Ep. 223: Clutter Help: When Your Brain Feels Full and Your Life Doesn't Fit Anymore

Before we get into anything, I want to ask you something. And I want you to actually sit with this. Don't just let it float past you.

Have you hit your 40s or 50s and found yourself thinking…when did I become so tired?

Not just physically tired. Not just the kind of tired that a good night's sleep fixes. I'm talking about bone-deep, soul-level, I-have-been-running-on-fumes-for-longer-than-I-want-to-admit tired.

The kind of tired where you sit down at the end of the day…finally, for the first time since six a.m. and instead of feeling relief, your brain just kicks into a different gear. Now you're running through tomorrow's appointments. You're replaying a conversation you had with your teenager that didn't go right. You're trying to remember if you ever actually responded to that email from last Tuesday. You're wondering if you said the wrong thing to your friend. You're mentally adding up the grocery list. You're calculating how many days until the next thing you're supposed to have handled.

And somewhere underneath all of that noise, there's this quiet, exhausting question that you maybe haven't said out loud to anyone:

Why can't I just get it together?

If this is you…even a little bit, you’re in the right place!

Resources mentioned in this episode: midlifeclutterhelp.com to read more insights from Midlife Clutter: Explained and Solved

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Transcript

Well, okay, so you used to be able to handle everything, right? You were the capable one, the relatable one, the reliable one, the one that people called. And now you're kind of staring at things and you're wondering what went wrong. It could be that you're starting things, you're starting plenty of things, but you're not finishing them. You're walking into rooms and you're forgetting why you were there in the first place. You're losing words in the middle of sentences, actual words, the things that you've known.

for your entire life. You're carrying everyone's schedules, everyone's emotions, the groceries, the permission slips, the mental note that the detergent is running low, and you're lying awake at night, and you're wondering what happened to the version of you who could do all of these things without even blinking? And here's the thing that makes it worse. You're not just tired of the load, you're tired of feeling like you should be able to handle it.

You look around and it seems like everyone else has it together, like everyone else is managing just fine. Like maybe the problem is you. And I want you to hear me say this clearly right at the beginning of this conversation, before we go anywhere else. Nothing is wrong with you, but something is happening and most people aren't talking about it honestly. And so today we are doing that here because most midlife women, they do not have a motivation problem.

They have a capacity problem, and those are not the same thing. They're not even close. And not only am I a strategist and a coach for midlife women, I'm someone who has lived every single thing that I'm about to talk to you about today. I'm still living it. So let's get into it. Well, I want to start with something that I think is going to make a lot of you feel genuinely seen.

and maybe even a little bit emotional because sometimes just having the words for something that you've been feeling but couldn't name yourself, that alone can feel like relief. And so let me name it. Let me call it what it is. Your brain is running 79 tabs all open at once and almost none of them are visible to anyone but you. And many of them have probably been open and running for so long that you don't even know they're even there anymore.

And I'm not talking about your work tabs. I'm not even talking about the obvious, out loud kind of responsibilities. I'm talking about the invisible ones, the ones that live in the background of your mind every single hour of every single day, the ones that nobody talks about, that nobody even knows exist. They're things like the dentist appointment that you've been meaning to reschedule for six weeks, the birthday card that you need to get, and mail, not just by, and you've got to do it by Thursday.

The fact that the detergent is almost gone, the conversation you need to have with your teenager that you've been putting off because you don't have the energy for the pushback that you know is coming. The thing your mom said a few weeks ago that's still sitting in your chest wrong. Whether your friend is okay, the one who went quiet on your text message, the bill that you meant to auto pay and you missed. And so now there's that dreaded late fee. The weird comment that someone made at work that you're still trying to decide.

What you think that was all about? The dinner that you haven't planned, the conversation you keep putting off, whether you remembered to take your vitamin this morning. In all of this, every single one of those tabs is running right now in that background, taking up processing power, taking up space, taking up you. And I call this the full brain effect. And here's what I want you to understand about this. It's not a personal failing. This is not a discipline problem.

