When Life Gets in the Way of Healing

Episode 162: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
View transcript on Buzzsprout

There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that comes with teaching nervous system regulation while your own nervous system is running on fumes. For the last several weeks, two of my kids have been playing wake-up tag team all night. One is three, the other is barely ten months. I know this is a phase. I know it won’t last forever. And I’m also genuinely exhausted in a way that makes it hard to practice a lot of what I’ve been putting out on this podcast lately.

I was prepping an episode on morning sunlight, which I genuinely believe in, and caught myself thinking: my actual wake times for the past five days were 3:30am, 5am, two 6:30ams, and 4am. And most mornings, eating the scraps off my kids’ breakfast plates feels like a more realistic option than making my own.

I’m sharing this because the gap between what we know and what we can actually do in a given season of life is real. This episode is about what keeps me grounded when I can’t execute the ideal version of any of this, and what I think actually matters for healing when life is genuinely chaotic.

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What We Cover in This Episode

• What flexibility actually looks like as a healing skill in a hard season
• Why context changes everything about how you interpret your symptoms
• The six domains of healing and why strategic healing requires considering all of them
• The Daily Five: the foundational daily inputs your nervous system needs to build capacity

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What Keeps Me Grounded When I Can’t Practice What I Preach

Two things save me in seasons like this one, and neither of them is a new habit or a better morning routine.

Flexibility

Flexibility is possible when you understand how interconnected the different foundations of wellbeing actually are. When one area feels out of control, you can pivot to another that’s more accessible. Right now, I cannot control how many times my kids wake up at night or whether I can fall back asleep after a 3am wake-up. But I can mostly control when I go to bed and how I nourish myself in the morning.

I learned the hard way last week that being sleep deprived, calorie deficient, and dehydrated at the same time will give me a migraine bad enough to make me sick. So my bedtime has moved to 8:30 or 9pm. My house is messier than I prefer because I am not doing the full reset at night. In the morning, even when I don’t feel like eating, I eat anyway and I drink a large glass of water. I have also dialed down the intensity of my workouts, because exercising at full capacity when I am not at full capacity leads to burnout or injury. Both things I have also learned the hard way.

This doesn’t get me to 100%. It gets me to enough. And in this season, enough is the goal.

Context

The second thing that helps is understanding that the foundations I teach about actually do drive how I feel. When I’m more anxious, more reactive, more prone to shutdown. That’s not a mystery or a pathology. It’s my nervous system accurately reporting on what it’s been given.

When I snapped at my kid at 3pm and walked out of the room, the internal voice I’m working with sounds something like: of course you did. You’re on day four of fragmented sleep, you haven’t had more than one glass of water, and kids are just genuinely hard sometimes. I’m not broken for being activated when my body is actually depleted.

Context is not an excuse. It’s accurate information that guides you back to what you actually need. And it’s what makes the difference between spiraling into shame about your symptoms and responding strategically to what’s driving them.

The Limits of Understanding Alone

I spent years in therapy developing genuine insight into my past, my patterns, and my triggers. That work mattered. And it also had a ceiling, because the deeper work can only create as much change as someone’s daily life allows for. Understanding why you do something doesn’t automatically change the daily conditions that keep reinforcing it.

I recently talked with someone who just signed up for RESTORE, our 1:1 program. He said: my therapist has been helpful, but she tells me I need to sleep more without helping me figure out how. She mentions that exercise would be good for me, but we never get into why I’m not exercising or what getting started would actually look like in my life right now. That’s a common experience, and it’s exactly the gap that more strategic, daily-life-level support is designed to fill.

Deep work and foundational habits are not competing priorities. They work together. The deeper healing work needs somewhere to land, and it lands most reliably in a daily life that provides the nervous system with what it needs to function.

The Six Domains of Healing

Strategic healing requires zooming out and considering all the categories that influence mental health. I have organized these into six domains:

• Physiology
• Psychology
• Environment
• Relationships
• Lifestyle
• Meaning and Purpose

Within those domains are the subcategories that actually do the work: trauma, chronic stress, limiting beliefs, protective parts, inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, hormone imbalance, unsafe environments, loneliness, grief, burnout. The list is real and it’s long, and that’s exactly why trying to address everything at once tends to lead nowhere.

