Ep #62: You’re Not Lazy Or Incapable - You’re Dysregulated

In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of one of the most challenging and transformative seasons I’ve experienced in a long time… and the truth is, it caught me completely off guard. Because from the outside, everything looked like it was working — the business was growing, I was showing up, I was doing all the “right” things — but internally, I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and slowly burning out in a way I couldn’t quite explain.

What I didn’t realise at the time is that I was deeply dysregulated, living in a constant state of fight or flight without even knowing it… and it was quietly impacting everything. My energy, my ability to take action, my emotions, and even the things I thought I just “didn’t have motivation” for.

I walk you through how this showed up for me, the moment it finally clicked, and the simple but powerful shift that changed everything. We talk about what self-regulation actually means in real life (not just the buzzword version), how your nervous system might be keeping you stuck without you realising, and why this piece of the work is non-negotiable if you want to feel secure, grounded, and in control of your life and relationships.

This is about expanding your capacity to actually live the life you keep telling yourself you want.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• What it really looks like to be dysregulated (and why most people miss it)
• Why you can “know the work” but still feel stuck in the same patterns
• How chronic stress impacts your energy, emotions, and decision-making
• Why self-regulation is the foundation for secure dating and relationships
• The shift that helped me move from burnout and avoidance… to clarity and action

🎧 Tune in now! And if this episode resonates, send me a DM on Instagram — I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway.

PEACEFULLY ATTACHED: https://www.mimiwatt.com/

MIMI SOCIAL MEDIA
Come say hi 👋 (or DM me your biggest takeaway) on Instagram HERE!

Transcript

0:00

You are listening to the Secure Love Club podcast. I'm your host, Mimi Watt. Hey friends. Welcome back to the Club. How are you doing today? It is a beautiful, stormy, windy day here in Melbourne. Today, I'm sitting at my desk in the new house and I'm looking out the windows, and there's a beautiful breeze blowing through the trees. It's raining lightly. It's gray skies, so the vibes are just cozy, right? I love to paint the picture for you, so I'm feeling, I'm feeling really good about sitting down and recording today because the vibe is right for the episode. Today's episode is. A bit of an insight into a personal journey that I've been on over the last year, specifically the last six months that has been. Challenging is an understatement, but it's also been one of the biggest breakthroughs and transformations I've had in a long time. And it relates to you very much so in how you are living your life, moving through the world, relating to other people and relating to yourself. And the crux of this conversation is really all about. Self-regulation and your nervous system now before you roll your eyes and you're like, oh, fucking self-regulation, nervous system. Like either what does this even mean? Or I don't need to hear about this, or I already know about this. I'm gonna encourage you to stick around anyway because. I'm going to share my personal story and my relationship with self-regulation and my nervous system, and I think it's going to give you a very valuable insight into where you might think you are regulated and where you might not actually be, and what to start to do about it, because the nervous system is. I would say from where I stand today now, undeniably the most important thing that we need to be paying attention to if we want to be living a big, full happy life, it is. It is everything. Okay? And I'm gonna go into why in this episode. So this is gonna be highly valuable for you. I encourage you to stick around, to open your ears, open your mind, and get ready for a story. Let's dive in. I've spoken here and there about what I was going through last year, but I haven't opened up to the depth of what I was truly experiencing. As you know, most of you probably know I moved to Melbourne about a year and a few months ago, and I came here on a whim after living in Bali. I'm originally from Sydney, and when I came to Melbourne, I didn't have any commu. I don't have any community here really outside of my family who lives here, which is my mom and my sisters, and. When I first arrived here, I thought, this is great. This is amazing. I have no distractions, and I just get to focus on building my business. And that felt really good for me at the time. And so that's what I did. I didn't make any effort to socialize or any effort to build a community because I always told myself that this was temporary and I'd only be here for a few months, so what's the point? And I just didn't really have any balance. My days were. All work hustling very hard, and my weekends were just spent mostly at home. I wasn't dating, I wasn't socializing, and at first, like I said, this felt good because being in Bali for six months was very overstimulating. So when I got to Melbourne, I thought, oh, this is heaven, this is peaceful, this is