Too Tired to Heal: When the Body Goes Into Survival Mode

This week I'm sharing something a little personal before diving into the content — I cut my 48th hair sample this week, and I've been sitting with what that means. Twelve years of returning to this work. Twelve years of watching patterns show up, shift, unwind, and resurface in my own body. What I've come to understand is that mineral balancing isn't something you do for a period of time and graduate from. It's a relationship. And that's the perfect doorway into today's episode.

I'm walking through one of the most common — and most misread — patterns I see in client work: a significantly elevated calcium to potassium ratio on a hair tissue mineral analysis.

When calcium is above 100 and potassium is low, that ratio tells a story that goes far beyond thyroid function. It describes a whole-body adaptation. A person's nervous system, their metabolism, and often their psyche learning to survive by doing less. And when this pattern gets missed — when someone in deep conservation mode gets handed a heavy protocol and told to do more — it doesn't help. It confirms the body's belief that change is overwhelming.

In this episode I cover:

— What a high calcium to potassium ratio actually means at the cellular level — Why thyroid hormone can look fine on a blood panel and still not be working at the receptor — How this pattern builds over time — stress, depletion, reproductive load, trauma, years of overriding body signals — What it looks and feels like clinically: blunted hunger, flattened energy, emotional muting, inconsistent follow-through — Why these people get labeled as resistant or non-compliant when what they actually are is underpowered — The psycho-emotional layer — withdrawal, holding, difficulty committing — and why it mirrors the chemistry — Why more supplements, more detox, more intensity makes this pattern worse — What actually moves it: tolerable, repeated, safe stimulation — and why pacing is treatment — The paradox at the heart of this pattern: wanting change while the body is invested in staying exactly as it is

This episode is the audio version of my blog post: When the Body Survives by Stopping — The HTMA Pattern Nobody Talks About Honestly.

Read the full blog HERE

If you recognize this in yourself — the fatigue that doesn't lift, the resistance to things that should help, the sense your body is doing everything it can just to hold steady — learn more about working together inside Minerals & Microbes: [link in show notes]

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. Y'all, I have been knee deep in the dirt this week, literally. I've been building a new garden bed and it's been a lot of work, but I'm so excited about it because it's gonna open up a whole new level of growing space. I made the decision this year not to join my CSA and instead really deepen my own skill set in the garden and grow a lot more of my own food and keep, you know, learning and leaning into the land. Um, and it's just become a devotion. Honestly, that's the only word for it. And it's been inside of me for a long time. Both of my parents grew up with parents who grew their own food, my dad, especially. Like they had the whole root cellar situation. They lived up in Maine. Um, you know, it was just like a skill, it was just part of life. And I just never lost that. That's always like been within me. Um, and I'm only just now finally getting to live it at the scale I've always wanted to. And it really brings me a kind of joy that's it's just hard to describe, you know, it's like when you finally get to be a part of yourself that you've always wanted to be, you know what I mean? So that is what I have been up to. Um, and before I get into today's content, I want to share something a little personal with the intention of giving you a sense of the depth of this work, particularly around what it means to guide someone through their health history using a hair tissue mineral analysis. I cut my 48th hair sample last week. And every time I cut my hair, I sit with it for a minute. Um because, you know, it's not really about the number per se. It's about what the number represents, right? So it's 12 years of returning to this, 12 years of watching patterns show up in my own body, shift, repeat, unwind, settle, resurface in a different form, right? 12 years of meeting myself in the data and going, oh, there it is again, or huh, that's new, or okay, so this is what this layer looks like, right? And what I've come to understand is that this work, what people call mineral balancing, it's not a thing, like for me, it's not a thing you you just like do it for a period of time and then like graduate from. It's more of like a relationship, uh, a way of like living, right? A relationship with your body, the body you live in, and the patterns that your body has had to build to survive. Right. So every single hair test is a snapshot, it's a record of what's being held, uh, what's being conserved, what has been adapting quietly in the background, sometimes for a really long time, decades. And what I've seen in myself over 12 years is that those patterns, they