftentimes my husband's in with the baby, and then I go in with the three-year-old, and then we get a couple hours of sleep, and then another one wakes up. And I can, I can logically contextualize this. They're three, barely 10 months. This is a phase of our lives. It's not going to last forever. And yet it doesn't change the reality that I am so tired. I am so, so tired. And almost perfectly coinciding with the sleep anxiety series, where I am giving you all the solutions for helping you to fall back asleep at two or three in the morning. I am now finding myself being woken up by a kid, you know, two, three, four in the morning, and like really struggling to go back to bed after that. And I'm just like, oh, the irony. Oh, the irony. And then again, in this morning's sunlight episode, I am going to reiterate the importance of a consistent wake up time. And while that is true, and I am going to make that point in that conversation, I'm living the reality that in the last five days, my wake up times were 3:30, 5, 2, 6.30 AMs, and a 4 a.m. And then we move into breakfast. And some of the mornings it just feels easier to eat the scraps off my kids' breakfast plates than to like make my own full breakfast plate. I'm also realizing that if I'm not getting to the gym, if I'm not doing my workout in the morning, there's like a 70% chance that I'm not going to get it in. But also, who wants to wake up early and go work out when your kids woke them up three to four times last night? And I want to share this because behind the scenes of all of the quote, like research-supported habits that I share, I share here on this podcast, is the oftentimes chaotic reality of life, even for me. And while I know all of these foundations matter, I teach about them here because they do. And when our clients dial in, at least some of these, we watch their lives change. We watch their symptoms decrease. We watch them have a more stable physiological baseline, a more regulated nervous system, so that they can step in and do the deeper work that they need to do to really move the needle in their healing. So while I know that these things need to be integrated into my life with some measure of fidelity for me to feel regulated, well, and energized, what I just explained to you is still my reality. And I think there are two things that save me most in these moments or in these seasons, these weeks, sometimes months, when I feel like a fraud preaching what I cannot practice very well right now. And the first, the first thing that I think saves me in this is flexibility. I have not always been very flexible. I would even say now, I'm not the most flexible human. I kind of like, I like things to go a certain way. But I have flexibility because of how deeply I understand how intertwined our physiology is with our psychology. I understand that when one foundational piece like sleep for me right now, when it feels out of my control and it feels maddening, I am able to pivot and focus on another area that is supportive and more within my control or within my current capacity. So flexibility for me right now looks like knowing that I cannot control how many times my kids wake up in the night, or sometimes whether I can fall back asleep again after that final 3 or 4 a.m. wake up. But there are other things that mostly are in my control, like the time that I go to bed, how I nourish myself in the morning. I cannot be sleep deprived, calorie deficient, and dehydrated. I learned that the hard way last week, where I migraine so hard that I puked. And I would really love to not do that again. So I have committed to controlling the controllables. I have moved my bedtime up. I am in bed right now by like 8:30. 8:30 or 9. I am letting my house just stay a little bit messier because I am not taking the time at night to do that full reset post-bedtime. And then in the morning, even when I don't feel like eating another scrambled egg, when I don't feel like eating a full breakfast, I'm just choosing to do it anyways, because self-discipline is self-care a lot of times. And so I make that full prey to breakfast and I chug that big old glass of water. And while this doesn't put me at 100% when I've had five, six hours of sleep the night before, it fills in the gaps where I can. One of the other changes I've been making is I'm dialing down the intensity of my workouts right now because I'm not at 100%. And if I try to exercise and lift like I am, I'm gonna end up further burnt out or injured. So I've learned both of those things the hard way, unfortunately. But part of regulated living is flexibility. It is adaptability because life is rarely happening under consistent optimal circumstances. And so, where coaching can be so supportive for folks is to help them figure out in specifics for this season of their life what this can look like. And that's what we do a lot of times in the membership is somebody saying, Hey, this is what I need to work on. This is the habit I'm trying to establish. Here's all of the obstacles in the way of that. Like, Amanda, help me figure out what is the small step I can take, what is the thing that I can do? What are my controllables right now? Because X, Y, and Z feel so out of control. And I need to have some stability