And this is not evidence that you are less capable than you used to be. This is what happens when one person has been designated officially or unofficially as the keeper of all the things. Because it's not just logistics. You're not just holding the to-do list. You're holding the emotional temperature of your entire household. You know who's having a hard week before they even say a word. You can feel when your kid is off before they can articulate it to themselves.

You're tracking the energy in every room that you walk into and you're adjusting yourself accordingly. You're reading between the lines of every conversation with your spouse, your kids, your aging parents, your coworkers, your friends, and you're filing it all away, managing it, quietly trying to find time to solve all of those things. You are not just the manager of the calendar, you're the emotional manager of everyone in your orbit. And that job, that job has no description.

It has no performance review. It has no end of the day and no one asking you how you're doing underneath it all. And here's the kicker. You probably do it. All of these things so naturally, so automatically that half the time you don't even realize that you're doing it. It just feels like a way of life. It's just living. It just feels like being a mom or a spouse, being a daughter, being a friend, being a coworker, being a responsible person, but it is work.

It is real, significant, and relentless work. And it is exhausting in a way that is very hard to explain to someone who isn't carrying it. And so when you feel like your brain is full, it is. You're not managing it. You're not being dramatic. You're not imagining any of these things. Your brain is actually the only one who might be telling the truth in all of this. So.

Take a second, when we finish up here today, maybe more than just a second, and I want you to ask yourself, where in your life do you feel like if you don't remember it, it just wouldn't happen? What are you essentially holding right now that has no one else's fingerprints on it but yours? And I don't want you to think about this to make you feel overwhelmed, but to help make these things visible. Because we cannot put down

what we cannot see. And here's what I want you to know before we move on. What I just described, the logistics, the emotional labor, the invisible tabs, that's only part of what's making your brain feel full. Because your brain isn't just holding all of these things, all of these things that are happening today and in the future, your brain is also holding the past. And that's a whole different kind of heavy.

And so I want to tell you about something that I see over and over again in the women that I work with. And it's one of the most, I think, under acknowledged sources of exhaustion in midlife and beyond. And it's this, your brain isn't just holding today's to-do lists and plus all the other things that we just talked about. As a midlife woman myself, what I'm about to tell you just might be the heaviest thing that you're actually holding. I say this from experience.

And it's the thing that perhaps exhausts you more than any of those other things that I talked about. It's holding years of unfinished emotions. And these emotions, they take up real, tangible space, cognitive space, emotional space, space that most women have never been given permission to even acknowledge, let alone put it down. And I call this emotional clutter.

And here's what emotional clutter sounds like when it talks. It sounds like, I thought my life would look different by now. Or, I used to be so on top of things. What happened to me? Or, I don't even recognize myself sometimes. I look in the mirror and I think, who is that woman? Or, I feel like I've lost something. I just can't tell you exactly what it is. Do any of these things sound familiar? Because if it does, I want you to know.

That's not a midlife crisis like we've been talking about for decades and probably longer. It's not just you forgetting things. It's not weakness. And it's also not you losing your mind, which it feels like that a lot of the time. This is emotional clutter. And it is real. And it is heavy. And it deserves to be talked about. And it absolutely deserves to be taken seriously. Emotional clutter are things like the career that you stepped away from.

maybe for your kids, maybe for your marriage, maybe for a thousand very good reasons. And you never really let yourself grieve that. It's the friendship that faded without either of you really addressing it. And you still wonder sometimes what happened. It's the changes in your body that nobody warned you would feel like a loss and that our culture certainly doesn't give you space to mourn. It's watching your kids grow up and realizing that the role that you've

defined yourself by for 18 plus years is quietly, steadily shifting. And nobody tells you that you're allowed to feel grief and loss alongside the pride and the relief sometimes. It's the dream that got quieter over the years, the thing that you wanted for yourself that kind of you set it aside. And then you set it aside again until one day you realized you couldn't even remember the last time you thought about that thing.

