Sn 2, Ep 2 - Reset & Renew Yourself for 2026

What do you do when you’re the one teaching about mindset, energy, and wellbeing… but your own nervous system is completely fried?

In this deeply honest solo episode, Kim shares what really happened behind the scenes at the end of 2025 — the burnout, the insomnia, the tears, the self-doubt — and how it all finally caught up to her. If you’ve been feeling overstimulated, overwhelmed, disconnected from yourself, or like you’re barely keeping your head above water, this episode is for you.

Kim walks you through the exact moment she realized something had to change — and the five simple, doable steps she used to reset her mind, regulate her nervous system, and feel safe in her body again. Not in months. Not in weeks. Almost instantly.

This episode weaves together:
 • Burnout & nervous system regulation
 • Why insomnia isn’t a sleep problem — it’s a safety problem
 • Perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and creative pressure
 • Why play is not optional for a fulfilled life
 • How what you consume mentally shapes your reality
 • The surprising connection between Greek mythology, astrology, and healing
 • And why your greatest insecurity may actually be your greatest strength

Kim also shares a powerful realization inspired by Percy Jackson & the Olympians that reframed everything she thought she knew about rest, safety, and healing — and why learning to feel safe again is the foundation for clarity, creativity, and joy.

You’ll leave this episode with a new perspective on why you’re feeling the way you are, permission to stop pushing through, and a clear path to reset your energy without blowing up your life.

This is not about fixing everything “out there.”
 It’s about changing what’s happening inside — so everything else stops feeling so heavy.

✨ New year. New energy. New way of living.
 Reset. Renew. And make this the year you come back to yourself.

If this episode resonates, share it with someone who needs a reset. We read every message — and we’re so glad you’re here. 💛

