#83: Your Nervous System First: The Summer Reset That Actually Works

American culture has taught us that being busy, slammed, having so much going on makes us important.  Like a packed calendar is proof that we matter.

But what if everything we've been measuring our worth by is working against us? Against our health, our clarity, our joy, and yes, even our productivity?

If you've been running on fumes and calling it productive, this episode is going to give you both the science and the permission to finally slow down. 

Not because the to-do list doesn't matter. But because taking care of your nervous system first is exactly how the to-do list gets done with less stress, less friction, and more clarity.

I say that as someone who calls herself a productivity strategist. I mean every word of it.

In this episode, I'm sharing what the research says about why we've become addicted to busy, what chronic stress is actually doing inside your body, and a simple summer reset menu,  backed by science, that you can start today, right where you are.

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE

1️⃣You don't have to choose between being productive and taking care of yourself. Caring for your nervous system first is what makes the to-do list actually get done.

2️⃣ Doing nothing with someone you love is not wasted time. It's co-regulation. Your nervous systems are literally calming each other down.

3️⃣ The guilt you feel when you slow down? That's withdrawal. Push through it — because what's on the other side is clarity you forgot was possible.

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:23

Hello, hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I'm your host, Carlene, and if you are new here, welcome. I am so glad that you found us. You know what I've been noticing? Is all the podcasts, and the coaches, and therapists out there, they are flooding your channels with, "It's time for a mid-year reset or a summer reset." And you know what? There's a good reason for it. The season of summer is actually ripe for the reset, and I'm gonna share my take on what a reset is. Yeah, you can look back on your year so far and look at what you've accomplished, and you can get geared up for the next six months, and get all focused and ready to crush it. But my approach is a bit different and a lot softer than that. So curl up in your favorite chair outside, on your porch, or your patio, or your driveway. It doesn't matter where. And sip your favorite beverage because we are about to have a really good conversation. And I wanna start with a question, and I want you to be really honest with yourself when you answer it. When someone asks you how you've been, what's the first word that comes out of your mouth? If the answer is busy, I see you, I hear you, because that used to be my automatic answer too. Like, "Oh, I'm so busy. I'm slammed. I got so much going on." And somewhere in there, we started saying it like it was a good thing. Like being exhausted at the end of the day meant that we are doing something right, like a full calendar is proof that we actually matter. And here's what I wanna talk about today, is what if it's not? What if the thing that we've been measuring our worth by is actually working against us, against our health, against our clarity, and our joy, and yes, even working against our productivity and I say that as someone who has called herself a productivity strategist, someone who has literally built a coaching practice around helping ADHDers get stuff done, and other stuff also, but a lot of it is about productivity. So trust me when I tell you, I don't say any of this lightly. I wanna start with a story. So every summer, something happens in my house since we moved to Tennessee that I look forward to all year. My oldest daughter, Emily, she's a social worker at an elementary school, and she finishes up her work for the year, and she comes to Tennessee for the entire summer to be with us. And I've noticed something, that when Emily is here, my relationship with time, it completely changes. It's like the to-do list, it becomes the thing that I squeeze in, and the rest of my time goes to going to barre class with her, or hiking, or shopping, or watching movies, and goofing off in the pool. And this amazing thing happens. My nervous system just calms. The pressure just comes off, and I'm not measuring my days by what I checked off a list anymore. I'm measuring them by the conversations that we had, the laughter, and the meals that we had together. And you know what's so interesting about this is all three of my girls have actually said they've noticed a difference since we moved to Tennessee, that we have more real quality family time than we ever did when we were in Illinois. Because in Illinois, we were all there, and we took it for granted. We said we'd all show up at some point, but it didn't always happen. But now, when Emily comes for the summer, we're present in a way that feels very different. You know, we're not scrolling on our phones when we're together. We're just talking and laughing, oh my gosh, so much laughing, and playing games. And you know what? Sometimes we're doing absolutely nothing at all. And I wanna stay on that for a second. Doing nothing with somebody is different than doing nothing by yourself. Because there's something about that kind of quiet togetherness, you know, where nothing is forced, there's no drama amping up in your nervous system, and