036: Your Nervous System Needs More White Space-What a Week in the Rainforest Taught Me About Stress, Healing, and Why We Need More White Space

Your Nervous System Needs More White Space

Do you wake up already feeling behind? Phone calls, texts, emails, responsibilities, appointments, family needs, financial pressure, and endless notifications can put your nervous system into stress mode before the day even begins.

In this Wellness Reset Thursday episode, Fredricka shares reflections from a week-long retreat in Costa Rica, including her quiet mornings in the rainforest with warm lemon ginger water, hummingbirds, nature sounds, and the powerful reminder that our bodies were never designed for the pace most women are living.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

✅ Why constant stimulation keeps your body in stress mode
✅ How chronic stress can affect inflammation, hormones, digestion, sleep, cravings, and energy
✅ Why you cannot out-supplement, out-diet, or out-exercise a nervous system problem
✅ What “white space” is and why your body needs it
✅ How being rooted, resilient, and limitless connects to nervous system healing
✅ A simple 5-minute reset using breath and your senses
✅ How to schedule a White Space Appointment this week

Reflection question:
What if your body is not fighting against you, but fighting for you?

Join the conversation inside Limitless Living for Women Who Want More and share what happened when you gave yourself permission to pause.

Website: FredrickaDavis.com
Facebook Group: Limitless Living For Women Who Want More

