Accidentally Sabotaging Your Wellness Journey?

Our urgency to heal can keep us trapped in sympathetic nervous system dominance, preventing the very healing we seek. The pressure of constantly adding more wellness practices often backfires when it creates another stressful to-do list that triggers fight-or-flight responses instead of facilitating rest and recovery.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Urgency Trap in Healing
• 1:39 Understanding Your Nervous System States
• 3:12 Finding Your Minimal Effective Dose
• 4:20 Rest vs Laziness: The Crucial Difference
• 5:15 Building a Sustainable Wellness Practice

Transcript

Emily Feist: 0:00

What if your urgency to heal is actually keeping you stuck? You try to get on that fast track to heal, adding more and more healthy habits, so much so that you need five timers on your phone to remember to do them all, and the weight of doing them all right keeps you awake at night and it starts feeling counterproductive to your mental health. And the list just keeps growing.

Emily Feist: 0:22

Today's episode is all about something that no one talks about in the wellness spaces the pace of healing. Because here's the truth nervous systems heal in slowness and if you're putting the same hustle, urgency and pressure in your healing journey that you did when you were living in survival mode, your nervous system doesn't feel safe and it won't let go.

Emily Feist: 0:45

Welcome to 'It Starts at Vagus', where holistic health meets modern day living Through the eyes of a massage therapist and that's me. I'm Emily, and I am a neuromuscular massage therapist that helps people every day relax their mind and their muscles, and we're going to be going through the philosophy of the vagus nerve it's the body's ultimate key to calm, connection and overall well-being. So if you have stress, anxiety or that burnout, feeling that you're just stuck, you're in the right place. Take a deep breath in, settle down and let's explore how we can use our nervous system to support our bodies. Let's dive in.

Emily Feist: 1:23

Last episode we talked about embracing a slow, calm life and today we are talking about the pressure of forcing yourself to heal, because feeling safe and calm cannot be your default if you add more and more urgency to practices that bog you down.

Emily Feist: 1:39

So just a quick overview your nervous system is in two states either sympathetic or parasympathetic. Sympathetic is that fight or flight mode where we have that urgency, scared feeling and we don't feel safe. Your brain is aware and scanning everything to see what to do in case something happens, while your parasympathetic state that is our rest and digest mode it's where we feel calm, it's where our body says, okay, we feel safe enough to digest our food properly and that's a state that we want to be in most of the time. But when we pile on urgency, even with good intentions, that keeps you stuck in the fight or flight. So trying to force calm is like yelling relax at someone during a panic attack. It just won't work. Now do you remember the phrase? Slow and steady wins the race? Health is very much like a slow race. Our bodies like consistency, especially our vagus nerve. It allows predictability and past events that were helpful and safe. But when we rush to do all the things and try to add every single aspect of healthy habits, it will ambush our nervous system. It can create more pressure or perfectionism and eventually that becomes unsustainable For

Emily Feist: 3:04

me

Emily Feist: 3:04

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Emily Feist: 3:04

I like to look at what's the bare minimum that I can do with the biggest positive impact to my life and health goals. I like breath, work and routines and finding ways to smoothly combine them if I can. For example, I have a puppy that gets up early and wants to run, so I take her to our fenced area and let her get out her morning energy. While she plays, I take off my shoes and allow myself to feel the dirt and the grass. I breathe in some slow breaths, I soak up that morning sun and I'm doing this all while my puppy plays. When I have my older dog, she typically just stays next to me smelling scents around us and it's a great calm morning for us. But I also get to take care of what needs to get done. It's not forced, it's just the flow that we have.

Emily Feist: 3:56

On another note, I'd like to mention that rest and lazy are not the same thing. Rest is essential. Our bodies need it mentally and physically. Laziness, on the other hand, can be a byproduct of a lack of life focus. It can lead to depression, while rest leads to health. Rest isn't a reward, it's a requirement. It's fundamental. We need it.

Emily Feist: 4:22

At the beginning to 'It Starts at Vagus' rest, but know that it is well worth it. The dishes and laundry can wait 20 minutes. So stillness, breath, rest, laughter, even gentle movements all of these things are good and they keep us in Vagus that parasympathetic mode, but you should enjoy them, not stress out about crossing them off a to-do list, and you want to be brave enough to listen to your body, how it makes you feel. Other examples of nervous system regulation include slow walks, warm tea humming which is a bonus again to get that vagus nerve having low lights on around your house. It's time that is set aside to do nothing productive and honestly, that's one of my biggest weaknesses.

Emily Feist: 5:11

Ideally, healing should be relational, not transactional. Your body is not a machine to optimize. It's a relationship to rebuild and support without the overload. Discover what you enjoy and what makes you feel calm longer throughout the day. Look at your goals and decide what healthy practices should and should not stay and then adjust accordingly. You're not behind, you're not broken. Your nervous system isn't asking for more effort. It's asking for less of the unnecessary. So go ahead, take notes, see what works great for you, find your flow and remember to soothe your nervous system and reclaim who you are.

Emily Feist: 5:55

Thanks for listening to It Starts at Vagus. New episodes are released every Tuesday. If you liked this episode, go ahead and subscribe so that you can get notifications and don't miss out on what's coming next. Until next time, remember wellness starts at Vagus.