The questions to ask when you’re struggling: which domain is contributing most to how I’m feeling right now? Which domain is most accessible to me in this season? What does the most supportive next step look like inside that domain? That’s what strategic healing actually is: not trying harder at everything, but getting clearer about where to focus.

The Daily Five

Underneath all six domains is a set of daily inputs that are non-negotiable for human wellbeing. These are what I call the Daily Five: five foundational behaviors and conditions the nervous system needs to build capacity, register safety, and do any of the deeper work reliably.

1. Sleep. Circadian rhythm, morning sunlight, consistent wake time, evening routines that prepare your nervous system to power down.
2. Nourishment. Adequate calories, blood sugar stability, hydration, gut health, minerals. The basics your physiology runs on.
3. Movement. Walking, exercise, mobility, time outside. Not optimized performance. Consistent, sustainable movement that fits your current capacity.
4. Regulation and Capacity Training. Breathwork, nervous system practices, stress management, vagal toning, building interoceptive awareness. This is the direct work of widening your window of tolerance.
5. Connection. Relationships, co-regulation, community, play, creativity, belonging. The relational inputs your nervous system was designed to depend on.

These are not trendy wellness habits. They are biological requirements. When they are consistently absent or depleted, you should expect to feel unwell. When you layer that depletion on top of unresolved trauma, relational stress, or a life that’s asking more than your current capacity can hold, you get the full picture of why someone struggles.

One useful practice inside this framework: identify your number one self-care anchor. The one thing that, when it’s happening consistently, makes everything else easier. Knowing that gives you something to protect in the seasons when 40% is your 100%. You can let other habits slide with intention, rather than losing everything at once. This kind of strategic, life-specific clarity is a big part of what we work on inside RESTORE, where we go through comprehensive bloodwork alongside your stress load, your patterns, and the realities of your daily life to build a roadmap that actually fits where you are.

Healing Is Both Simpler and More Complicated Than We Want It to Be

Simpler, because some things are just true. Human beings need sleep. We need nourishment. We need movement. We need connection. We need ways to process stress and build capacity. These are not optional.

More complicated, because none of us live in a laboratory. We live in marriages and divorces. We have toddlers who wake up all night and teenagers who only want to talk at 11pm. We move through grief, layoffs, trauma, caregiving, financial stress, chronic illness, and seasons where getting the dishes done feels like a real accomplishment.

The goal is not perfect execution of every healthy habit at all times. The goal is learning how to work with reality: understanding which inputs matter most, which ones are available to you right now, and how to make supportive choices within the life you are actually living.

Right now my sleep is inconsistent, my workouts are dialed back, and my house is messier than I prefer. I still feel reasonably grounded most days. Not because everything is in order, but because I understand what season I’m in, I know what’s contributing to how I feel, and I know which levers I can pull and which ones I cannot touch right now.

Healing is thousands of small adjustments. It’s adapting. It’s coming back to the basics over and over. If you’re feeling behind or like you’re failing at everything you know you should be doing, two questions worth sitting with: What season of life am I actually in right now, optimizing or baseline? And what is the most supportive next step available to me today?

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Three Tangible Takeaways

1. Flexibility is a healing skill. When one foundation slips out of your control, the move is to pivot to what’s still accessible. Identify what you can anchor to in this season and let the rest go with intention rather than guilt. Doing less well is still doing something.
2. Your symptoms make sense given the load. When the foundations are slipping and you feel it: more anxious, more reactive, more shut down. That’s your nervous system accurately reporting on what it’s been given. Context changes how you interpret your symptoms, and that shift guides you toward what you actually need.
3. Healing is strategic. The six domains of healing (physiology, psychology, environment, relationships, lifestyle, and meaning) give you a map for where to look when you’re struggling. Strategic healing means zooming out, identifying which domain needs attention right now, and focusing there rather than trying harder at everything at once.

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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.