Transcript

1:39

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Charmed Life Project. I'm Kim Littrell, and today we're talking about how to reset and renew yourself in five simple and easy steps for a revolutionary 2026. It's a new year. It's a new season, and it's a new format for the show. So you may have noticed that things have changed a bit. Gina dropped a solo episode last week and this is my first solo. Not to worry, we'll be doing plenty of episodes together still, but after what felt like a very busy and chaotic end season one, we are shaking things up a bit so that we can practice what we preach. Live more in the moment. And do things in a way that aligns more with our energy. Gina is the energizer bunny. We talked about that. She can go and go and go. I, on the other hand, need a little bit more downtime to think and to process and create. If you listen to our last episode of 2025, the Life Audit episode, you may have heard it in my voice. I talked about not having enough energy, not having enough time or space to take care of myself the way I knew I needed to. It felt like I was constantly rushing, constantly behind, just trying to keep my head above water. Well, guess what? It caught up to me hard and fast before I even realized what was happening. I hit a wall and felt completely burnt out. There were tears, y'all. I wasn't sleeping. I was completely dysregulated, snapping at my kids and feeling like I was on the edge of a full on mental breakdown. It seemed like nothing could go right, like there was a new problem to deal with every hour of the day, and I was already at max capacity. If you've ever felt like that stretch too thin. Overwhelmed, disconnected from yourself. This episode is for you because today I wanna share with you guys how I got myself back, how I dug myself out of the hole I was in and back to a place of feeling whole, feeling like my spiritual, healthy, authentic self. I'm going to tell you exactly what I did to reset my mind, to renew my energy, and to come back clearer and stronger and more creative and lit up than ever. So let's jump in. All right. Reflecting back on it all now, I think one of the biggest contributing factors that led to me feeling like this was self-doubt. Everyone feels imposter syndrome to some degree, but I was feeling it even more than usual because here I was talking about all of these things, preaching about energy and mental health and wellbeing every week, and practicing none of it. I had fully convinced myself. I just didn't have the time at the moment. That's the crazy thing about our minds. We have this way of convincing ourselves that there will be time later. Once we get through X, Y, Z, then we will be able to do the things we wanna do. But that's just a lie we tell ourselves later does not exist. It just keeps being later. Right? And it's never about finding time for things. It's about making time. It's about your priorities. I think at the root of it all, I was putting way too much pressure on myself. I'm a perfectionist in this format of releasing every week made me feel. Out of control, like there wasn't enough preparation going into these podcasts, like I wasn't bringing anything new to the table, didn't have anything valuable to add to the conversation. And since there's two of us, we had to plan ahead, of course, and choose the topics way in advance. So it just started to feel really forced to me, like I was locked into thinking about and researching these topics each week that we'd planned for, which then left me no room to follow my own natural urges of what was actually peaking my interest in speaking to me in the moment. So it was feeling a lot more like work than a creative outlet and. Because I wanna be totally transparent with you guys. I also was getting in my head way too much and worrying about what people thought. Gina is incredible. She's so good at what she does, and she has a ton of experience with public speaking. Me on the other hand, not so much. I'm a writer for a reason. Okay? Speaking has never been my thing. This is really vulnerable for me to admit because I like to pretend that I don't care what anyone thinks about me, but I do like, especially when it comes to writing and sharing my ideas, and it's hard putting yourself out there week after week just bearing your soul to anyone that will listen with very little feedback while also not really having the time to fully process it week over week because it's all just moving so fast. So I just started to get into this head space of like, I know Gina's great at this, but maybe I'm not really cut out for this. Maybe I'm bringing us down. And as you know, once you start focusing on a thought such as that, it multiplies. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it consumes you. And that's exactly what it did. So yeah, I needed to take a break to have some time to think and really to see if this was even something I wanted to continue to do. But before I can make any big life decisions such as that I knew I needed to get my mind back in a good place first. I didn't want overwhelm and insecurities in the moment to cause me to make a drastic decision that I would later regret. And thank God for that little bit of clarity that I had because now. I'm back. I feel renewed. I feel re-energized. All the creative juices are flowing again. I feel like I'm back on top of my health, back into my self-care routines. My mind feels clear, and most importantly, I feel safe in my body again. Which brings me to a very profound quote that I heard the other day. Sleeps good. It means you are safe. This quote came from Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Kids series on Disney. It's really cute and it's actually very funny. I think I enjoyed it so much