51: The Nervous System Reset Every High-Achieving Woman Needs

Daffney shares how people-pleasing, pushing through, and constantly operating at her edge kept her nervous system stuck on high alert, even when there was no obvious reason to feel stressed. She breaks down how old patterns can quietly hijack the way you respond to pressure and shares ways to recognize your triggers, interrupt automatic reactions, and use simple tools to move through stress so you can perform at a high level without running yourself into the ground.

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In This Episode:

• (01:35) The high-performer persona that eventually breaks down
• (04:00) Challenging the patterns your nervous system learned
• (07:20) Stop ignoring what your body is telling you
• (10:30) Building new neural pathways for sustainable performance

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you just can't keep it all together, I hear you. You can't keep showing up at work, burning out every moment, and being at your razor's edge, just one step from watching it all break. I know that moment. I am a former type A recovering people pleaser, just like you. And the thing that changed everything for me is when I took a real hard look at my own identity. We are so often conditioned to believe that if we're not on the go, on the gas, every single moment of every single day, we suffer opportunity for performance. But I'm gonna break it down for you today. We are gonna talk openly and honestly from my own story and how I finally stepped away from burnout, from needing to please and move at breakneck pace, only to find out the chaos was in me. Welcome to Don't F and Shrink, the podcast, where we stop playing small and start showing up big. I'm your host, Daphne Allwine, and I'm here to cut through the noise, ditch the self-doubt, and get honest about what it takes to live and lead with unapologetic confidence. Each week you'll hear unfiltered conversations, powerful stories, and in real life strategies to help you take up space in your life, your work, and your world. So buckle up because shrinking is not an option here. Let's dive in. We talked a lot in the last few weeks about recognizing that our need to be in control is actually what's holding us back the most. The story for me has been the absolute breakdown of a persona I had built for 15 years. Not even recognizing, we do this so often in our younger years, is we study hard and we learn a craft and we and we put all of our skills together and then we build this incredible professional experience where we are at our top, doing our best and feeling really good about the outcome, running at full capacity. And one day over a series of days, let's be honest, over a series of months, we start to notice our inability to maintain and sustain that pace. I had a lot of uh, a lot of concerns wrapped around mental health. I was actually really concerned that my physical body was going through these major transformations of plus 40, being mom for a second time. And I was not recovering in a way that made sense. My energy would not come back. I felt emotionally overwhelmed at many times to the point where I couldn't sleep. It was actually such a hard process to even recover with sleep because it would feel as if my body was vibrating at all times. My nervous system was just at its edge at all times. And quite honestly, I hadn't taken on anything new. I hadn't taken on anything that would have caused me to accelerate my stress in any way during this period. It was just that I was in a place where my body was recovering from childbirth, from numerous surgeries. And I was not taking the time to listen to my own body. And for me, the thing that was that was falling apart seemed to be the nervous system. It seemed to be that everything was causing my nervous system to trigger in this chapter. And I couldn't pinpoint it down to a bad night's sleep or a bad run of sleep. And I certainly was drinking enough water, getting enough movement. So, what were my other opportunities in this case? The thing about the nervous system is it is constantly, whether we, whether we are choosing to or not, it's often not conscious, is taking in new information from our environment, whether it's the people, the location, the temperature, past experiences that we've woven in. One of the issues that came in is because I had this complex PTSD experience growing up that had just spanned my childhood. I was having difficulty breaking my focus on patterns. So something that was no longer an actual threat still felt like a threat in my body because I had been taught for so long. And as many of my clients will agree, we're taught for so long to suppress emotion, suppress emotion, ignore emotions, ignore those stimuluses. But when it comes to an honest apex, when we stuff things down, when we ignore them, they don't actually go away. They sit deeper into the tissue, they sit deeper into the body and only heighten the nervous system awareness we have over time. And when we have intrinsic factors like childbirth and hormones and things that are changing, lack of sleep in our environment day to day, it triggers onto a habit of reaching back into those pattern recognitions. So one of the biggest hurdles and the foundation of my reclamation, as I'll call it, or