here. So the first thing that saves me when I sometimes feel like I'm a fraud talking into this microphone or preparing these podcasts is this reminder that I need flexibility and that it is so human of me, even being the person here, talking to all of you, teaching all of these foundations and the importance of them, how human of me to also fall short of like an ideal standard in all of these areas. The second thing that I think saves me is understanding that these things, these daily foundational basics, holding myself accountable to the fact that they do in fact matter. And this might feel like a little bit of a catch-22. So stick with me. These play a role in my symptoms. So when I am feeling more anxious or snappy or have trouble focusing on worse tasks, or even when I reach the point of shutdown or apathy or just feeling like I can't care about one more thing, I don't pathologize those symptoms. I can look at it with the perspective of, all right, yeah, it's 3 p.m. You just yelled at your kids and then you walked out of the room to cry for a few minutes. Or you woke up feeling numb today, like you just didn't want to get out of bed. You don't care about anything. My inner voice that I have worked on for years and years and years and years and years. My inner voice comes in now and often sounds like, okay, like, okay, sweet self. Of course. Of course you did. Of course you just snapped at your kid. Of course you just cried. Of course you're so exhausted you don't care right now. Like you're on four days of crappy sleep. Your headache is because it's 3 p.m. and you haven't had more than a single glass of water. And kids are just annoying sometimes. I am not broken. There's nothing wrong with me for being annoyed with my kids or feeling activated or depleted in a body that's actually depleted. And for me, this context matters so much because this clearer picture of having this accurate context can more accurately guide me back to the things I can tangibly focus on right here, right now, in this moment, today, or tomorrow. And are there deeper things to address for me to be my best self? For sure. I'm in therapy working on relational patterns and how they tie to my childhood and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. But that deeper work has no place to land if the reality of my present life is depletion and chronic stress. If the reality of my present life is that my physiology is constantly in survival mode because of not just one or two of these biologically imperative habits or areas of my life that are off, but all of them. If I'm under-eating or overeating or under-exercising or overexercising, if I'm not sleeping enough, if I'm dehydrated, if my environment, all of those things that matter. And the reason I teach about all of them is not because I'm saying, hey, do all of them and do all of them perfectly and do all of them the well, but I'm saying, hey, all of these matter. And I want you to know about that. I want you to have buy-in. I want you to have context. Because inevitably, in almost every season of your life, one or two of these things is going to have a variable that you can't control. That's gonna be a, that's gonna be a bummer, that can be maddening, that can be annoying, it can feel like it's gonna set you back in your healing. But do you remember that I talked about seven other things? Maybe can you put a little more effort or energy towards stabilizing your system in one of those ways right now? One of the things that I know for myself and that we often help clients identify really explicitly, is what we call their number one self-care habit. So, my question for you right now is do you know for you, what is the number one thing that when it's happening pretty well, pretty consistently, other things just feel easier? Is it when I am sleeping good enough most of the time? Is it when I'm exercising consistently? Is it eating breakfast? Is it getting morning sunlight? Is it making sure that I have at least one quality friend date a week across these domains? And I'll, I'll mention them briefly later, but we're gonna talk about them on the podcast again and again, what I call kind of these daily anchors or these different domains of healing. Are you crystal clear on the number one or the number two that tend to have the highest payoff for you? And I want you and we want our clients, and it's important for myself to be really clear about what those are, because when they enter a season of life, like I feel like I'm in right now, where like my 40% right now, my 40% is 100%. And so when you or our clients enter a season similar, they know and they already have permission to let the other habits or the other should, I should do, I shouldn't do, they can let them go to singularly focus on the one or two things they know have the highest payoff. And again, this is where coaching can often look very different than what people typically experience in therapy, because coaching can and is often a little bit more strategic and tangible. We sit with you in the chaos, in the reality of your daily life to help you figure out not just that you should be getting better sleep, but exactly how and what that next step looks like based on your current reality. For example, just