because I find Greek mythology to be. So interesting, and I also really like astrology. Please save your eye rolls. I don't care how ridiculous that that may sound to some of you. Honestly, if it does sound ridiculous to you, it's probably because you've only scratched the surface of astrology and you've never actually gone deep into it. Like, I'm not talking about your weekly newspaper's horoscope, okay? Do not come at me with that nonsense. But astrology is deeply intertwined with Greek mythology because the gods were used as archetypes to explain the energy of the different aspects of the sky, the planets, and the constellations. They were identified based on these. Mythological stories of the past. Think of it like astrology was the map, and Greek mythology was the stories that explained the map. So these myths were used to explain why these constellations existed and what their energy represented, what it brought about. Now you don't have to believe mythological Greek gods to recognize that there are patterns in human behavior. In nature and in the cosmos, and that people of the past tracked these patterns and then assigned meaning to them. If you want to go deeper on cyclical patterns and how they play out you can listen to our episode on the Universal Law of Rhythm, but. This is very much rooted in science that everything kind of comes back around in cycles and predictably so, so you're probably wondering where I'm going with this Back to Percy Jackson. An example of this is in the show. Chiron, is a big character in the series, and he's like Percy's guide that is with him before he even knows about his powers. And then he helps him realize his powers by giving him the tool he needs to actualize them. Chiron gives Percy the sword he needs to slay monsters. In astrology, Chiron is a huge figure as well. Chiron is known as the wounded healer. Like wherever your Chiron placement is in your chart is very important because it tells you what inner wounds or deep insecurities, what vulnerabilities you have. And astrology tells you that we are meant to overcome our Chiron placement in this lifetime. Once you identify and heal this aspect of yourself, your weakness, it then becomes your greatest strength healing. It is what makes you unstoppable and the best version of yourself. Guess what? My Chiron is my voice. Isn't that interesting that I think speaking is my greatest weakness? Hence my mental struggle with using my voice uninhibitedly on this podcast. And yet Chiron says, if I can find a way to work through using my voice, it will then become my greatest strength and what brings me ultimate success. This is why I'm not giving up on this podcast, and I'm going to continue to work through my insecurities because I know that then I'll be healed. Okay. In my notes, I have the word story written here with a question mark after it because, um, I wasn't sure if I was going to tell you guys this or not. It's very off subject but Kyle and I were laying in bed watching the show the other night and I was just like deep in thought about all of this kind of stuff. I love to make connections between things and, and put ideas together. And so out of nowhere something came to me and so I said to him, I said, this is gonna be really weird that I'm thinking about this, but. Pan is the god of nature and Greek mythology. And pantheism is the idea that God is nature and nature is God. It's actually, which I didn't say this to him in that moment, but it's actually a big part of what Albert Einstein believed and what a lot of scientists air toward in their beliefs. But anyway, Kyle goes, who? You know, he's very used to me and my like random outbursts when I'm deep in thought on something. But he goes, it's gonna be really weird when I say this, but did you know that pan is the god of nature? And Peter Pan lives in a tree. And honestly, I about peed myself, so I, again, I don't know if that's gonna land or not, but it cracked me up, so I had to share it. But anyway, that was a tangent, but I'm bringing this all back around now to the quote that I started this with and why I am telling you all of this. There's this Cyclops character that apparently has been through it. I don't know, I actually think I fell asleep during his backstory, but I assume he was like living on the streets, had a lot of monsters or people after him or what have you. Anyway, he and. C arrives at this camp, which is like this place that is safe for demigods, it's protected for monsters, and they're lying in bed the first night and he says, sleep's good. It means you are safe. And I think we'll get a lot of sleep here tonight. And this just really ran through my whole body. When he said it, it spoke to me like I got goosebumps because that's it. If you are experiencing trouble sleeping, odds are at the root of it. It's because you don't feel safe. Some aspect of your life, the way you live, your livelihood, your family, your identity, whatever it is, it's no longer safe. And there's this fear eating away at you that you are going to f it all up. Or you're in the process of effing it all up or have already effed it all up in some way, and therefore some aspect of your life is in jeopardy. And when your most basic need of safety is not being fulfilled, of course you can't sleep. Your body is perceiving all of these problems that you are worried about as threats. And what does the body do when it perceives a threat? The rational part of the brain shuts down. Your amygdala takes over. It activates the fight or flight response and releases adrenaline and cortisol throughout your body, causing your heart to race, your senses, to heighten. You are literally preparing for battle. Of course, you can't sleep. No one can sleep and fight or flight because the body has switched