it's deeply restorative in a way I can't fully explain. You just feel it. And you know what? Emily, she's always been my calm. She takes a break when she needs one. She doesn't apologize for it. She doesn't feel guilty about it. She just stops. I've always admired that about her. And being around that is such a good reminder to me to slow down, to stop treating my exhaustion like it's some type of trophy that I should be celebrating. And every summer I come back to the same realization, that when I take the pressure off, when I stop measuring my worth by my output, I actually get more done. And I get more done with less stress and less friction, and I have more clarity every single summer. So let's talk about this. Why is it like we're addicted to being productive? Why is it so hard to stop? Why does slowing down feel like we're doing something wrong? And here's the truth that no one's telling you, and I've got actual research to back this up. So researchers at Columbia and Harvard, they published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2017 that found something that should stop us all in our tracks, and that is Americans increasingly perceive busy, overworked people as having a higher status. If you're busy, you're more important. The more slammed you are, the more important you seem. And being perpetually exhausted has literally become a status symbol. And you know what? They looked at why, and it comes down to this: we've been conditioned to believe that a busy person must be competent, ambitious, and in demand. So we signal our busyness the way previous generations signaled wealth. We wear our packed calendars the way someone else wears a designer bag. And here's the part that I find so fascinating and, well, honestly, a little depressing. The researchers found that this effect is specific to American culture. Italians, they still view a leisurely life as representative of high status. Leisure means that you're high status in Italy. No wonder I wanna go there and stay there. So this isn't human nature. It is American culture. We learned it, and the good news is, is that if we learned it, we can unlearn it. But first, we have to see it for what it is because right now a lot of us are running on fumes and calling it success. Okay, I wanna get into a little bit of science here about what chronic stress is actually doing to you. Let's talk about what's happening inside your body when you're living in perpetual productivity mode. And I'm gonna keep this simple because the science is actually pretty straightforward, and honestly, once you hear it, you really can't unhear it. You've heard this before, I talk about this often on the podcast here, is your nervous system. It has two modes. Think of them like a seesaw, right? You got two sides, and on one side of the seesaw, you have your sympathetic nervous system, and that's your fight, flight, or freeze mode, and it's designed for emergencies, like short bursts of energy, there's a real threat. And when it fires up, your heart rate goes up, your cortisol spikes, and your body is ready to run from the tiger, then on the other side of the seesaw is your parasympathetic nervous system. That's your rest and digest mode. It's where your body repairs itself, it regulates itself, and it recovers. This is where healing happens. This is where your creativity lives, and this is where your clarity comes from also. Now, here's the critical part, and I want you to really hear this. There is research published in the Journal of ScienceDirect that analyzed 325 participants across four different studies, and the research confirmed that these two systems, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, they work like a seesaw, like I said. So when one goes up, the other goes down. You literally cannot be in recovery mode and stress mode at the same time. They are biologically opposing states. So when we're chronically busy, When we never truly come down from that stressful pace, we are keeping that seesaw permanently tilted toward fight or flight. And you know what? Our bodies were not designed for that another study looked at 191 business executives, people who live and breathe high-performance culture. And you know what they found? They found that over 90% of the stressed participants were experiencing what the researchers classified as chronic stress. And those people, they had higher baseline cortisol levels. They also made more cognitive errors, and they took longer to think clearly. So the chronic stress wasn't making them sharper, it was making them slower. I just wanna say that again. The relentless pace, it is not making you more productive. It is making you less effective, less clear, and over time, it puts you at greater risk for insomnia, high blood pressure, heart disease, and immune issues my friend, exhaustion isn't a badge of honor. It is a warning light here's where I land with all of this, because I know some of you are thinking, "Okay, Carlene, but I have real things that need to get done." And I hear you, and I'm not telling you to quit or to not be responsible. I am not saying that your to-do list doesn't matter. I am saying that taking care of your nervous system first is how the to-do list gets done with less stress, less friction, and more clarity. This is not anti-productivity. This is smarter productivity. And you know what? I prove this to myself every single summer. When Emily is here and I'm not white-knuckling