last week, just a couple days ago, I had a discovery call with somebody who just opted into restore, which is our one-on-one coaching program. And on that call, because he has a therapist, he's working with a therapist. And I said, What is it that you're hoping to get from working with us in our program that's different than the work that you're doing in therapy? And the usals came up of I really want a nervous system approach, I need some tangible tools. But one of the things he said really explicitly to me was, for example, I feel like I'm doing helpful work with my therapist, but I'm also feeling stuck. Last week she told me, and like, quote, you need to get more sleep. But she didn't talk about how to do it. She's previously told me I should consider exercising more consistently, but we never talk about why I'm not doing that or how to make that happen in my life right now. End quote. And so the deep work that you might be doing in therapy, it is important. It matters, but sometimes it can only create as much change as your current daily life and habits and circumstances and relationships allow for your well-being. I spent years, years understanding my past and how that created my triggers. Knowing why I was struggling was not enough to get me out of my struggle. I had to make some big fundamental changes about my life on a daily basis to truly get to the other side of my anxiety and my depression. And right now, my husband and I are in couples therapy. We are there because we've noticed and we've recognized some bigger patterns that we need help looking at and working through and skill sets. But we also recognize that all of the awareness and the skills and the work that we might do in therapy are only going to get us so far if we don't have less chronic daily stress in our lives. And so when it comes to healing, we have to approach it. We have to put both these things on the table: the deep, the deep work, the relational patterns, the mindset stuff, the self-belief, the protective parts, and the daily stressors or supporters and the balance or imbalance of those things. And my goal with my regulated living practice and this podcast is just to consistently and regularly bring this conversation to life and in the way that we work with clients to bring a lot of these things under one roof. In at least the way that we acknowledge, understand, and approach our symptoms and our healing. We have to, in this journey for healing, and I am speaking as much to you as I am a reminder to myself in this season, we have to consider more broadly these domains of healing. And then look at the more specific daily habits and the practices that are non-negotiable for human well-being, these non-negotiable inputs to our biology, things our nervous system needs to have capacity to register safety. And so when I am talking about the habits and like these episodes that I'm talking about scripting, when I talk about habits on this podcast that are fundamental to wellness, I really try my best to not come across as saying, like, hey, sleep more, eat better, exercise, and you're gonna heal because mental health struggles, humans, and life, we are so much more complex than that. But I also want to reiterate, I think I've probably reiterated this three times in just this conversation alone. I want to make a very clear point that if you aren't hitting those basic things to some non-negotiable biological standard, you should expect to feel unwell. You should expect symptoms and fatigue and trouble falling asleep and low sex drive and appetite and high anxiety and shut down, like trouble-regulating emotions. When you layer lots of real-time deficiencies and depletedness from bad sleep, poor nutrition, dehydration, over or under-exercising, with the complicated trauma and drama of your past. When we can look at it that way, the number one thing that I hear from the clients that we work with, and even from you, the listeners here on this podcast, is oh, it makes sense. I make sense. My symptoms make sense. And that is kind of the crack or the switch that gets flipped that really starts to move the needle in people's healing, where our coaching practice gets into that, oh, this makes sense. All of the pieces are on the table. Where do we want to start? What is a meaningful and an accessible place to start? And what I think makes the regulated living approach so effective, but also so tricky and sticky to sometimes articulate really simply and concisely. I have people all the time who are like, oh, what do you do? I'm like, I run a mental health coaching practice. We specialize in anxiety and depression, but like from a they're like, oh, you're a therapist. I'm like, yeah, no, like we take a more physiology first approach and we do blood work, but we also do parts work. And we're also like, yeah, I haven't quite nailed, haven't quite nailed that elevator pitch yet. But what again, I think makes this approach so effective and so nuanced is what I'm constantly trying to say, which is that healing, true lasting healing happens when you consider all of the categories that influence our mental health. One of the things that we do really well is we help people look at these five areas or these five primary domains of healing: physiology, psychology, environment, relationships, and self. And there are a number of subcategories under each of those things. There is a proactive and a reactive way in which we approach different elements of those things. But strategic healing happens when you can zoom out and when you can consider each of these. Like, what are the things that are happening for me physiologically under the surface? The nervous system states, maybe my blood work, my habits. What about psychologically, the mindset, the limiting beliefs, our parts, our protectors, the environments, work, home, communal environments, relationships, our sense of self, our meaning, our purpose? So much becomes clearer in the why you're struggling and exactly what you can do to move forward, where you have control, where you can move the needle, where you can't, when you take a look at those things. And then you ask yourself, which one of these domains is currently contributing to my suffering most? Which one of these domains has the most supporters available to me? What feels the most supportive right now? Which of these areas is accessible and needs support right now? What would that look like? And then oftentimes we need somebody who is going to get into the boring weeds and logistics of what making a change somewhere actually looks like, what it actually means. Sometimes it means sleep habits, and other times it's going to look at looking at a decades-old trigger. And true healing that holds is as much about looking at building awareness, starting to move the needle in some of those grander areas, those domains of healing, as well as stepping into those daily habits, those daily things, something that we at Regulated Living call our daily five on a regular basis. How am I sleeping? How am I nourishing? How am I moving? How am I regulating or training my capacity? And what does connection look like? So we've been a lot of places in this conversation. There's been a lot on my mind lately as I've been trying to create a more streamlined and clearly articulated framework and just the ways that I am talking about regulated living and sharing and teaching all of you, and yet feeling so chaotic in my personal life. So I want to wrap this up. And the point I am trying to make is that healing is both simpler and more complicated than we often want it to be. Simpler because there are some things that are just true, right? Human beings need sleep. We need nourishment, movement, connection. We need ways to process stress and to build capacity. These things are not trendy wellness habits. They are biological imperatives. They are biological requirements. And then I think healing is more complicated than we often want it to be because there is no blueprint for what this is supposed to look like, or at least no universal blueprint. There's just yours and mine and theirs. And it's also more complicated because none of us live in a laboratory. We live in marriages and divorces. We live with toddlers who wake up all night long and teens who only want to chat at 11 p.m. We live through grief and layoffs and trauma and caregiving and financial stress and chronic illness and seasons where doing the dishes feels like the most monumental task. The goal is not perfect execution of healthy habits every time, of a perfectly regulated response to every situation. Our lives. The goal is learning how to work with reality. It is in understanding what inputs matter most for you, which ones are currently available to you, and how to make supportive choices within the life that you are actually living instead of the life that you wish you were living or you think you should be living or that you used to be living. Because every week when I hop on this mic and I have these conversations with you, when I talk about regulated living, I never want it to feel like another impossible standard to feel like a failure at. What it is, is it is meant to be a framework that helps you navigate hard seasons with more compassion, with more clarity, with more tangible tools and strategy and confidence. And right now, if I'm being honest, my life, like I've shared, does not look like the ideal version of regulated living. Friends, I'm again, I'm tired. My sleep is inconsistent. My workouts are not what I wish they were. My house is messier than I'd prefer. And yet, even in this, I still feel pretty grounded, or at least somewhat grounded most days. Not because everything is perfect, but because I have context for understanding what season I am in. I know what is contributing to how I'm feeling. I know what levers I can pull and which ones I can't right now. And perhaps most importantly, I know that healing and this process of becoming our most healed, our most authentic selves, it's not something that you either do perfectly or fail at completely. It is made up, this journey of healing is made up of thousands of small adjustments. It is adapting, it is responding, it is coming back to the basics over and over and over and over again. So if you are listening to this and you are feeling behind, if you are feeling like you are failing at times, or you just don't know what to do right now, I want to invite you to ask yourself a couple of these questions. Is number one, reflect