And now it's kind of just this quiet ache that you mostly don't look at directly. I had a client who once described something that I have thought about almost every week since she said it. She said, Jennifer, every time I open my closet, I feel this weird kind of wave of something that I can't quite name. And when I asked her to describe it, she said, it's like I'm looking at all of the old versions of myself. There's the work clothes from my job that I left when my kids were little.

There's all the maternity clothes. There's the clothes that don't fit my body anymore, but I've been trying to get back into for years. The stuff that was me in a season that's now over, and I stand there every morning trying to find something to wear, and I realize that I don't feel like the person who belongs in that closet because none of those clothes actually represent me.

The person who's gonna wear or who did wear all of those things just doesn't exist. And this hit me so hard because it wasn't about the closet, right? It wasn't even about the clothes. It was the emotional clutter that was hanging on the hangers, right? It was years of unprocessed transitions that were all hanging there, visible every morning before she's even had her coffee. And here's the thing about emotional clutter, the thing that makes it so persistent.

and silent at the same time. It doesn't go away just because you're busy. It doesn't get resolved by staying busy or staying in motion. When you don't have the time or the space or the permission to process it, it kind of just goes underground. It becomes part of the weight that you carry without quite naming it. Part of why everything feels heavier than it should. Part of why you feel tired in ways that sleep just doesn't fix.

Because you're not just tired from today or even the future. You're tired from all of those years carrying things that were never put down.

Just sit with that for a second. Let's not rush to the next thing. Let that be real for just a minute. You're not just carrying everything from today and in the future. You are tired from carrying all of those things that were never properly put down. Because here's where I'm going with this. Underneath the mental load and the emotional clutter, there's something even deeper going on. Something that I think is at the root of why so many midlife women feel lost.

even when their lives look completely fine from the outside. It's an identity question. it might be the most important conversation that you're going to have in a long time. So I want you to think about something else. Think about how you introduce yourself when you meet someone. If someone asked you right now, who are you? What would you say? Most midlife women that I work with, they lead with their roles. They say things like, I'm a mom, I'm a grandmother, I'm a wife.

I work in this type of field, whatever it is. I take care of my parents. I run the household. They describe what they do, what they're responsible for, who needs them. Very few of them, without me prompting them, would say anything about who they actually are underneath all of those things. And sometimes, a lot of the time, when I ask, but who are you when nobody actually needs you? Who are you?

when all of those roles are quiet for just a second. Oftentimes I watch the women go quiet. Some of them get a little teary-eyed because they genuinely don't know how to answer that question anymore. And that doesn't mean that you did anything wrong. It doesn't mean that those roles or responsibilities just swallowed you up. It's not a character flaw. This is the predictable, honestly, the predictable result of spending years, sometimes decades, defining your worth.

by what you produce and who you take care of. And so underneath this whole my brain is full feeling, underneath all of the logistics and all of that emotional clutter, there is usually this quieter, scarier question that doesn't get spoken out loud. Who am I now? My client who was standing in her closet looking at all of those clothes, that's what she was struggling with. It's not about who I was, not about

who I'm supposed to be, but who am I right now in this season underneath all of those roles? So many women that I work with, they say the same version of the same thing. I used to be so energetic. I used to be on top of everything. I was the person with the system, with the plan, with the answers. And now I'm forgetting words. I start a task and somehow I end up in a different room doing something completely different.

I lose my train of thought. I feel scattered. I don't understand what is going on. I don't understand what is happening to me. And the way that they say it, like they're confessing something, like it's evidence of a failure, like losing that sharp and capable and on top of everything version of themselves means that they are fundamentally broken. And can I just tell you what is actually happening?

If that resonates with you, I don't think you're actually losing yourself. I think the version of yourself that you have been performing, that has been showing, that you've been trying, that you've been being for years, maybe for most of your adult life, it's finally starting to break down. And that breakdown feels like loss, but it might actually be the beginning of something that's really genuinely true.

