Welcome to Simple Healings with Sara, I believe that true healing doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether you’re dealing with chronic stress and overwhelm, nervous system dysregulation, feeling exhausted, or just wanting to understand yourself and your parts better. This podcast is here to guide you on your journey to Holistic aliveness. My goal for you is to feel held, seen and alive as you embark on this sacred path of healing and healing whole so that you can show up for your life and your loved ones in a way that feels truly aligned for you, in a way that speaks to your inner light. If you’re seeking to feel more held in your healing journey, repairing your inner little ones, learn more about your parts, heal your adrenals, regulate your nervous system, and feel truly nourished. You’re in the right place. Hello, it is Sarah here, your host. And today we’re going to tackle a topic that many of us face but don’t always fully understand. And that is overwhelm. Overwhelm is something that can affect anyone. But for busy individuals, especially moms, it can feel like a constant companion. So what exactly is overwhelm? At its core, it’s a state where the demands on our time and energy exceed our capacity to hold It’s a feeling of being stretched too thin, and it often comes with physical, emotional and mental let’s take a pause for that for a moment. And even just imagining a cup. And what happens if you fill that cup and you just keep filling it and it’s overflowing. So stress is not necessarily the thing itself. Stress is this is too much for my system to that in mind, when I tell some of my clients and I’m saying your system is experiencing stress and they’ll say, but I’m not stressed out, and I’ll say, based off of what you’re sharing with me, your capacity to hold what is coming into your life, it’s it’s it’s beyond that. It’s overflowing. And so these might be positive stressors or things that you want to be doing, and maybe you have a lot of free time and a lot of this and a lot of that. the way your system is perceiving it, which were our cells are constantly deciding on a cellular level, right. Safe. Not safe stress. Not stress. And so stress is that is that overfilling. And there are various practices that enhance or let’s say heighten that stress response or cause that overflowing to become greater. And there are certain practices that expand your cup and your capacity to hold. And we’ll get into that a bit soon. But let’s just take a pause with that and really sense into and feel into what? Where is your cup and how much is it being filled? And what comes up for you and I when I ask you about this Let’s dive into the incredible health benefits of liver. Liver is one of the most nutrient dense foods you can eat, loaded with essential vitamins, minerals, and powerful compounds that support everything from your skin to your brain to your nervous system. But here’s the thing getting your hands on fresh, grass fed beef liver isn’t always convenient or easy, and that’s where kosher, grass fed beef liver supplements from kosher carnivore have been a huge find for me and my clients. Why rely on traditional multivitamins that your body might not even absorb well and are synthetic? Whereas beef liver is a much better alternative, offering nutrients in their most bioavailable form. It’s especially rich in iron and vitamin A, which is crucial for tissue repair, exercise, recovery, and even skin issues like eczema. Unlike beta carotene and other supplements which needs to be converted by your body. The vitamin A in beef liver is ready to go, giving your skin immune system the boost that they need right away. Let’s not forget beef liver is the ultimate brain fuel, packed with all the B vitamins essential for mind body health, adrenal regulation, and nervous system support. As someone who deeply values nourishing the body and supporting overall vitality, I can’t recommend this supplement enough. So if you’re ready to upgrade your wellness routine and your mind body health, head over to Kosher carnivore.com and use code. Simply heal at checkout for 15% off your first order, or just click the link in the show notes below. Fuel your body with the best and feel the difference. Now back to the show Let’s now take some time to break down what overwhelm can feel like It often feels like juggling a million responsibilities, from work to family to personal commitments. You might experience a sense of being constantly behind a lack of control or persistent fatigue. It’s that nagging feeling that no matter how much you do, it’s not going to be enough. And in that space, right, we can sense into what’s the somatic experience of that. I’m falling behind. Not enough time, not enough space, not enough. And it might feel very tight and closed. And often in that space there’s I can’t take a break. There’s no time to take a break. And that’s usually when we need the break the most. We need the reset the most. And physiologically, overwhelm has significant markers. When we’re overwhelmed, our stress hormones, particularly cortisol, can become dysregulated. This means our body’s stress response system is in overdrive, often leading to a constant, a chronic state of fight or flight. And when that crashes, it leads to freeze the Free State. If you’re familiar with poly vagal theory What is freeze? Freeze is shut down. Collapse. Giving up. Hopeless. Can’t move. And that. And that to me, is where the overwhelm really lifts. I mean, there’s different forms of overwhelm. There’s the more of, like the activated