or new foundation was about challenging those triggers. Now, I'm not a therapist and I am not projecting to be so. So I will only speak from first person experience in this and also self-reported realization in my clients. And the realization is that if we can start to challenge that awareness and say, I remember this from this circumstance, this is causing me to run on pattern, we could start to build a different identity. We could start to build a different confidence. And when you are able to break free and start building and practicing these new patterns in your brain, you show up differently. You have the peace and confidence to show up confidently as yourself and put away some of these imposter issues. Put away a number of these well, people like me, the people pleasing thing that happens to all of us, or the type A, I must show up at my edge in every room so that people know I mean business and take me seriously. This is where we break down those things. Because the confidence comes with that brain plasticity, with your ability to stop and actually be aware of what's happening in your nervous system without giving way to a reaction. This is completely different than stuffing down an emotion. So when we work together, when we when we look at these patterns and finally give voice and action to what is going on, what is triggering your nervous system, we can start building this incredible foundation where nothing shakes you loose anymore. Now, I say that with all hopefulness because as we're learning, ladies, we are going through a transformation. Whether we are running a Fortune 500 company or we are running a home as the CEO, the truth of the matter is, is this day is coming. This reboot, this challenge of our own foundation is coming for each and every one of us because the way we started, the world we walked into, the world we were conditioned to is an old operating system. And it is your responsibility to upgrade. So the number one rule is we are no longer ignoring our own emotions. We are no longer ignoring our own intuitions, sensations, feelings that are going on in our own body. Number two, what do we do with that sensation? When we start noticing that sensation in our body and self-reported from clients, sometimes it feels like a vibration going on. Sometimes it feels like an emotion. It happens in our eyes, it happens in our head, we furrow our brows, we tense our muscles. This is why this work is so important in collaboration with physical movement and why I love doing the work I do is because when we can allow those sensations to happen, we can let it move through our body and not get stuck, not cause that chronic inflammation, not cause that illness and feeling like your immune system is at its brink and that you're in a constant state of stress and headache all the time. So we recognized it. We felt where it was in the body, and now we get to move it out. We don't have to identify with that feeling. We don't have to identify with that sensation that triggered us. What we can do is give it its place, give it its time, not ignore it, but address it in real time. If you can get up and have a cup of coffee, have a cup of tea before you respond, before you react to whatever the stimulus was, it's a win. If we can get you doing it on your feet or in movement for a walk, go do some big physical exercise if you like. These are really great tools for figuring out how to move that through your body so that we can start building the skill. These emotions are always going to come. But as we build these new neural pathways and start breaking away from chronic reactions, we are building this foundation that will be far more unshakable. We are building these skills to allow you to live inside your own body and to show up at your best, at your highest performance, your most creative, your most energetic and most sustainable, which is the biggest piece. When we want to be sustainable, we need to start building these skills and allowing these emotions, allowing these reactions to our nervous system to happen. I've been doing this for 20 years now. I have been very fortunate to work with the people who are in high stress, high stakes situation. So I'm going to tell you the absolute way to be sustainable, to be at your best performance is to build these skills around moving those big emotions, those big moments through your body as we build into your full identity. We too often, as women, are constantly suppressing the idea that we should be heard, seen, respected, given the space that we deserve. And that shame cycle, that constant need to please or apologize for interjecting ourselves and our experience and our voice in those situations needs to change. And thank God there is this beautiful moment in every woman's life where your body says, no more. It's time to upgrade our operating system. If you are interested in deep diving for yourself and experiencing what these high performers are doing, sign up for a game changer consult. This is your opportunity, your investment to look into where am I going to next? Where do I need the clarity? What are the patterns that I can break free of and allow my body to heal, operate, and move sustainably through these next chapters of performance? I look forward to talking to you next week. And remember, don't fucking shrink.