For many of us, and I include myself in this, our sense of worth, it kind of got fused with our usefulness, with being needed, with being the one who handles it, with being valued, at least ideally for being reliable and productive. We built in identity around being the person who shows up and who solves the problems and who holds it all together. We often say that we're the glue who holds it all together. And that was what our identity actually was.

And we did it so well. did all of these things so well for so long that we forgot there was a person underneath all of that person who was performing all of these things. And then midlife comes. Maybe the kids need you differently now or your body changes or you hit a season of transition, empty nest on the horizon, aging parents, a career shift. And suddenly the role that you've been playing so well, it doesn't fit anymore.

And it doesn't feel like growth or moving forward like it should. It feels like falling apart. But here's the thing, your nervous system, your body, your brain, your gut is saying something very wise to you. It's actually saying, I can't keep just performing all of this stuff anymore. There's nothing left of me to keep up, to keep this up in the same way. And again, this doesn't mean that you are weak.

This is a reckoning of sorts. And reckonings, while they are hard, they are the place where change starts to grow from. The women that I see do the most powerful, lasting work in our work together, in coming up with strategies, and in coaching on mindset, and mindset shifts, and stepping into who we want to be, that best version of ourselves.

The women who do that the best are not the ones who white-knuckle their way back to who they used to be. They're the ones who get honest, genuinely do the work of being uncomfortably honest about who they're becoming and what actually matters to them right now in this season, right here, not the 10 years ago season. And they're honest about this. They're honest about what they can't keep doing anymore. And this list is usually long.

Right? When I unpack this with women, this list starts out with a few things. And then it just keeps going and going and going. It just pours out, usually with a river of tears, along with it. And this, this identity conversation that we start having, this is exactly what I write about in my sub stack writings. I write about midlife clutter explained and solved. Because you need to have it explained. That's what I'm doing here.

You can actually find my sub stack writings where we go deeper on all this kind of stuff at midlifeclutterhelp.com. I'm not just talking about the logistics of clutter there, but what we're talking about here today, the emotional clutter, the identity clutter, the quiet, who am I now that midlife women are wrestling with and almost nobody is talking about openly and honestly. And if this is hitting home for you, if you're nodding your head or you're feeling

something tightened up in your chest right now, come and find me there. midlifeclutterhelp.com. I write from the real life chair, from my own journey, and from the women that I coach every day. There's no fluff. There's no hype. There's really no sugar coating. It's just honest conversation for the midlife woman who is ready to stop pretending that she's fine. OK, back to this conversation. When it comes to moving forward,

You don't have to start completely over. You don't have to burn everything down. You don't have to abandon everyone and everything. I'm just asking you to look at who you are, who you have been, and how far apart those things actually are. Probably quite far, and you never noticed the transition as it was happening. I want you to be able to see it clearly for what it is, because you can't make a conscious choice about something

that you're doing on autopilot. And right now a lot of midlife women are exhausting themselves on autopilot, doing all the things, and then blaming themselves for being on, blaming themselves for being exhausted. Which brings me to this lie that I want to talk about. It's the big lie. It's the one that I want to call out directly. So this really is the moment in the conversation where things can go one of two ways. The first way is that a woman hears everything that I've just said.

about the mental load, about the emotional clutter, about the identity shift, and she feels genuinely seen, maybe a little lighter, maybe even hopeful. The second way is that she hears all of it, and instead of feeling seen, she turns it into evidence to then use as a weapon against herself, and she thinks, okay, but clearly the problem is still me. I just need more discipline. I need better routines. I need to get my life together. If I could just...

wake up earlier, if I could just be more consistent, if I could be more intentional and be more balanced, then I'd be fine. And I say this with so much compassion because I have done this to myself and I watch women do this constantly thinking that if I was just more whatever it is or if my life was just more whatever it is, then it would be better. Then I wouldn't feel this way. These things,

