All of the moms around the table peppered us with the standard questions: What’s sleep like? How long are his naps? Does he eat well?

Every question an opportunity for everyone to share their own experience.

“My son was a horrible sleeper at that age.”
”You’re so lucky, my son used to wake up 10 times a night.”
”My daughter was the absolute worst newborn. She never stopped crying!”

One of the husbands who barely ever says anything had been quietly listening and chimed in and said, all matter-of-fact, without any emotion:

“There are no hard or easy babies, there are just babies.”

The whole conversation came to an abrupt end. Because he was right. Babies really are just BABIES, and here we were critiquing and comparing them.

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Some cry more than others, some sleep better than others, some enjoy bottles, some enjoy boobs. Some newborns follow perfectly curated wake windows. Some sleep on their own terms no matter which cute little PDF’d sleep you download from a random baby sleep influencer everyone swears by. My son was the latter.

Some are content sitting in a BabyBjörn bouncer for hours on end giggling to themselves (it’s true, I’ve actually met babies like this), others won’t tolerate it for longer than two minutes before screaming their head off (again, my son was the latter lol).

They’re just babies.

We are the ones who apply meaning to it all. Easy. Hard. Stubborn. Difficult. Good sleeper. Bad sleeper. Good eater. Bad eater.

But really, they’re just babies! And they’re gonna be however they’re gonna be.

I think so much of my suffering in early motherhood came from me wanting things to be different than they were.

I remember one night in particular trying a Taking Cara Babies (a baby sleep influencer on the internet for those of you lucky enough to have no idea who that is lol), technique on my son to try to get him to go back to sleep. He absolutely fucking hated it, and I remember being SO frustrated that it wasn’t working!

BUT CARA SAID IT SHOULD WORK!
As if a woman I never met knows more about my baby than I do and that every single 8-week old baby is supposed to act the same 😂

When I look back on those early postpartum days, my least favorite moments were absolutely the ones when I was resisting whatever was happening. When I really wanted him to nap in his crib so I could get anything at all done, but he would only nap on me. When he just wouldn’t stop crying, and I’d pull out every tip and trick in the book, only to realize none of them were working so I just had to hold him close and wait.

When I stopped trying to control him and started following his his lead and accept everything exactly as it was, that’s when it all became more enjoyable.

He didn’t change at all. I changed.

My perspective changed. I chose to look at things differently. I stopped fighting reality. I stopped creating suffering around what was already happening.

This, of course, applies waaay beyond motherhood.

Some of the most painful moments in my life have been the moments when I so desperately wanted something to be different than it was.

So much of our suffering comes not from what’s actually happening in our lives, but from our refusal to accept what is happening.

This shouldn’t be happening. This should be different. I don’t want this. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Why is this happening to me?

We resist the reality in front of us because we want it to be different. And then, on top of that resistance, we start creating stories about what it means.

Mindfulness has taught me that pain is simply part of being alive. Pain, pleasure, disappointment, joy, rejection, heartbreak, uncertainty…all of it. Things will happen that we don’t want to happen. Things won’t always go the way we hoped!

But suffering really is entirely optional. It’s an additional layer we create when we fight against what is. When we refuse to let the moment be what it is or insist that reality should look different than it does.

Because sometimes the baby is gonna cry for seemingly no reason! Sometimes the nap is going to be on your chest even when there’s laundry to do. Sometimes the thing you desperately wanted isn’t going to happen. Sometimes life is going to hurt.

We don’t get to choose everything that happens to us or every experience we have. But we do have some say in whether we spend our energy fighting what’s already here.

It is SO FREEING to decide to stop fighting against reality.

Babies really are just babies, ya know?

Love,
Bri

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She was being serious.

She went on to explain that his love language was Receiving Gifts but hers was Physical Touch, and according to Chat, they don’t really line up astrologically either. Not once did she mention anything about the time they spend together, if they have similar interests, if she even LIKED him.

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So I asked! Do you like him? Do you have fun? Do you laugh together?

She answered yes to all of the above! So then wtf was she so worried about everything else for?!

I want to pause and say there’s zero judgment here. I know what my love language is (Quality Time, the best one IMO), I looove astrology, and I have absolutely 100% OBVIOUSLY compared my natal birth chart to my wife’s, HOWEVER, it’s wild to use these things exclusively to decide Y/N on a partner!

I notice a similar trend when it comes to diets and what to eat. You can go on Instagram or TikTok or ask ChatGPT and find an infinite number of diets and guiding principles that are all “the best.” Eat this, not that, eat at this time, don’t eat after 8pm, don’t eat before 12, eat right when you wake up, don’t snack, eat a lot of snacks, here’s the perfect way to build your plate, and it goes on and on and on.

I got caught on this very hamster wheel when I first found the “wellness” world and I was trying to lose weight and solve my stomach problems (both of which ultimately all tied back to stress and not feeling my feelings and had basically NOTHING to do with what I was actually eating lol but I digress).

You know what finally “worked?” Listening to my body! You know how I did that? I stopped ignoring its cues and overriding how I actually felt with whatever I read on the internet.

It’s disorienting and exhausting to search outside of yourself for answers. I would know because I did it for YEARS and looked everywhere except my self for The Perfect Way to go about life. It didn’t work. I never felt more lost.

Instead of asking AI or your friend or your mom or your favorite influencer for the best diet to follow, first try asking yourself what even sounds good to you. What are you craving? What makes your body feel good? What satiates YOU?

We now have an infinite amount of information at our fingertips which has everyone frantically searching outside of themselves for answers. The perfect way to handle any situation that stumps us, the perfect text to send, the perfect email response, the perfect diet, the perfect workout routine, the perfect plan. We want to get it all Right. We seek out statistic after statistic so we can properly set our expectations because God forbid we get excited about something if it’s not “realistic.”

We thirst for alllll of the science! Like isn’t it kind of sad that we need scientific studies to convince us that it’s worthwhile to spend time in nature, hug our friends, and put down our phones? (It’s almost as if we’re designed to be outside, present, connected, joyful, and at peace?!) We already know all of this is good for us because it FEELS good! And maybe the fact that we feel good is the all data we need.

What if we put as much trust in our own inner knowing as we did a scientific study conducted by someone we don’t even know?

We don’t need more scientific studies or information. If information was going to solve our problems, we’d all be carefree and blissful by now and there would be world peace. More information is sooo clearly not the answer. And endless analysis has a way of keeping us frozen in place.

All of this obsessive information seeking points to two things: 1) We don’t trust ourselves. Because if we did, we wouldn’t need a constant stream of info and reassurance to make a decision. And 2) We have an insanely low tolerance for any kind of uncertainty or discomfort.

We’ve lost the plot! We’ve forgotten how to follow our hearts.

Most of the best things in life make ZERO logical sense. The way the sun rises and sets every day! Falling in love! BABIES BEING BORN! The fact that we exist at all and that we are literally just a bundle of cells that somehow operate in perfect harmony. Scientists still don’t fully understand how the universe even works, and we’re over here agonizing over and wanting to validate every single decision we make with a ChatGPT prompt.

Let things be messy! Don’t be scared to make mistakes and learn “the hard way.” It’s okay to fuck around and find out! Isn’t that kind of what life is all about? What fun would it be if we were all handed a one-size-fits-all manual detailing the exact steps to take each day?

What lights you up? Who makes your heart flutter? What makes you FEEL GOOD? How do you WANT to spend your days? Your life? These aren’t questions that science or AI or anyone else can answer for you. Only you know the answers!

I really can’t think of a better time to learn how to get quiet. To learn what your inner voice is trying to tell you. Not because the internet is bad or AI is bad or science is bad. None of it’s bad! They’re all incredible tools and we’re lucky to live in a time with so much instantaneous information. But tools and info are meant to support your intuition, not replace it.

There is a part of you that already knows when something feels off. It knows what lights you up! It knows when you’re forcing something that isn’t meant for you, what kind of food leaves you feeling energized, what relationships feel safe, what work feels meaningful, and what kind of life you actually want to live.

The problem is that voice has gotten drowned out by everyone else’s! We’ve become so afraid of making the “wrong” decision that we outsource every decision instead because it feels safer.

You’ll make mistakes! You’ll change your mind! And then you’ll be wiser because of it! Your intuition isn’t built by consuming more information. It’s built by actually just living your life and learning along the way. Following your heart!

So read the books, listen to the podcasts, ask ChatGPT, geek out on the science. Compare birth charts and love languages. It’s fun!! Take what resonates and leave the rest. Then put down your phone and go outside. Get quiet long enough to hear yourself again!

For me, that looks like breathwork and meditation. For you it might be a phone-free walk, a run, painting, gardening, music, or simply sitting on your porch by yourself with a cup of coffee.

Whatever it is, do it daily. Learn to hear yourself and then learn to trust yourself.

I honestly can’t think of a better use of time.

See you next time 🌟 🔮 ⭐️ 🍄 🦋
Bri

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We’re not really even chasing the perfect partner! What we’re really after is love, connection, belonging, and feeling seen.

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The opposite is true, too!

We also run from feelings. We do everything we possibly can to avoid discomfort, shame, rejection, conflict, or disappointment.