my calendar, I am more focused when I do sit down to work. I'm more creative. I make better decisions, and I'm not running on fumes and just hoping for the best. I'm running on a full tank. So the question isn't whether to get things done, the question is what state do you want to be in when you do them? And I'm gonna add one more thing here, because I think a lot of us, especially women in midlife, we have tied our identity so tightly to being productive, to being needed, to being the one who holds it all together, that slowing down feels like losing ourselves. Like, if we stop moving, we might not know who we are. And I wanna challenge that, because I actually think the opposite is true. I think it's in the slowing down that you find out who you actually are. Not the you who's running the show, but the you who still exists when that show stops what I wanna do next is I wanna give you, uh, like a summer reset menu. Some simple ways to calm your nervous system, because it's really not as hard as you might think it is. We're gonna get practical, and I want you to know that this isn't a prescription, I'm not a doctor, and this isn't a perfect plan, but these are all backed by science, and it's just a list of simple things you can choose from. And none of these require you to schedule anything. You don't need to block time on your calendar to do them, and you don't have to do them perfectly. You just pick what feels right in the moment and do it. And like I said, the science backs up every single one of these. The first one, and I've talked about this numerous times on the podcast too, because it's so basic to our existence, is to breathe. Just breathe. And I know you've heard this 100 times, but here's why it works and why it's the one thing that requires nothing from you. Not a single extra minute of your day. Your breath is the only function of your autonomic nervous system that you can consciously control. So when you take a slow, intentional breath, let's say you inhale for three counts, hold for three counts, and exhale for six counts, you are literally manually activating your parasympathetic nervous system. You are shifting the seesaw on purpose. You know what? You can do it in the car before you go inside. You can do it when you close your laptop. You can do it standing in line at the grocery store or when you're sitting in traffic. You're not scheduling anything. You're just breathing differently for 60 seconds wherever you are, doing whatever it is that you're doing. So breathe. Just breathe. The second thing that you can do to reset your nervous system is to go outside, and I'm not talking about a two-hour hike. I'm talking about stepping outside. A 20-minute walk, or sitting on your porch, or standing in your backyard and looking at the sky there's actually research that's been published in Frontiers in Psychology that measured salivary cortisol, so the cortisol that's in your saliva, and that cortisol is your stress hormone, as we know, and they measured it before and after someone spent time in nature, and they found that even short exposures to outdoor environments, being out in nature, it measurably reduced the physiological stress markers. The cortisol actually drops, and that's biology. And also, I love this detail, that same research noted that cortisol levels are naturally lower in summertime. Remember at the beginning of the episode, I said that summer is like prime time for a reset? Yeah, there's research that says that is true. So summer, this season itself, is already working in your favor because your cortisol levels are already naturally lower. So use this season to do that. Okay, the third thing that you can do to settle your nervous system is to laugh with somebody, stop scrolling. Stop watching something alone at midnight. Actually laugh with another human being. So Professor Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford, he has spent years studying what laughter does to the brain, and his research, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, found that social laughter upregulates the brain's endorphin system and increases the sense of bonding between the people laughing together. It literally changes your brain chemistry. And because laughter is contagious, that endorphin response, it can spread through everybody in the room. And whenever you're just goofing around with somebody and laughing, that is not wasted time. That's your nervous system being repaired by one of the oldest biological bonding mechanisms that we as humans have ever had. So go laugh. Go have fun. All right, the fourth way to reset your nervous system is to just be, but just be with someone. So remember what I said earlier, doing nothing with somebody is different than doing nothing alone. That quiet togetherness, watching something, sitting on the porch, just existing in the same space, is co-regulation. It's your nervous systems calming each other down. So research on vagal tone and social connection, it confirms it. The quality of your relationships directly affects your autonomic regulation. The people you feel safe with are literally good for your health, and the people you don't feel safe with, that is not good for your health. They are not going to help you reset your nervous system. So be careful who you are spending time with And also, don't underestimate a quiet evening with someone that you love. It's doing more work than you know. All right. The last thing that