These are all different nuances of the same lie. And they are some of the most damaging lies that midlife women tell themselves. You are not undisciplined. You are not crazy. You are not lazy. You do not need to try harder. You are someone who has been caring a lot for a very long time, probably without enough support. And your brain is doing exactly what any system does when it gets pushed

past It's

to an overwhelmed and overloaded system does not fix the overload. It just makes the collapsing essentially more organized. You can download every productivity app. You can buy the most beautiful planner. You can set up a color-coded calendar. You can wake up at 5 a.m. and you can do all the things. And if the root issue is that you are carrying more than one person can keep carrying,

None of those things will matter. None of them will stick. None of them will help. And you are treating the symptom. You're not actually treating the problem. I have a client. I'm gonna keep her totally anonymous, but she knows who she is, right? And she came to me having tried everything. The planners, the systems, the morning routines, the this time I'm really gonna get it together kind of determination and seasons that would last two or three weeks before life came in and intervened.

and everything collapsed. She was convinced the problem was her follow through. That's what she came to me saying she needed. I need you to help me with follow through. Her discipline, her consistency, just doing this stuff I don't feel like doing. But when we actually started to dig in, when we got honest about everything she was carrying and why she was carrying it, it was so easy to see, even for her to see.

that this is not a discipline problem at all. She was trying to operate at full capacity while running on empty, carrying grief. Remember how we talked about that? Carrying grief, lots of it that she hadn't processed. Holding roles that weren't hers to hold anymore. Asking a depleted, overwhelmed woman to perform like she was at her best. And then blaming herself when she couldn't.

Let me just have you think about a bookshelf with different shelves, right? Imagine this bookshelf. Over the years, you've been stacking things on it, right? Your responsibilities, your roles, other people's needs, unfinished business from seasons that are over, things that were never yours to carry in the first place. What happens when you pile and pile and pile a shelf on a bookshelf to the point of being over full, right? It starts to sag, right? Imagine you,

You are a shelf, you are piling all the roles and responsibilities and worries and emotional clutter and tension and trying to be the peacekeeper and trying to do all the things. All of those things are getting loaded on the shelf. And now it can't handle that weight. And really going back to that bookshelf analogy, I think a lot of times our first thought is, I need a stronger shelf.

I just need to put some braces or somehow support this shelf better. But what if the answer wasn't a stronger shelf? What if the answer, the easiest answer, is put less on the shelf? You are like that shelf. You don't need better systems. You need less to carry. And so I want to offer you a different question to ask yourself. Rather than asking yourself things like, why can't I handle this?

which puts all of the blame on you, ask this question. What am I still carrying that belongs in a different season? What am I holding that was never mine to begin with? What would I put down if I actually didn't worry about any of the ramifications and I just gave myself permission to put something down? What would it be? These questions are where the real change can start. It doesn't start with more,

It doesn't start with more follow through. It doesn't start with more motivation. It's more discernment. And so we've done a lot of work today. We've taken some honest, hard looks, right? We've had the honest, uncomfortable, necessary conversations and we've done the honest, uncomfortable, at least started to do the necessary work of looking at what's actually going on.

And now I want to give you something that you can actually start to do with all of these discoveries. And this is not another thing to add to your impossible list, but this is going to be something that when you do it, it brings you honest, genuine relief. So these are three gentle ways to kind of start working on taking some things off of that shelf. And I mean, we're going to start this gently.

Right? Very intentionally. And it's, it's not because you can't handle all of those things on your shelf. You, you clearly can. Right? And you have been doing that for a long time, but you have probably been going throughout every day, just white knuckling it. And that approach isn't working anymore. And so we're going to try something different. We're going to try to start something new with a graceful approach, right? A grace filled, compassionate start. Okay.