don't just like magically disappear. They unfold, right? Like layer by layer. And you meet yourself inside of that, sometimes with compassion, sometimes with frustration, sometimes with a little genuine surprise at what's still there or what has maybe uh unwound finally. And I think people coming into this work are they're looking for like the missing piece, if you will, right? The thing that's finally going to explain what's been confusing or stuck or frustrating. And what they find if they actually stay with it is something a little different than that. They find the place where their body stopped being able to receive support, where it had to like slow things way down, or even shut things down, or maybe hold things in place just to keep going. And then the work becomes something quieter than fixing. It becomes can I support myself in a way my body can actually tolerate? Can I let this unfold at the pace my system can actually handle, even when that pace doesn't match what I had in my head? Because that's what builds capacity over time, not forcing change or, you know, pushing through or chasing the next answer, staying, supporting, learning how to be with yourself as your body slowly reorganizes. That's not something you do once for a little bit, it's something you practice. And I wanted to share that today because it's the perfect doorway into what I'm talking about in this episode, which is a pattern I see constantly in client work. And I wrote about it recently on the blog. It's called When the Body Survives by Stopping, the HTMA pattern nobody talks about honestly. And I want to go ahead and talk through this blog with a little extra commentary along the way because I think a lot of you are gonna recognize yourself in it or recognize someone you love, or if you're a practitioner, recognize someone maybe even sitting across from you. So let's go ahead and get into it. One of the patterns I see most often in client work, and one of the most, I feel like it's misunderstood. It shows up clearly on a hair tissue mineral analysis as a significantly elevated calcium to potassium ratio. Um without a hair test, this could be someone who is, you know, thinking like, okay, why is my body slowing down? They could be thinking they need to check in on their thyroid. They could have gone to the doctor and been told, you know, they have sluggish thyroid. Um, so many things. Digestion could be slowing down. You know, they could feel like they're just losing their luster for life, you know. Um, anyways, so I just want to make sure I give at least a little context in case someone's listening and they never had a hair test. But when we look at this in the actual hair test information, uh, if the calcium is really high, if say it's above 100 and the potassium is very low, so calcium is supposed to be 42, so 100 and higher is very high. That's kind of like the body's braking system, right? Um, then the two minerals together, the ratio of them can climb dramatically. And when that ratio does climb high, um, it tells a story that goes far beyond like just thyroid function or just like mineral balance, if you will. It really describes a whole body adaptation, right? It's, you know, the person's nervous system pumping the brakes, their metabolism slowing way down, often their psyche learning to survive by doing less. And we typically would characterize this as slow oxidation, right? Uh it's kind of a way to uh help us understand like the body's not burning, uh not using the fuel as quickly as it can't, it needs to for energy. Um, right, some metabolism has slowed way down. The adrenals and thyroid are like, yo, we gotta, we gotta pump the brakes here, right? Um, so this is not um me going into slow oxidation as a label here, because even though that's part of the data we get, this is more about human biology that really has organized itself around conservation. And when we understand that, it really changes everything about how you work with it. So the calcium to potassium ratio from a HTMA is actually saying something a little bit deeper than maybe the simple, you know, explained logical uh things that you've probably heard. So in the HTMA interpretation, calcium and potassium have an inverse functional relationship. So potassium is a driver, it supports cellular permeability, uh, thyroid hormone uptake at the receptor level, overall metabolic responsiveness, a lot of really amazing stuff. Um calcium, when it is in excess in the tissue relative to the potassium, it's there because it's acting as a buffer, right? Like a break or maybe even an insulator, if you will. And so when the calcium is significantly elevated and potassium is low, the cellular environment becomes less permeable and less reactive. So, say you have thyroid hormone already circulating well just fine. Maybe you took a uh got a blood test, right? And and things looked fine on your thyroid labs. Um, whatever thyroid hormone is in circulation isn't able to actually land efficiently at the receptor level, right? So the cell becomes much harder to reach and harder to mobilize into. So when I see this pattern, I don't just think, okay, low