overwhelm. And this is the freeze overwhelm, the given up, the can’t breathe, the hopelessness. And soon we’ll go more into the IFS perspective on this and some other pieces. But first, I must mention one of my favorite pieces of this whole puzzle is the blood sugar regulation, the glucose impact, and its connection to overwhelm. So what a lot of people don’t know is that when we are engaging in certain practices and behaviors that cause big spikes in our glucose levels and then drops, big drops overwhelm lives in that whole process and especially in the drop. So we might start our day feeling kind of hyper and let’s say, that more of that heightened version, that activated version of I’m overwhelmed, but like, I’m just going to get everything done and then maybe a little bit later after certain behaviors and practices. So we’ll crash. And that’s when the emotions are just too big and the experience is too big. And there’s too much and there’s no space. So my point is that there is a massive connection between the two. There’s a connection between your physiology and how you are going to feel and how you will experience life. And a little bit later, we’ll speak more about what are some of those behaviors that contribute to that peace. Next, I wanted to speak about the internal family systems piece or the internal aspects of overwhelm internally. this might look different for different people, but in general our mind and body might have different parts that are involved. For example, there might be a part of you that feels responsible for taking care of everything and getting everything done and feeling a certain pressure. And there might be another part that is simply exhausted and needs to rest. And then these internal parts interacting creates a conflict. It creates a friction, a bind. And in that space, there’s really no good option. It’s making it hard to find a sense of balance and peace. And from the theory perspective, this could be the sympathetic freeze, which means I’m feeling very activated. I need to get things done, and I’m also frozen and I can’t move, which might manifest in different ways for different people. Some people might be hyper multitasking, some people might be procrastinating and doing nothing and numbing out. But what’s the underlying tone? Overwhelm. And it often goes unnamed because there are so many layers and so many parts. So I invite you to take a moment and just lightly ask yourself, what is my overwhelm? What are my parts involved? So hopefully some of this is resonating for you or enlightening or helpful in some way. And before we go into the technical pieces of how to navigate this, and I’d like to offer you some practical tips, I think it would make sense to share a little bit of my personal experience with overwhelm. It’s something that I really understand and have dived into for so many years that I remember. I mean, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. I feel like I spent a lot of my life in this, like, kind of sublevel of overwhelm. I never really had the resources or the capacity to hold, life’s stresses as they came at me. So I kind of dealt with it in a frazzled, anxious sort of way. And that was my journey. I think it was around the my pregnancy with my first kid. I just remember feeling so overwhelmed and so dysregulated, so stressed, and I would have all these intense palpitations in my system. Like just feeling like I was jumping out of my skin. It was like that intense jitteriness and anxiety. And that was a whole other picture. We’ll talk about that another day about adrenal and HPA axis dysfunction or whatever. There’s so many, names for it these days. But yeah, for me the overwhelm was there. That was the heightened one. That was the like I couldn’t settle and and then I would crash and I would just feel like just overwhelmed. And of course, that was, maximized with the birth of my first kid and changing my whole life and becoming a parent and being tested in so many ways with sleep deprivation. And, I mean, I was already not sleeping because I struggled with a lot of insomnia. We can speak about that in another time, if that interests you. But yeah, and that journey over the past, you know, however many years of. Just moving through this chronic like it was like a sublevel state of stress and overwhelm and then crashes and realizing and seeing the connection all of a sudden with, with my glucose levels and then playing with that on a physiological level with how I ate, and different behaviors and different things to nourish my mitochondria, and then suddenly seeing, wow, I’m not overwhelmed anymore. Obviously, I get overwhelmed because it’s a part of, you know, like being a human for me. But it was totally different. It’s like I could be overwhelmed and I can be okay. I can be overwhelmed, and I can have my resources and I can know how to help myself get back on track. It may not be immediate, but it’s enough that I. It’s not this chronic stream of overwhelm that just never ends. And the more I did that, the more I worked with, you know, the physiology and also my internal parts around it. The more harmony can come into the system. And for me, actually, the food piece and the physiology piece with the different behaviors enabled me to do the internal family systems work and the somatic work that I had so wanted to do because I was sending my system. The message is safe, you are safe, you are okay, you are nourished. And in that way, I I think was able for some to people do it more might be of the deeper a flip work. around