Unclenched, On Purpose

What if reinvention didn’t require hustle, grit, or a spreadsheet of new habits—just the courage to meet yourself where you are? We open our new chapter with a simple promise: change can feel like alignment, not pressure. The rebrand to Unclenched Conversations with Nicole is less a makeover and more a marker of completion, a way to honor what served and step toward what feels true now.

We dig into the nervous system as the thread running through our struggles with anxiety, ADHD, overthinking, and burnout. These aren’t moral failures; they’re signals. By seeing how the brain and body protect us, we trade shame for literacy and willpower for regulation. I share how trying to meditate “harder” never worked until I learned to prime my system with active practices—walking, rhythmic breath, guided focus—so passive stillness could finally land. That shift changed everything: clarity, safety, and the quiet I craved stopped being ideas and became lived experience.

This conversation blends science and spirituality without asking for blind belief. We explore why mindfulness works on a physiological level, how regulation widens our capacity to choose, and what it means to elevate by truth instead of performance. You’ll hear practical prompts—Who is your next version? What feels expansive right now?—along with a grounded framework for approaching change without self-critique. If your mind runs a mile a minute and you still long for peace, this is your space to exhale, learn, and practice.

Come with curiosity. Leave with language for your signals, tools that meet your real state, and permission to imagine again. If the idea of living a little more unclenched resonates, press play, subscribe, and share this with someone who’s ready to evolve by choice rather than pressure. Then tell us: what version of you wants more room today?

Thanks for listening!

Connect with me on instagram: @theburnedoutb

I'd love for you to message me what you thought, what it made you think about, your reflections, and of course what’s been coming up for your or causing you anxiety lately. I will never share your name or info unless you say it’s okay!

Chapters

• 0:00 Rebrand And Invitation To Change
• 0:37 Reinvention From Curiosity Not Critique
• 2:04 Evolution Through Honest Desire
• 3:03 The Nervous System Lens
• 4:18 From Symptom Fixing To Self Understanding
• 6:11 When Stillness Felt Impossible
• 7:32 Active To Passive Meditation Breakthrough
• 8:20 Where Science Meets Spirituality
• 9:07 Permission To Be Your Actual Self

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome. Welcome, truly. If you've been listening for a while, you might notice that something feels a little bit different. New name, new year, same heart, just more spacious. This is Unclenched Conversations with Nicole, a burned out B production. And yes, it is a rebrand. But it's more than that. It's an invitation. I want to start with something that I care deeply about. I hope that you know to the core of yourself that you're allowed to change. And not just slowly, not just carefully, and not just when it makes sense. You're allowed to reinvent yourself if you want to. I remember being younger and just feeling that excitement so clearly, trying on different versions of myself, different ways of being, different outfits, different ideas of who I could be. And sometimes it was the physical, it was how I dressed, how I showed up. Sometimes it was internal confidence, curiosity, boldness, softness. There was something just electric about asking myself, who do I want to be now? Who can I imagine myself becoming? And that instinct isn't immature. It's not naive, it's a creative life force. And somewhere along the way, many of us were taught to stop listening to it. Here's the distinction that really matters to me. Reinvention doesn't have to come from self-criticism. And I would argue that that is like absolutely the least helpful way to do reinvention. It doesn't have to sound like I need to fix myself. I need to put new habits in place because, oh my gosh, like I am not okay. Like I there's something about me that's just not okay. And it doesn't need to look like I should be further along. The kind of reinvention that I'm talking about and that I care about, and the kind that this podcast supports comes from curiosity. It sounds like what feels interesting to me now, what feels expansive to me now. What version of me wants a little more room to breathe, to see the sunlight? That's not force, that's alignment. This rebrand happened because I met myself somewhere new. I felt called forward, not because the old version of me was wrong, but because it was complete. And I'm curious for you too. Who is your next version? What does your most elevated self look like? Your next most elevated self. Not elevated by hustle or by discipline or by toxic positivity, but elevated by truth. Your truth. One of the core values of the burned out bee, and now this podcast is evolution, but not evolution through pressure. Evolution through honest desire. Yours, not anybody else's. I have been a lot of different kinds of coaches in my life. I have been a first grade soccer coach. I've been a varsity soccer coach. I've been a chemistry coach, a testing coach, a fitness coach, a classroom teacher, a teacher burnout coach. And each of these roles taught me something important. But what I've realized after years of observation, years of education, degrees, and lived experience is that everything that I care about comes back to one thing over and over and over. The human nervous system, the human brain, anxiety, ADHD, ADD, depressive thought patterns, burnouts. The things that keep us from feeling clear and feeling whole. These are not moral failures. They're not personal weaknesses. They're signals. And when we understand them, we can work with ourselves rather than against ourselves. See, most of us are taught to manage our symptoms, fix the anxiety, stop the overthinking, find that childhood core wound, and all of a sudden it's going to get better. Push through the exhaustion. But real change doesn't come from fighting what's on the surface. It comes from understanding what's underneath. It comes from knowing and authentically loving yourself. And to do that, we have to look inward because you are wildly and magically you. Nobody else is just like you. And this can be really, really hard, especially when your mind is going a million miles a minute with so many thoughts that you can't even stop to hear yourself think. If you can't tell, I struggled deeply with that. I wanted quiet the way that you want air when you've been underwater for too long. I wanted peace. Just a sliver of peace. Like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're just so thirsty that you would drink anything you found in the fridge. Like I will drink the jelly. I am just so parched. I tried to just meditate more times than I can count. Like I'm telling you, a hundred times I restarted with all of the conviction in the entire world that this was it. It was going to work this time. And then I sat there meditating, thinking, okay, so like when does this start working? And the guides, the teachers, they were loving. The programs, they were well made, well executed, but none of them helped me break through that wall. Because my nervous system wasn't primed, it wasn't ready for stillness. What actually changed everything for me was learning to meet my anxious active mind where it actually was. I learned how to move from active meditation into a passive meditation. And once that happened, everything shifted. Stillness became possible for me. Like I felt it. I feel it every day now. And now meditation is as natural to me as breathing. It's a part of my routine, just like making my morning coffee. And what it's actually done for my nervous system, for my family, for my sense of safety, for my soul. I genuinely cannot overstate it. So this is what Unclenched Conversations is now. It's a place where science and spirituality meet. We'll talk mindfulness and why it works. We'll talk meditation and what's actually happening in your brain and your body. We'll talk regulation and why willpower just isn't the answer. There will be curiosity, there will be depth, there will be a little woo and the science that explains it. If you're skeptical, you're in the right place. I am too. I'll never ask you to believe something without understanding it. This podcast is not about becoming someone better. It's about giving yourself permission to be your actual self again, permission to imagine again, permission to ask, who do I want to be now? What feels possible for me? What would it feel like to live a little more unclenched? If you're ready to explore that with curiosity, with intelligence, and with compassion, then you're in the right place. Welcome to Unclenched Conversations with Nicole. Let's begin.