thyroid effect at the cell level, right? I think this person's biology is not available for rapid change. It is not easily mobilized. And there's kind of like a biological refusal built in. And this isn't like to put anyone in a moral like place of like they're being oppositional on purpose, right? It's more because the change itself is metabolically costly to that person's body. Their body has run out of the resources to afford the change. All right. So typically when potassium is low, I often see sodium low, these two minerals together low, tell you that there isn't much spark, right? I've talked about this a lot where it's voltage, right? Charge, capacity is another way we could frame it. Um, so there's not a lot of uh energy in the system, right? Um, then there's also a whole nother ratio where we have like the sodium relative to magnesium. This is when the adrenals they just aren't in vigorous output anymore, right? So that's typically goes alongside of the calcium to potassium ratio when it is high. Um, and so when that high calcium relative to the potassium, it when it's high like that, it's basically telling you the brakes are dominating the engine. The whole picture says, okay, we've been through a lot and now we're conserving. It's just a conservation pattern. So, how do people get into this pattern? It's well, here's the thing: it it rarely appears overnight. It actually builds. It builds through years of depletion, chronic stress, right? Output more than you can actually do, right? Like people that I'm speaking with, you know, they're changing jobs, more sh more demand on the job, and then like another life demand. Maybe like they have something going on, whether they just had a new child, or a kid is having trouble in their life and they're putting all their energy into that, or maybe the a parent becomes uh, you know, unable to care for themselves. So they're, you know, now stepping up to take care of their parent, you know, or they went through a breakup and you know, another thing and another thing and another thing, right? Then the like the body starts slipping over time, little by little here and there, and until one day you're like, I don't even recognize myself anymore. You've got poor sleep. Uh, a lot of times women are talking about something in their hormones, reproductive stress. Uh, no matter what age you are, whether you're still having children or not, you know, your hormonal situation is under stress, uh, easier to get infections, uh, you know, take way longer to recover from them, um, challenges in your physiology that are creating nutrient loss, or maybe you're not even able to get enough nutrition in, right? Unstable routines, some type of, you know, let's use the word trauma, but you know, keep in mind there's variants here, right? Or just simply the accumulated weight of managing way too much for too long without enough repair time or recovery time or reserves being able to be replenished, right? And so basically, it builds when someone has repeatedly been asked to override their body signals, you know, when forward movement has required way too much output for too long with too little restoration in between. And at some point, something shifts and it's not conscious, right? Like it's very physiological. The body just starts to change its strategy, and you know, it becomes a little less reactive, it becomes a little less available for inputs that it doesn't have the bandwidth reserves to process. And so what happens is your body will start conserving by slowing. I talked about this in the low buffer blog I wrote recently. It starts to mute things out here and there, narrow things out here and there, right? And that is the we can call it the calcium shell pattern. You maybe, if you're paying attention to the whole mineral balancing world, you've heard this term. But it's really just um, you know, the body protecting you, right? Calcium in excess relative to the driving minerals, it doesn't just represent a thyroid issue. It represents a kind of structural hardening that the body built for a reason. And so, you know, if this is some, if this is you and you're listening, you know, it's like you become less penetrable and less reactive, which serves a purpose at some point, but it also makes receiving support much harder. Now, here's where this pattern gets misread, often badly, right? If you look at only symptoms on the surface, um, you could mistake yourself or a person for someone who needs better compliance, right? Or more motivation, right? Like more motivation, right? Or like a more strict protocol, or even like more intense support, right? But that completely misses what's actually in front of us, right? Because this is primarily not a doing problem. It's a state problem. Clinically, the picture can look like this. It can be like, okay, your hunger, you know, it could be quieter, it could be absent, especially in the morning. Motility, meaning how everything in your body has to move. We think of bowels, right? Slower, much slower. Energy output is just very flat. Um, people's emotional range just feels meh. It just feels kind of narrow. Um, people can't often