into survival mode. It's therefore dangerous to sleep, and since the rational part of your brain is shut down, you have no chance of solving the problems that are keeping you up. They just get bigger and bigger and bigger as your mind triggers your body, and then your body's reactions trigger your mind. And it's like the snowball effect until. You're homeless on the street with no job, no partner, and no family to love you. And oh my God, my heart is beating outta my chest. Am I having a heart attack? It's illogical because you cannot access your logical mind. I want you to listen to me very closely. You are not an insomniac. You have just let your mind get the best of you. But you can regain control of it. If you've read my book, you know, I've struggled with insomnia during some very rough times in my life, and I'd venture to say that a lot of people have dealt with it at some point or another based on what's going on in their life too. It is like not just tossing and turning and struggling to go to sleep, but like the whole waking up every few hours in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, all of a sudden just wide awake and totally panicked, and your body can be so tired and yet your mind will not stop racing, will not let it rest. It just goes round and round and round through all these problems and back again. And for me, this is my first indication when this starts happening in the middle of the night. I know, okay, something needs to change. I need to stop everything and I need to focus on and work on my mental health because if I don't, if I try to ignore it or just hope it gets better on its own, it will only get worse because as you know. Nothing gets easier without sleep. Being exhausted will exasperate every problem in your life. Things that maybe aren't even that big will seem huge when you've not gotten enough sleep. You can't deal with even the smallest annoyances, much less big problems. So when this starts happening to me, and it did at the end of 2025, I know it's time for a reset. I need to focus all of my energy on my mental and emotional health and put it front and center as the number one priority. That's above my work, above my husband, above my kids even, because I cannot be a good mother or wife without sleep and without my mental health functioning at its best. Now, I'm going to do a podcast soon on what to do in the middle of the night when this happens to you to calm your nervous system, bring your body back, and to homeostasis. So look out for that soon. But that's not what this podcast is about. This is about what I did the next morning. The next morning, the first thing I did was I started to remove all of the threats from the next two weeks of my life. I began canceling everything I could. I told Gina I needed to take a couple weeks off of the podcast. I canceled appointments and meetings.. I scheduled extra childcare. I told my husband I needed extra help for a while, and I began creating open white space for myself and my calendar. This space was only to be used for joy, for creativity and play. Going on another tangent here, but I just finished listening to a book by Brene Brown called The Power of Vulnerability, and one of the main ideas in that book is that play is essential to live a full and happy life. Years and years of research has shown that the number one difference between happy, fulfilled people and unfulfilled, unhappy people across the board, the number one thing they have in common is play. Fulfilled people prioritized and made time to play, not in a productive or lucrative way to just play for the simple enjoyment of it. Interestingly enough, she also found in the research that psychopaths all had one blaringly obvious thing in common across the research too. They had been restricted from play in one way or another growing up, and therefore, as adults did not play, likely, didn't even know how to play. As a kid, you have to feel safe to play. Safety is the most basic need that must be fulfilled before you can move on to fulfilling any other needs. Sad fact, they found this across the board in common for kids involved in school shootings as well. They had been restricted from play, so that should really tell you exactly how important play is. We act like it's not important, like it's somehow even ridiculous as an adult to play. That it's something you do maybe when you have the time that it's not a priority. It's the most important thing to prioritize above all else. If you wanna live a fulfilled life, listen to that book. It's incredible, and the research will blow your mind. And if you don't know what you like to do for play, it's time to start trying some new hobbies out. Maybe it's painting, maybe it's pickleball, maybe it's crafting, dancing, hiking, cooking. I don't know what that will be for you, but it just has to bring you joy. That's the only requirement. So that's number one. The first thing I did,. I removed all of the perceived threats and gave myself safe, open, white space in my calendar to play. Then I took a very honest and hard look at what I'd been consuming lately. I did an audit of everything. I'd been reading and scrolling and watching and listening to on a daily basis. And guess what? I'd been watching a ton of reality tv. Instead of throwing on an inspiring podcast or audiobook or masterclass while I was working on administrative tasks or getting ready or working out like I'd been doing for the past 15 years, I'd started pulling up Netflix and Hulu and watching absolute trash. And honestly, I'd gotten kind of addicted to it, like I was using it as a form of escape to not have to think about how overwhelming my life had become. Okay, so I put a stop to that immediately. I made myself a promise. It was back to only