And if we reeeally don’t want to feel those feelings, it’s so much less likely that we’ll ask the person out, start the business, or put ourselves out there.

You can see how we’re run by our emotions!

The feelings we’re chasing are actually available to us long before we achieve the thing! And the feelings we avoid will just follow us around until we’re brave enough to actually feel them.

This is why one of the most important things you can do (IMO) is expand your capacity is to learn how to just be with your emotions.

I think a lot of us feel like “we have our emotions under control,” but really, our emotions are controlling us. If we’re not able to do what we want to do or say what we want to say or take the risks that we want to take because we never want to feel discomfort, are we really living our lives the way we want to be living them? Or are we just spending a lot of energy avoiding one feeling and chasing another?

Here’s a practice you can try that will help you build capacity to feel uncomfy emotions in the body without escaping, fixing, or analyzing them.

1. Pick a feeling

Choose something mild-to-moderate, don’t pick the most intense emotion you have:

• anxiety

• sadness

• irritation

• loneliness

• tension

2. Locate it in the body

Ask yourself: Where do I feel this?

Notice the sensation only:

• tight, heavy, buzzing, warm, constricted, etc.

3. Drop the story

For the next minute, don’t analyze the “why” behind the story. If thoughts come up (they likely will), just label them and let them float by:

• “thinking”

• “story”

Keep returning to the body.

4. Stay with the sensations for 90 seconds

Set a timer on your phone. Don’t fix it, change it, or swirl around it. Just notice what’s happening in the body.

The goal isn’t to get rid of the feeling or the sensations, it’s to stop abandoning yourself when it shows up! It’s to show yourself that you can stay with yourself through uncomfortable emotions so that your capacity to feel them increases.

When you’re no longer so afraid of feeling sadness, fear, discomfort, rejection, uncertainty, anger, grief or disappointment, you can stop organizing your entire life around avoiding them!

All of a sudden, you’re capable of having the difficult conversation, putting a boundary in place, taking the risks that scares the shit out of you, and speaking honestly because you’re not scared of the feelings that might come along.

Until next time!
Bri

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If this article resonated, I have something for you!

I’m creating a 6-week small group coaching program for the woman who's done the therapy, read the books, and understands her patterns—but still doesn't feel good. In this program, you’ll learn how to identify, allow, and move through emotions using breathwork as the primary tool, so you can stop suppressing, analyzing, or numbing, and start actually processing what you feel in your body.

Get on the waitlist to be the first to know more!

You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

If you might be interested in doing 1:1 work with me, you can book a free discovery call here :)

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Neuroscientifically speaking, your brain is incredibly plastic during those years, meaning it’s highly adaptable and constantly forming new neural pathways. Neural pathways are basically little “roads” in your brain. They’re connections between neurons (brain cells) that carry signals related to thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and memories. The more a certain thought, feeling, or behavior happens, the stronger that connection gets. Kind of like how a dirt path becomes more and more distinct after lots of use.

So when you’re little, you have this susceptible little mind garden ready for whatever gets planted by parents, teachers, strangers, society at large. Everything you’re told and everything you learn through your experiences plants little seeds in your subconscious. Some grow into flowers that support you (“I’m enough,” “I’m safe to be seen”), and others grow into weeds that drain your energy (“I have to earn love,” “I can’t trust myself,” “I’m too sensitive”). The soil of your subconscious holds everything that’s ever been planted there! Old conditioning, stories from childhood, unprocessed emotions.

We watched how our caregivers responded to us, we interpreted facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. We formed meaning around safety, love, worth, and belonging. We learned how to act if we wanted love and how not to act if we wanted love. Each of these repeated experiences fired certain neurons together—it’s literally how the neural pathways in our brain were formed! Neurons that fire together, wire together.

Essentially, what I’m saying is, our subconscious minds are programmed
When you take a step back and really think about this—it’s WILD. We didn’t have any say over what was planted in our minds, what we experienced, and what was reinforced. And then we carry it all with us into adulthood!!! Bananas.

We’ve all inherited this little garden in our minds, filled with flowers, plants, and trees that we might not have planted otherwise if given the choice. The thing is, now we do have a choice. We can take a step back and get curious about what’s been growing in there. What have we been inadvertently nurturing? We can objectively look at our mind gardens and decide what can stay and what’s gotta go.

Luckily, our brains stay plastic forever. We can all literally reprogram ourselves and rewire the neural pathways in our brains through awareness, repetition, and new emotional experiences! When you consciously practice new thoughts, habits, or emotional responses, you’re literally building new neural pathways and creating new “roads” and letting old, unused ones fade.

Just like a real garden, your mind needs regular tending! Clean it up, make it cute! Pull up all of the weeds at the root, plant new beliefs, and make your mind a beautiful place to be. Whatever you focus on grows. Over time, your inner world starts to reflect the energy and care you pour into it.

We have so much more power over our thoughts and our beliefs—and ultimately our realities—than we realize.

Try this exercise:
What’s one belief that’s been taking up space in your mind that you didn’t plant on purpose?
Maybe it’s something like “I have to be productive to be worthy,” or “Resting is lazy.”
Get curious about where this belief comes from—maybe mom or dad? Realize that this belief you’ve been carrying around might not even be from you!
Then, choose new beliefs you’d rather grow instead: “My worth isn’t tied to what I do,” or “Rest is productive.”

Plant new seeds and watch them flourish :)

Love,
Bri

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You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

If you might be interested in doing 1:1 work with me, you can book a free discovery call here :)

We’ve all been Mel at one point or another!

Anger is one of those emotions that’s gotten SUUUCH bad PR. Which actually makes a lot of sense.

We all probably remember a time in our childhoods where a parent, caregiver, teacher, or another adult expressed anger in a way that felt scary, unpredictable, or unsafe. Many of us were also taught—directly or indirectly—that our own anger wasn’t okay.

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Society frowns upon tantrums and meltdowns or big emotions in general. Don’t be “too much.” Don’t cry, don’t stomp your feet, don’t kick and scream, don’t yell.

And when we did (inevitably and healthily!) express big emotions, the adults around us might have responded from their own place of overwhelm and nervous system dysregulation. A parent snaps because they're at capacity or shuts us down because they don't know what to do with our feelings. Not because they’re bad people or because they were trying to make us feel badly, but because they were carrying their own stress too!

So basically, most of us got the same programming, the same memo:

Anger = really bad

Don’t get angry and definitely don’t express your anger if you are. So, we follow the rules. Shove it down. Bottle it up. Hope it goes away.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go away! And another spoiler alert: anger is an inevitable part of being human. There’s no way around it. There’s a whole spectrum of emotions, and as humans, we feel and experience every last one. No exceptions!

Anger itself isn’t bad. But we often confuse anger with aggression.

When most people think of anger, they picture screaming, physical violence, lashing out, or losing control. But those aren’t examples of anger. They’re examples of anger being expressed in unhealthy or uncontained ways.

Anger is simply an emotion. It’s a spicy messenger! An incredibly clear, punchy signal that something’s off.

Aggression is a behavior.

So the anger itself isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens when we don’t have the awareness, support, or tools to work with it skillfully.

We’ve all been really angry about something and then it ends up coming out somewhere else entirely unrelated. We snap at our partners or kids when we’re really actually pissed about something at work. We lose it when someone cuts us off in traffic or at the customer service representative who isn’t being helpful. We have a bigger reaction than the situation warrants.

And then comes the shame spiral! We beat ourselves up for being angry, push it back down again, and the cycle continues.

Unprocessed anger doesn’t just disappear because we ignore it. It accumulates!

It’s like someone pressing on a wound that hasn’t fully healed. The response isn’t just about the poke—it’s about everything that’s already pretty tender and painful underneath.

For me, a lot of my suppressed anger used to come out when I drank. Once my inhibitions were lowered, all the emotions I’d been stuffing down would explode out.

This is incredibly common!

What we suppress doesn’t vanish, it just waits to be released.

And we should really want to release it because research has linked chronic anger and hostility to:

• Increased blood pressure and hypertension

• Higher risk of cardiovascular disease

• Increased inflammation throughout the body

• Greater risk of heart attack and stroke

• Sleep disturbances

• Anxiety and depression

• Weakened immune function

• Digestive issues such as IBS and stomach discomfort

• Increased muscle tension, headaches, and chronic pain

Eek!

So today I want to share favorite practices to release anger when I’m feeling really HOT about something. And if any or all of them seem crazy or unhinged to you, that’s okay, they did to me too—until I tried them. I really can’t express how good it feels to let your rage out, let your anger out. Because I assure you it’s in there!

The next time you’re feeling angsty, irritable, or ragey, give one of these a try:

• Scream into a pillow as many times as you need to until you feel empty

• Punch a pillow until there’s nothing left

• Blast music in the car and scream your head off

I promise you that 1) you’ll be surprised at how much anger you had inside and 2) you’ll be amazed at how much better you feel afterwards.

Once you’ve moved the energy out of your body then get curious about what made you feel angry in the first place.

Like all of our emotions, they come to us as messengers, and they just want to move. Feelings are meant to be felt, and anger is no different.

