What High Performers Misunderstand About Energy

[00:00:02]:
So there she is. She goes to yoga once a week, she meditates. And she still has that low level generalised anxiety most days. And she’s not someone who ignores her well being. She’s carved the time out of a demanding week. She’s built the practises in, she’s taken it seriously, and something still isn’t shifting. So it’s Wednesday night, she’s at yoga. It takes a while to sink into the class.

[00:00:29]:
She can feel the tension in her body. And then gradually, the class starts to work on her. That tension begins to fall away. Before she knows it, she’s in child’s pose. The instructor’s voice is somewhere above her, saying something about surrendering to the present moment. And as she begins to do exactly that, bamboo, there’s that email she forgot to send on Thursday. And now that’s all she can think about. And then somewhere on the drive home tomorrow is already in the front seat with her.

[00:01:01]:
The meeting she’s slightly dreading, the conversation she’s been putting off, the things she said she’d follow up on and hasn’t quite yet. And this isn’t just Wednesday night at yoga. She meditates in the morning, mostly consistently, which, for someone with as much going on as she has, is quite frankly, amazing. She sits, she breathes, she does the practise. And then she opens her eyes and that low level hum of anxiety is back right where she left it. Patient as anything, waiting on the other side of the silence that she just created. She tracks her sleep. Seven and a half hours, according to the app, and yet she wakes up feeling like some part of her never quite went under, like something was still running in the background, even while her body was horizontal and her eyes were closed.

[00:01:54]:
She does everything right the night before. No screens. After a certain time, magnesium on her bedside table. The room is cool and dark and still. There’s that feeling of having slept but not quite rested, of returning to the day already slightly behind herself. And then there’s the restlessness that surfaces when she actually stops. She’s finally sitting down. The week’s done.

[00:02:20]:
There’s genuinely nothing that needs her right now. And instead of the relief she expected, there’s a low static she can’t quite settle. She knows she needs this. She’s been telling herself all week that she needs this. And now that she has it, some part of her system doesn’t quite know what to do with it. She might reach for her phone cheque, nothing in particular. Put it down, pick it up again, mentally run through Tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday evening. And she’s been telling herself since Friday that this weekend was going to be different.

[00:02:56]:
Because busyness over time becomes familiar in a way that goes so much deeper than habit. When the pace is high, when the to do list is long, when she’s needed and moving, and across everything there’s a certainty that comes with that, a quiet satisfaction, the internal signal that she’s productive, capable, on top of it. And when that drops away, even temporarily, even because she created that space intentionally, something slightly unfamiliar moves in a quietness her system doesn’t quite have a map for yet. So she fills it without really deciding to. And she goes back to yoga on Wednesday and she meditates on Thursday morning. And the low level hum of anxiety is still there when she opens her eyes. So what’s really going on here? Because she’s doing all the things right, the yoga’s real, the meditation’s real, the magnesium and the sleep tracking and the carved out Sunday and the consistency, all of it’s real. And I want to be really clear about something before we go any further into this, because these practises work.

[00:04:11]:
There is solid physiological evidence that yoga, meditation, breath work and quality sleep activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the branch of your autonomic nervous system that’s responsible for rest, for restoration, for digestion, cellular repair and genuine recovery. These aren’t wellness trends, they are physiologically sound intervention. So let’s talk about what’s going on in your nervous system. So your autonomic nervous system’s got two primary branches. The sympathetic nervous system, which governs activation, alertness in your stress response, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs rest, restoration and recovery. Now, in a regulated system, these two branches move fluidly in response to what the environment actually requires. Demand rises, the sympathetic branch activates, demand passes, the parasympathetic branch restores.