process. and obviously there’s no way to know for sure what, you know, what allowed for what, but it’s just something that I want to share my experience of how deeply important this is to me, and how much I want to get this message out to others of there’s so much that can be done. To really shift your physiology. And when I say your physiology, what does that mean? It means in any given moment your cells are responding to your environment. They’re sending out information to other cells, and your hormones are firing and your neurotransmitters and your neurofeedback is firing. Everything is happening all at the same time, and it’s all getting this information from around you, from within you, and from what you are putting into your system. And different practices can allow you to have this ability and the ability to receive more of those safe messages. So how about we go into that now? What are some things that you can pay attention to or start noticing today to help shift your physiology from overwhelm to vitality to a sense of capacity? we get into that, I wanted to just name that navigating overwhelm can be challenging because like I said, we’re dealing with overwhelm. So none of this information is meant to overwhelm your overwhelmed parts. And I want you to to invite you to take a moment, to just pause and ask which parts of me are listening right now. Is it my overwhelm that’s listening? Or can I bring in some other, maybe adult like part, some part of me that is taking initiative that is less, charged with emotion, that can listen in and invite my overwhelm to sort of just letting you know it doesn’t have to do anything. It just it could just be. I notice the shift that happens there in your body or your emotions or in your mind of just taking a moment to slow down. This doesn’t have to be some consuming consumption of information or some hyper race to get well, because that itself is stressful. And that’s the kind of things we’re not trying to do here. So with that said, here are a few tips that I hope can help you to orient to your personal healing journey and process, and really catering it to what you need at this time. Taking what speaks to you and maybe leaving the rest for the first I want to speak of is finding practices to help regulate your stress response. engaging in practices that help balance cortisol, adrenaline, and your circadian rhythm in general. Because your circadian rhythm is dictating when cortisol. Cortisol is not bad. Wait. We have to make this clear. Cortisol is not bad. Adrenaline is not bad. We need these things. Cortisol spikes naturally in the first part of your day to give you energy to get your tush out of bed. And when these things are balanced, you don’t need that coffee head. You don’t need that sugar hit. You can just get out of bed. Right? So cortisol is not bad. The question is, how can we regulate the levels of it so that it’s coming up at the right times a day and then let’s say going down towards the end of your day and melatonin is spiking and helping you to feel sleepy. So what are some practices that can help balance this process? Your circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that guides your body to know what hormones to release, when to help you feel aligned, energetic, and your energy to be aligned with your day. So some practices could be just in general, developing a mindfulness practice, deep breathing exercises, gentle movement, embodiment practices. That’s more of the general, which might seem obvious. And then there’s other ones, such as sun exposure and technology exposure. On the flip side, so are you regulating your exposure to technology at night and also during the day? Are you aware of how those screens impact your system? Because they are, whether you like it or not, that is just how it is. I’m not going to go into that today. Maybe another day If that interests you, you can let me know. and also sun exposure. Are you getting outside? Can you get outside first thing in the morning? Is that possible? Can you get outside throughout your day? Can you let your eyes just sort of adjust without contacts, without glasses, just adjust to the sun. And another piece of this is how are you starting your day? Are you starting your day with checking the news which will inevitably spike your cortisol nowadays? Or are you starting your day with just two minutes of silence? And now I might have some people with pitchforks come at me and saying, do you know what my life looks like in the morning? And I’ll say, yes, I probably do my own way. I have two little kids, two toddlers who are just. They are what they are. I love them and I found a practice that works for my life and my system of creating. It might be literally three minutes of peace for myself in the morning. And the more I engage in these practices, the more my body has adjusted to be able to settle into that. And it doesn’t take much. It’s just enough to really set the tone. But really, that’s online. I can’t stress it enough. We are meant to be regulated according to that. And if you are saying, yeah, but I need to use technology throughout my day and especially at night, there are hacks which I will share, in the future if you’d like. how to limit the blue lights from your screen when you are looking at them, which, if there’s one thing you take away from today, I recommend doing that. I will share it on my Instagram. I hack for changing your your blue and yellow light or green light. I forget exposure on your phones or devices at night. This already can make such a big difference