So punch a pillow, scream into the abyss, just LET IT OUT!

Love,
Bri

PS. If you’re someone who feels like you have lots of anger stored inside (this was me!), active breathwork is an incredible practice to let some of that stuck energy go. My friend and co-teacher, Britney, and I are hosting a free, virtual active breathwork class on Sunday, June 14 at 7pm EST.

You can sign up here or reply to this email directly with any questions!

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How many times have you had a bad feeling about something or someone only to ignore it and later realize your bad feeling was right all along? Or can you think of a time when you knew what to do about something but then you ran it by ChatGPT, got a different answer, and then immediately started second guessing yourself even though your instincts were perfectly correct?

That initial knowing is our intuition.

I know when I first started trying to listen to my intuition or “trust my gut,” I found it really challenging because 1) I honestly didn’t know wtf my intuition was trying to tell me and 2) I definitely couldn’t trust it.

This is a common experience! People get confused when it comes to their intuition. And that’s because we’ve all spent years and years being taught to override our bodies.

Intuition is the body and brain’s ability to sense, interpret, and respond to information beneath conscious awareness—often before logic can fully explain why.

It’s the quiet inner knowing that comes online when we are actually connected enough to ourselves to hear it.

Intuition lives in the bod. It’s a felt sense. It’s often portrayed as something mystical or woo woo, but biologically, it’s the body and brain processing information faster than the conscious mind can explain! Basically, your body notices things before you have a chance to consciously catch up.

Scientists literally call our gut our second brain because it’s made up of over 500 million neurons that communicate with our actual brain constantly! That’s where the term “gut feeling” comes from! They’re physiological signals tied to the nervous system, emotional memory, hormones, and bodily sensation.

The issue is a lot of us have learned to ignore our body’s cues. So we can’t recognize the gut feeling or we ignore it altogether.

We learn to push past exhaustion, ignore hunger cues, dismiss tension, stuff down our emotions, stay productive, stay pleasant even when we’re not feeling pleasant, stay disciplined, yadda yadda. We are taught at a young age to follow one-size-fits-all rules instead of learning how to follow our own intuition, our own inner compass.

So it’s no wonder that over time, we become pretty good at abandoning ourselves and our bodies.

I bet you can relate to some of the subtle ways we ignore our body’s cues on the daily:

• Eating past the point of being full or not eating when we’re hungry

• Forcing ourselves to get up and work out when what we really need is rest

• Sticking to a certain diet even if it’s not what our body is actually craving

• Drinking more caffeine instead of actually doing something real about your exhaustion

• Scrolling when the body is asking for quiet and stillness

• Ignoring tension headaches, tight jaws, shallow breathing, or clenched shoulders

• Pushing through emotional overwhelm instead of allowing ourselves space to process

• Calling ourselves “lazy” when the body is actually just dysregulated or depleted

• Following wellness “rules” that disconnect us further from ourselves instead of closer

• Blindly following the advice of "experts” or AI even when we know something with the advice feels off for us

Strengthening intuition is really just about getting back into relationship with your body and learning to trust what it’s already communicating on the daily.

It starts with nervous system regulation (shocking no one here I’m sure 😂). When you’re constantly in stress or survival mode, intuition gets buried under anxiety, urgency, and racing thoughts.

From there, it’s about building awareness of your internal signals. This looks like pausing throughout the day to notice: What do I feel in my body right now? Where is there openness or contraction? What does my breath feel like?

It also comes from slowing down your decision-making just enough to notice how something lands…does it feel expansive or tight, steady or activated? Is this really a yes or is my body telling me it’s a no?

And then the most important piece: stopping the pattern of overriding your body in small ways! Resting when your body’s asking for it, eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full, sitting in your discomfort before you immediately go to ChatGPT, saying no when something feels off, going to bed when you’re tired. I know it sounds simple, and that’s because it is! This is how you build trust with yourself! In the small, daily moments.

Over time, intuition becomes clearer not because it gets louder but because you finally stop screaming over it and start listening to it!

See you next week!
Bri

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PS. You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

If you might be interested in doing 1:1 work with me, you can book a free discovery call here :)

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In this 7ish minute clip, I give a very intro-level, brief overview of parts work and how you can apply it in your own life.

Parts work helps you realize that conflicting behaviors often come from different parts of you trying to keep you safe in different ways.

You can think of your mind as a team of different “parts” inside of you. Each part developed for a reason. Usually in childhood and usually to protect you, help you feel safe, loved, accepted, or in control.

So when someone says: “I know I should say no…but I can’t.” It’s not because they’re weak, it’s because a part of them believes saying no is literally unsafe!

I dive deeper into all of this in the recording below so pop in your headphones and enjoy!

Do we like this format? Feel free to let me know in the comments or reply to this email directly!

See you next week,
Bri

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You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

If you might be interested in doing 1:1 work with me, you can book a free discovery call here :)

I know…this can sound overly simple. Maybe a little trite or even a little annoying! But your mindset can either bring you down or lift you up. It’s either working for you or against you. I’m not saying changing your thoughts is always easy, but it really is that simple. It just starts with a lil bit of awareness!

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The way you think about your day—your job, your to-do list, the traffic, your kids, your body, your friendships, the little inconveniences, your relationships—all of it! is the lens that shapes everything.

I catch myself in little icky thought spirals all of the time. I call them icky not because they’re bad—they’re very human—but because they just don’t feel good. Like complaining to myself in my head about the somehow never-freaking-ending laundry or getting annoyed at my sweet son when he’s glued to my legs screaming “UP MAMAAAAA” on repeat (literally 24/7 as of late). I notice it when bedtime is dragging on longer than I’d like, and I catch myself trying to rush it along because I’m thinking of everything I have to do.

But then I wonder what exactly could be more important than cuddling him at bedtime while he’s still this small and memorizing this exact version of his face?!

Nothing about the moment changes. Bedtime is still bedtime, he still wants one more story. But the way I’m thinking about it changes, and then the experience itself changes with it. It goes from something that feels draining to something that feels really special and fleeting. Something I know I’ll miss.

But PS and a big disclaimer: sometimes you can’t find that perspective in the moment. Sometimes you’re overwhelmed and you’re not able to find a better feeling thought, you just want to send a voice note to your best friend while you cry (literally me last night lol), and that’s okay too!

So to be clear, I’m not always able to find this perspective in the moment, but when I do, it feels like such a sweet relief!

We all know all of this, right? “Everything is temporary.” Or this one about the early years of parenthood: “One day you’ll miss it.” It’s all capital-T-universal-Truth kind of stuff, and yet, we forget to actually do something about it in the moment. We default to frustration, to rushing, to wishing it away.

But if you spend your whole day wishing away what’s in front of you, that’s how you end up spending your entire life!

And maybe that sounds dramatic, but really think about it. If you find the problem in every situation, if you’re constantly complaining about everyone and everything in your own mind, that’s not just randomly happening…it’s a perspective you’re choosing.

It reminds me of that idea: if you’re not changing it, you’re choosing it.

So if you’re in a situation that can’t change right now—maybe it’s a job you don’t love—what would it look like to change the way you’re thinking about it instead? Can you find one good thing? Can you feel into the gratitude for a steady paycheck or the work friend you love?

We all have to do the dishes, sit in traffic, handle inconveniences, do things we reeeally don’t feel like doing.

So if you’re in a place where you can’t change your circumstances right now, try changing how you’re thinking about them.

Catch yourself complaining in your mind and just decide not to. And be light about it, have some fun with it! Don’t take it so seriously, make it a game. If you catch yourself, just shrug and laugh a little, “there I go again.” And then reach for the better-feeling thought if you can find it.

It really can be that simple!

Love,
Bri

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You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

If you might be interested in doing 1:1 work with me, you can book a free discovery call here :)

But unfortunately, I must admit, that I myself fell into that trap for so many years. I bought alllll the things in hopes that I’d somehow magically feel comfy in my skin if I only had the right outfit. My version of “self-love” wasn’t only material, it showed up in small justifications, too. I’d have just one more drink because why not? I deserve it! Or I’d skip the workout class or whatever other commitments I had made under the guise of “self-care.”

But none of that was actually coming from a deep love for myself (duh). It was coming from a deep sense of lack and a pattern of not showing up for myself. Which all stemmed from the fact that I didn’t respect myself, trust myself, or love myself.

So what is self-love, really?

I really like this definition: self-love is self-trust in action. It’s a steady, practiced commitment to treating yourself like someone whose life matters and like someone you deeply respect.

Self-love is built on self-trust and self-respect.

When I was in my early 20s, I had a really amazing therapist named Maddi Jane. She was an old Jewish woman who ate hard boiled eggs during our sessions and talked with her mouth open which was all v gross, but I loved her; she had great one-liners and always gave me the tough love I needed. ANYWAYS, I remember talking with her during one of our sessions about self-love and confidence, and sharing that it felt like something I just wasn’t born with. Like there was something other people naturally had that I didn’t seem to.

She said “anyone can have either. Confidence and self-love are both built on what you do.” It really landed the second she said it, and I’ve thought about it a lot since. She was right!

