I was in my Harvest facilitators accountability group this week, and the prompt was simple: what small habit is working for you that you could expand into something as automatic as brushing your teeth?

And I felt immediately called out.

Because after those weeks of deep restorative care coming out of burnout, I started easing back into my life. My husband came home after being gone for a month. My work picked back up, my life filled back in. And without really noticing it at first, I slipped.

If I’m honest, this last week I’m probably at about 85% my old ways and maybe 15% still holding onto the restorative practices that actually got me well. And it’s showing. In my energy, in my thinking, and very clearly in my Oura ring data… my sleep, my readiness, my HRV, my stress. Nothing dramatic, just trending in the wrong direction, which is exactly how this works.

What I’m seeing more clearly than ever is that you don’t just fix burnout and move on.
You either build a way of living that supports you, or you slowly drift back into the one that doesn’t.

I learned that hard lesson, and yet I still drifted.

For me, it shows up as thoughts like these: if I don’t show up early or right on time, I’m not professional. If I’m not on top of everything, I’m dropping the ball. If I’m not pushing, I’m falling behind.

Underneath all of it is this need to prove that I’m responsible, capable, and doing enough.

And if I really stop and ask myself… prove it to who?

In all honesty, it does matter to me to show up to my work. I want my clients to know I am here to serve them. But the way my brain is trying to adhere to that is by overriding myself with every potentially outward-facing thing. Like constantly.

Then there’s this… I had a conversation with a friend recently about someone she works with who had to leave her job after a heart attack. She’s in her early 60s, and the recovery and the job just don’t mix. And here’s what struck a chord in me. We can eat well, take care of our bodies, stay on top of our health, but what are we doing about the way we drive ourselves internally? Which burnout has taught me is far more problematic for your health.

The pressure to prove, to produce, to be over-responsible for everything and everyone before ourselves… that’s the part no one really teaches us to question.

I used to joke, especially when I was raising kids, “I need a wife.”

Except I wasn’t joking.

Because that’s what it feels like. You’re holding everything, and somewhere along the way you learned that holding everything means holding yourself last.

This isn’t just a habit you picked up along the way. This is conditioning.

To notice the mechanism at play takes a tremendous amount of awareness. To interrupt it is something else entirely. This is conditioning, reinforced over years, practiced until it feels like who you are, how things are. You think it’s your values.

And yeah… it makes me angry too.

What I’m seeing now is that this takes a whole new level of trust. You can see the pattern and still choose yourself anyway. You take care of yourself and trust that the plates you’re spinning won’t all fall… they’ll either keep spinning or need less from you than you think.

This is a receiving problem. And a leaking problem. And it shows up in where you’re stuck with money.

And maybe some of those plates will fall. Maybe they need to.

Because you need to survive. And not just survive… you need to thrive.

That’s a very different way of looking at things than how most of us have been taught to operate.

Because the belief I always did lip service to, but now I’m seeing I was absolutely not living by until my recent realizations and experience… is that you create more safety and stability by stepping off that wheel, not staying on it. You can create more when you’re actually taken care of. You can access a level of ease and effectiveness that you literally cannot reach from a depleted state.

I’ve seen my effectiveness increase dramatically when I’m actually taking care of myself. Less time, less doing, but the right things, done in the right way, from the right state of mind. And the results are better. But it requires interrupting that inner dialogue that keeps telling me it’s not enough unless I’m sacrificing for it.

That’s the part that keeps the whole thing going. It’s an insidious, treacherous hamster wheel. This pattern has been reinforced for generations.

At some point, we stop being put on it… and then we start running on it ourselves.

That’s where this gets real. You don’t have to tear your life apart to change it. But you do have to start noticing where you’re still participating in something that doesn’t actually work for you.

I don’t think we ever get to have a brain that does not veer back onto this well worn track. Oh, the joys of being human.

BUT you can question it, choose differently, and move toward a way that doesn’t require you to abandon yourself.

By believing you can carve a new path.

OOO, there’s that self-trust piece again.

If this is hitting, the next step is my free training:

Rethinking Manifestation Masterclass: What actually works (and why)

May 7

Because once you start seeing these patterns, the real shift is understanding how your brain is actually creating your results… and how to work with it instead.

Then we go deeper inside Break Up With Broke on May 22.

This is where we look at how these patterns show up in your money and start interrupting them so you can actually hold what you create.