Grab Your Free Reset Guide and more at www.fredrickadavis.com

Continue the conversation inside the here: Limitless Living community.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Limitless Living podcast. Today's theme is Wellness Reset Thursday. I'm Frederica Davis, creator of the Limitless Reset Method. And every Thursday here we talk about practical tips to help you feel better, think clearer, reduce inflammation, support your nervous system, and create sustainable wellness from the inside out. So today's episode is inspired by something I experienced recently that really reminded me just how disconnected many of us become from the things our bodies actually need. You may have listened to the last podcast where I mentioned coming back from a week-long retreat in Costa Rica. I was both a facilitator at this retreat and an attendee. I taught experiential sessions and I held space. I listened, I learned, and honestly, I brought home a lot of lessons too. So one of the biggest reminders for me was this. And it's that, you know, honestly, our nervous systems are not designed. They are simply just not designed for the pace that most of us are living. And this is something that I know very well. This is something I teach, but even I need reminders of this all the time. The pace we often keep in our daily lives is kind of crazy when you really stop and think about it. But we don't often take time to think about it until we slow down or break down and actually have the space to do so or are forced to do so. That's one of the biggest gifts of stepping away, is taking that space to think about this. Every single morning, while I was at this retreat, I would wake up in my cabin in the rainforest, and we had this private chef and amazing team and uh luxury linens and a hot water bottle in our beds at night when it was a little cooler that we would come back and find and all these wonderful little things. But every morning I would wake up and right outside my door would be an insulated mug with my name on it, and inside was my drink of choice, which is hot lemon and fresh squeezed ginger water. Now I drank this at home. You may have heard me talk about this before. So it was really extra special that I could continue to get that there, and it was extra wonderful, just showed right up at my door every single morning. I mean, how beautiful is that? With a little tiny fresh flower on top for me. It was just really super special. So I didn't have to make it, I didn't have to think about it. It was just there. And I would take that mug out onto my little deck that overlooked the rainforest. And, you know, this was all before I ever even thought about checking my phone or social media or emails. And quite honestly, I did not do very much of that at all while I was there, which was on purpose and wonderful. It was before my responsibilities, too, of the day when I was sipping this. And, you know, meaning before teaching and before holding space for someone else or taking a class or any of the demands of the day, I would just sit on my deck. Sometimes I stretched, sometimes I watched the hummingbirds. Oh my gosh, there were so many hummingbirds, so many beautiful colors. It was as if they were just putting on a show. And sometimes I just listened to the sounds of the nature and simply held the mug, the nice warm mug, and breathed. Just deep, slow, wonderful breaths. And what struck me so much was that nothing extraordinary was happening. And everything extraordinary was happening kind of all around me all at the same time. Nobody was teaching me anything in that moment. Nobody was trying to fix me. Nobody was solving my problems, and I wasn't even trying to solve my problems. Yet my nervous system was settling. My body was softening. My breathing was getting deeper, slower, more rhythmic. And my mind was slowing down. And honestly, I think that might be one of the most important things for us as women. Because maybe you can relate to this as you listen. How often does your mind actually slow down? How often do you get a moment where nothing needs your attention? Nothing is urgent, nothing is wrong, nothing needs fixing. Because I realized how rare those moments are and how rare they've become for almost all of us. Most women I know, is this you wake up and already feel exhausted. This used to be me, and I still have days here and there as a recovering overachiever, overdoer. Um, truth be told. But you know, most of us we wake up and we already feel behind. And if you're waking up like that and you're feeling behind in the morning, you know, I know what that feels like. And those mornings set you up for an entirely dysregulated day, an entirely stressful day, which leads to a whole host of other things. Maybe you're already feeling like you're behind on returning calls or emails or texts or messages. And maybe there are things that weren't done yesterday that now have to be added to today's list, or you're not sure how you're going to get them all done, or it's work demands, or appointments, deadlines. You get the picture. Family needs, everybody needs, right? How about responsibilities? All those responsibilities on our shoulders. And then, my God, throw in the social media notifications, the text, the news, and everybody seems to want an instant response. I tell you, it's just crazy. I call it crazy town because I remember the days, I'm old enough to remember the days when your phone was attached to the wall, and if you missed a call, you missed a call. There wasn't a constant expectation that you had to be available every single solitary second of the day. And when you came home, once we had answering machines invented, you came home, you got the message, and you called somebody back when you had a free moment. But now we live in this world where it feels like everything has to be instant. Instant access, instant response, instant pressure. And this is all often before we've even had breakfast. Honestly, your nervous system is just having so much thrown at it. Something needs your attention, something is urgent, something's wrong or needs fixing. And you compare that to what happens at a retreat like I was at, where I got to wake up, hear nature, open the door, pick up my warm ginger and lemon water, and my nervous system was already being told it's okay. It's okay to slow down. Nothing needs your attention right now, nothing is urgent, nothing is wrong, nothing needs fixing. And how wonderful does that sound? Then we wonder why we are exhausted all the time. And I want to tell you all, nothing fell apart. You know, I did have a few dead plants by the time I got home that didn't get watered like they were supposed to, and things like that. Truly, nothing really fell apart by the time I got home. My team in my wellness center, my family, they took care of everything that really, really, really, really needed to be taken care of. I can buy another plant. And we wonder so often when we don't take time away or time to do things for ourselves, even if it's not going to our retreat. We wonder why we feel anxious or exhausted. And we wonder why we can't hear ourselves think anymore, can't connect with ourselves, with our gut, our core, our intuition, and that deeper knowing of what's really meaningful to us anymore, what our purpose in life is and what we want next for ourselves. We wonder why our bodies are so inflamed. And this is a really, really big piece of it. For those of you listening who don't know my story, I've dealt with autoimmune issues, massive inflammation, psoriatic arthritis, histamine issues, long COVID, fatigue, uh, Lyme disease, pain, brain fog, limited movement. Oh my gosh, my list goes on and on. Skin lesions from the psoriasis, I mean, it goes on and on. I've dealt with a lot. And part of what triggered that for me to become really, really big, because those were already there, was long COVID. Absolutely. But part of what made it worse and gave it the open door to trigger those things at the rate that it did, and made it worse was that I was operating at too high of a pace for too long, being every single person's everything, basically, for too long, pushing through long hours, long uh client schedules, staying late, uh, being there for family, being there for everybody in my life that I wanted to be there for, which is also a beautiful thing, but I was doing so much of it and not doing it for myself. I was burning that midnight oil for just too long. And what I came to understand over the years is that yes, nutrition matters. I teach it and I believe it, and it matters. I am proof of it. Yes, sleep matters, movement matters, stress matters, all these things matter too, and they don't just matter, they matter a lot. In fact, I would argue that many women are trying out. Uh in fact, I would argue that many of you listening to this right now might be trying to out-supplement a stress problem. And while supplements can be great, you cannot out-supplement a nutrition problem, a stress problem, a movement problem, or a sleep problem. You just can't. You also can't out-diet a nervous system problem. The right nutrition will support