So the first thing that you're gonna do is empty your brain onto paper, right? Tonight, tomorrow, sometime this week, sit down with a piece paper, not your phone, but actual paper with a pen and make a list. A messy, ugly, no rules, not gonna categorize it, nobody is gonna see this list, list, okay? And I want you to put a title at the top. It needs to say everything that is currently being carried in my head.

everything I am currently carrying in my head, okay? And then just start dumping it. All of it, the appointments, the unfinished conversations, the worries, the thing about your kid that you haven't figured out, the aging parent situation, the financial thing that you keep pushing to the back of your mind because you don't want to think about it, the I should be further along than this thought that visits you at two in the morning, the emotions, right? The emotions too, not just logistics, but things like the grief, the resentment.

that you feel a little bit guilty about, the hope that you're afraid to say out loud. Get it out of your head and onto the page. Here's why this works. Your brain is not a storage system. It is not designed to hold all of these open loops indefinitely. When you have unresolved things that are living in your head, your brain keeps cycling and spiraling back to them. It's like a notification that you keep dismissing without actually dealing with it. It keeps popping back up.

and it's using a processing power constantly. It's keeping you in this low-grade state of vigilance that is adding to that exhaustion even when nothing is technically wrong. And when you put things on paper, your brain gets a signal. I don't have to keep holding this quite so tightly. It's captured here on this paper. It's not gonna be lost. And I can just ease up a little bit.

and then your brain can start to breathe. Now this is not a to-do list, right? You're not committing to doing those things. You're not committed to solving those things on that page. You are literally just making all of this invisible stuff in your head visible. And that alone, just that one thing, is one of the most underrated acts of self-care that I know of. We don't think of that as self-care. We hear self-care and we think bubble baths and evenings away. This is self-care.

Okay? Let me just say that. All right, so that's the first thing. The second thing that I want you to do is to release one outdated role, at least to some degree. And this really is deceptively simple. Here's all I'm asking. Before you think, my gosh, I can't abandon all these things. That's not what I'm suggesting. Okay? Here's what I want you to do. Look at your life and find one thing that you are currently responsible for that you don't actually need to be. Just one.

Maybe you're still the person who tracks and remembers every birthday in your extended family, even though your kids are grown, even though no one asked you to do that. You just always have and so you keep doing that. Maybe you're still the person who has to fix every problem before it fully surfaces, the one who senses tension and immediately starts to work to smooth it over, who sees the need and moves to meet it before anyone else has to ask. Pick one, just one thing.

And ask yourself, really ask yourself, what would actually happen if I stopped doing this? Most of the time, the honest answer is someone else would figure it out or it just wouldn't happen. And for most things on that list, the world would not end. It is not going to be a catastrophic result. You are allowed to put things down. You are allowed to stop being the infrastructure.

of everything, every relationship in your life. And you don't have to announce that you're doing this, that you are setting this thing down. You have to just make one small, quiet, intentional decision. I'm not going to carry this anymore. And then practice not picking it back up. That's the second thing to do. The third thing to do in this,

This is the one that you're gonna wanna skip over and you're gonna say, don't have time, I don't have bandwidth, I don't have the ability to do that, but you have to, okay? This is gonna be one that I know you're wanna skip, but just stay with me. This is actually what I think is the most important one because all of the brain dumps and all of the role releases that we can do, they're only gonna go so far if you're still carrying years of unprocessed grief underneath everything.

Grief that doesn't get acknowledged doesn't just go away. It just gets carried. You're carrying it with you like baggage. It becomes part of that invisible weight. It shows up as irritability or numbness or the vague persistent feeling that something is missing and you can't quite put your finger on what it is. And so this week, just this week, I want you to take 10 minutes, 10 minutes a day, and I want you to let yourself acknowledge something that has changed or shifted or ended.

that you never properly said goodbye to. Maybe it's a version of your body that has changed. Not to judge it, not to fix it, just to acknowledge that the change happened and you're allowed to have feelings about it. Maybe it's a dream that has shifted, something that you wanted for yourself that got set aside and never picked back up. And you're allowed to grieve that. Maybe it's who you were before...

caregiving seasons, before the years of putting yourself at the end of the line, the version of you who had more space and more lightness and more brightness and more access to herself. You don't have to go back to that person, but you're allowed to say, I miss her. 10 minutes a day, maybe 20 sometimes. That's all. And again, we're not fixing anything. We just want to acknowledge it and give ourselves permission to feel the grief that comes with it.