you can do to settle your nervous system is to give yourself one afternoon, just one afternoon this summer. I'm not even telling you one afternoon a week this summer, although I would challenge you to do that, but one afternoon this summer where the to-do list, it doesn't even exist. You don't have to do a full day because that might feel too big, just one afternoon. There's no productivity. There's no optimizing. There's no thinking, "Well, I really should be doing..." dot, dot, dot. Who knows, right? Notice how it feels at the beginning when you do this. It feels a little uncomfortable, I'm gonna tell you. And then notice how it feels in the middle. You know what? It feels kinda great because you're probably doing something with somebody that you love, and you're starting to feel your nervous system calm. And then notice how it feels at the end because that transition from guilty to settled is your nervous system coming back online, and that is what recovery actually feels like. And once you feel it, you're gonna start protecting it because you are not gonna wanna go back to the way you used to feel because I have to tell you, there is so much to learn on the other side of withdrawing from the productivity. I mentioned at the start of this episode that I wanted to answer a question: What do we learn about ourselves when we're finally on the other side of the productivity withdrawal? And here's what I've learned from my own summers, from coaching people through this, from watching what happens when someone finally gives themselves permission to stop performing. You learn what you actually enjoy, not what you think you should enjoy, not what looks good, but you learn what genuinely lights you up, and you learn that you're more capable than you thought, and that your best thinking does not happen under pressure. It happens when you're rested. The other thing you learn is that the to-do list will always be there, but you do not need to suffer for the to-do list. And finally, you learn, and this, this is a big one, is that your worth is not a productivity metric. It never was Okay, let's bring this home. I wanna recap because you guys love when I recap, so I'm gonna recap here. I've got... Oh, let me look at my outline here. I've got four points that I wanna highlight for you so that when you stop listening to this, you're thinking about these four things. The first one is we have been culturally conditioned, and research proves this, to treat busyness as a status symbol. Americans see the most exhausted person in the room as the most important one, and that is a story that we've been told, and I am saying we can write a different one. The second thing I want you to think about is chronic stress and how it keeps your sympathetic nervous system in charge. And when your sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, or freeze, is running the show, your cognitive performance, it actually drops. You are not getting more done. You're getting less done, and you're doing less well, and it's costing you your health. Okay, the third thing that I really want you to think about is that your nervous system and your productivity, they are not enemies. Taking care of your nervous system first is how you protect your productivity. So it's nervous system first, and the to-do list gets done with less stress, less friction, and more clarity. And finally, that reset menu I gave you, pick something and do it. Practice it. Be intentional about it. Leave Post-it notes for yourself. So again, you can breathe intentionally. Do some deep breathing. Go outside. Nature is so good for your nervous system. And laugh with someone. Just laugh. Have a good time and laugh. Also, be still with someone you love. Do nothing, but do nothing with somebody. And finally, give yourself one afternoon this summer where your to-do list does not exist. And remember, none of this requires a perfect plan. You don't have to do it perfectly. You just have to do something before we leave today, I wanna leave you with this. Because, yeah, I'm an ADHD coach, I'm a midlife transition coach, And I call myself a productivity strategist, and I've built an entire coaching practice around helping people with ADHD get things done. And I am standing here telling you, slow down. Take care of your nervous system first. Let the summer do what summer is actually designed to do. What I'm telling you here, this is not a contradiction. This is the most honest thing that I know right now. And you do not have to earn your rest. You do not have to justify a slow afternoon, and you do not have to perform your exhaustion for anyone, including yourself. And I want you to know, you are allowed to just be And it turns out your body has been waiting for exactly that for years. Remember, summer is your season to reset, so use it. Take advantage of it And if anything here resonated for you and you thought of somebody in your life who needs a reset, please forward this episode to them. And then have a conversation with each other about it, and tell each other, what are you gonna focus on this summer for yourself? I wanna give you a high five for showing up for yourself today and being here for this conversation, and I want you to know that I am going to be here next week ready to welcome you into our next episode as soon as you hit play. Until then, please take care of yourself. Bye for now

Carlene 25:38

oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.