quiet. I just get to be in my own energy, do my thing in a really safe, cozy environment, staying with my mom. So this was the vibe and this was all good and well for a few months. And then I beg, I think it was about after four or five months of this, I began to notice my mental health was starting to take a dip, and this was showing up in the form of. Uh, very emotional, especially on the weekends because I realized I was just distracting myself all week with work, and that when it came to the weekends, which I typically try not to work, all these feelings were bubbling to the surface that I had clearly been suppressing throughout the week, and I started to feel really emotional. I started to be crying a lot because I was like, I don't have a life here. I have no outlets. What am I doing? And at the same time was feeling this resistance still towards going and creating a life. Because I kept saying, well, no, I'm not staying here. I'm not staying here, so I don't want to do that. And. So I was getting more emotional. Another thing that I noticed was my energy was starting to be really low. So on the weekends or whenever I would stop work, and some days even throughout the workday, I just felt exhausted. I had very little energy. Anything that I had to get done felt very hard to do. It felt like. Climbing a mountain, a very big challenge, and when the weekend would come around, I would just basically want to do absolutely nothing. And so this started to happen and I wasn't thinking too much of it outside of the fact that, well, outside of the obvious, right? Like, yeah, of course this makes sense. I don't have a community here, so of course I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling a bit flat. This really escalated in the second half of last year of 2025. I had invested into a business mentorship program, a container that I'm still in, and this was a huge uplevel for me. This program, it was a big investment and it came at a time in my life and in my business where I was so serious about taking this to the next level and setting my business up for success and longevity. And when this container started, it was midway through last year. I gave it fucking everything. Okay. I didn't half as this. I didn't invest and then dabble. I gave it everything. So not only was I still coaching and supporting all my current clients, doing the podcast every week, creating content on the daily writing emails, like all the things that come with running an online business. I was doing all of this. And I was going through a very content heavy, uh, intense business program. And whilst doing that, I was learning so many new things and I was adapting and I was implementing. So I was using this whole new part of my brain, this other part of my brain, I should say, that is not the autopilot part, right? Where I'm doing the things that I do all the time every day. This was all new stuff to me. And so it was using up a lot of my energy, and I'm a pretty determined person when I put my mind to something and when I really want to give it my all. And so I just kept pushing myself. I was working 12 hour days every day at my desk without like hardly any breaks. I was just pushing and pushing and pushing. I had ambitious goals. I wanted to reach them fast and. Yeah, I basically didn't give myself any other choice. And I remember my sister was there at the time as well, and I remember her starting to notice this in me and notice this change in my energy, noticing more of the emotional highs and lows and the lack of balance in my life. And she started to say to me, you know, I think you need to stop working so hard. I think you need to like take a break. I don't think this is good for you. And at first I wanted to just push that away or I did push that away and I said, no, no, no, it's fine. Like this is just a sprint. I know what I'm doing. This is just a chapter of my life where I need to work really hard. It's fine. And she said it a few times, right? And I kept kind of pushing it back and, and rejecting it. And then towards the end of last year, things just got really, really bad. I mean, I'm talking bursting into tears. I'm talking waking up in the morning and looking at my to-do list and feeling such. Anxiety in my chest that I would just start crying. I would walk away from my desk. I felt completely overwhelmed, couldn't do anything. It was awful. And on the weekends, again, I honestly could hardly get out of bed. And maybe this comes as a bit of a shock because throughout all of this, I was still showing up on social media. I was still running my business. But behind the scenes, this is what I was navigating and I wasn't ready to talk about it too openly then, because I like to share from the wound, not the, sorry, from the scar, not the wound. So once I'm out the other side, I always like to share my wisdom and lessons with you, but during the time, I just needed to navigate that privately and yeah, it was really fucking heavy. And so I was getting to this point where I just felt very hopeless and. Very pessimistic and I didn't know what the hell was wrong with me and it felt, it honestly felt like I was in this hole that I didn't know how to get myself out of. And I got to a point where I did say to myself, I need support. I need help. Because as much as my family is an amazing support