Confidence, self-trust, and self-respect aren’t things we think our way into or magically just become one day, they’re things that strengthen over time through daily action and what you do each and every day!

So with that in mind, here are some simple ways to start strengthening self-trust and self-respect. From there, self-love will grow naturally.

🌷 Keep small promises to yourself

• If you say you’re going to go for a 10-minute walk, GO

• If you say you’ll drink water first thing in the morning, DO IT

• If you say you’re going to start meditating every morning, START

Start with small things so you actually follow through and prove to yourself that you can stick to your own word. If you can’t trust yourself to follow through on the little things, how will you be able to count on yourself to follow through on the big things?

🌸 Do one thing you’ve been avoiding

• Send the email

• Make the doctor’s appointment you’ve been putting off

• Clean out the junk drawer

• Pay the bill

Whatever just popped into your mind, that’s the thing. Go do it! This builds evidence that you can handle a lil discomfort.

🌼 Speak to yourself a little more honestly (and kindly)

Swap out “I’m so lazy” for “I didn’t follow through today, but I can tomorrow!”

🌻 Set one boundary

• Say “I can’t make it tonight” instead of forcing yourself when every part of you doesn’t want to go

• Don’t immediately say yes to everything! (I was QUEEN of this) Practice pausing before responding, not every invitation requires an immediate response

🌷 Follow through on basic care

• Eat when you’re hungry

• Go to bed when you’re tired

• Move your body, even if only for 5-10 minutes

These might sound silly, but think about how often you override your own needs. What message does that send to you about how you value yourself?!

🌸 Stop breaking your own rules!

• If you decide “no phone in bed,” don’t bring your phone in bed

• If you plan a workout, do it!

• If you say you’re going to drink water before your first cup of coffee…actually drink water before your first cup of coffee

If you break your own rules and promises often enough, you start to lose trust in yourself, and eventually, you stop taking yourself seriously at all. Follow your own rules!

🌼 Do things for your future self

• Prep your coffee

• Lay out clothes

• Keep a full glass of water next to your bed

• Do the dishes before you go to sleep

Do I ever want to do the dishes at the end of the day? No! But I’m thinking about future me! It’s a small act of love for the version of me who gets to wake up to a clean kitchen.

🌻 Be someone you can rely on!

• Less overpromising, more following through

• Build a good reputation with yourself: “I do what I say I’ll do”

• Keep your own word so that it means something to you

Like Maddi Jane told me, self-love really is something you can consciously build through your quiet, daily decisions. The small moments only you see. Where you follow through, choose your long-term well-being, and treat yourself with care and respect. Show up for yourself consistently again and again and over time, you become someone you trust…and someone you genuinely feel proud to be!

See you here next week!
Bri

You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

If you might be interested in doing 1:1 work with me, you can book a free discovery call here :)

Travel has a way of dysregulating people! It pushes the nervous system out of its comfort zone because of the uncertainty, lack of control, and overstimulation. And for a lot of people, that’s enough to tip them over.

(PS. There’s zero judgment here! I used to lose it, too. There’s a particular moment that always comes to mind when I had a full-on mental breakdown in an airport in Italy after they lost my luggage. Perhaps a story for another time 🫠)

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How you handle yourself in an airport (or in traffic, or in a very long, very slow line, or in a waiting room, or when your travel plans go sideways) can tell you a lot about your own nervous system capacity. The way you respond in those moments is really good data to understand where your nervous system’s at.

Nervous system capacity is basically how much your body can handle—emotionally, mentally, and physically—without getting overwhelmed or shutting down.

I like to think of it as your internal “window” for life. Your window of tolerance for uncertainty. How much can you physically handle?

When your nervous system capacity is high, you can:

• Feel stress or big emotions without spiraling

• Stay present in conversations, even hard ones

• Adapt, respond, and make grounded choices

• Hold multiple things at once (kids, work, feelings, conflict)

• Tolerate the discomfort and uncertainty that often comes with new experiences (even good ones!)

When your capacity is low, you’re more likely to:

• Get triggered quickly or feel reactive

• Shut down, numb out, or dissociate

• Feel anxious, irritable, or overstimulated

• Avoid things that normally feel manageable

Nervous system capacity is sooo important because I really believe the bigger your nervous system capacity, the bigger the life you can ultimately have!

When your capacity is low, it’s not just the big, scary risks—like quitting your job to go after your dreams, traveling solo, stepping outside your comfort zone in a big way, etc.—that feel impossible. It’s the smaller things too! Traveling with your kids, trying something new, even handling a slight disruption to your routine can feel like too much.

When your capacity expands, so does your world! This is one of the (very many) reasons I’m so passionate about nervous system regulation! If you can regulate your nervous system, your literal world starts to expand because you can start to handle things you couldn’t previously handle.

What once felt too overwhelming becomes doable and what once felt impossible starts to feel realistic.

When your nervous system capacity is super small, it can start to feel like a bit of a prison because you might really want to try new things, show up differently, or move through life with more ease, but something in you holds back. You just can’t get yourself there. It’s not a lack of desire or motivation…it’s really that your system just doesn’t feel safe enough to hold it or tolerate it!

So even when your mind is ready, your body might resist. Which can feel so frustrating because it’s not because you’re incapable! It’s just that (to your nervous system) it feels like too much, too fast, or too unfamiliar to handle.

This is where nervous system regulation comes in.

Regulation comes before expanding capacity. Always! Safety first then expansion.

If your system has been chronically activated and spun up and exclusively running on stress, pressure, or overwhelm, it needs to learn what safety feels like again before it can hold more. You can’t build your capacity on top of chronic dysregulation.

So first, you create safety! You slow things down and meet your body where it’s at.

This might mean taking time to really rest (not the “scroll on your phone and call it rest” kind, but like actual rest and restoration). It might mean taking 10-15 minutes out of your day for breathwork or meditation or simply just being with your body in quiet. It might also mean saying no when you’d normally say yes, really paying attention to when you’re overextending and making the choice not to.

As your system starts to feel more grounded and steady, your nervous system capacity will expand and grow naturally. You start to tolerate a little more at a time. You recover faster from overwhelm and stress when you get knocked off center. Things that once felt overwhelming begin to feel more manageable!

And it’s important to remember, this isn’t about doing everything perfectly or fixing yourself overnight or white-knuckling yourself through nervous system regulation 😂 It’s really just about repetition! Small, daily moments of creating safety, over and over again, that slowly teach your body it doesn’t have to stay braced all the time.

Nothing changes if nothing changes! This takes practice :) The same way we understand that in order to get physically stronger we gotta lift weights, if we want to expand our capacity, we gotta practice regulating our nervous systems in real time over and over.

You don’t think your way into a more regulated system, you practice it. Daily and in real time, over and over again. Each moment you notice yourself activated and choose to come back to center (even just a little!), you’re strengthening your capacity to hold more.

So speaking of practice, here’s a tiny one for the next time you’re in an “airport moment” (or any stressful environment):

Next time you notice yourself getting activated (rushing, irritation, tension, anxiety, shallow breath, on the verge of losing it), try this:

1. Pause for at least 10 seconds
   Stop wherever you are and count backwards from 10. And then do it again and again if necessary until you feel yourself coming back to the present.

2. Find your feet!
   Press them gently into the ground and just feel into the sensation of your feet weighted on the ground.

3. Lengthen your exhale
   Take one slow inhale in through the nose…and a longer exhale out through the mouth. Repeat for as long as you’d like! (in for 4, out for 6 is nice)

4. Orient your eyes.
   Slowly look around and name (silently or in your head) 3 things you can see. Bring yourself back into the room!

This is a great practice signaling safety to your system in real time.

May we all move through the airport completely unbothered!

💖,
Bri

We could be just 10 minutes away from a miracle without even realizing it…if we could just get out of our own way.

So much easier said than done, obviously (!), but I loved how simply he put it. And the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I think it actually is that simple.

Simple. Not easy, necessarily, but simple!

When you’re trying to make a change in your life, quit a habit, pick up a new one…there’s that tiny, almost invisible moment where you’re presented with the opportunity to make the new choice, do the new thing, stop doing the old thing…but you decide to cave to that that little voice in your head that says “fuck it, not today.”

David Ghiyam talks about how this little voice is your inner opponent…and in that moment, when you choose to lean the way of “fuck it,” you keep yourself stuck in the same cycle! All without ever knowing how close you might’ve been to something different, something better, if you had just made a different choice. Maybe you were just 10 minutes away from something really good!

(The “10 minutes” is metaphorical, but you get it.)

You can think of your inner opponent as a challenger. It shows up to test you: Which version of yourself are you going to choose today?

The tricky part is your inner opponent isn’t always loud or destructive. Sometimes it’s really convincing. Logical, seemingly rational. Maybe even nurturing!

It’s super sneaky!

When I was trying to quit drinking almost 10 years ago, my inner opponent was loud af. I’d wake up swearing to myself, “I’m done drinking. For real this time.” And by that same night, I’d be like “fuck it,” as I found myself back out at a bar drinking an old fashioned.

But that little voice didn’t even really sound that reckless most of the time. It sounded kinda reasonable:

• “You have that big event this weekend, just wait until after.”