[00:05:13]:
It’s a dance. And that’s what a regulated nervous system looks like. Two branches in responsive, intelligent conversation with each other and with the world around you. But here’s what changes when the sympathetic nervous system has been running in a state of chronic activation, not in those peak moments of acute demand, not the high pressure week or the tough month, but the sustained low level activation that comes from years of high responsibility, high visibility and high consequence environments. Years of being the person who holds it together, who anticipates what’s coming and keeps moving, regardless of what the weeks asked. And over time, that level of activation stops feeling like Stress. It starts feeling like normal, your system recalibrates around it and that recalibrated state becomes the baseline your body returns to consistently, predictably, regardless of what you layer on top of it. And this is where the practises meet their limit.

[00:06:20]:
So think of it this way. Imagine a room where the heating’s running at full blast. You bring in a fan and you can feel that lovely cool air moving about the room. But overall, the room stays really warm because the underlying system running beneath it is more powerful than the intervention that’s sitting on top of the it. So the yoga works, the meditation works, the parasympathetic nervous system activates during the practise and she feels it. That’s the calm she finds in child’s pose, that’s the exhale that finally arrives mid class. And then the practise ends and your system returns to its conditioned baseline. The heating that’s been running for years quietly reasserts itself, which is why the calm lasts until maybe the key goes in your car door.

[00:07:15]:
Which is why that low level hum of anxiety is back on the other side of the meditation. Which is why she can do everything right and still wake up feeling like something and her never fully rested. The practises are working. The baseline is what’s overriding them. And now I want to come back to that email that she thought she forgot about. You know, the one that arrived when she was in child’s pose, right at the moment that she was finally surrendering to the present moment. Because that email didn’t arrive to sabotage her practise, it actually arrived because of her practise. When the parasympathetic nervous system activates, when your body finally gets enough space to move out of pure survival mode, even corporate survival mode, it creates the conditions for something amazing.

[00:08:09]:
Cognitive space. The kind of open, available thinking that allows your brain to surface what’s actually been waiting to be seen. Creative thought, unfinished business, the things that couldn’t find their way through. When your system was running flat out, that email was always there. Your body just finally had enough space to surface it. Fast forward that to a busy week when your sympathetic nervous system’s dominant, when you’re moving fast, you’re across everything, you’re managing every thread simultaneously and that same cognitive space isn’t available. Your brain’s in an entirely different mode. Efficient, focused, responsive to immediate demand.

[00:08:55]:
But the email doesn’t surface, the creative thought doesn’t arrive. The thing you’ve been meaning to think about properly stays just out of reach. The very Busyness that feels productive is quietly narrowing what your brain can access. So the email arriving in child’s pose wasn’t an interruption, it was evidence. Evidence of how amazing your body is the moment it’s given the conditions that it’s asking for. And that baseline, the one your system keeps returning to, well, that didn’t appear from nowhere. It was shaped gradually and intelligently by every environment that rewarded you for being constantly ready, every role that required you to anticipate the next thing before the current thing was finished, every version of leadership that asked you to be across everything. Always.

[00:09:50]:
Your nervous system learned over a long period of time that this level of activation is what the environment requires. And it holds that learned state with remarkable consistency. On the yoga mat, in meditation, in the cool, dark room at 11pm, with that magnesium on your bedside table, your system is amazing at adapting. Everything in it is working exactly as it was designed to work. So the question we’re going to sit with is simply whether that state is adapted to is still the one that serves you. And this is where something shifts, because, like I said, the practises are working. The email arrived in child’s pose because the parasympathetic nervous system did exactly what it was designed to do. So the yoga worked, the meditation worked, the calm was real.

[00:10:44]:
But what we’re looking at isn’t a failure of the practises. We’re looking at a baseline that keeps reasserting itself the moment the practise ends. And this reminds me of something I come back to often in my work as a medical herbalist. Conventional medicine is amazingly good at addressing symptoms. You have a headache, here’s something for the headache and that matters, that works, right? There’s absolutely a place for that. But herbal medicine’s always worked from a different premise. We’re not looking at the symptom in isolation, we’re looking at the underlying condition that’s producing it. What’s the body doing and why is it doing that? What has it adapted to? What does it need in order to function differently, not just feel better temporarily? The energy conversation is exactly the same.