Because here's what I know about women who do this work, honestly. When they make room for the grief, they make room for themselves and for the women that they actually are right now. Not the one that they used to be, not the one that they think they're supposed to be, the real, current, whole, worthy of being known woman that they are today. This isn't drama work. This is human work. And being human,

is permissible. And it's not a problem to fix. It's simply something to acknowledge. And so I want to come back to where we started, to the woman that I described at the beginning, the one lying awake at 3 in the morning while her brain is still going, the one who can't remember the last time she felt like herself, the one who's doing everything for everyone and somehow still feels like she's falling behind, the one who's tired, not just physically tired, but soul level tired.

in a way that she doesn't quite know how to explain. If that's you, I want to say something to you directly. You are not crazy. You are not lazy. You are not broken. You are a woman who has been carrying a tremendous amount, visible and invisible, loud and quiet, for yourself and other people for a very long time. And your body and your brain are not betraying you in any way. They're being the honest truth teller. They are saying something has to change, not because you aren't enough.

Because you are human and you are a human being with limits and you have been living beyond those limits for longer than is probably sustainable. And the answer is not to push harder or just keep going. It's not another system. It's not another morning that starts at 5 a.m. and ends at midnight with nothing left for you. The answer starts with being able to see yourself clearly. It's telling yourself the truth about what you're carrying and why.

It's giving yourself real permission, not the kind that you say out loud and immediately take back.

to put some of these roles down. You are not here to disappear inside your responsibilities. You are not here to be consumed by the roles that you play until there's nothing left of you. You are here to live your life, not just manage it. And that version of you, the one who leads herself well, who shows up with clarity and intention, who loves the people in her life from a place of fullness rather than depletion,

She's not gone. She's not lost. She's just been under a lot of weight for a long time. And you don't have to pour out and empty your life, your whole life all at once, right? You just have to decide today, this week, right? What's worth putting down? Because it's worth putting something, some of these things down. That's where it starts. It doesn't start with a new planner, a new system, a new routine. Not with more discipline.

not with follow through, but with a decision about yourself and your own life. So before I let you go, if this felt like you know, if you felt like this finally put into words something that has been swirling around in your head, that is exactly why I started Midlife Clutter Explained and Solved over on Substack. It's where I take everything that we talk about and go deeper.

the invisible mental load, the emotional clutter, the identity shifts that nobody warns you about, real stories from my own life and from the insights from the women that I coach every single day. There's no fluff. There's no hype. There's no toxic positivity. It's just honest, grounded writings for the woman who is caring a lot and who is finally ready to start looking and saying, should I put some of this down?

come check out those posts over at midlifeclutterhelp.com. That will take you right to my sub stack. And if this episode made you feel seen, if it made you feel a little bit less alone in what you've been carrying, would you share it with a friend? Just send her the link. Tell her, thought of you. Because I know that somewhere right now, there is a woman that you know who has quietly been thinking the same thing. Maybe you're even having conversations with her about it.

She's the woman who you know is thinking, my brain is just so full. She needs to know that she's not alone in that. And one last thing, if you've listened to this and thought, my life is different, this isn't gonna work for me, I hear you and I agree with you. And I would love for you to put something down. But maybe you're saying, I truly can't. I have no choice but to keep pushing and doing.

and doing things just the same way that I always have, the same things I'm doing now I have to keep doing. Well, when we talk next week, that conversation is gonna be for you. So make sure you come back right here next week Tuesday and we'll have that conversation. And so until we talk again, make it a great day.