feel their own cues very clearly. And this isn't a moral thing. It's not like they're not disconnected because of some moral issue, but it's because there's this sensation within them physiologically that is just dampened, right? It's like the body just like turned the volume way down. And if it kept the volume all the way up while also depleted, it would be way overwhelmed, right? So part of it is just an adaptation, right? It's like kind of muting everything down, right? So it's it's almost like a numbness or a delay, even, right? And then hunger feels like it just kind of comes on later or slower, or maybe almost like not at all. Same thing with thirst. People are not like feeling their thirst. And then there's just kind of like this low energy, this like fatigue. It's not really dramatic fatigue. It's more of like just like a baseline than an obvious symptom, right? It's just kind of like a uh, I just don't have the juice I used to have, right? And people have emotions, but they're a little more padded than they once were, right? Um and then the signals that the body is trying to give on a regular basis, they are present, but they're very blunted. And so this is why people in this pattern say things like I've heard so many things, I couldn't even begin to tell you them all, but like I don't, I'm not even sure if I'm hungry, but sometimes I just eat because I know I should. Um I'm I'm just tired all the time, but I still get up and do the things I have to do, and I just kind of have to push myself through. Nothing I do seems to really make a difference. Part of me knows what I need to do, but I I kind of just can't even seem to get myself to do any of it consistently. There's sometimes there's even like a lack of trust of like, well, I don't even know what's gonna make a difference. And, you know, if you felt yourself here or if you've met someone like this, a person like this could be read as like very resistant, right? Or very unmotivated, or if you're a practitioner, you might use the the term like non-compliant, if you will. But really, what a person in this pattern actually is is underpowered. And underpowered people do not love to turn on a dime, they do not love novelty, they do not love stimulation, they do not love abrupt course correction, definitely don't love force. And every time someone in this pattern is pushed, you know, to do more uh or pushed it to like do something that they just they're you know, they just can't sustain it. And, you know, they may absorb a little shame about why they can't seem to get this together. Um, and so they may resist, you know, even anyone who might encourage or not properly encourage, and maybe just tell them you just need to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Especially if you're out there, you know, reading on the interwebs, all the things you should be doing in 2026 to be healthy. You may just want to explode your phone because it's just ridiculously overwhelming. Um, yeah. Anyways, so the same pattern that shows up in the chemistry often shows up in how a person moves through their life, right? So we're not talking about anxiety, like in more of the classic sense. It's more of like there is an anxiousness to the this pattern, but it's more of like a low grade withdrawal. Do you know what I mean? Like there's just like a mutedness. I almost want to use the word uh to avoid, like avoid things, right? Like it's a tendency just to hold, maybe not fully commit or not fully digest experience, right? Like there's this watching, there's like a constant conservation going on, or maybe waiting. And really, there's often this long history of someone who is managing way too much, or like too sooner than they're ready to manage it, right? Or just for too long. And, you know, they've been life somehow, you know, there's so many layers of this, but like life, you know, asked them to override their body signals, or they got into a lifestyle with themselves or people or whatever, right? And they just kind of had to override themselves, you know. Maybe it's a job. It's like, shoot, I have to do this new position and it's much more demanding. And now I'm like overriding my body throughout the day to meet this demand of this job. Do you see what I'm saying? Um, or maybe they got depleted even before they stepped into the new demand of life. And so then they never got to resolve that. I don't know, like say a mom who had three babies back to back over six years or something, and then a whole new big, you know, responsible thing happened, whatever. You guys get the point, right? We can all probably find ourselves in this somewhere, right? And eventually what happens is this person's body says, enough. We are going to survive by becoming just less permeable, right? And the calcium shell concept is clinically useful here as long as it isn't, you know, made into some kind of ridiculous, I don't know, overreach here or cartoonish or whatever. Because I'm not trying to sit here and say calcium is bad, right? Like, please don't hear this linearly. Um, calcium in excess relative to the other driving minerals represents a kind of structural conservation, the