• “You’ll lose all your friends.”

• “You live in NYC, what else are you going to do?”

• “You’re in your 20s, it’s normal to blackout. Lighten up!”

It made a pretty compelling case for a while!

Nowadays, the stakes are lower, but it still gets in my way. It tells me to hit snooze and sleep for 15 more minutes instead of rolling out of bed for 15 minutes of meditation, even though I know those 15 minutes of me-time will make my day like 80% better. Or sometimes it encourages me to push a workout to tomorrow because “my body needs rest,” even though sometimes I don’t actually need the rest, I just don’t wanna work out.

And to be fair, sometimes those things are the right call. Sometimes I do need the extra sleep! Sometimes my body genuinely needs rest. But the nuance—the hard part—is learning to discern when it’s honestly coming from a place of care…and when it’s my inner opponent that pulling me just slightly off the path I’ve committed to.

What I love about the idea of an inner opponent is that it reframes everything. Instead of judging yourself or spiraling into “why am I like this, why can’t I change?” it becomes a game.

‘Oh, you’re showing up today to throw me off course? Nbd, let’s play.’

It’s all about awareness. It’s about catching the moment that little voice kicks in and realizing: Oh, this is the test! This is the moment where I get to actually choose differently.

And here’s where the neuroscience comes in (I love marrying the woo with the science 🦄 🤓):

Every time you cave to that voice, your inner opponent, you’re strengthening a neural pathway in your brain. You’re reinforcing the pattern. So over time, of course it becomes automatic—our brain defaults there because it’s familiar! It’s literally biological.

Reeeaally take a minute to think about how many days and how much time we all waste stuck in the same loops and patterns that we just can’t bring ourselves to change!

It’s not that you’re lazy or undisciplined or whatever other unhelpful, defeating story you’re telling yourself. We say things like “this is who I am,” “I’m just not someone who does xyz,” “I’m not consistent,” “I always drop the ball.” But it’s not that personal! You’re just stuck on the human version of autopilot!

But luckily, the same way that pathway was built…it can be rewired by choosing differently and creating a new neural pathway. You can change at any time.

That moment where you get to choose differently is really hard! At least it is for me. But that’s the exact moment you get to decide to stay in a pattern or a loop or choose to go a different way.

Your inner opponent isn’t going anywhere, it’s part of being human. But when you start seeing it as an invitation instead of an obstacle, you can change the game.

The moment you notice that it shows up, you get to pause, get honest, and ask: am I moving toward what I say I want…or staying exactly where I am?

That’s the moment that truly changes everything. That’s the moment you might be just 10 minutes away from something you never thought was possible!

Here’s a journaling prompt to help you practice recognizing your own inner opponent and seeing your own patterns clearly:

Bring to mind a habit you’ve been wanting to shift.
Now think about the moment you normally struggle to actually make the change—your edge. What usually happens there? What does your inner opponent sound like? What does it say? And what do you tend to do next? Write it out honestly so you can start to see the pattern clearly so the next time it pops up, you can clearly see what’s happening and make a different choice!

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Have a great weekend!
Bri

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It rolled in slowly like a fog yesterday, and by now it’s fully settled and seemingly not in any rush to leave 🙄

I was going to wait to write this newsletter and come back to it when I had something more sunshiney and upbeat to say, but then I realized that was silly and also straight up inauthentic. Because I’m certainly not sunshiney all the time!

I’ve had waves of depression that have come and gone since I was a teenager. These days they show up way less often, and when they do, they definitely don’t linger as long as they used to (thank goodness!). But still, every so often, that familiar fogs roll in and somehow always catches me off guard.

When this happens I immediately get super annoyed.

What now? Aren’t we past this? Haven’t I done enough “work” on myself? Plus, things are objectively good right now! What’s the issue? Leave me alone!!!

And then I’ll quickly pivot into investigation mode, surveying all of the different areas of my life to find the culprit. The thing that’s put me into the funk.

Am I PMSing? (honestly…9 out of 10 times, yes lol) Is it work? Is it family? Is it something that happened today? Did I sleep weird? Eat weird? Scroll too long?

And underneath all of that is this subtle panic! This urgency to fix it. To identify it, label it, solve it, move it out as quickly as possible so I can get back to feeling like myself again.

So then I go into fixing mode. Breathwork, journaling, yoga. All of the things that are supposed to make me feel better. And they do! But the fog is often still there.

I’ve noticed these practices land v differently depending on where they’re coming from. When they come from care and love, ie: I want to take a few minutes for myself and show myself some love and gentleness—they feel grounding. But when they come from urgency, ie: SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG, how aggressively and quickly can I breathe or move my way out of it?—they carry a totally different energy. The intention behind the action matters so much.

What I’ve also noticed with myself is that sadness, depression, and that heavy, hopeless feeling are the hardest ones for me to sit with. I think maybe because I’ve been in deeper depression before, when these feelings creep back occasionally, even in a smaller way, my mind and my body are both immediately like SOS something is terribly wrong! As if I’m going to get sucked right back in. It feels scary!

I recently heard someone describe their depression and sadness as just “stopping by for tea,” (although I don’t drink tea so maybe mine stops by for coffee or a sweet treat lol), and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Because our feelings really are just that—transient visitors. They knock at the door uninvited and sit with us for a while. They take their shoes off, cozy up with us on the couch, maybe stay longer we’d prefer….and then, eventually, they always go.

I know this intellectually, and yet I continue to find myself resisting these fogs when they knock at the door. I still reach for meaning, for an explanation, for something to do with it or about it.

But I keep coming back to this reminder: we don’t need to make meaning of it all! More and more, I am reminded again and again that “the work” isn’t figuring everything out, it’s just about softening. Letting things be what they are, and allowing ourselves to feel what we feel without immediately turning it into a problem to solve.

Of course, we can still support ourselves in hard moments. We can rest, breathe, eat well, move slowly, reach for comfort, ask for help. But we don’t have to force a solution on top of what’s already here.

So tonight, I’m letting myself mope. I’m giving myself grace, lying on the couch, putting on Summer House, eating peanut butter cups, and chilling with sadness without trying to move it along too quickly.

This fog has rolled in many times before, and I know with certainty that it will leave, and I also know with just as much certainty that it’ll be back. But nothing is wrong! Nothing needs to be fixed! I don’t need to rush my way out of it.

Sometimes the only thing to do is let it move through, and trust that it will.

The reason I care so much about teaching this—about feeling your feelings, about breathing through and holding yourself in discomfort—is because it’s something I still find so hard! It hasn’t come naturally to me. My nervous system is really quick to go into fight-or-flight when big, unwanted feelings show up.

So this isn’t coming from a place of having it all figured out. It’s coming from being in it, and continuing to learn what helps and sharing with you along the way :)

Love,
Bri

I love it because it’s so simple. (We love simple and clear around here.) The idea is that in any given moment, you’re either above the line or below it. It’s a way to understand your state of consciousness in any moment.

K, so what’s ‘the line’?

Imagine a straight, horizontal line. When you’re above it, you feel open, present, and willing. You go below the line when you feel threatened, overwhelmed, or protective.

That’s it. In any given moment, you’re either above or below it. As I said, super simple!

When you’re above the line, you’re coming from a place of presence and responsibility. You’re open, curious, and conscious. When you’re below it, you’re basically in protection mode. Your nervous system is activated. You’re reactive, defensive, and unconscious.

We all go below the line, it’s human! There’s no judgment here. It’s just information about the state you’re in so that you can respond accordingly! The work is just learning to recognize when you’re there.

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What’s it like below the line? (aka being human)

Below the line is where most of us spend more time than we realize. It’s challenging to find perspective below the line. It feels stifling, like the walls are closing in.

It’s when:

• You get triggered by something small but it feels big

• You shut down mid-convo

• You replay something over and over in your head

• You feel the urge to control, fix, or withdraw entirely

• You notice your chest is tight, your breath is shallow, and you have angsty vibes going

It can look like blame, avoidance, overthinking, ruminating, or numbing. Being below the line doesn’t mean you’re bad or you’re failing, it’s just your nervous system in low grade fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Something in you perceives a lack of safety—emotionally, in a relationship, at work, or just internally—and so it kicks into gear to protect you against whatever the perceived the threat is.

The problem isn’t that you go below the line. We all do it, it’s normal, we’re just lil bb humans! The problem is when you live there without realizing it.

So then what’s it like above the line?

Above the line, you have perspective. The air is fresh and clear. It’s nice above the line!

It’s simply where you have capacity (btw, capacity is your nervous system’s ability to stay present with what you’re feeling without getting overwhelmed, reactive, or shut down). You’re still human above the line! You still have feelings! But they’re not in the driver’s seat and you’re not at war with them.

You might feel:

• Angry, but not consumed by it

• Sad, but not collapsed into a pile of depression

• Uncertain, but still open to going with the flow

Above the line sounds like:

• “Something about this is triggering me.”

• “Let me pause for a second before I respond.”

• “What am I actually feeling right now?”

It’s not about being calm all the time (like we’ve talked about before). It’s about being with yourself in a way that creates space instead of contraction.

