Why Discipline Never Fixed My Inconsistency (It Was My Nervous System)

If you’ve ever felt like every hard season knocks you off your routines

If you’ve called yourself inconsistent, lazy, or bad at follow-through

If discipline has never quite worked the way it’s “supposed to”

This episode is for you.

In this deeply personal episode, Anne shares her story, not as a lesson in willpower or motivation, but as a lived example of how the nervous system adapts long before the mind understands what’s happening.

From early childhood surgery to body image struggles, bingeing, burnout, postpartum anxiety, and repeated identity shifts, Anne unpacks how what looks like inconsistency is often a nervous system doing its best to survive.

This isn’t an episode about trying harder.

It’s about understanding your body, rebuilding self-trust, and learning how to stay with yourself when life changes.

If you’re done white-knuckling your way through routines and ready for calm, sustainable consistency, this conversation will land exactly where it needs to.

Feeling capable, but still falling off when life gets loud?

This podcast is for the woman who knows what to do, but keeps disconnecting from herself under pressure.

Around here, we talk about staying with yourself when motivation fades, building real capacity instead of pushing harder, and creating a life that feels steady, regulated, and yours, even in chaotic seasons.

No hustle. No performative discipline. No starting over every Monday.

Start here:

• Free Guide: The High-Achiever's Guide to Losing Fat Without Obsessing Over Food or Workouts: [https://www.annejonescoaching.ca/free-guide-your-body-your-way]

• Deeper support + essays: Join my Substack: [https://annejonesfit.substack.com/]

Work with me:

• Website: [https://www.annejonescoaching.ca/]

Connect With Me:

• Instagram: [@annejonesfit]

• YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/@annejones]

Love This Episode? Share & Review!

If you found this episode helpful, take a screenshot and share it on your Instagram stories, tagging [@annejonesfit] so I can say thanks! Don’t forget to leave a review on your favourite podcast platform—it helps more women discover the show and start their tr...

