Decision Debt: The Hidden Reason You Can’t Stay Consistent

Why do so many high-achieving women struggle to stay consistent with habits like exercise, sleep, or self-care?

In this episode, Coach Anne Jones introduces the concept of decision debt — the invisible pattern that forms when you repeatedly make small promises to yourself and break them. Over time, your nervous system stops believing your intentions, which leads to procrastination, avoidance, and the feeling that you “just can’t stay consistent.”

This isn’t laziness or lack of discipline. It’s a self-trust problem rooted in your nervous system.

Anne explains how decision debt builds, why perfectionism keeps you stuck in the start-over cycle, and how rebuilding consistency starts with tiny promises your body actually believes you’ll keep.

If you’re a high-achieving woman who feels like you know what to do but struggle to follow through when life gets busy, this episode will change how you think about consistency.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• What decision debt is and how it sabotages consistency
• Why your nervous system stops trusting your promises
• The 3 real jobs of the brain (and how they affect habits)
• How perfectionism quietly destroys motivation
• Why follow-through matters more than intensity
• A simple method to rebuild self-trust and calm consistency

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

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

Welcome to the Muscles and Mindset Revolution podcast, which is becoming back to you. In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to the Muscles and Mindset Revolution Podcast on Apple and Spotify. The links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way.

Speaker 2 0:16

Welcome to back To You, the podcast for high achieving women who are tired of abandoning themselves just to keep everything running, I'm your host, Anne Jones, certified life coach and mentor and nervous system educator. For 17 years, I helped women build stronger bodies and sustainable habits, but what I discovered is that most women don't struggle with knowing what to do. They struggle with staying with themselves when life gets intense. Here we talk about nervous systems, self-trust and calm, consistency so you can stop overriding yourself and finally build a life that actually feels as good as it looks. No hustle, no self pressure, just the skills that help you come back to yourself. Let's dive in. Hello, I'm really glad you're here. this was my first real week back from our cruise vacation, first week back in real life, first week back in my. New business, simply coaching clients. My non fitness coaching business. It was all suitcases, laundry really that wait, what day is it feeling? Especially because we homeschool now, I'm constantly like, what day is it? You know the vibe. Right? And it was also my first week working as a one-on-one coach with my first cohort in this new chapter. I of course have coached one-on-one clients for several years since becoming a life coach and mentor in 2021, but it's my full-time gig now, which is really exciting. one of the beauties of coaching high achieving women in this niche in our demographic is that I get to see inside so many beautiful brains, and so I would like to talk about something that I see constantly. If you are a high achieving woman, a mom, perhaps premenopausal or premenopausal, overstimulated, running hot, trying to keep your life together, this will probably hit. Because this is the pattern underneath most'I can't stay consistent' stories. It is not laziness. It is not a lack of discipline. It is not that you are bad at routine or structure. It is decision debt and decision Debt is the invisible reason you keep making. I'll do it later. Deals with yourself until your body stops believing you what decision debt actually is. Decision debt is what happens. When you keep deferring tiny promises to yourself, it sounds harmless. I'll work out later. I'll go for a walk after lunch. I'll start tomorrow. I'll meal prep on Sunday. I'll do it when I have more time. I'll do it when I'm feeling more motivated. I need more motivation. And each of these is very small, but they stack and compound. And here's what nobody tells you. Your nervous system keeps receipts. Your body learns your patterns. So when you say, I'll do it later, and later never happens. Your body starts to treat your promises to yourself like noise. And when your body doesn't believe you, it protects you, with procrastination, with exhaustion, with avoidance with I'm too tired. Not because you're lazy, but because your system has learned your word is not reliable. And that is what I mean when I say decision debt. It's debt because you keep borrowing from your future self in order to avoid discomfort right now. And then you wonder why your future self is tired, resentful, and unmotivated. Let me walk you through the exact loop, especially if you're the kind of woman who says, I, I know what to do. I just can't seem to do it consistently. Here's the loop. You wake up tired probably'cause you went to bed to it late. You negotiate with yourself. Just 20 more minutes. Movement gets bumped to later. Later becomes tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes months, and then you feel disappointed and call it a motivation problem. I'm just not motivated, but it is not a motivation problem. I've talked about motivation before and I can do a whole other podcast on how I almost think motivation is not real. Motivation is only accessible when we are in tune with ourselves and when we're not in tune and we never rest or slow down enough to build motivation, or we don't even know ourselves well enough to know what our desires are of, of course, we're not gonna have motivation. So this is not a motivation problem. It is the slow erosion of self-trust because every time you make a deal with yourself and break it, you're teaching your body. We don't follow through and your nervous system responds with, cool. Then I'm not gonna mobilize and waste energy for this because energy is expensive. Your brain has three jobs. Keep you alive at all costs, survival and safety, constantly scanning for threat, trying to keep the body safe. Number two, conserve energy. I just said energy is expensive, so it's prioritizing efficiency to conserve energy, because energy is metabolically expensive. The brain itself uses roughly 20% of your body's energy, so it's always trying to create habits and avoid unnecessary discomfort. And the brain's third job is to avoid discomfort and pain to minimize threat. The brain prefers familiar comfort over unfamiliar efforts, so if something feels uncertain, risky, or emotionally uncomfortable. Nervous system because brain is one of the parts of the nervous system will often steer you away, even if it's good for you long term. So all that to say energy is expensive, brain is trying to conserve energy. Your system doesn't wanna spend energy on goals, it doesn't trust you to complete. So that is not Lees, that's actually intelligent conservation conservation. Let's name the real villain. Perfectionism. Perfectionism is sneaky. Perfectionism is why you believe your effort only counts if it's enough, IE 45 to 60 minutes of exercise five days a week. Perfectionism is why you keep starting at the finish