uh or conservatism, I should say, that the body has built for a reason. Right? The body needed to become less reactive. And that was serving a purpose. However, it also makes receiving support way harder. And a person in this pattern may feel like they're trying, but nothing lands, or something helps briefly and then maybe like reverts. And they understand what they need to do, but somehow can't convert that knowledge into consistent embodied action. Um, there like the conversion itself is just like impaired. The responsiveness is impaired. Um, and if you really want to go there, it can feel like life force has pulled inward, right? Like there's just less spontaneousness, uh, especially less spontaneous movement, like outward, meaning like let's use the term extroverted, like, you know, where you might have used to go and do all these things that you love to do and had the energy to do them. And suddenly you just found yourself like, oh, I kind of stopped doing those things, right? Like I stopped going to this thing every month with my friends, or I stopped doing this hobby that I loved, right? And really, it's just like there's less trust in the the frivolity of life, right? Like the fun of life, the flow. And people tend to have more of like a, they have less risk tolerance, right? Like, and sometimes just less appetite for life, literally and metaphorically, right? And the person may um still deeply want to heal, but you know, wanting is it's not the same as having access to mobilization. And so this is the clinical failure point, and I want to name it clearly. When someone presents with this pattern and is given a heavy supplement protocol or an aggressive detox or a complex elimination diet or even an intensive emotional work all at once, their body just often cannot receive it, right? Like more restriction with food or more intensity with food just feels incredibly overwhelming. More supplements just feels like whoa, way too much. Like I can't just can't, I can't, I can't. Like, um, or more detox can produce crashes. Same thing with exercise, right? Like either you think you need to do a certain level of exercise in this pattern, but it tends to deplete you further. Um, and even more emotional processing can flood and overwhelm a person in this pattern. And so what do they do? They resist. And their body is reading any change as a demand. And demand for an already under-resourced person feels genuinely dangerous, right? Even beneficial change can feel dangerous. And what their body is asking for isn't like a ton more things they have to do to fix the pattern, right? Or a lot of input. It's really more usable energy and more safety in receiving input. And this is also why these people become so discouraged, because we live in a world, you guys, that worships activation. Go get it done. Bigger, better, faster, more, do more, optimize faster, fix the gut in 12 weeks, right? Whatever it is. But the problem is, is the biology of this pattern is saying the total opposite of what the health and wellness circles and all the messaging out there is saying. It's saying, slow down enough for me to even hear myself again, right? And for high-functioning people, especially, that can feel kind of humiliating, right? Like they carry like an internal image of themselves as someone who should be able to handle more than they can currently metabolize. So part of the work becomes, honestly, guys, grieving. I'm serious, grieving. Grieving at the pace that you wish you could move at in this pattern, grieving the idea that healing will feel impressive or fast, grieving that the body is asking for repetition, simplicity, patience, and what feels like boring consistency instead of breakthrough intensity, right? So if anyone has ever found themselves here, I promise you, you're not failing at whatever protocol, intense protocol or path has been thrown at you. Uh, maybe it wasn't thrown at you, maybe it was recommended with all good intention. Um, because that is true many times. However, it's you're not failing in this pattern. It's the biology that this pattern is. It's really not yet in a state where a typical protocol can be received efficiently. So, what actually moves this pattern? Because, you know, we want to we want to get into that part, right? And I'm just gonna say this the way through is not intensity. Again, our culture gl glamorizes intensity. If it's not intense, it's not meaningful, apparently. Um but, you know, the thing that people really need is tolerable, repeated, safe stimulation. Not too much, not too fast. I'm not saying don't do anything. I'm just saying don't try to fix it all overnight, right? Uh enough to remind the body that change does not always equal danger. Enough to bring back the signals in your body, right? Uh, so that they're being read properly and uh actually responded to properly. There's so many signals in the body, I don't even want to get into it. But like just for example, like your hunger signals, your hunger cues, for example, um, you know, being able to read your own body, right, instead of not understand it. Right? We need to do enough change that creates