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Muscles and Mindset Revolution, the podcast for high achieving women who are done burning out in the name of discipline and are ready to build strength, self-trust, and calm, consistency for life. I'm your host, Anne Jones, certified life coach and mentor, personal trainer, and mindset Expert and after 15 plus years in the fitness and health industry, I know the real key to lasting change isn't just what you do, it's how you think. If you're ready to shift your mindset, build a lifestyle you love and feel confident af, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Hey friend. I am recording this at home, but by the time you'll be listening to this, I will be in Toronto with my girlfriends. that detail is really timely considering what today's podcast is about because for most of my life, I not even knowingly disappeared when my environment changed. New city, new season, new stress, new identity shift. And suddenly my routines, my body, my sense of self would quietly fall apart. So if you have ever felt like every hard season knocks you off your habits, if you start strong and then quietly fall apart, if you've ever called yourself inconsistent, lazy, dramatic, too much or bad at following through this episode is for you because discipline was never the thing that quote unquote fixed me. And it's probably not the thing that's going to fix you either. I originally shared this story in writing on my substack last week. And the response really surprised me, not because I felt that it was dramatic, but because so many women said, I can relate to this in so many ways. This makes sense to me. This finally explains me and. I mean, to me, it's just my story, right? Our own stories feel normal to us. I think I wanted to bring it to your ears and to your body. So today I'm gonna walk you through a little bit sharing the most vulnerable parts of my story. So this story doesn't start with food or fitness actually, or discipline or nervous system or anything like that. It starts the day I was born on a cold day in November in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. And the reason this is relevant is'cause I was born with a congenital condition called troticollis, where one of my major neck muscles, your sternal cla mastoid, your SCM is contracted so tightly, that you can't rotate your head one way and you can't hold your head up erect. And it's not that, I mean, it's not super common, but it's not really that it's super uncommon or rare, but it is that in the Northwest Territories in the 1980s, their intervention wasn't physiotherapy and massage therapy like it would be today. It was, there wasn't like trauma informed care yet, right? It was just like, let's just cut it. They just cut it. So I had a rare plastic surgery, like they cut the muscle. I had a rare plastic surgery called zplasty, and so I just don't have it. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see. I can even show you, you'll see my left one is here. You can see it when I turn my head to the right and then you'll see that you don't see it here. This is just like scar tissue when I turn my head to the left. I am sharing this, not because my story is extreme or special, but because there's just an early example of something that the body does all the time, right? When something isn't safe or doesn't work, the body adapts first long before the mind ever knows what's going on or catches up. So that's just the thing that I'm missing, which, I've managed pretty well, to be honest, but is one of the biggest reasons that I've received massage therapy since I was a child, got into massage therapy and cannot, and do not stray from my strength training and my fitness and my mobility because it keeps me moving. One of the biggest reasons that I got so into the body because it shaped how my body grew. It shaped how I stand, how I can move. I danced in high school and nobody knew about it, right? It wasn't like I had a disability that I told everybody about, but things were hard for me. Like in dance, I have very limited thoracic mobility in my spine. And I didn't know this or have this language at the time, but because my neck doesn't go and I can't hold it up, my body learned to compensate through my hips and my lower back. So I have a very mobile, lower back and hips, to the point that it caused me chronic low back pain before I learned how to manage it. Only about six years ago, by the way. If I go to a yoga class or something, I just basically have to, if it's an instructor who doesn't know me, I just have to tune them out.'cause they'll tell me the opposite of how I know I have to move my body.'cause my body is basically the opposite of most people who sit at a computer all day. So I say that too, you as well, because I learned that I really had to learn my own body, which is part of this whole story. And it's had a lot to do with body image as well, because I love my body. I love my body so much. I'm so grateful for it. I have a very strong core. Very strong core, to be quite frank. And things are hard for me because I have limited range of motion in my spine, so I can never let go of that core training and I will never probably, I don't think I'll ever, even if I had the strength, even if I had the limited body fat, I would never have a six or an eight pack because of the way my body is shaped. I have a very extreme anterior pelvic tilt, which I've been working on my entire life. I've worked with all the professionals. I've been receiving massage and physiotherapy my entire life. I have a trainer specifically, we work on movement stuff related to this. I