You can’t think your way above the line

This is where most people get stuck. Because if going below the line is a nervous system response, you can’t really talk yourself out of it. We all know what it feels like to try to talk yourself down—it normally doesn’t work. You have to feel your way back. This is why breathwork, somatics, and body-based practices matter so much because they allow you to regulate your body and create a little space.

When you find yourself below the line:

• Notice: “I’m below the line right now.”

• Breathe: slow it down, especially your exhales

• Feel: name what’s actually coming up

• Move: go for a walk, shake out your hands, or just sit with it and allow yourself to feel the sensations

• Get curious: “What’s really going on here?” “What story am I telling myself right now?”

How to apply this tool IRL

Checking in to orient yourself and see if you’re above the line or below the line in every day life is SO helpful because it allows you to notice your state in real time and choose how you want to respond, instead of unconsciously reacting from it.

When I was in the corporate world, I’d try to do this before writing an email to a client or giving feedback to an employee. If I found that I was below the line (bitchy, reactive, defensive, pissed, committed to “being right,” etc.), I’d wait to write the email or have the conversation until I was able to get myself back above the line so that I was coming from a place of calm and clarity.

I do this in my relationship with my wife as well. This is a silly example, but sometimes if I’m below the line, I’ll start unconsciously scanning the house for things to get pissed about (clothes on the floor in the bedroom, trash not taken out, etc. lol), but I really do my best to catch myself, realize I’m below the line, and do what I need to do to get back above it before I get snippy and pick a fight over nothing something inconsequential. (She might say I normally fail at this, but I try! 😂)

The goal is not to stay above the line 24/7. That’s not realistic!

The work is just noticing when you’ve gone below the line, being honest with yourself about it, and having the tools to come back.

Sometimes that looks like taking a breath before you respond. Sometimes it looks like stepping away instead of pushing through. And oftentimes it just looks like letting yourself actually feel the thing you’ve been avoiding!

Love,
Bri

PS. I’d love to hear from you! If something resonates or if you have any questions, feel free to hit reply :)

Hi! I’m Bri, I’m so glad you’re here 💌

I’m obsessed with all things related to our inner worlds. Personal growth, why we are the way we are, the mind-body connection, spirituality, the mysteries of the universe…I write about all of it here in a way that’s equal parts practical and woo.

when you nurture and tend to your inner world, your outer world transforms ✿

You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

After he finally fell asleep, I plopped onto the couch and started scrolling (as one does). Unsurprisingly, it only made me feel worse. I think sometimes we convince ourselves that numbing out with the TV or scrolling or alcohol or weed or eating—or whatever your thing is—gives our brain a break. And in a way, it does…but it doesn’t actually help you or your body feel any better. So the moment you stop doing whatever your cute little unhealthy coping mechanism is (we all have one!), the angst or anxiety is still there patiently waiting for you.

So when I noticed the scrolling was making things worse, I (begrudgingly) put my phone down, went into the bedroom, turned off all the lights, starfished on the bed, and slowed down my breath (inhaled for a count of 4, exhaled for a count of 6).

That’s it. And within 10 minutes I felt so much better. It was a total system reset.

And it was the sweetest little reminder that the simple stuff really works.

So today I want to share the suuuper simple things that help me reset when I inevitably crash out. All of these things have actually become non-negotiables for keeping my nervous system steady and grounded most of the time.

Have you tried breathwork yet? :)
If you’re not practicing breathwork yet, literally WHY NOT!? Not to be aggressive, but come onnn man! It’s simple, it’s free, it’s with you all the time, and it’s scientifically proven to work!

The world is extra loud right now. There is TRULY no better time to give your nervous system some extra love and learn how to create calm and safety within yourself. I doubt we’ll ever see a day where the headlines read “Okay, you’re safe now! All is well! Now you can be calm!” It’s up to us to learn how to steady ourselves.

Practicing breathwork allows you to build a relationship with your breath so that it can support you and become a safe place to return to no matter what’s happening around you!

If you’re looking for guided practices, you can start here! I send a weekly breathwork practice to my paid subscribers. The next one goes out this Friday—if you’d like to receive it, you can upgrade below ($5/month).

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Practice grounding
Get outside and get your toesies on the ground, hug a tree, sniff a flower. This is not some hippy-dippy-woo-woo BS! When your bare skin touches the ground, your body can absorb free electrons from the earth’s surface, which research suggests may help neutralize inflammation and regulate the nervous system. Direct contact with nature has been shown to lower cortisol levels and calm the bod’s stress response. Doctors in Japan literally prescribe ‘time in the forest’ for stress-related lifestyle conditions like burnout, anxiety and depression, sleep problems, and weakened immune function. Your body naturally settles when it’s connected to the earth. How cool!!!

Let the sun reset you
Step outside and let the sun hit your eyes and skin (without sunglasses if you can, safely. Don’t look directly at it obvi, but look in it’s direction). Morning sunlight, in particular, helps regulate your circadian rhythm by signaling to your brain that it’s daytime, which then also improves sleep later that night. Sunlight also triggers vitamin D production and supports serotonin which is the neurotransmitter associated with mood and wellbeing. But most importantly, it just FEELS GOOD. A few minutes of sunlight is like a natural reset for your brain and body. We’re basically plants!

Turn your phone off!
Or at the very least, put it down long enough to hear yourself think. Our phones are inherently overstimulating—the blue light, the cheap dopamine hits, all of it. Turn that shit off. I love keeping mine off for the first hour of the day. It lets me wake up slowly and be fully present in my morning, which really does set the tone for the rest of my day.

None of this is revolutionary. None of it is expensive. None of it requires some complicated protocol or crazy biohacking routine.

But we’ve collectively strayed so far away from the basics that it’s worth a reminder. It’s breath! It’s sunlight! It’s the earth under your feet! It’s giving your brain a break from the tiny glowing rectangle of chaos in your hand.

Sometimes the things that help us the most are also the simplest! We just have to remember to come back to them.

Let this be your reminder and encouragement :)
Bri

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Hi! I’m Bri, I’m so glad you’re here 💌

I’m obsessed with all things related to our inner worlds. Personal growth, why we are the way we are, the mind-body connection, spirituality, the mysteries of the universe…I write about all of it here in a way that’s equal parts practical and woo.

when you nurture and tend to your inner world, your outer world transforms ✿

You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

In times of crisis, which I guess is all of the time nowadays, we’re inundated constantly with a seemingly endless stream of content and news stories. Every media outlet races to be the first one to break the news—the more disturbing and emotional the story, the better! Each and every story is sensationalized. There’s a palpable media frenzy, especially as of late, given there’s literally no shortage of atrocities to report on.

From there, every brand and influencer rushes to create content on social media to address whatever the latest tragedy is. There’s relentless reporting and then relentless rehashing of catastrophic and traumatic events, with disturbing images and videos repeatedly on display on our screens. It’s become hard to avoid! Push notifications from news apps, “breaking news” email alerts, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok—the news is everywhere. It’s easy to get sucked in and “doom scroll,” which is defined as the act of excessively consuming negative news on social media or online.

Our nervous systems aren’t built for this level of information overload! I think we all know this intuitively based on how we feel when watching or reading the news, and recent studies also prove this scientifically. It’s been shown that doom scrolling, for instance, increases cortisol and adrenaline levels within the body, putting the body into a state of fight-or-flight—just from consuming the news!

We’re simply not meant to have this onslaught of (mostly negative) information at all times. I understand the value in communicating what’s happening locally, nationally, and globally, obvi, but we need to be careful to not let it consume us all day every day.

Your attention is energy. Where are you putting your attention? What are you giving your energy to? Is what you’re regularly reading and viewing online putting you into a state of fear? Does your breath get shallow when you’re scrolling and tapping through social media? Get curious about how you feel when you’re taking in the content you regularly consume. Does the influencer you’re following make you anxious with their constant hot takes on global politics? Unfollow! Delete Instagram for a bit! It’s okay, necessary even, to opt out more often than not.

We all emit a certain frequency based on how we’re feeling. Our emotions literally have measurable frequencies associated with them. It’s why you can feel someone’s “vibe” when they walk into a room. I’m sure you’ve physically felt when there’s tension in a work meeting or if the energy is light, friendly, and airy.

So when I think about what we’re shown in the media and all of the doom scrolling and how we’re kept in a state of fear (intentionally, btw!), I think about the effect this must have on our collective “vibe” and frequency worldwide. I don’t want to contribute to even more fear and chaos, I want to emit the frequencies associated with love, joy, and peace instead! Look at where fear sits in the above chart; it’s associated with a low frequency and feelings of anxiety. All emotions are okay—it’s a part of being human to feel the entire spectrum—but staying in an emotional state over time can start to shape your worldview. If we’re constantly in a state of fear and anxiety, we start to believe the world is a frightening place. We start to look at life through that lens.

Personally, I stopped reading and watching the news consistently towards the end of 2020. I was feeling overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, and burnt out from it all. I remember getting well over 10 “breaking news” alert emails from The New York Times in one day and decided to unsubscribe. None of it was actually “breaking news!” I realized I would have been just fine going about my day not knowing about any of it. I decided it was time to opt out, and my mental health changed for the better almost immediately.

