Why You Can’t Slow Down (Even When You Want To)

You don’t rest. You race.

You don’t sit with it. You solve it.

You don’t feel it. You fix it.

And when people look at you, they don’t see burnout.

They see drive.

Reliability.

Someone who just gets shit done.

But what they don’t see, what they’ve never had to, is that somewhere along the way, doing became the only way you knew how to survive.

I know this loop. Not from theory. From muscle memory.

I remember once, I was in hospital needing emergency surgery for appendicitis. The next day, I had a client meeting I’d spent months chasing, finally about to see what they were building on their internal BI dashboards. And I cried. Not because I was scared. But because I might miss the meeting.

That meeting had become the tether keeping me upright.

I was in literal physical pain. Strong pain meds. Monitors on. Fresh out of recovery. And I still pulled out my laptop to keep working, building a website for the company I worked for at the time.

And people thought I was mad.

But here’s the thing.

I wasn’t drowning because I missed a meeting.

I was drowning because stopping meant thinking.

And thinking meant confronting all the things I couldn’t change, the deaths that had just happened, the cracks in my life I was trying to outrun, the noise in my own mind I didn’t have tools to face.

Work was my achievement.

Work was my distraction.

Work was my addiction, the same way gaming is for gamers. The same way perfection is for performers.

When Stillness Feels Like a Threat

If you’ve ever tried to slow down and felt like the walls were closing in, this is why.

When the body has stored trauma or emotional loops that were never closed, stillness becomes a threat, not a relief.

The world tells you to “just breathe,” “just rest,” “take a break.”But you’ve done that.And instead of peace, it felt like drowning.

That’s not because you’re broken.It’s because your nervous system is doing exactly what it was trained to do.

Your Feely Brain Is Running the Show

There’s a part of your brain I call your Feely Brain. It’s your limbic system. And it doesn’t give a shit about logic.

It fires based on pattern memory.

It links silence to danger.

It links action to safety.

So even now, years later, new job, new partner, maybe even kids,

you find yourself still hustling. Still overdoing. Still checking the boxes that no one asked you to tick.

Because somewhere deep down, your system believes:

“If I stop, I’ll feel everything I’ve been avoiding.”

Let’s Name the Real Cost

This isn’t about overwork.

It never was.

This is about what the overwork is hiding.

What it’s protecting you from.

What it’s helping you avoid because your system doesn’t yet know how to stay still and stay safe at the same time.

Here’s what I’ve seen it steal, not just in clients, but in me:

The ability to rest without guilt. Not just rest, but actual downshifting. The kind where you’re not mentally rehearsing a to-do list while pretending to watch Netflix. The kind where rest lands in your body like safety, not punishment.

• The capacity to feel joy without earning it. If you’ve ever sabotaged a good moment because you didn’t feel like you’d ‘done enough’ that day… you know this one.

• Emotional intimacy. Because you can’t connect deeply while also performing. You become the one who holds space, fixes things, absorbs it all—but never lets anyone see the ache behind your own eyes.

• Peace. Real peace. Not just the absence of chaos, but the presence of calm. Because your system has wired slowness to danger, and so silence feels like threat instead of healing.

• Your own damn needs. Buried under performance. Dismissed in the name of progress. Reframed as “goals” so they seem productive when really you just want to be held, witnessed, known.

• Time. The kind you can never get back. Moments that could’ve been felt but were instead managed, monitored, micromanaged.

And here’s the twist that might gut you a little:

The world rewards it.

It claps for it.

It calls you disciplined. Ambitious. Resilient.

It praises the very behaviours that are keeping you emotionally looped and relationally starved.

Because what they call excellence?

Was actually your body trying not to fall apart.

You’ve built an identity on being the one who can, but it came at the cost of the parts of you that never had the chance to say, I can’t.

And that’s not strength.

That’s survival with good branding.

Why Mindset Won’t Fix This

I’ve heard it all.

Some of my clients journal every day.

Some of them meditate at sunrise, drink mushroom tea, and wear mala beads.

Others sign up for the mindset course, do the visualisation, stack the affirmations, try to manifest their way out of chaos.

I’ve had women tell me they’ve stepped away from their businesses or handed over responsibilities, thinking maybe if I just stop doing so much, I’ll feel better.

And for a few days, they do.

Until the guilt kicks in.

Until the agitation starts.

Until they feel so irrationally out of control that they take all the responsibility back, plus more, because at least that way they feel functional again.

Others try to reconnect with their families.

They carve out time.

Plan the quality moments.

But the truth they don’t say out loud is this:

It feels mind-numbing.

And not because they don’t love their people, but because their system isn’t wired for presence and connection it’s wired for performance and results.

So they sit there trying to connect, but feeling disconnected.

Distracted. Flat.

Like their body’s there but their mind’s running a thousand tabs in the background.

And the guilt that comes with that? It’s suffocating.

Then there are the ones who go all in on stillness.

They book the meditation retreat.

Buy the books.

Try to act like a monk because maybe, just maybe, peace lives on the other side of a perfectly curated morning routine.

And for a moment, they find it.

Until they uncross their legs, stand up from the mat, and 30 minutes later realise…

They’re back in the same loop.

Back in over-functioning.

Back sprinting into the day with no buffer, no anchor, no peace left in their body.

Because presence isn’t enough when your body doesn’t feel safe there.

You can try every tool on the shelf.

But if the loop is still active, you’ll keep coming back to it, no matter how disciplined, spiritual, or insightful you are.

This is what I mean when I say:

Mindset won’t fix this.

Because this isn’t about your mind.

It’s about your nervous system.

It’s about the patterns your body memorised in survival, and never got the update that it’s safe to stop.

That’s why SHIFT exists.

Not to manage the loop.

Not to make you better at coping.

To collapse it.

So that stillness doesn’t feel like a trap.

So that joy doesn’t feel like a performance.

So that peace isn’t earned, it’s available.

If This Hit Something Deep, Trust That

This loop doesn’t show up as weakness.

It shows up as competence that runs on cortisol.

As presence that’s paper-thin.

As achievement that keeps asking for more, because the moment you stop, something in you unravels.

If this hit you somewhere you can’t quite name yet…

That’s not coincidence.

That’s your nervous system recognising itself in someone else’s words.

And here’s the part no one tells you:

This isn’t just who you are.

It’s what you adapted into.

Which means it can be rewired.

Every week, I write to the part of you that’s still running the loop, even when you’re done with it.

The part that knows how to hold it all together but secretly wants out and if you want to learn yourself better, understand why it's all happening and give yourself a chance to unravel it all, then you've come to the right place.

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