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Nourished Living
Nourished Living is a holistic wellness podcast for women who want to nourish their bodies beyond food, through grounded nutrition, nervous system regulation, energetics, and a deeper connection to nature and self.
Hosted by Courtney Podany, Nutritional Therapist and Certified Personal Trainer with over 15 years of experience, this podcast bridges science and intuition to help you feel more regulated, resilient, and at home in your body.
Each episode offers realistic, sustainable shifts, from blood sugar balance and digestion to mindset, movement, and daily rituals, that fit into real life. No diets ever. No deprivation. Just supportive practices that help your body feel safe, nourished, and energized.
If you’re ready to move out of survival mode and into a more vibrant, connected way of living, hit subscribe and begin your journey to truly nourished living.
Follow Courtney on Instagram:
@healthywithcourtneyy
https://www.instagram.com/healthywithcourtneyy/
Work with Courtney:
https://stan.store/nourished_living_
Nourished Living
48 - What Survival Mode is Doing to Your Body
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Do you feel like you're constantly bracing for the next thing?
Maybe your mind is always racing, you're overthinking every decision, your shoulders live up near your ears, and even when life is "fine," you still can't seem to relax.
In this special episode, I'm sharing a sneak peek from my upcoming free training, How to Stop Living in Survival Mode.
You'll learn:
• What survival mode actually is and why so many women get stuck there
• The difference between fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest
• Why your brain treats everyday stressors like real emergencies
• Common signs you may be living in survival mode without realizing it
If you've been feeling anxious, overwhelmed, reactive, exhausted, or like your body is working against you, this episode is for you.
Ready to stop feeling like everything is an emergency?
Join me for my free live training:
✨ How to Stop Living in Survival Mode
Wednesday, June 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific
OR
Thursday, June 18th at 5:00 PM Pacific
During this free workshop, I'll teach you the framework I use to help women create calm as their baseline, stop spiraling, and feel safe in their bodies again.
If you enjoyed this episode and would like to go through the Identifying Hidden Stressors Activity, reference episode 41!
Connect with Courtney:
Instagram: @healthywithcourtneyy
Welcome to the Nourished Living Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Podany. So today's episode will be a little different. I am actually giving you a sneak peek into my upcoming free training, How to Stop Living in Survival Mode. So this is a clip, an actual clip, from this training that I did in March. If you have been feeling anxious, overwhelmed, constantly on edge, or like you can never fully relax, no matter how much self-care you give yourself, this is for you. In this clip, I am teaching one of the foundational concepts that I share with my clients about why so many women get stuck in survival mode and what it's actually doing to your body. I hope you enjoy when I am talking about survival mode, I'm talking about our fight or flight state. This is also known as the sympathetic state. Like I was saying, this is solely designed to try to keep us safe, but it's supposed to only be used in life-threatening emergencies. Like if you were in the presence of a lion, and you had to try to escape this lion from eating you. But our brain cannot decipher levels of stress. Stress is just stress, so once stress is activated, we're in that survival mode. So that could be something little like you were late to work. It could be you forgot to send your kid's homework to school with them. Anything little like that is taken as a life-threatening emergency. And in survival mode, our blood and our resources are diverted to our brain, so we can make quick decisions to get us out of, out of harm's way, and to our limbs, so we can outrun lions. Um, and so the blood is taken away from all of our internal organs, which is where a lot of stuff happens. It's where we breathe. It's where we digest food. So staying in this survival mode all of the time, it just... It messes with things. We get out of balance. And in survival mode, you might feel like your heart is racing. You might feel on edge, anxious, stressed, overwhelmed. You might feel fearful. You'll probably have some muscle tension. I don't know about you, but I used to just keep my shoulders up in my ears all the time. So if you're with me here live right now, go ahead and let's pull our shoulders down away. That has now become, like, my favorite cue with personal training and Pilates. I'm like, "Get your shoulders out of your ears." Um, so anyway, muscle tension could be a sign of survival mode. Uh, trouble- Concentrating and forgetfulness. So again, your brain is scanning for danger. We're looking for the best and easiest options to get us out of danger, and so you can have trouble concentrating on other tasks and things that aren't that. Uh, trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. Lots of times, um, you know, you have just racing thoughts. You're so in your head, you can't get out of your head to fall asleep or, you know, it just... You're not getting restful sleep. You're tossing and turning, and you wake up, and then, you know, the thoughts just begin again. So it could be hard staying asleep as well, which both of those can lead to fatigue. But also, you could be fatigued just because of, like, the mental load that is constantly going in the background, no matter what you try to do. That is exhausting on us. Uh, difficulty losing weight, especially around the midsection. So, um, when we hold weight in our midsection, it's because we're in survival mode, and our body is trying to, um, cushion the areas around our internal organs. It's trying to keep us, our, our- It's trying to keep our organs safe and protected. So especially if you're just in survival mode all the time, you might notice that you're gaining weight there, and it is hard to get rid of. Uh, and you're probably sick more often. You know, your resources are being used for all the things keeping you in survival mode when they could be, you know, allocated to other places like your immune system to try to keep you healthier. So the opposite of survival mode, where we want to spend the majority of our time, is the parasympathetic state, also known as rest and digest. So in the parasympathetic state, we are calm. We can rest and relax, and that's when our digestion takes place because our blood is no longer in our limbs, ready to run. Um, our blood and resources can then go to all of our organs as well. Okay, I am back. So if you are tired of feeling like everything is an emergency, tired of constantly overthinking, having spiraling thoughts, and carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, I'd love to invite you to my free live training, How to Stop Living in Survival Mode. During this workshop, I will walk you through the full framework I use to help women create calm as their baseline, regulate their nervous systems, and finally stop living in a constant state of stress and overwhelm. I have two training dates coming up, so you can hang out with me Wednesday, June 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific, 12:00 PM Eastern, or Thursday, June 18th at 5:00 PM Pacific, 8:00 PM Eastern. I also pulled an actual exercise that we did on this training and released it a few months ago. So I'm also going to link that episode in the show notes so you can go back, listen to that, and go through the exercise for yourself in real time. And then I will have the links to sign up for the training to come join me. Thank you so much for listening. I hope to see you at one of my free trainings, and I will see you in the next episode