in your health and in your stress responses. Okay. Number two maintaining stable blood sugar levels. This is a huge one. And for those of you who have read the Glucose Goddess or any of those other things, you might already be familiar with a lot of this, but I’ll share some basic rundown and maybe go a little more in depth another time. trying to eat with breakfast within 30 to 60 minutes from when you wake up is one of the key crusaders in your glucose levels, regulating keeping your glucose levels stable. And what do I mean by eating? Are you having balanced meals that include protein, healthy fats, maybe some sort of complex carbohydrate or, a more natural source of carbs to keep your energy level steady? And this is going to vary depending on your bio individuality and what you need. there are definitely going to be certain people who are leptin resistant, which we can speak about another time. And those people I wouldn’t necessarily recommend having carbs at, let’s say, breakfast so finding your flow within that, but really, really zoning in to, you know, what would tell me that my breakfast or my meals are not balanced or not leaving me feeling balanced. How are you feeling afterward and how are you feeling two hours after? Are you feeling cranky and overwhelmed and dysregulated and reactive and impatient? It’s telling you something about what you’re eating. Which brings me to number three, which is the most important thing I could probably tell you, which is tuning into you. Are you noticing your system? Are you blaming yourself for how you’re feeling and saying, oh, this is just who I am, I am sensitive, I am highly sensitive, I’m reactive, I am this, I am that. Your physiology is contributing a huge piece to that. And if you could just start tuning in to that and maybe offer yourself compassion to saying, Maybe I’m not this, maybe I really am someone who’s filled with energy and aliveness. I think that was one of my greatest realizations when I started my health journey about, I think it was, I don’t know, seven years ago, maybe more. And like suddenly I shifted the way I was eating very slightly and like, I had energy to run. I didn’t remember ever running in my life, and I was running down the street just for fun. And I was like, wow, could it be this is who I was all along? Until then, I had just accepted like, no, I’m someone who doesn’t like to run. I’m someone who’s kind of tired and like, sluggish. So I really invite you to take a moment and be like, who am I? Who do I want to be? Who do I feel like I really am in my essence and allow those sort of parts of you, or the outer shell of you, just to be there, not to make them go away, and just allowing them to get this vision, this idea of who you could be with a little more nourishment and compassion and support and that integration. So when it comes to tuning tuning into you, I’m really inviting you to get to know the different parts of yourself that are involved in this overwhelm, and integrating some sort of practice that increases self-compassion, that increases self presence, as they say, in efforts to address the needs of these parts. And sometimes working with like a integrative practitioner or IFS type person or somatics, how come to really hold space for these parts? Because this is a very big piece of it. At the end of the day, you can’t ignore this piece. Yes. The physiology, it makes such a difference. And at the same time, if overwhelm is living on in your system from very young parts that are like frozen in time because of, you know, like these things are there, they’re real. And so finding a place or a space where you can work through that and invite more of that self with a capital S, you know, the part of you that’s just compassionate, that’s just curious, that’s just open and that’s a process to develop that, of course. So really, that’s that piece of allowing those parts to get the attention and the care that they need in order to for them to also embrace the physiological changes happening in your system, because otherwise they might just be resistant to that or unable not resistant. What is resistance? I don’t really believe in resistance. It’s they’re unable to update. They’re still stuck in the past, which is literally overwhelm. Right. That frozen, collapsed state. So that’s something to I invite you to explore if it calls to you. And lastly, I think we’re up to number five. Maybe I wanted to talk about, noticing what you are taking in and what are your patterns around overwhelm and what do I mean by that? So there’s one what are you literally taking in meaning? What are the kinds of foods you’re eating or are you eating very inflammatory foods, foods that cause the body on a cellular level, on a physiological level to be overwhelmed. And this will vary depending on your system, and your bio individuality. But also there are some classic things that for most people, it’s going to have that reaction, such as processed foods and gluten, sugar. and this might surprise you, but there are certain foods that you might consider a health food that could be causing this, such as juices. We think juices are so healthy, but it’s very concentrated sugars. And so for some people, this can be something that causes this glucose spike that we spoke about earlier. But how did I get to this? Oh yeah. Thinking about coffee or different, consumption of. It’s a weed or different things that can cause your system depending on you to react in different ways and can contribute to this natural your body’s natural rhythm and and shift