mean, I've tried to fix it and what I've eventually learned that I'm not a, it's not a problem to solve. It's just the way my body adapted, and so I have learned to roll with it. I've got it under control, but it's always gonna look a little bit like I am sticking my booty out and like I have a belly, even when I'm at my leanest, which I don't have. And no, I don't need to strengthen my hamstrings more and No my hip flexors won't open up more Like I have worked with all the professionals and done all the things. It's good, I'm good, and I've accepted that this is the way I'm shaped and it's totally cool. This is the way my body grew. This is how it compensated. This is how I learned to live inside myself. So if we backtrack a little bit to the baby story, I obviously didn't know it then I was like, even my poor mom didn't know what was going on. They're just like, oh, your baby needs surgery. She's like, obviously you're gonna be like, okay. but the important piece is that my nervous system learned something very early, and that was to adapt, right? Body had to adapt to this. Little, you know, different functions. So literally how how I move is different. How I move my head, how I move my neck, my collarbone on this side grew more bone. cause that's what happens when, when tissue pulls on bone. So I had a bigger collarbone on one side, like all of my body learned. And I just feel like that is a theme that has run through my whole life. And it started with that very physical little baby thing. the next piece of the story that I think is relevant, which other people find interesting and many don't know, is that I was homeschooled in the bush in the Northwest Territories. And when I say bush, there are very few people in the world who actually understand what I'm talking about. Not a town, not a store, not a school, not a post office, not a road, not on Google. Maps like the nearest Hamlet. When I say Hamlet, I mean a couple hundred people. Like a place that you would consider nowhere, like over an hour away. The closest McDonald's, eight hours away. The closest save on foods, a four hour driveway, I mean, truly in the bush. There are no street lights. There is no light at night, no electricity, no running water. I had baths in a metal wash basin with water heated on a wood stove. It's beautiful, right? People have done, all they say to me is so cool. It's so cool. I mean, again, at the time it just felt normal to me. this is my life, whatever guys. In hindsight I see its rarity. I see it. I also see how it probably was hard for a kid. And it taught me how to be tough. Yes. And self-sufficient and adaptable and independent and who knows what else, right. Well, we'll never know. It doesn't matter. But that's again, part of the theme of adapting. And eventually, I did start going to public school in still a very small town of 4,000. Again, four hours south in northern British Columbia where I went to high school. And then at 17. I left by myself. I graduated high school. I went to Ryerson University in Toronto, biggest city in Canada, 17 years old. I went,'cause I wanted to be a journalist like Rory Gilmore. So I moved from a town from 4,000 people in northern BC to downtown Toronto for journalism school. And it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It's probably the beginning of, I have this habit now. Where, I'm actually really good at making big decisions that are scary, but I process them after the fact, I'll be decisive and we can do this, and then I have to deal with the consequence of like emotionally processing it later. So this is probably the beginning of that, and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. So glad I did it. I learned so much that I otherwise wouldn't have learned about culture and the world and other people, and it was amazing. It was also the beginning of my first real self abandonment chapter, which of course I didn't have the language for at the time, until that point, movement was structured, right? I played basketball in high school, although I was never good at basketball, was not a big team sports person. But I danced. I loved dance. I danced competitively. I taught dance. I was dancing, you know, over 10 hours a week. So movement was very included and structured. Never worried about food. Food was handled by my mom, who loved me deeply. She did try to teach me to cook. I was not interested. I was held right. My nervous system was held. It was safe. Suddenly I was in the biggest city in the country full of comparison, right? Kids from different backgrounds and like beautiful in me, my opinion, like beautiful city girls who, had gone to schools that like really prepared them for university, which mine did not. And it's like my bo, my body compass went wonky, right? I totally lost it because I went completely outside of myself, all this input and stimulation. Lost my body compass. I did try to stay with the things that I loved. I tried to dance even recreationally at our school recreation, and athletic center, again, like the caliber of dance that I had learned in my tiny town was not like these girls who were coming from Calgary and had danced really, really, really danced. I just got lost like so fast. I felt super behind. I felt super, like tiny and silly. Definitely not good enough. So I quit. I didn't keep going with dance. I was totally embarrassed and instead I tried to control my body. So for a couple reasons, because I was out of it. And because I had had no internal intuitive body compass, like especially around food, because I was just fed, like there's just food just appeared at the correct times. Like food was packed for