This doesn’t mean I have no idea what’s going on (although I definitely know a lot less than most people it seems!), but I’m more intentional about what I choose to consume and when. I’m not suggesting that we should all bury our heads in the sand because it’s important to stay informed to an extent and understand what’s happening in the world around us, but I am suggesting you should engage on your terms in ways that feel healthiest and best for you.

Here are some ways I’ve created boundaries around the news and media:

• Unsubscribed from all email alerts from any news publications

• Went on an unfollowing spree on social media (this was fun)

• Stopped checking my phone first thing in the morning and stopped checking it right before bed. I give myself an hour phone-free in the AM after I wake up and in the PM before I go to bed! I turn it off entirely so it’s not even an option

• Stopped watching the news on TV altogether

• Stopped listening to news/political podcasts

• When I do engage with the news, I’m super mindful of my breath! Deep, slow breathing will keep your body in a balanced state when you’re reading about or watching total chaos

I encourage you to try even just one of these things and notice how your days change and how you feel!

Contrary to what people seem to believe nowadays, how up-to-date you are on the news at any given moment does not equate to the amount you care about humanity. Personally, I have trouble showing up as my best self in my own life if I’m anxious, stressed, or fearful and ruminating on everything that’s going wrong in the world.

I try to remind myself that I can make the biggest difference in my day-to-day life in how I treat my coworkers, my neighbors, the barista at my favorite coffee shop, the cashier at the grocery store. Am I being kind? Am I able to brighten someone’s day? Am I taking care of myself? Am I showing up well for my family and friends? Am I a source of calm for my son? I really believe that’s where my energy and attention can be most impactful.

I always think of my Aunt Julie who will occasionally leave her home baked goods in the mailbox for her mailman—just because! Imagine being that mailman and how exciting it must be to open a mailbox to a giant chocolate chip cookie.

What if we all channeled a little bit of Aunt Julie today? Think of all of the little ripples of kindness we could create!

That’s how we start to create a better, safer world! It starts with each one of us treating ourselves and each other with love and kindness and raising our own frequency in our everyday lives.

Love,
Bri

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Hi! I’m Bri, I’m so glad you’re here 💌

I’m obsessed with all things related to our inner worlds. Personal growth, why we are the way we are, the mind-body connection, spirituality, the mysteries of the universe…I write about all of it here in a way that’s equal parts practical and woo.

when you nurture and tend to your inner world, your outer world transforms ✿

You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

But looking back, Mrs. Salin was right. I was a total worry wart, as early as age 8, apparently! And I continued to worry nonstop well into my late 20s.

I share this because I’m not writing this as someone who came out of the womb all easy-breezy and never spent a day worrying (lol yeah right), I’m writing this as a former chronic worrier. Someone who woke up worried and went to sleep worrying and worried all day long in between.

I worried about my health, I worried about all of the different things that could go wrong in a day, I worried if people were mad at me, I worried if my coworkers liked me, I worried about what it meant if someone didn’t text me back, I worried about money, I worried about the state of the world, I worried about making decisions, I worried about the future, I worried about the past, I worried about the weather, traffic, potential flight delays, big things, little things. All of it. I worried about everything! (Aren’t you exhausted just reading that?!)

But I don’t worry like that anymore because 1) I’ve realized it’s SUCH a waste of energy and 2) life feels so! much! better! when you stop compulsively worrying about every single thing that is completely out of your control.

So take it from me, you can stop obsessively worrying if you wanna!

And you should wanna!

“I really want to spend my entire life chronically and obsessively worrying about all of the things that are completely out of my control.”

—No One Ever

AND YET so many of us really do spend our lives this way!

How the heck did we all become such cute little worry warts?

Most of us got the same (well intentioned but secretly very shitty) programming around worry when we were kids.

We were taught from a young age that worrying = love because our parents probably told us they worry about us because they love us.

“I worry about you because I care about you.”

So then we go on living our lives worrying about all of the things that we love because we think that’s just a part of loving someone or something or ourselves. And here’s the extra sneaky part: when worry gets marketed as love, it becomes self-reinforcing. You don’t just worry, you feel guilty when you don’t! Relaxation starts to feel like neglect or that you’re forgetting something important, and peace feels unsafe.

We also learn to equate worrying with safety because, again, our families likely told us they worry about us because they want to keep us safe. So then it’s no wonder we grow up thinking we need to worry about everything to stay safe!

But really worry isn’t about love or safety.

Love can exist without chronic worry. Safety can exist without hypervigilance. And learning to release worry isn’t about becoming indifferent! It’s just about trusting yourself, your resilience, and your ability to respond if and when something actually happens.

Let’s get into the energetics of worry

When I say “energetics,” I just mean what the vibe of worry is and what’s really lying underneath.

The underlying current of energy running under our worries is just fear. Fear of the unknown and fear of things outside of our control.

Worry also carries a frequency of distrust. Worrying broadcasts: “I don’t have any trust!”—in yourself, in your partners, in your friends, in your kids, in something larger than yourself. You’re sending out a subtle message that says: I won’t be able to handle it if something goes wrong.

We think, If I stop worrying, I’m being careless. But in reality, worry rarely prevents the thing we’re afraid of—it just keeps us braced for it.

The body responds to this distrust by tightening, speeding up, and staying on hiiigh alert. Over time, this trains your sweet little nervous system to live in a low-grade survival mode, even when life is objectively okay!

There’s also a control component at play. We looove to feel like we have control. Energetically, worry is an attempt to manage uncertainty with lots of mental effort. But because uncertainty is inherent to being alive and to being human (it’s part of the magic tbh), the energy never resolves—it just continuously loops. That looping is why worry feels exhausting rather than productive.

Worrying is not productive! It literally doesn’t even work!

Really think about it.

No one’s ever like:
“I got the job because I worried really long and hard about the interview for weeks.” “My kid didn’t get sick because I was anxious af and worried excessively that he wouldn’t.”
“My plane didn’t get delayed because I was up all night long worrying about it!”
”It didn’t rain on my wedding day because I spent months in a state of pure panic that it might.”

I don’t think anyone would equate how much they worried with how well something turned out. Maybe the worry drove you to prep and plan, but the worry itself didn’t bring about a positive outcome.

Worry ≠ practical planning and preparation

You can choose to do your prep and make your plans from a place of love and trust, not fear.

Practical planning and preparation from a place of “I love myself so much that I want to set myself (or my partner, or my kids, or my family, or whoever) up for success” comes from a verrry different energy than sitting around wringing your hands with anxiety, prepping from a place of sheer fear, worrying about all of the ways something could go wrong and trying to micromanage outcomes just to avoid sitting in your own discomfort with the unknown.

Ya feel me??? Can you see and feel the difference?

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I wanna pause here quickly and make it clear that I’m not saying there aren’t things to worry about. I don’t live under a rock (although that sounds nice). There are PLENTY, an infinite number of things, really. The news gives us a fresh batch of tragedies and pending catastrophes to worry about daily, we scroll our feeds and see a million other things to add to the Worry List, and then there’s all of the stuff we could agonize over in our own everyday lives.

But this is where you get to exercise your agency and decide if you want to choose to worry about it all or choose to lean into trust and faith—in yourself and in life.

Worrying is a choice!

And I know it might not feel that way, especially if you’ve spent a lot of your life worrying. It might really feel as though your worries are involuntary and that they’re keeping you safe and protecting you, but I promise you they’re not!

We all say we want life to feel better, to enjoy the ride a little more, to stop sweating the small stuff…right?! RIGHT?!

Okay, great!

Then commit to letting some worry go when you can. This is an area that you actually do have control over as much as your mind would like to tell you otherwise. Don’t argue to keep your worries around!

How to stop worrying

I know it might feel straight up SCARY to stop worrying. It did for me at least. It felt like I was forgetting to do something, like I was leaving the house without my phone and wallet. That’s because your nervous system is simply used to worrying—it’s learned to equate worrying with love and safety.

So when you’ve been worrying on autopilot for years or even decades, it will feel uncomfortable and even ~dangerous~ to stop worrying.

Try it anyway! Give it a whirl!

Start small. Test out not worrying on the little things that are totally outside of your control: weather, traffic, flight delays—use these as reps to teach your nervous system that not worrying is safe!

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

• Notice the worry without making it wrong. Don’t shame yourself or beat yourself up. No drama. Just think of it as a mental habit that’s popping up again! And realize that it’s just your mind and body trying to protect you.

• Ask: is the thing I’m worrying about actually in my control right now? If yes, cool! Take a deep breath and take one small, grounded action, and move along. If it’s not in your control, practice letting your body chill instead of mentally spiraling. (see next step)

• Interrupt worry with the body, not the mind. Get outta the mind and into the body! Slow your exhale, drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw. Bring your body down to calm, your mind will eventually follow.

• Replace your worry with presence. Worry lives in the future. In an imagined scenario that you quite literally made up. It’s not real. So bring your attention back to what is real—your feet on the floor, your breath, a sound in the room. Is there a problem right now in this very moment? You’ll be surprised to find the answer is usually no.