inspiring content. From that point on, this was probably the most important of all the things I did, it was like a light switch, how quickly it changed my mentality. So don't think that you can skip this step, you guys. You don't have to get rid of the things that you love to watch and listen to and scroll completely, but you do need to take a break from them completely. And then when you go back to it in a couple weeks, make sure it's 20% of what you're consuming and the other 80% is only inspiring content. This will change your life. Okay, so that was number two. I audited my content consumption. The third thing I did was I meditated. I know you guys get tired of hearing this, but. 10 minutes every day. That's it. That's all you need. Even if you don't make it a practice, at least do it a few times when you feel like you're losing your mind, I'm telling you, it will help you feel mentally clearer, calmer, more energized, overall, more peaceful, and more happy throughout your entire day. Please give it a try. Throw on a guided meditation. It's the easiest thing to do. You can find them everywhere. It will change your mentality and it will get you through those tough times when you're dealing with Extra stress and anxiety and it too will change your life if you make it a life practice. I had. Gotten away from doing my practice, so I started it again. It makes a huge difference. After I meditated, while my mind was clear, I took out a pen and a piece of paper and I started to write. If you don't enjoy writing, you can talk into a voice note, you can talk to a therapist, whatever works best for you, but you need to get everything you are worried about out of your head. Otherwise, it will keep going around and around and around on repeat in your mind. You've got to get it out. And last I scheduled time to move again. I hadn't been working out. I'd been telling myself that I didn't have the time, the energy. I made myself do it first thing in the morning when I was at my peak energy every day. It is the hardest thing to get back to when you're feeling anxious and depressed, but I forced myself go for a walk. Do some yoga stretches. Doesn't have to be huge. Just make the time to move your body. I swear it helps to move the stress and anxiety out of it, and it just makes you feel so much better. And yes, it's easier early in the day when you have the energy for it. Every day. I was telling myself, I'll do it as soon as I have time. Guess what? I never had time. So you have to make the time. So that's it. I created open space to play. I did a content audit. I meditated. I got my feelings out, and I moved my body. It's so simple, and yet actually doing these things can seem so hard. You just have to remember that you're never going to find the time. You have to make the time, and it may seem hard at first, but it is the easiest thing in the world once you get started and when you do, everything changes instantly. It didn't take me days or weeks, or months to feel better. I felt better. Almost instantly, you guys, after the first day, I felt like a new person. I'd given myself a feeling of safety again in my body, to have time for me to do things for myself and not just everyone else, to focus and put myself first. I'm safe to rest. I'm safe to play. I'm safe to sleep, and I am sleeping like a baby again, guys. I was so in fear that if I took time for myself to do these things, that I would just get. Further behind and never be able to catch back up that all of the balls would drop. But guess what? I'm more efficient and productive than ever. I get more done working in the fewer hours a day that I work than I did letting work, consume my every hour. I wake up in the morning, I work out, I meditate, I play, and then, and only then I do some work and I get more done, better quality work done, because my mind is not in total chaos. You may have a more rigid schedule than I do. You may have a nine to five job. Just because it may look a little different for you does not mean you cannot do this for yourself. If you were in a state of emotional overwhelm, take a few days off work. Trust me. You cannot use your PTO on anything more important than your mental health. And then start looking for those little pockets that you can create in your day to bring back your peace, your joy, and your health. Everyone has 20 to 30 minutes a day they can focus on themselves. Turn on the TV to distract your kids. Trust me. It's way better than them having a dysregulated mother let the dishes in the laundry pile up. Those things do not move the needle forward in your life. There will still be dishes and laundry tomorrow, I can promise you that. And here's the kicker, you guys, all of my problems aren't solved. They're just not that big of a deal anymore. I can honestly laugh now at all the things I was so stressed about then. It's never about solving X, Y, and Z out there to make yourself feel better. It's about the inside. If you can't make yourself feel better now, regardless of X, Y, and Z out there, it won't matter. If you solve those problems, you're still not going to feel better. You'll just find other reasons to feel bad. This is what all of manifestation is. You have to find a way to feel the feelings you want to feel now on the inside. Then it will be reflected back to you on the outside. What would I do if I had no problems? Now I'd play, I'd meditate, I'd write. I'd go on a walk. So go do those things now. This is how you feel the feelings now. Alright guys, that's all I've got for you today. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who needs a reset or let us know. We read every message. I love you guys. It's a new year. Reset, renew. Go out there and make today the day you change your life. Make this the best year yet.