line. Perfectionism is why you think, if I can't do 60 minutes, why bother? And if you're nodding right now, I want you to hear me say this. That belief is the reason you're getting none. High achieving women love to set a standard so high that it requires the perfect day and circumstances to execute it. Then they blame themselves for refusing to cooperate. But your nervous system is not refusing. It is responding accurately to pressure because when your standard is to do it perfectly, your system here is that's unsafe. That's not gonna happen. So it opts out and the fix is not more intensity. It's follow through, and this is where fit most fitness culture ruins women. It teaches intensity. It teaches all or nothing. It teaches more motivation. It teaches the plan, and I've been there, I've done that. You need a structure. There's lots of research that shows having a plan is more important even than what is in the plan, the one thing that actually creates consistency, which is follow through and follow through, is what makes your body trust you again. And body trust is the part that feels good when your body trusts you, energy comes back online, not because you're pushing harder or working harder because you are safe with yourself again. So the goal is not fitness first. The goal is self-trust. Fitness is just the practice. Ground fitness is the tool. So here's a tiny fix that changes everything. And I need you to not roll your eyes at how simple this will be. Okay? Because simple is the point. It has to be simple, stupid. I had a client tell me recently, I think I need 45 full minutes to do a real workout. So if I don't have that, why bother? So she was getting none. And I'm saying that one client said this to me recently, but I have had dozens of clients say this exact same thing to me over the past 17 years, so I didn't fix this with a motivational speech. We fixed it with a plan. So stupid simple that her nervous system could not believe it, but when it's simple, you're gonna get on board. And here's what we did. this is just an example, right? We can apply this to anything, but this is just such a common example, especially when I was working in the fitness industry, not getting up to do the workout, which usually comes from not getting enough sleep, which usually comes from not going to bed early enough. Which is often based in a like me time fallacy. But we're not gonna address that right now. Let's address the bedtime thing. We gotta have a solid bedtime. Yeah, I know you're an adult. You still need a bedtime Most days of the week, there's tons of research that shows that consistent bedtime within an hour is like one of the best things that you can do for your sleep and for your longevity of life. So with this client that was being in bed 10 15. Lights out by 11. Alarm set for 6 45. Snooze, disabled. This is another thing that I coach client. I, I have never used a snooze button, you guys. I don't, I just looked, maybe it wasn't raised that way, but like, just disable it on your phone. Just turn the snooze off so you have to get up. Like just don't do it. And then all I asked her to do. Was get on the stationary bike for 10 not starting with the 45, 60 minute workout.'cause we just have to create the habit. We have to get into that flow. Instructor, you do this for three, four days in a row. Give yourself evidence that you can trust yourself to show up. You will continue. You don't need 45 minutes. You don't need five days a week. You don't need a whole identity makeover yet, just 10 minutes. But we like Poo poo starting with that 10 minutes. You do that three days in a row, and you know what happens? This client, her energy started coming back. Her mornings felt less dramatic. She stopped treating, waking up like a war with herself, and she started to feel proud of herself again. Not because she transformed overnight, but because she followed through. So here's. When just get up, it doesn't feel like adult logic. When I did a somatic investigation with this client and slowed down and listened to her body, the I should get up pressure didn't feel like adult logic. It felt like a hot, heavy weight in her chest and her back. So instead of pushing through that, we got curious about it. We followed the sensation, this is what we do in somatic practice, and it led her straight back to a 10-year-old version of herself, doing private school homework, not really knowing what to do, feeling pressure, being so afraid of disappointing people, having this feeling of like, I have to do this thing and I'm not doing it yet. So, of course, mornings feel loaded because it's not just get on the bike for her. It's an old nervous system schema and story. If I don't do it perfectly. I'm failing. I'm a failure. I'm letting people down. I'm not good enough, essentially. And so once she could name that story, she could stop letting the 10-year-old version of her run the show, which is what was happening. She could say, thank you, adult me has got this. Now I can actually take a break and still follow through. I'm safe. I am capable. I can do the next smallest step. And that is how you build consistency, not white knuckling, not pushing harder, not bullying yourself into a routine. Consistency is when your body learns, oh, I can trust her. So your assignment this week is to pick the action your body believes. If you are stuck in this loop, here's where you start tomorrow. Not with the plan that impresses you or you think will impress someone else, but with the plan that your body can believe and buy into. I want you to pick one tiny self-honoring action that you can actually keep. Maybe it's 10 minutes of movement every day. Maybe it's a short walk before the rest of your house wakes up, stretching beside your bed, five minutes on the bike because starting is the win Three minutes of meditation, 60 seconds of breathing. One protein forward breakfast, putting your phone in another room for 20 minutes, turning the lights out 30 minutes earlier. Whatever it is that is moving you towards the version of yourself who you desire to be. And here's the important part. If you miss a day, I need you to opt out of spiraling because spiraling is a choice. It's something we buy into and then it's really hard to get out of you. Do not spiral. You do it the next day. This is the tenacious piece that most people skip. Most women perceive one or two missed days as a failure, and instead of believing in themselves and being ruthlessly tenacious, they opt out. But energy builds through, follow through, even imperfect follow through, especially imperfect follow through because that is how self-trust is rebuilt. Let me leave you with this. You are not bad at consistency. You are just carrying decision debt and the way out is not intensity, it's proof. One tiny promise, kept again and again and again. If this hit, I have a brand new free email experience for you. It is for the woman who's done starting over and wants to rebuild self-trust without more pressure. I will put the link in the show notes. I'm so excited about it, and if you want more personalized support, you can always book a tune-in session with me. if you enjoyed this episode, it really helps. If you can please give the show a five star review so that more women can find it. I so appreciate you being here, and I will see you next week.