me. Like there was just food. I never had to think about it. Now, even though I was like staying in a residence with the cafeteria where there was food, you had to like make a choice and. You know, eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. And like, do you have to eat? Like I had, I didn't know how to do that. But as a very logical thinker, I knew that I could become obsessive about it. So I became obsessive about food and exercise. I liked exercise, I liked fitness, although it did probably turn into like a little bit of a punishment, trying to change my body for sure that first year at university. But I came from a place, like I started working out at the gym in grade 12 in high school. So I already liked it. It didn't start as a place of self punishment, but it moved there and then, I binge ate and perched and I would binge like on a stressful day, like I was stressed, I was lonely in this big, I didn't know that's what it was. I just thought there was something wrong with me. Like no one else is stressed. No one else has to have a cry and eat cookies, just me. So. I learned to binge and purge control it. Right? And I got to the point where like I would buy boxes of cookies and hide them under my bed, but then just end up eating them all anyways. Or I remember one day I was really stressed'cause I, I was like renewing my passport or something, which is never a fun process. And I went to Starbucks like three or four times that day each, each like back and forth to the passport office and to buy those giant macadamia nut cookies. so I ate like four of them in one day. one time my roommate brought her leftover birthday cake and left it in the fridge and said I could have some, and I just ate the whole thing before she even got any, which I was deeply ashamed about. But I, I didn't know. I didn't know any different. I wanna say this slowly'cause this is the part maybe you can relate to. I wasn't undisciplined, I was completely dysregulated. My body was in survival, and we never make our best decisions when we're in survival mode, when we are not in executive function mode, when we are not using our highest functioning brain, when our nervous system is dysregulated. It wasn't a lack of discipline that was causing me to go to Starbucks four times in one day or eat my roommate's birthday cake. It was dysregulation. I was in the black, couldn't make a reasonable decision out of my body. Okay. But I did have the awareness that. Something's going on here with this eating thing. Actually, you know what it was? I probably just thought it was fat. I thought it was fat and overweight and needed to fix it. And I saw a flyer on a corkboard at university.'cause youth, that's how we used to learn about things in the day. There's these pieces of paper with dangly things. At least I'm from the age. It was probably an email and not a phone number. But anyways, I joined this research study within in the nutrition department with this university professor, I remember her name. I remember her interviewing me with thought, her name is Jacqui Gingras. and I was part of her research study. I don't know. I answered some questions about eating binge and obsessive eating, and I was part of her study and then she referred me to a university nutrition student, Billy. Shout out to Billy Hermosa, who I know is still a nutritionist and a CrossFitter in Ottawa. She was amazing and she was my first exposure to intuitive eating. I don't know that that's what we called it at the time. I still did like food logs for her. It was certainly not tracking. It was like I ate a yogurt. But she taught me like, oh, well you're eating'cause. If you're hungry or something else is going on. But that was my first introduction to what we would now call probably somewhat intuitive eating, not as a not for an aesthetic, but as a way to rebuild trust with my body. That was the beginning of rebuilding trust with my body. All throughout university, I became a group fitness junkie group, fitness teacher's pet. And then my last year of university, I became a group fitness instructor. I was like, this seems fun. I could do this. So I did. And then I had met my now husband, my boyfriend, Matt, in my fourth year of university. And so. After university. I was like, I don't know what I wanna do, but he's over there. So I moved back to northern BC to be with him. I took a job at a literacy society, which was like related to journalism, I suppose, and I started teaching fitness on the side in this small town, it absolutely exploded. I had these, it was like such a fun time at these like huge gymnasiums full of, students doing classes. And then I started. Teaching yoga and like those were packed. And I was teaching yoga in the health food store and it was awesome. And then I started like teaching workshops and boot camps and then everything. I loved it truly. And then a couple years later we went to Vancouver. There was no question like, this is my thing. I hustled, I marketed myself, I reached out ever. This was my era of like working my butt off and it eventually paid off, but I drove around the city with my speakers and my yoga blocks and yoga straps in my car are teaching everywhere for, it was fun and I'm, I, there was a reason that I did that and I met so many wonderful people and that's where burnout quietly started because, just'cause, you know, things about the body doesn't fix the nervous system. I don't even know anything about the nervous system at that point. Eventually I did go to massage therapy school because I wanted to learn more about the body, and then I became a registered massage therapist, which just feels like a