on and ask yourself, what season of life am I actually in right now? Is it a season of optimizing? Am I doing well and now I can optimize? Or is it a season of baseline, of establishing those foundations? Because I right now would love to be in a season of optimizing. And there are some areas of my life in which I am, but for the most part, right now, I'm just trying to re-establish baseline in life that has really, really just knocked me off all the wagons. And then I want you to ask yourself: what is the most supportive next step or tiny helpful choice that is available to me today, right now? Because again, healing rarely happens through these dramatic transformations. Most often it happens through consistent, imperfect, flexible actions and attention to the things that matter most and are accessible today. And if you have listened to this podcast for any length of time, you know that that's that's what it's all about. We talk about tiny habits 1% all the time, not perfection, not optimization, about learning how to support your nervous system, your body, and your mind through the reality of being human. And sometimes being human looks like morning sunshine and strength training and protein-packed breakfasts and feeling amazing. And sometimes it looks like surviving on interrupted sleep, reheated coffee, a season of deep grief, or reminding yourself for the fifth time today to drink some freaking water. Healing is never gonna be a one size fits all. There's never gonna be the 10-step formula to reclaiming your life from anxiety or from depression. I wish I could hand you that. Healing is not linear. And it's rarely, if ever, gonna happen under ideal circumstances. And so having people in your corner who understand this, who have knowledge of all the domains that could be contributing to your symptoms that can help you be strategic and flexible can be what makes all the difference in your healing. And if you are hearing that, if you are hearing this conversation and thinking, I want someone to actually help me do this in my life, that is exactly what Restore is. It's not a program where we hand you some generic protocol and send you on your way. It is four months of somebody actually in the work with you. We're taking a look at all of those domains. You're getting comprehensive blood work done to look at what's going on under the surface. We figure out what your current life can actually hold and then help you get clear on what strategic healing looks like for you right now, but also the long-term path of the big and small things that you will need to look at. You will need to take on as capacity allows to be well. And so if you are curious about what that looks like, there's always a link in the show notes to book a completely pressure-free discovery call with me, with me personally. And I start almost every single one of those with hey, I just want you to know there's no, there's no particular agenda that we follow for these calls. It's really just an opportunity for you and I to talk about where you are with your mental health, what's worked for you, what hasn't worked for you. And it gives me an opportunity to answer any questions you have about restore or regulated living to see if it is the right next step for you. And even if at the end of that call you decide that it's not, usually you're gonna walk away from that call with some suggestions from me about where else or what else might be a more appropriate next step for. So if that feels like a helpful conversation, I would love to connect with you sometime next week. Now, let's wrap it up. Here's the three takeaways from today's call. Number one, flexibility is a healing skill. When one of our foundations is out of our control, our move is not to spiral, it is to pivot. So for me right now, I would love for sleep to be dialed in. I'm so committed to my sleep right now. And it doesn't matter how committed I am to my sleep right now or how good my sleep hygiene is right now, my children, my children are ruining it. And so I am needing to lean into flexibility and to be adaptable and to dial up some of these other foundations that maybe don't matter as much when my sleep is really dialed in. Control your controllables. Number two, your symptoms make sense. Your symptoms make sense when our foundation slips and when you feel that your anxiety, your snappiness, your shutdown, that's not, it's often not a disorder. And having that context, at least for me and for our clients, changes just about everything. Number three is that healing is strategic. In healing, if you haven't already, this is my invitation for you to consider those different domains of healing, to get curious about the physiology, the psychology, environments, relationships, lifestyle, meaning, sense of meaning and purpose. How much of your symptoms are rooted in those different domains? And what would the approach to meeting yourself in that domain, moving the needle in that domain? Do you need a different kind of support? Different using this to give you a framework for where to look when you're struggling instead of just trying a little harder at everything all at once. All right, friends. That is it. Until next week, I am sending so much hope and healing your way.