you, absolutely, and it can be tremendous. But if your body is still living in a survival mode, there is only so much it can do. And you cannot out-exercise a burnout problem. A lot of women are exercising, eating right, doing all the right things, and still wondering why can't I drop the weight? Why am I still exhausted? Why do I feel inflamed? Why do I feel stuck? Often, underneath all of this, it's the nervous system problem, it's the common denominator so often. Your body cannot heal efficiently when it constantly feels unsafe. And you might think to yourself, wait a minute, I'm safe. I don't feel unsafe. But when you're stuck in this fight or flight response too much and this ongoing constant stress too much, any of these types of things, that's the result. When we push and we push and we push, our bodies feel unsafe. You simply cannot heal efficiently when you constantly feel unsafe. So when we deprive ourselves too much or for too long, our bodies will feel unsafe. When we live in this constant straight stress and pressure, our bodies feel unsafe. See, now you get the picture, right? When your body perceives danger, whether that danger is real or not, and it can be simply chronic stress. It doesn't even have to be like this high, high, high, but if you're in a chronic state of it, your cortisol rises, your adrenaline then rises, inflammation rises, your digestion will slow, your recovery will slow, sleep suffers, and your hormones can become disrupted. And good grief. I mean, if you're at that age where your pre-menopausal, menopausal, or post-menopausal, we don't need any more help having our hormones disrupted, right? Then cravings. Oh, gotta love those cravings that creep in, right? They increase when we are dysregulated. Energy decreases, and then we wonder why we don't feel like we have the energy we used to, or the brain fog comes in and gets that increases and gets bigger. And over time your body starts paying this price. So now I'm wondering, is any of this striking a chord with you? If you can relate to any of these things, because the challenge is today's stressors don't look like the saber-toothed tigers that we used to have to run away from back in the caveman days. Back then, cortisol and adrenaline helped us survive. They helped us run, they helped us, you know, move faster, do what we had to. They served a purpose. Cortisol is not all bad. It's actually something very important. And when we need it, you want it to be there for you and your body to react appropriately and give you the adrenaline and everything. It's not a bad thing. The problem is that now we are getting bombarded with stress all day long. And again, it's our emails, our calendars, our financial pressures and responsibilities. All this constant stimulation, regardless of where it's coming from, relationships, or, you know, the person who pulled out in front of you on the way to work, or the text you forgot to answer, the bill you need to pay, or whatever it is, appointments we forget to schedule or to or we have too many of in our day. All these little things, they add up. And when they happen all the time, even at a low level, your cortisol can stay elevated. And when it stays elevated for too long, that's when we start to feel the results, the negative results that I just talked about. For so many of us, we stay in this stress state for so long, like kind of all the time, really, really all the time. That stress starts to even begin to feel normal. We've normalized living in this fast-paced, high stress environment and world so much so that we don't even question it anymore. When's the last time we really thought, okay, wait, there is a better way. I need to shift some things and actually believe that you could. We're taking the steps to do so. You know, being able to handle more and more and more stress has even become, for some of us, a badge of honor in our brains, right? Or in our societies. But here's the truth: it's being able to carry everything is not the same as being healthy, being well, being happy. And that brings me back to the retreat. So one of the things I noticed was how quickly people began changing. All of the retreat participants met at the airport, and then we got on the bus and headed up into the mountains into the rainforest. And you can picture this bus going up these winding roads where it felt like there was only a few inches on either side of the bus. One side felt like it was basically a cliff, and the other side was, you know, a ravine because we're going up into the mountains. And we were all holding our breath a little bit, you know, like please don't sway the bus for a few moments as we were traveling. But that moment that we all met, we all started talking as we waited for the bus, and then we got on. You could feel the energy in all the women shifting. We were connecting, we were laughing, we were excited. Everybody was looking forward to what was to come. We hadn't even gotten into the workshops yet. We hadn't even had the breakthrough moments yet, we hadn't had any of the quiet moments yet, yet still you could feel how quickly the women were shifting. It was really something to experience. And it wasn't because anybody had been given a magical answer or had anything fixed yet. It was because there was space, space for something new, space to think, space to reflect, to breathe, and connect and wander, space to do a little bit of just nothing. Now, as much as it amazed me how you could feel the excitement and the anticipation and everybody was connecting, it also amazed me how uncomfortable that initially felt for some people. Not the connection part, but the part where there would be space, space to do nothing, space to breathe, space to reflect and go inward. Some people embraced that right away. Others were a little more resistant to it. And I understand that completely because we are all so conditioned to believe that every moment should be productive. We feel guilty when we rest, we feel guilty when we pause, and guilty when we are not checking something off of a list. But your nervous system requires white space. Your body needs moments where nothing is being demanded of it. Your mind needs moments where it is not being flooded with information, not even podcasts. Your spirit needs moments where you can start to hear yourself again. Three words kept coming up for me recently. And I actually even did a little bit of brand modification with these in my logo because they just really hit home so much. And those words are rooted, resilient, and limitless. And I the more I think about these words, the more I just realize your nervous system needs all three. You become rooted when you slow down long enough to hear yourself. You become resilient when you create recovery periods between stress. And you become limitless when you stop living from a constant state of survival mode. Limitless doesn't mean you do everything or you have more and more and more. It means you stop being limited by old stories, old expectations, old patterns, and nervous system survival responses. These are all keeping you smaller than you were meant to be. So this week, what I want to give you is a very simple challenge. I call it the white space appointment. I want you to schedule 30 minutes this week. Literally put it in your calendar and protect it. Don't let anything leak into it or shorten it. No agenda, no productivity goals, no phone, no podcast. And yes, I know you are listening to a podcast right now, but for this exercise, not even this one. And no fixing, no planning. I just want this to be space. You could take a walk, sit on a porch quietly, visit a coffee shop, people watch, browse through a gift shop, watch birds, journal, read, sit by water, sit in your car for a few minutes and enjoy the sunshine on you before you go in to wherever you need to go. Just simply breathe. And if you're listening right now thinking, I don't have time for that, you are probably honestly, exactly the person who needs it most. And I want to give you another tool too. Now, this one's five-minute nervous system reset. Everybody has five minutes. And I know it might feel like you do not. I've been there, I've said it, I'm like, I don't have time, I don't even have five minutes. But honestly, if we are all being honest with ourselves, we all can find five minutes. If somebody else needed a favor from you, your best friend or your daughter, you'd find the five minutes, right? So we can all carve out five minutes. And here's what I want you to do I want you to inhale slowly. Through your nose deeply and slowly, and then I want you to exhale longer than you inhaled. Do this a few times. Feel yourself relaxed. Notice your body relaxing. And then I want you to look around the room and notice five things that you can see. Just notice them. Once you've done that, I want you to notice four things that you can touch. Maybe touch them. Three things that you can hear. What do you hear? Then two things that you can smell. What do you smell? Did somebody just clean recently? Or do you smell the outdoors? What do you smell? Do you smell coffee? What do you smell?