small part of the story at this point. But I went because I wanted to understand the body more. I wanted to know more, like in fitness, they don't really honestly teach you very much. So I became a registered massage therapist again. I worked really hard. I hustled. I worked, I treated every spare hour of every day. I became quite good at it. Few years in, I got pregnant. The most inevitable miracle of my life. I had an incredible pregnancy. Went well. I trained consistently. I did exactly how I would have asked a client to eat and move during pregnancy. I did so much yoga, said, Ohm so many times, I swear, like that's why she was such a good baby. And postpartum. I returned to movement pretty quickly, very thoughtfully. Wasn't rushing into it. On paper, I was doing everything right, but after a bit inside, I wasn't, I pretty quickly developed postnatal anxiety, but I didn't really know what it was.'cause they tell you you're gonna have the baby blues and you're gonna feel all these things. But I had never experienced anxiety before. It was very strange. And so there was some episodes of that. I started teaching yoga after a month, after giving birth And then to returned to work after four months to return to massage therapy. I entered a baby swap situation with a good friend, so we both had babies around the same time, so I would watch them both a couple days a week while she would work. She would watch them both a couple days while I would work. Every hour of our lives were filled. We did that for almost a year, almost a full year. I found it very overwhelming. I found it very overstimulating, and I felt deeply ashamed and confused about why I couldn't handle it. I was like, this is just two babies. Like people have twins all the time. people have more than two babies, like I just work a couple days a week, like all these, what's, there must be something wrong with me that I can't handle this. I became very anxious, like almost like to the level of paranoid. And I think that level of overwhelm is what led me to reach out for coaching. I had already been exposed to coaching, the fitness studio that I worked at for many years. Before having Sophie, the owner of it, Andrea, she went to the life coaching school and then she came back and started introducing us as fitness instructors and personal trainers to coaching like, basically like a, a heart led life, like learning about the brain and like having choice. And I thought it was really cool. So we started to integrate that with clients, but I thought it was for clients, right? I was like, this is for other people like. This is for people who can't handle their lives and think they need to lose weight and like are overwhelmed by their kids. This is not for me. I think that I subconsciously thought that for a long time, and then even when I did reach out to her for coaching, I was like, I'm just overwhelmed and being overwhelmed is my thing. Like I remember saying that to her like I was fully owning my overwhelm, but staying alive in my brain. And that just became more important than my pride at some point. So I did reach out for coaching I had a huge scarcity mindset at this time. I couldn't imagine spending money on myself for coaching. It seemed like a huge luxury that I couldn't afford. So I joined like a group coaching situation, and then eventually it led me to one-on-ones with her. And then I haven't stopped receiving coaching since. It's the most valuable thing I think that a person can invest in. It would help in general in any way. But coaching gave me language for my thoughts. I had been through therapy, I had done years of therapy. Therapy is very like, past healing, deep dives. Coaching is like forward thinking, like, cool, who do you wanna be from here? How do you wanna feel? Where do you wanna go from here? And it's, I do find it more tools based. So coaching gave me the language for my thoughts. It taught me to see my thoughts as thoughts. Separate from necessarily the truth. It gave me tools for my anxiety, permission to slow down. It didn't make things easier. It made life survivable. So I became a coaching client, and then I started my online fitness business when my daughter was one. I went to my favorite fitness coaching. Conference in Vancouver. I went to this online fitness coaching seminar with this guy who was like, ah, you can coach people online. I was like, what? So I signed up with him as my first business coach. Went through his process. My program was initially called Cross Training for Life. Shout out to my cross training for life people. My daughter was one at this time. I built this business working from. Five to seven in the morning before she was awake, and then like seven to nine, 10 at night while she was asleep. And then when I started doing coaching calls, remember I was doing a baby swap. I had two babies. If I wasn't already massaging people, I would coach during their nap times. They were so sleep trained. I scheduled coaching calls for their nap times, and then I did massage therapy every other available hour. I called it efficiency. I was like, I'm not efficient as fuck. In hindsight, it was wild and it was survival. I was just surviving. But we did hit a solid groove. Eventually my business started getting really busy. During COVID, I left massage therapy and then in 2021 we moved to the Sunshine Coast, a place we had always wanted to live. Like really called to us and I grieved harder, Than I ever had in my life. I grieved leaving the city. I grieved leaving our townhouse where Matt brought me home after our wedding, like our first house where we brought Sophie home as a baby. Oh my gosh. I