system, I need someone who is gonna be that. That safe space where there is no personal bias or opinion on the matter and I can just vent and really get some structured support. So I did that. I went in, got myself a therapist, and I've been working with her for the last couple of months or few months and that's been amazing. And, and then one day I was, I was just on Instagram and. One of my past mentors, her name's Hailey Lloyd, she has just built a breathwork app called In Awe, and I worked with Haley in the past. She was a business mentor of mine. I absolutely adore Haley. She's incredible. Just such a dear, dear person in my life for so many wa in so many ways. Anyway, we, um, we are still friends to this day and so we, I was on Instagram and I'm watching her Instagram story and she said like, you know, reply to my story and I'll give you some free coaching. And I thought, fuck yeah, I love Haley's coaching. So I replied to her story and I told her, she said, tell me what your block is like, what's happening? And so I replied and I said to her, I'm like, look, I'm really stuck. I. Don't know where I wanna live. I know that I don't wanna be in Melbourne, but I want to, I wanna move somewhere else. I just dunno where that is, or I have a, an inkling, but I. No wait, sorry. At this point I was saying that I think I wanna move to the Gold Coast, but I have no idea. That's actually for me and I, and I want to go book a trip there, but I just haven't been able to get myself to do it. I was saying, you know, I've been wanting to get back into dating, haven't been able to get myself to do it. I'm stressed and overwhelmed like crazy with work. Um, I am struggling to get out of bed. My energy's really low. I just feel really flat. And she said back to me in a voice note, you are incredibly dysregulated. All of this you are describing to me is dysregulation and your nervous system is stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight. And the reason you can't get yourself to do these things that are arguably going to be a bit outside your comfort zone is because you are stuck in survival mode. And when you are stuck in survival mode, all your nervous system and your body cares about is literally surviving, which means doing the bare minimum and just getting through the day. Okay, so just at this point in the story, I want you to reflect and just notice if you are maybe experiencing any of these symptoms, if you will, that I'm describing that I was going through last year. And just, yeah, just bring that awareness to the surface because in this moment when she said this to me, I was actually really shocked, which sounds ridiculous now that I say it, but I was shocked because. I always thought of myself as being quite a regulated person. You know, I thought, well, I'm very mindful, I'm self-aware. I exercise regularly. I take care of my health. You know, I'm, I'm pretty regulated, but boy did this wake me up. Okay. And so maybe you think that. You are regulated too, but if any of these feelings are happening for you, like you cannot get yourself to take action and this is not about being lazy or you just don't have the discipline or the will to go and do hard things, a lot of the time for a lot of people, there's this shame that we inflict on ourselves because we think we can't do something. When really your body doesn't feel safe to do that thing, you don't. You are not regulated and so. When we are just a little bit of context for regulation now, when we are, oh, in our physiology, we have what is called our window of tolerance, and within our window of tolerance, that is when you feel calm, regulated, you can think clearly, you can make rational decisions, you can think with perspective. Okay? So it's like when you're just feeling good, you're feeling regulated. And whenever we are dysregulated, we are gonna go into a fight or flight response. So when we're. Anxious, we're overthinking, we're spiraling, we're freaking out. Or we go into a freeze or a foreign response, which is where we just shut down and numb out basically, and dunno how to move forward. And we can have either a very small window of tolerance or a big window of tolerance. And when your window of tolerance is very small, what that means is that. It doesn't take much in day-to-day life to trigger you or to activate you and send you into dysregulation. Okay, so this is extremely applicable for my anxiously attached girlies people, women who are listening, because when we are in a relationship or we're dating people who are avoidant and emotionally unavailable, we are getting triggered left, right, and center. And so we go into a dysregulated state. And with most people that I've worked with and that I've spoken to, and this used to be me, your window of tolerance, your baseline is very small. So anything or any little thing can set you off. And then you, it's like you lose yourself, okay? You're just in that chaos. You spiraling, and that's when we're dysregulated. So. I didn't realize that my window of tolerance in day-to-day life had become very small. And the other thing that happens, right, is when we go into a dysregulated state. It is a normal physiological process in our body. We are meant to have these moments of acute stress where we do get dysregulated because number one, it's a survival instinct. Like if