slow progress, momentum that actually sticks. So the goal early on in this pattern is not like radical transformation, it's responsiveness, right? Being able to feel hunger in the morning when you couldn't before is a win, right? Like if you're not even able to eat a breakfast, nothing sounds good. And now you can, um, that's a win, right? Like if your bowels are slow and off, you know, more consistent form bowel movements daily, that's a win, right? More consistent energy through the afternoon, even if it's not perfect, is a win, right? And none of this looks very impressive from the outside. It's not like you can say, oh, guess what? I went from, you know, feeling like total shit a month ago and now I'm running a marathon. I'm being ridiculous here, but like you get the point of like culture, uh like over culture messaging has kind of imprinted within us like this idea that like, you know, it has to be like a big deal or else we're not progressing. Do you see what I'm saying? But really, all these things that I just mentioned, um, it shows us biologically that your system is coming back online, right? Responsiveness is returning. And, you know, the body has things that are becoming more available to actually mobilize within it, right? So basically, clinically, that means that the interventions that work here tend to be simple. They're rhythmic, they're nourishing rather than like, I want to use the word aggressive because I feel like there's been a lot of aggression in the holistic health space of like, I've seen protocols, you know, being recommended to people, and I'm like, holy moly. I would feel like someone just opened a fire hydrant and my face was right there and I got blasted. Like that, that's the vibe that I feel when I see some of these protocols. Um, right, it's getting more mineral-dense food. It's getting up and getting your circadian timing with the sun down. It's salt, it's using bitters for digestion, it's consistency in your meal timing, it's, you know, balancing your meals out better so that your blood sugar stabilizes, it's gentle nervous system support, it's really building the conditions for Spark to return before asking the body to do anything more complicated with it, right? And I think pacing this way is like treatment, if you will. And, you know, learning how to interpret your own body better. That is beautiful. That's a that's treatment, if you will. Well, you should think of the term treatment because, you know, in the health world, everyone's like, what's the treatment for this thing I have, right? That's why I'm using that word. And helping someone understand why they cannot go as fast as they want to is supportive, is nourishment, is treatment, right? Swap out the protocol, that is it, right? Like reducing shame, right? Giving the body small, successful experiences of change, not being dangerous for them. That is supportive, right? Because you're not just replenishing minerals, you're renegotiating a person's relationship to change itself. And here's the paradox at the heart of this pattern that I think is worth sitting with. I know most people coming to me, they desperately want to feel better. And part of their body is deeply invested in staying exactly as it is, because exactly as it is has been the survival strategy. So of course, they want change and fear it simultaneously, which is why they a lot of times people find themselves starting and stopping. And then people want fast results, but they can't tolerate fast movement. So they're caught between like longing and protection. So when we understand that ambivalence, not just psychologically, but biologically, this is one of the most important things you can understand in this body of work, whether you're a practitioner listening or whether you're the person in the pattern. And the frame that actually helps is not, oh, here's my hair test. I'm deficient in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, the the frame is your body is currently adapting in these ways, right? Your body is adapting. You are not necessarily a lazy human. I mean, I say necessarily because I don't know you. Some people are. I don't know. But I most people who come to me, like seriously, I they're not genuinely lazy because if they were, they wouldn't hire me. Right? Their body is just organized around survival through reduction, and it has learned to conserve by slowing, buffering, buting, narrowing. And once you understand that, the pace changes, right? The pace of the care that you receive is gonna need to be different. The expectations change, the emotional tone can change. Hopefully, you stop fighting with your body and start working with the logic of what it is actually doing for you. And then the, you know, the support plan, the treatment, the protocol, whatever, the path that we take, right? That question shifts from what's wrong with me and how do we fix it? To, okay, well, what inputs can I, or what can inputs can this person receive without their body feeling pushed or overrided, right? What rhythms can their body begin to trust? What minerals do they need right now to begin to restore spark without flooding the