grieved my identity as this city person with a community and access. My anxiety exploded. My husband also was stepping into two jobs. One of them, both of them being shift work, so he was working 60% of the time. I had a 3-year-old. My anxiety exploded. My insomnia took over. I remember I still was seeing my psychologist at this time and telling her my coping strategies were scrolling and drinking wine. And I didn't connect the dots and wisely she was like, well, we're not gonna remove all your vices at once. Ironically. Also at this exact same time is when I started and completed my life coaching certification. I was like, I'm, I love coaching. I do this coaching thing. It was so rough'cause it was intense. It was an intense certification where we were meeting on calls like two, three times a week live, and I was not, remember, I was not sleeping. I was cloudy, I was foggy, I was anxious, I was having panic attacks. I was crying on calls. Like, not even when people were talking to me. I just couldn't focus. I was also exhausted. And during that process, as unfocused as I was, I still learned most of the things I needed to start to understand myself. I started to learn mindset work, thought work, inner child work, and somatics, and I started to integrate those things into my business and my clients transformed. That's what became muscles and mindset, and set it apart. That's what set muscles and mindset apart was that work that I do with clients and I still hadn't fully regulated myself. Then in 2022, I found nervous system work. I found my coach Cara, and I was like, nervous system coach. What is this? I was very intrigued. I joined her program as a VIP, so I did her heal the Hustle nervous system program, and I did one-on-one coaching with her, which again, I was terrified to invest in. I remember saying to her like, it was so much money for me, I thought in my head like, what if it doesn't work? And in hindsight, I needed it so bad. I can't imagine where I would be if I didn't do it. It changed my life, but it was so scary to invest that much in myself at that time. And I remember her saying, but what if it allows you to do more and make more? And I was like, okay. But a hundred percent she was right. Working with Cara, learning nervous system work changed my life. Not because it added more effort or things to do, but because it removed the constant internal threat. For the first time in my life, my body felt safe. I had not felt this piece, I had not learned to relax my body. In seated, I could sit and watch TV without my job being clenched, which just was a. Reflex I hadn't been able to release. I stopped bracing for impact. I stopped worrying about my business and money and clients and client stuff. I stopped feeling like everything was urgent, and I finally understood my inconsistency was not a character flaw, not that I don't know what I'm doing or there's something wrong with me. It was a nervous system doing its best to survive. We moved again in 2025. Many of you know,'cause it was just last summer and this time I, I was a bit aware because it was so hard moving last time. So hard, so hard. But I wasn't surprised, I wasn't afraid of the grief. I knew I could handle it. I felt it. I knew how to stay with it in that moment. I remember like when we sold our house, I just need to go lie in bed and cry it out and feel through this. And for the first time I knew how to do that. I felt it. I stayed with myself. I didn't numb it. I didn't try to do something or just move on. I didn't abandon myself and that is the work that I do now. I am considering, I already do somatics with my clients, but I think I'm gonna do the start the Somatic Experiencing Practitioner course in May. cause this isn't just content for me. Like it sounds so cheesy, but it's like this is my calling. Like I get so excited and lit up to work on this stuff with clients. And that's my story. So if you can relate to this, I would love to hear about it. If you have spent months or years thinking you're just inconsistent, there's something wrong with you. Every hard season knocks you off track. If your body feels tense, even when everything is fine, logically your logical brain says it's fine. There's nothing wrong. Your husband's like, it's fine, everything's fine. Your mom's like, it's okay, but your body, it's different. Right? Your body doesn't feel that way. You don't need more discipline or structure. You need nervous system safety, and you can build it. You can. It doesn't take more than a few minutes a day. You're not broken. You're not screwed. You are an adaptive, like there's so much research that shows that our brains are neuroplastic. Our brains are a key part of the nervous system. They can adapt and change, and with the right support, you become unshakeable. But you have to put that attention and energy to where you want to go to the, the how you would like your brain to be. And if you are listening to this in the middle of a season, that's changing everything. You don't need to just white knuckle and hold yourself together, but you do need to stay with yourself. Okay. Before you go, I just wanna say this, if something in this episode felt familiar or relieving or emotional in a way that you didn't expect. That's not weakness. You're not being too vulnerable. It's recognition, right? I felt that too. Nothing here is meant to fix you or push you. It's meant to help you understand yourself with self-compassion, more than self-blame. You don't need to do anything with this information right away. Just let it land. Let your body catch up, and when you're ready, I'm here in your corner. Thank you for listening.