that in some way which might contribute to your feelings of overwhelm. So this is something that you can kind of become a detective if you want and start to notice, some other things that are really important to consider that often get overlooked is your relationships, your connection, your how you spend your day. One of the highest contributors to like this pattern of overwhelm or dysregulation is being highly isolated. There’s obviously, you know, different levels and different degrees of what’s good for different people. But if you are in living on an island, and I’m not saying to stop living on an island because there’s a reason why you’re doing that, there’s a reason why we behave the way we behave. So I’m not saying to stop doing things, to suddenly stop drinking that coffee or, To just stop. No, I’m saying just start to notice. What are these things that I have in my life that might be contributing to this overall pattern of feeling chronically stressed and then asking, you know, what is this? Give me? How has this served me? And is there any space here where I might be able to try something different and what might be needed in order for me to shift that? If, let’s say you, your answer is, I want to stop reading the news, or I want to read the news list and it’s possible for you, maybe you could say, you know what? I’ll read the news for 15 minutes a day at 1 p.m. every day, and by that you’re containing it. You’re creating a container for it. You’re choosing to do it at a time that’s better for you, as opposed to right when you wake up or right before you go to sleep. That’s just an example Maybe you don’t like the community you live in, but moving is not an option. So how can you create points of contact within that community? And you might find that, oh hey, there is what for me to be connected to here? something that’s just popping into my mind is I love human design, and I learned a lot there about how our systems like how you can identify with your you’re in a dysregulated state or a regulated state. And it has like a lot to do with like, how you are interacting with your environment. And you could see, okay, I’m not even going to go there. It’s way too big of a topic. But maybe another day I could talk about human design and how it interacts with, holistic wellness. So bottom line is beginning to notice how you are interacting with your environment. What are you putting into your system? What are you surrounded by, and how might that be contributing to your overwhelm, or just to your nervous system in general, and realizing that all these things are input and feedback and developing resilience is a piece of that is like, how can I create behaviors and patterns? noticing how these behaviors and patterns are interacting with your environment. And how can you create more signals of safety within that? Okay. Did I say that was the last one, I was mistaken. Number six. Last but not least, cannot go on this topic. Go on with this topic without mentioning premises. And this is a really big one that I cannot go into detail today, but I just wanted to say that for my own personal journey and process, no amount of meditation, of mindfulness, of, whatever you want to call it, inner work could, could, make up for or bypass the need for this piece in my healing journey or in my aliveness. And in short, for me this has been cold plunge and sauna. And the reason this is so effective is because it’s directly impacting your physiology It is impacting your mitochondria. And these are the powerhouses of your energy, of your cells. And you could be eating all the right things. You could be doing all the right things. But if you are not being challenged in this way, and there are many forms of this of what Hermes looks like in your life, but for me, this was the final missing piece in a way. I don’t know if I would say final. There’s so many final missing pieces or not missing pieces, so many final pieces. But this was a really big piece that I had done so many other things, and I didn’t yet know about this, and I found out about it from I think the podcast is the Energy Blueprint or something like that. he’s like an expert in stuff like this, and he changed my life. At first I was like, oh, I don’t do saunas. I don’t like sauna. and then I started to get to know it. And so to get a new cold plunging. And we can go into this in another podcast, if it’s of interest to you, please let me know. But yeah, finding ways that are basically outside of yourself, things that you can do to impact your system that really on like a physiological level changes how you feel in this moment. It’s almost like a shock to the system waking you up. And you can use your environment. You can use, you know, like So the gifts I think of for this today world that’s to quite have that a lot of effect. information. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. I really hope that some of what I shared shed some light on your own overwhelm, maybe that of others that you know, and how you might start to create little shifts that could be nourishing and supportive to you. And please remember, you are not alone in this, and taking small steps towards balance can make a big difference. I would love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out on any questions or topics that you’d like to hear more of. Maybe something that I’ve mentioned today and if you found this episode helpful, please subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who might benefit from it. Until next time, take care and be kind to yourself.