From Knowing Different to Living Different (Part 5)

Episode 155: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
View transcript on Buzzsprout

Knowing different and doing different aren’t the same thing.

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me, “I know what I should be doing to support my mental health, why can’t I just actually do it?!” — well I’d have at least $100.

Understanding how stress works is genuinely useful. The self-awarness of knowing what your nervous system needs, being able to name what’s in your stress bucket, recognizing when you’re running on fumes, that matters. But awareness alone doesn’t move the needle. There’s a gap between understanding what needs to change and actually living differently, and that gap is where a lot of people get stuck.

This is the fifth and final episode of the stress management series. It wraps up the practical frameworks from the previous four episodes and turns toward the harder question: once you know, then what? If the series has given you clarity, this episode is a gently push towards what to actually do with it.

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What We Cover in This Episode

• Where you land on the nervous system ladder after doing this work — and what that actually tells you
• The “light switch moment” why it matters and what it opens up
• Why the gap between knowing and changing is a capacity problem, not a willpower problem
• The four seasons of healing and why matching your support to your actual season changes everything

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Where Are You on the Ladder Right Now?

If you’ve spent time in this series honestly looking at your stress bucket, the next question is: where are you actually landing? The nervous system ladder is a visual that helps answer that. Picture three zones stacked on top of each other. Green at the top-this is regulation, where life feels mostly manageable and you have access to your own resources. Yellow in the middle- activation, where anxiety, irritability, and that chronic on-edge feeling live. Red at the bottom – shutdown, where exhaustion, apathy, and numbness take over.

The heavier your stress bucket, the further down the ladder it pushes you. Most people in the yellow zone aren’t there because something is wrong with them, they’re there because their bucket is full and there’s not enough on the supporter side to offset it.

What the series was designed to do is give you enough honest information about your own system that you could have a genuine “oh” moment. Not “I’m the problem” or “I’ll always be this way”, but “of course I’m struggling. Look at what I’m carrying.” That shift from shame to context is what I call the light switch moment, and it’s where real change becomes possible.

The Gap Between Knowing and Living

Some of you will take the frameworks from this series — the stress bucket, the see-saw, the core values filter, the 3 D’s and start putting them to work. You’ll make small consistent shifts, and over time, things will change. That’s real and it happens.

And then there are people and I’ve been this person who understand every single piece of the framework, can clearly see what needs to change, but can’t actually close that gap between conceptually knowing and genuinely living differently. That’s not a willpower problem. It’s a capacity problem. And capacity isn’t built through more information. It’s built through support.

I would not have been able to regulate my nervous system and heal my anxiety and depression without one on one support. That support has taken a lot of different forms over the years coaching, therapy, functional lab work, health coaching. I’ve invested in my healing because I’ve come to understand it as the highest-return investment in my life.

If you’re sitting here thinking I need more than a podcast series that instinct is worth listening to. Inside RESTORE, we do exactly this work with people a full stress bucket assessment, a personalized roadmap, and the ongoing accountability that makes change actually stick.

The Four Seasons of Healing

One of the most clarifying ideas in my book, Healing Through the Vagus Nerve, is that healing has a sequence. It isn’t random and it isn’t linear, but it does have an order and skipping ahead of that order is one of the main reasons people get stuck or feel like nothing they try actually works.

The four phases look like this:

Phase 1: Education & Awareness. You develop a working understanding of your nervous system, your patterns, and the factors driving your symptoms. This is the foundation. Without it, everything else is guesswork.

Phase 2 : Regulation. You build a toolbox of practices that actually work for your specific nervous system. Not a generic list, the specific things your system responds to. This phase is about creating a baseline of safety in your body that makes deeper work possible.

Phase 3 : Rewiring. With a regulated enough nervous system, you start addressing the deeper patterns — old beliefs, trauma responses, relational habits that have been running in the background. This is where a lot of the profound shifts happen.

Phase 4: Resourcing. You build a life that actively supports your nervous system on an ongoing basis not just in the hard moments, but as a baseline practice.

What tends to go wrong is when people try to do Phase 3 work before their nervous system has the capacity to hold it. This is why years of therapy can feel like expensive venting without real-life change, not because therapy isn’t valuable, but because the sequence matters. Your nervous system has to be regulated enough to do the deeper work. Jumping that step doesn’t speed things up; it usually stalls them.

Knowing which phase you’re in changes what kind of support actually makes sense right now. It changes the questions you ask, the help you seek, and the expectations you hold for yourself.

Strategic, Personalized Healing

The philosophy I’ve carried from a decade in fitness and wellness into mental health coaching is this: strategy beats volume. It’s not about doing the most things or throwing everything at the wall. It’s about identifying what actually works for your specific system and doing that consistently.

That means starting with your actual nervous system, your actual history, your actual season. Not a generic protocol layered on top of a life that wasn’t built to support it. Minimalist in the best sense. Strategic, personalized, whole human.

This is the structure of RESTORE, the 16-week one-on-one coaching program. We start by exploring your unique nervous system patterns, build a reactive toolbox specific to your system, do a full stress bucket assessment, and build a personalized roadmap from there, including comprehensive bloodwork to see how your underlying physiology may be playing into your symptoms. Then we ask: what’s the most meaningful and accessible place to start right now? And we build from there, together, with someone who knows your system and can adapt the plan when life doesn’t cooperate.

If you’ve spent years understanding yourself but still feel stuck, or you’ve done therapy and learned things that mattered but nothing in your day to day life actually changed, RESTORE might be what comes next. You can book a pressure-free discovery call HERE.

If You’re Not There Yet

If you want to keep going at your own pace with community around you, the Regulated Living Membership is where this series lives in full with the workbook that maps to everything we’ve covered, monthly deep dives, a growing practice library, and a community of people doing this same work alongside you.

Whether you move forward with one-on-one support, inside the membership, or simply with more awareness than you had before healing is possible for you. With your actual nervous system. Your actual history. Your actual life. Your system is not fixed. It is responsive. And it responds to the conditions you create for it.

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Three Tangible Takeaways

1. Know what season of healing you’re in and match your support to your actual capacity. Each phase has its own needs. Trying to force Phase 3 work before your nervous system is regulated enough to hold it doesn’t accelerate healing; it stalls it. Asking “what season am I in?” is one of the most clarifying questions you can bring to your next step.
2. Healing has a general sequence: education, regulation, rewiring, resourcing. Order matters. Building a regulated baseline is the foundation that makes deeper work possible — not an optional first step you can skip.
3. Knowing different and living different are not the same thing and that gap is not a willpower problem. It’s a capacity and support problem. Strategic, personalized, whole-human support is what bridges it. If you’re looking for that kind of support, it exists.

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Looking for more personalized support?

• Regulated Living Membership -A Monthly membership for nervous system healing
• RESTORE -1:1 coaching program for anxiety and depression

*Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know HERE.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.