Beyond survival mode: Your body is meant for more

Jul 3

As Mentioned:

This morning I did the thing I do every month: I sat down to make my printable calendar. Except this time, I actually sat with it first — and my body said, very clearly, we don't want to do this.

And I listened. That is everything. I listened.

Capacity is everything

You might know I have a whole program around creating systems, and the reason I care about this so much is simple: when women lay down all of that mental overload, it frees up capacity. Capacity to get perspective. To make better choices. To see what's working and what's not.

And we cannot access any of that when we're running around trying to remember everything and do everything. You literally can't get perspective from that mode. It's survival mode — a mode where all you can do is keep doing.

When you hold it all in your head, you become someone who's just working, working, working. You never become someone who thinks about the work before you do it, who makes decisions about the work before you do it. And that is where the magic is.

My body said, “We don't want to do this.”

So back to the calendar. Every month I create one to map out my areas of life — I'd do this whether or not I had a business. But this month, because I have the capacity to actually tune in, I noticed something: I'm tired of making this calendar. I did not want to sit in Canva plugging in new dates and double-checking them.

Old me would have pushed through. Instead, I realized I've spent the past couple of months building the skills to create tools that do what I used to do manually. So I made a tool that makes the calendar for me.

I had the idea this morning. I made the tool this morning. I printed my calendar this morning, and I put it up on my website this morning — with moon phases, cycle tracking, your language, your holidays, all of it. Now I can benefit every month, my community benefits every month, and the work part is completely eliminated.

That's not a one-off. That's what happens when you can stand back from your to-do list and look at it from the vantage point of what is my body telling me?

Survival mode makes you numb

Here's why this matters beyond calendars. Survival mode is toxic because it makes you ignore the messages from your body. It makes you treat your body like a machine instead of what it actually is — a magical, intuitive map to all of your desires and all of your well-being.

I've been in seasons in the past where I was working myself to the ground, not being compensated fairly, and it was never going to pay off. The simple practice that would have saved me was this: Am I sacrificing my well-being in this process? If the answer is yes, the process is toxic. Whether it's your business, your boyfriend, or the company you work for — if keeping the relationship going requires sacrificing yourself, that's not a sign to try harder. It's a sign something needs to change.

Give everything a home

Here's the simple practice. Throughout your day, you come across little things that are meant for you — a book recommendation, a tip from a podcast, everything you're learning about perimenopause. And instead of letting it pile up in your head, you ask one question: where does this go in my system?

They say strength training matters more than ever? That goes in your habit tracker, where your weekly review will show you whether you did it three times this week. Learning about your hormones? That goes in a hub, linked to the reminder for your next blood work appointment, so the notes are right there when you need them.

That one little gateway — between consuming information and actually implementing it — is what keeps learning from becoming one more exhausting thing to carry.

Your body is meant for more

We have all defaulted to using our body as the system. The thing that carries everything, all the time, all at once.

And your body is meant for more. Your body is brilliant. It has messages it wants to tell you — and it can't do that through all of that static and all of that baggage.