there is something chasing you, you want, you want your nervous system to become dysregulated to go into that fight or that flight, so you can either fight that person or run away. We want that to happen, but what we also want to happen, which. Doesn't sometimes is we need to complete that stress response and discharge that energy from our body and then down regulate and come back into our window of tolerance. And so when we don't properly process what we're feeling and process our emotions and then discharge that energy, that is when we get stuck in that state of chronic dysregulation. Your nervous system gets stuck in your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight response, and you just stay there the whole time, which, just think about it for a second. When you're in that fight or flight state, your body reads that the same way as if you were being chased by a person or chased by a tiger, and you are living in that state 24 7. Just think about how exhausting that is for your body. And maybe that gives you some insight into why you, you are exhausted all the time, but you could just push through and you push through and you push through and you just keep showing up every day and you're getting stuff done. But it feels so hard. Up. So this is what was happening to me. I was not taking adequate time to properly process what I was experiencing, my stress in my body. And so I got stuck in that chronic place and it destroyed me temporarily. It was, it's also what we call like a functional freeze state where. My nervous system had gone into complete shutdown, but I was still functioning day to day from pure Force. So it's almost like you have the one foot on the accelerator, like pedal to the metal and the other foot on the brake at the same time because one part of you is trying to can't move, is like trying to slow down. And the other part of you is forcing you to keep moving because you gotta get shit done and you gotta live your life. So that was a bit of a tangent. I digress. But I wanted to give you some context and all of this just in case. So coming back to Haley's message. So yeah, she says to me, you're incredibly dysregulated. And she said, so she just built an app called in, or as I mentioned, which is all about breath work. It has a whole lot of different breath work flows in it. And she said to me, you need to start doing breath work every day. Like that is your non-negotiable. Now you, you've gotta do breath work every single day and. Because this was such a shock to me, and it was one of those real eye-opening moments that, oh my God, this all makes sense. Why I haven't been able to do anything, why I've been struggling. I am dysregulated. Fuck. I need to do something about this. I need to change. So I said, I'm okay. I'm committing to this. I'm going to do the breath work. I started, I'd done breath work here and there over the years. But I'd never done it as a daily ritual and with, with as much intention and dedication as I started doing back in, this was actually only in January that this started, okay, end of January that I started doing this. So I start doing the breath work every day within one week. Of focusing on regulating my nervous system. I did two of the things that I had been putting off for months. One of them was booking a trip to go to the Gold Coast by myself to go fly there, to spend a couple of days there and suss it out to see if I wanna live there. And the other thing was going on dates and I was so surprised and amazed. I was like, oh my God. What is happening? What, what is going on? Why am I suddenly able to do these things that I haven't been able to do? And I realized. Oh, my body is starting to relax. My body is starting to come out of dysregulation. Suddenly I'm freeing up a bit more capacity in my body to be able to take these steps outside my comfort zone. Oh my God. Let me keep going with this. Let me see what else I can do. So I keep doing the breath work. Day after day after day, and every time I'm doing this, I feel incredible. I'm feeling back in my physical body, and this is the amazing thing about breath work is that when we do it. It actually temporarily shuts off the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that is the thinking part of our brain, right? The part where we are overthinking, we're spiraling all the time. It shuts that off temporarily, and you go into your mammalian brain, which is the part of your brain that processes feelings and emotions. So it's like the brain switches off in a way and. Body takes over and it starts to process all this emotion that you've had stored in your nervous system that you may not have even been aware of. It starts to discharge that stress, and just by doing the breath work, you are regulating and actively expanding your window of tolerance. So remember, when we have a broader window of tolerance, it means you have more capacity to do more things in your life. In other words, it means that your you, your physiology can handle more stress or more change or pressure or responsibility. And all of those factors, all of those things usually come with anything outside of our comfort zone. So the more regulated we are, the more things we can do that we actually have a desire to do that we are drawn to that maybe we haven't been able to because we've been feeling stuck