[00:11:38]:
The conventional wellness model starts at the practise. Sleep more, move your body, meditate, rest. And your body needs all of those things. They’re genuinely valuable. And none of them can fully land in a system whose baseline has recalibrated around chronic activation. Because restoration isn’t simply a matter of doing the right things. It’s a matter of your system being in a state where it can actually restore, receive what you’re Giving it. What could it mean for you to approach restoration from that angle, to stop asking, am I doing enough to recover? And to start asking, what does my system need in order to be able to receive recovery? Those aren’t the same question and they don’t lead to the same place.

[00:12:27]:
The first question keeps her adding practises, tracking inputs, another supplement, optimising the variables she can see. The second question takes her somewhere underneath all that, to the baseline itself, to the conditioned state her system’s been holding faithfully and intelligently for a very long time. Women who make this shift don’t necessarily change everything they’re doing, by the way. They often keep the yoga, they keep the meditation. But something about how those practises land begins to change, because the question underneath them’s changed. She’s no longer trying to override her system with enough recovery, she’s beginning to work with it. Your nervous system adapted to what your environment kept asking of it, and it did that with amazing precision. The recalibration that becomes available when you start working at the level of the baseline isn’t about dismantling any of that, it’s about creating enough internal safety that your system no longer needs to hold that level of activation as its default.

[00:13:42]:
And in my experience, that’s where something genuinely different becomes possible. Not just temporarily, at the level where it actually lasts. Before you move on to whatever is next in your day, I want to leave you with something and I want to start with the sigh. Isn’t that gorgeous? And the reason I’m starting with the sigh is because you already do it. When you sigh, what your body’s actually doing is extending the exhale. It’s a spontaneous, involuntary act of sigh self regulation. And your system does it naturally, without being asked, because it works. It’s your body’s own way of releasing a little of the sympathetic activation that’s been building, creating just enough space for your parasympathetic nervous system to come back online.

[00:14:37]:
So what we’re going to do right now is simply give it a little more of what it’s already reaching for. So I’m going to guide you through two rounds of breath, breath work. And it’s simply breathing in for four counts and out for six to eight counts. So the exhale is going to be longer than the inhale. That’s all we’re doing. So wherever you are, driving, walking, sitting, listening, let’s do this together, shall we? So let’s start by breathing into the nose for four counts. One, two, three, four. And now Breathe out through the mouth slowly.

[00:15:19]:
One, two, three, four, five, six. Let’s do it again. Breathe in for four. Two, three, four. And this time, let that out. Breath be a sigh, just let it go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Good.

[00:15:53]:
Just find your own natural rhythm now and just notice what’s there. Not what you think about it, what you actually feel. Whether something even slightly begins to settle with just those two breaths. That settling is your parasympathetic nervous system, not relaxation. As a reward for getting everything done. Your biology doing what it’s always been capable of doing, the moment it’s given a little space. And that’s really what this episode’s been about. Your body already has this at its disposal.

[00:16:31]:
The sigh, the exhale, the capacity to restore. None of this is new information for your nervous system. It’s been doing this all along. On the yoga mat, in the meditation, in that cool, dark room at night. What changes when you start working at the level of the baseline is that these moments stop being temporary relief and they start becoming something your system can actually build on. And that’s the work. Not adding more into an already full life. Working with the intelligence that your body already has.

[00:17:04]:
And if something in this episode has landed for you today, if you recognised yourself somewhere in that Wednesday evening yoga class, or in this Sunday that was supposed to be different, or in that low level hum that’s still there when you open your eyes in the morning, the link to work with me is in the show notes now. There’s no urgency, there’s no pressure. It’s just an open door. If it feels like the right next step for you, for now, I’m sending you lots of love. Bye for now.