unknown 22:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

And one thing you can taste. It's that simple. This exercise seems or sounds almost too simple, I know. But what it does when you're doing this backwards like this, and you're you're you're focusing on each of your senses, it literally signals safety to your nervous system. And then you are bringing yourself back into the present moment. You're telling your body, I am here, I am safe, I can slow down. So again, do your breath in through your nose, out through your mouth, a little longer with the exhale. Do that a few times, and then it's five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste, and then give yourself five minutes with all of it. Don't rush through this. Let each step have a little bit of focus. And then I want to leave you with a bigger question this week. What if your body is not fighting against you? What if it's actually fighting for you? And I know this is a lot of questions, but this is all on the same train of thought. With those two questions, here's what I mean. What if the things you feel are breaking down in your body are actually your body trying to communicate? What if the fatigue is information? What if it's telling you that you need rest? What if your anxiety is actually information? And it's telling you you need quiet and calm? What if your burnout is a signal? What if your body is actually simply not betraying you? And I know it might feel like it is. When our bodies are not cooperative, we feel like they're breaking down and they're betraying us. But what if your body is asking you for something? You have stopped giving it? Maybe it's rest or connection, maybe it's nature, time to play. Maybe it's just simply space and recovery time. Maybe your body is asking you for nourishment or simple presence in the moment. Maybe you've never given yourself enough of any of these things. And this is all totally new. That's okay too. It's never too late to start. One thing I brought home from Costa Rica also is that healing is not always about adding more. I mean, this is you know something I've talked about before as well. Sometimes it's just about creating space for what matters most. The space to breathe and reflect, the space to reconnect with yourself and with others, the space to reconnect with nature and to become rooted. The space to build resilience, to remember what is possible. Because so much more is possible. I don't care what age you are, I don't care what state your body is in, I don't care what is going on in your life, there is more possible from wherever your starting point is. So this week I challenge you to schedule one white space appointment with yourself. And when you do it, I would absolutely love to hear about it. So as I wrap this up, I'm gonna invite you to come join us inside the limitless living for women who want more private Facebook group. Tell me all about how your white space was. I would love to hear. Tell us what happened. Give yourself that permission to pause and share it because that's inspiring to other women who are in the group. It's reinforcing for you as well. And it's a beautiful way for us to continue to connect. And if you want to learn more about the limitless reset method, upcoming experiences, coaching or resources or anything at all, feel free to reach out and visit me at fredericadavis.com. So until next time, stay rooted, stay resilient, and be limitless. And I'll see you Saturday for the Identity, Passion, and Purpose Saturday. Take care. Until then.