or we've been feeling unsafe. The other thing that it does is it allows us to stop being so reactive in our life and falling back into the same patterns. So when we're really anxiously attached and most likely very dysregulated, that's when we are reacting to the same types of behaviors and patterns that people we we're dating are exhibiting because it's familiar, it's what we're used to. We're in that set of dysregulation. And we are not in our window of tolerance. So when you are, it means that you are able to slow down and look at situations with more perspective and long-term thinking and ask yourself, do I really want to engage with this again? Am I really going to entertain this? Do I feel, do I need to, uh, sorry, do I feel so unsafe that I need to go into this and react? Or can I create safety here internally and can I see with more rationale that this person is not good for me, they are not compatible with the person that I'm stepping into and the type of relationship I want to call in. And you can make a new decision because you have the space and the groundedness to do so. It is so important. So I keep doing the breath work and then this other huge thing for me happens. Now, this is very niche, but I'm sure most of you women listening will be able to relate to this in one way or another. So I've spoken about this a little bit, but for my whole adult life, or since I was about 14 or 15, I had this awful dependency on fake tan to feel confident and to feel good about myself. And this just comes from being bullied in high school for having pale skin and being called pasty and disgusting and a ghost, and just all the awful things that girls in high school say. And growing up in Australia, you know, the beauty standard is to have that beautiful bronze skin. So. I developed this insecurity around my authenticity, and I started fake tanning every single week, and it was something that had such a choke hold over me. It became something I felt like I had to do, and I didn't really have a choice in the matter. Now I have been trying to quit this habit and release myself from this crutch for five years. The first moment, I remember the first time I. Really tried to quit was in 2021 morning I went to do it, and I literally had a breakdown because I remember saying, I can't do this anymore. This is exhausting. I don't wanna have to keep doing this and feeling like I have to change myself all the time and. I actually, I actually did stop fake tanning for a few months, but then a few months later something happened and the old habit creeped in and it started up again. Now, over the last five years, this has happened probably three or four times where I've gone through periods of stopping it and then going back on it and, and I am not kidding when I say that. This conversation. It came up in one of my therapy sessions with my therapist, and I was telling her how this is something I really want to give up. I feel like it's really holding me back in life. And we had this great conversation about it and something just clicked in my brain that I realized I could release this. I realized that. Oh my God, I don't even, who the, like who have I been living for? I've been doing this for everyone else. This hasn't even really been for me. And I can actually, in this moment right now, just decide that I get to create my own beauty standard and I get to be me. And that's what it's gonna be. And whoever, you know, is attracted to me for what I naturally am amazing. And if anyone isn't, not my problem. And I know that sounds, that might sound simplistic, but it truly clicked for me. And I'm telling you since that session, this was a few weeks ago, I walked outta that session and was like, I'm done. I'm so done. And I think that the self-regulation work I have been doing in the lead up to that session and ongoing since then has been the reason why I've been able to feel this shift internally. Because every other time that I tried to give it up, I was, yeah, I wasn't using it, but I still felt really insecure and I was still plagued with all these thoughts and these fears every week of like, oh my God, what are people gonna think of me? You know, people are gonna see me looking like this. They're gonna judge me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was still feeling very unsafe in my body around this topic. Whereas this time. I feel completely different. I feel I, Hey, I'm feeling myself. Let me put it that way. I feel amazing. I feel so confident. I am loving taking care of my skin. I love what I see in the mirror. I have no desire to go back to fake tanning like this feels different than ever before, and what feels different? Is how grounded and how safe I feel in my body, in my nervous system. I realized that that crutch was part of dysregulation because I was having this cycle all the time of feeling amazing when I first did fake tan, and then feeling awful about myself when it would come off, and then feeling amazing when I had it on, and then feeling awful when it came off. And this is, maybe you see a similarity here between that. Toxic relationships. You feel awful when things aren't going well. And when that person starts to pull away, and then you feel fucking amazing when they finally come back and they give you attention again, and then they pull away and it's awful. And