system too much that overwhelms it, right? And creates any reactivity. And how do we increase responsiveness without triggering that defense mode, right? Like because the cells, there's cell danger response going on in everybody. And there's, you know, it depends on your pattern, but like there's different levels of that, right? So the body has these built-in things going on that we can't just like force and override. So it come, it becomes like, how do we help someone understand that slowness is not failure here? It is the actual doorway out, right? You guys remember the story of the tortoise and the hare, right? Anyways, um, hair tissue mineral analysis really gives us a window into this piece of a pattern. I mean, uh, there's always layers to every pattern, but you know, I'm only kind of delving into a specific ratio, but I'm also in my mind knowing it also sits with some other markers typically. But the thing that's so nice about HTMA is it gives us a window into kind of your nervous system pattern, right? That most other tools miss. And that calcium to potassium ratio, when it's really elevated, it's not just a data point. It really is like a map of how the whole person has been operating and what they need to begin shifting. So inside my client work, I run a hair tissue mineral analysis alongside um the biomefx, right? And then we can really get a better idea of your nervous system, kind of assess where you're at, right? Um, that helps us build a picture of kind of what your body's adapted to, um, not where you should be, right? Because a lot of people come in and they want, they already are thinking I need to optimize and this, that, the other thing. Like, right, they've read everything on the internet. They know they need to optimize all these things, but they should like trying to optimize in a body like this is a bad idea. Slow it way down, right? It's it's it's where is your body right now and what can it even receive? And how can we help it start to receive better, right? Like, how can we build a plan that your body can actually receive right now, today? Not the optimized version that you think it should be, right? But enough to actually hold, enough to actually receive, enough to actually turn things back on, right? And clear enough that we're not adding a major load to someone who cannot afford more load, if that makes sense, right? Like 10 things all at once, right? You're and you're just like, oh my God, I can barely make myself a healthy breakfast, right? And so the wins when we take this path tend to be quiet at first, but then they compound, right? And I always keep saying this is not fast work. And I feel like people need to understand, like, when I say that, it's not, it's not fast in a sense of intense or dramatic or yay, I had a victory, right? Like I I I earned my goal. Like you think about people going in the gym and they they set up these goals for themselves, like, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run a mile in a month, and then I'm gonna get my time down, or I'm gonna get this many reps in, or whatever, right? And we set these goals in our head, right? But then we actually get in and do the work, and it's like, oh man, I actually have to do this in a way that I don't hurt myself, and I have to do it in a way that I meet my body where it's at, right? And sometimes, you know, it's it's slower than we think in our head before we get into it. And we actually get in there, get into the arena, actually show up every day for ourselves, be consistent, not quit, keep going slow and steady, give ourselves all the foundational things we can, as we can, right? That is what starts to hold and stick. And that matters more than anything else, right? You can always optimize later and over time. But if you're trying to optimize based on what the internet tells you you need to do, girl, I don't know. You're you could be completely overwhelmed always forever. There's way too much being told out there that we need to do. It's insane. So that said, if you recognize yourself in what I just described, right? That fatigue that doesn't fully lift, the resistance to things that should help, the sense that your body is like doing everything it can just to hold steady, that is worth looking at properly. And if you're interested in uh getting supported and guided deeply, um the link to learn more about working with me is in the show notes below. And if you want to read the full blog, um, which goes into the biology there, you can check out that link in the show notes below. But for now, that is today's episode. I hope it gave you some language for something you may have been feeling but couldn't quite name, or gave you a different way to understand something something or maybe someone you're working with or caring for. If it resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Uh, also, you can text me directly through the first link in the show notes and share your thoughts on the episode. I'd love to hear from you. All right, guys. Well, take good care of yourselves at whatever pace your body can actually handle right now. And until next time, stay wild and stay well.