they come back and it's amazing. And this was the same thing. It was the same pattern. And so when I really started to just. Discharge. All of this wound up stress that I've been holding in my body. It just allowed me to not need that anymore to feel safe because that's what it was. It was an armor of sorts. It was a safety protection mechanism. But the more I'm creating safety internally, the less I need these external crutches. I'm telling you, my sugar cravings have completely just dropped so much. The need for Fat Tan has gone. I'm feeling so much better. My creativity is sky high. I'm attracting amazing people into my life. Clients, this is no joke. Your self-regulation is like the remote control to your nervous system, which is the captain of your life, for lack of a better description. I am telling you, understanding your nervous system and self-regulating is what is going to change your fucking life. It's going to change what you are a match for and what you are not, and who you are a match for in life and who you are not. The more regulated and calm you become internally, the less interested you are in chaos and games and drama in a relationship. You can recognize with more clarity when you are starting to be pulled back into an old pattern and you can pull yourself back out of it. Inside, peacefully attached. We talk about all of this. I go into many different examples and different ways that you can approach your self-regulation and how to approach it as well, not just from an acute point of view around, oh, I'm, I'm triggered or activated in this very moment because something just happened. How do I regulate? But also from a holistic point of view of how are we regulating? Outside of those acute moments of stress on a day-to-day basis, expanding our window of tolerance so that A, we're triggered less, we're dysregulated less often, but B, when we are, we can manage it so much more effectively and make better decisions that are going to serve us in the long run. What we talk about in the program is already amazing. But to make it even better, your girl has gone invested in a breath work facilitation certification. Yeah. Because naturally I wanna do this with you. I wanna support you through breath work, and I wanna help change your life and change your relationships. Like this has changed mine. So I'm currently in my certification, I'm learning. All the things I'm studying, I'm practicing, and I am going to be bringing this into peacefully attached. It's going to be so fricking powerful and I can't wait to support you with this. Your life can truly change in such a short amount of time when you have the right support and the right tools at your disposal. It has been January, February, March, two months. And all of this has happened for me in two months. It's actually wild. So do with that what you will. But to wrap this episode up, I wanna give you some questions to reflect on. From this conversation and give you some, some insight maybe into your own life and your own nervous system. So the first question, where have I been wanting to take action or where have I kept telling myself there's these things that I'm going to do or that I want to do? But now that I look back, I can see I have not been taking action on those things. And where is that coming from? What intuitively, if you can feel, where is that coming from? A state of overwhelm, fear and stress, rather than just lack of motivation. Can you pinpoint and highlight those areas in your life where that is happening for you? Number two, I want you to ask yourself or pick one of those things and in your mind when you think about going and doing that thing, what reaction comes up in your body? Does your chest tighten? Do you get a lump in your throat or in your stomach? Do you feel constricted? Do you feel anxiety in your chest? Like you just wanna back away? Because if you do, that is likely a sign of dysregulation and a sign that we need to be creating safety within your body. And number three is how can I support myself today to give more safety and space for my nervous system? What does my body need? Not what do I want to do? What do I. Need and really give yourself the grace of answering that question. Give yourself space. Maybe you haven't even asked yourself that question in a while. What does my body need from me today? And trust the answer that comes through. Your body is so intelligent and it will tell you what it needs if you give it the space to listen. All right, my friends. If this episode resonated with you, I would love to hear it. So make sure you jump over to my Instagram, send me a message, let me know and get regulating my friends, because it will change your life. And if you want support on doing that, jump on into peacefully attached. We are actually officially opening the doors next week. Even those spots are already filling. So hit the link in the description box below if you would like to learn more or if you wanna apply and connect with me to talk about securing a spot. All right, my friends, you have a beautiful week and I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye If you enjoyed today's episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this episode with your friends and come find me on social so we can hang out between episodes. All the links are below in the show notes.