• Indulge yourself in playing out the worst case scenario if you must. If your worst fears come to fruition—would you be okay?! If your flight get delayed? If you’re late to the appointment? If you don’t get the job? If your kid gets the flu? If you get laid off? Would you be okay? Would you rise to the occasion? I’m betting yes. And if you’re like no, Bri, you don’t get it. Prove yourself wrong: think of a time when shit hit the fan, your lowest moment, something went terribly wrong…did you survive? I’m gonna bet yes again!

• Don’t forget to play out the best case scenario, too. Imagine everything working out perfectly—remind yourself that this scenario is just as real as the doomsday scenario.

Worries will inevitably pop up. I catch myself mid-worry often. So what happens when you catch yourself mid-worry? You take it as the perfect opportunity to practice the above. Soothe yourself, get back into your body, switch up the dialogue in your head, and orient yourself around trust instead of fear.

WHAT IF?!

Whatever is going to happen will happen, whether we worry about it or not. So…

Why worry? Ya know?
Bri

Hi! I’m Bri, I’m so glad you’re here 💌

I’m obsessed with all things related to our inner worlds. Personal growth, why we are the way we are, the mind-body connection, spirituality, the mysteries of the universe…I write about all of it here in a way that’s equal parts practical and woo.

when you nurture and tend to your inner world, your outer world transforms ✿

You can learn more about me and my work here. I currently offer 1:1 coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

I didn’t even brush up against her, but clearly I got too close for her liking on the way to grab a jar of Crazy Richard’s Smooth Peanut Butter (the only peanut butter, aside from the smooth and salted at Trader Joe’s, iykyk). I saw her side-eye me so I said “sorry,” and she quickly snapped “the word is excuse me,” and then continued to go off angrily under her breath.

“Okay, sorry and excuse me,” I said in an even tone. “CALM DOWN!” was her response. I felt like I was in the twilight zone. “I am calm,” I replied.

But I was no longer feeling calm. I was feeling pretty pissed. I could sense my chest tightening, my cheeks getting flushed, and my heart pounding fast. And if I’m being honest, I reeeally wanted to ask her what the fuck her problem was. I was standing there with my toddler son in my cart, she had her toddler daughter in hers, and I literally didn’t even graze her, let alone bump into her. What the heck!

This all flashed through my mind as I felt what was happening in my body and paused.

THIS is nervous system regulation. The ability to consciously pause in the heat of the moment. It’s taking note of what’s happening in your body before you get carried into an emotional reaction that would only make things worse. I had the very real, very human urge to snap back at her, to defend myself, but I had enough presence of mind in that moment to know that it wouldn’t help the situation. And I had Jacob with me! I was able to zoom out and see the higher perspective, grab my peanut butter, and keep my mouth shut.

Not today, crazy lady! I thought to myself.

She eventually walked away but continued ranting loudly about me as she walked through the store. At first, I will admit that I was judging her big time. What a psycho, I thought to myself. And with her daughter! What a shame. But then I noticed my thoughts and my judgments and realized how mean I was being. It felt shitty to judge her. And I, too, had the urge to snap back at her after all.

I realized the only difference between me and her in that moment was that she was ranting about me out loud whereas I was ranting about her in my head. We were both being mean. I was the villain in her version of events and she was the villain in mine. This is a perspective I definitely wouldn’t have been able to find had I not been able to pause! It took longer than I’d like to admit, but I eventually decided to let the judgments go and send her love instead and move on with the rest of my grocery list.

Because the truth is I don’t know anything about her. Maybe she was just having a supremely shitty day. Maybe she was PMSing. Maybe her mom died the day prior. Maybe she’s raising her daughter alone. Maybe none of those things! But that’s the point: I have no idea.

And so many of us don’t have access to our breath and to that pause in the heat of the moment! I could barely find it myself, and I’m a freaking breathwork facilitator.

Most of the world is running around frantically, bumping into each other and brushing up against one another and snapping back instinctively without a second thought. It happens online in DMs and in the comment sections of Instagram and TikTok, in the car, in conversations about politics, on the street, in Zoom meetings amongst executives, and in the freaking peanut butter aisle of the grocery store with our PB&J loving toddlers! We’re all ready to fight and defend ourselves at any second. Constantly activated. Locked in fight or flight without even realizing it.

This is why I’m so passionate about nervous system regulation!

What if everyone had access to The Pause? What if we all learned how to take a few breaths before reacting without thought? What if we were able to consciously take a step back and see each other as human beings doing our best with the tools we have avail instead of writing each other off as assholes? What if we could all give each other some grace?

Finding my breath in the heat of the moment and pausing is something I continue to practice! I wanted to share this silly grocery store drama in case it inspires you to practice pausing, too 🥰

Love,
Bri

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It’s frustrating because when you feel stuck, it’s normally not that you feel confused about what it is that you want! You’re clear. You want something or things to be different. You want to make a change. You make all these grand plans for yourself—lists of habits you’re finally gonna quit, the money you’ll save, promises to stop dating the same emotionally unavailable people or to stop being so hard on your partner, declarations that you’ll finally set boundaries with your boss, intentions to start (or stop) a dozen different things, etcetera. Lotsa plans!

And yet, every time you start making moves toward actually making those changes, something pulls you back! Anxiety spikes seemingly out of nowhere, you fall back into the old habits and dynamics you swore you were done with, you impulsively buy the sweater you don’t need, relationship patterns repeat themselves.

You say you really want to change something, but your actions tell a different story. You get in your own way. We’ve all been there!

Why is this such a common experience?!

Enter: unconscious commitments.

What’s an unconscious commitment?

SO glad you asked!

An unconscious commitment (a concept from the Conscious Leadership Group) is a hidden promise you’re keeping to yourself that directly contradicts whatever it is you consciously desire. It’s one of my favorite concepts to use with coaching clients (and in my own life too!) because it’s so simple and clarifying.

You can want something with your mind (conscious desire), but your nervous system is always going to be more loyal to feeling safe (unconscious commitment), not to you getting you what you want.

Unconscious commitments follow a really simple pattern. There’s 1) what you say you want, 2) what you keep doing (or not doing) instead, 3) the hidden commitment that explains your behavior, and 4) the fear that lives underneath that commitment.

Unconscious commitments fly safely under the radar because they live below your conscious awareness. They’re buried deeeeep in your subconscious and are usually formed earlier on in your life to protect you from emotional pain, danger, or a threat (real or perceived). We all have them!

Your seemingly conflicting behavior will almost always make sense once you see your hidden commitment.

Let’s walk through some examples, shall we?

Here’s a super classic unconscious commitment when it comes to relationships:

1. What I say I want: “I want a deep, intimate relationship”

2. What I keep doing (or not doing) instead: Emotional distancing, needing “space” out of nowhere, choosing emotionally unavailable partners

3. The unconscious commitment: “I’m committed to self-protection over vulnerability and connection”

4. Underlying fear: “If I fully open up and let someone in, I’ll get hurt or they’ll abandon me”

So you better believe that you’re going to stay loyal to your unconscious commitment and make sure that you don’t let anyone in or choose a partner that’s emotionally available or else you’ll get hurt! Cue the self-sabotage.

(It’s actually super sweet of our unconscious commitments. They’re just trying to protect us and keep us safe, but at a certain point they really start to get in our way.)

Here’s another common one that I struggled with in my very short-lived startup days. (I legit shudder when I think of this time of my life lol):

1. What I said I wanted: “I want to have better work-life balance”

2. What I kept doing (or not doing) instead: Overworked, said yes automatically even when I actually really freaking wanted to say no, refreshed my emails and Slack notifications like a nut, never actually signed offline ever

3. The unconscious commitment: “I’m committed to going above and beyond, staying needed, becoming indispensable, and getting external validation”

4. Underlying fear: “If I stop producing at this level or making myself this available, I won’t matter, and I’ll lose everyone’s respect. I’ll be forgotten or replaced”

   

Basically, my nervous system translated busy-ness, working hard, and getting external validation to safety. And I learned somewhere along the way (like a lot of us do) that my worth came from working hard (ew). So even though I deeply wanted to have a better work-life balance, I wasn’t actually doing anything to create that outcome. In fact, I was quite literally doing the exact opposite.

I was checking Slack the second I opened my eyes in the morning, made myself available to my boss and team at literally all times, did my job plus other people’s jobs, and said yes to any and all projects and asks waaay outside of my scope. That’s because, despite being totally burnt out and mis, I was (unconsciously) committed to the belief that I needed to go above and beyond to stay needed, liked, and indispensable. My nervous system actually didn’t feel safe otherwise.

Unconscious commitments are v sneaky!

But see what can happen when you out them?! It’s immediately clarifying. It becomes a whole lot easier to see why you’re having a hard time changing your behavior despite knowing what it is that you actually want. You’re (unknowingly) more committed to your unconscious commitments than you are to what you consciously desire. Your hidden commitments are in the driver’s seat calling the shots.

So here’s how to spot an unconscious commitment in the wild

If there’s an area of your life where you’re feeling stuck or having trouble changing your behavior or patterns, take yourself through this exercise:

• Ask yourself: what benefit do I get from staying the same?
  It’s normally one of these (or multiple): approval, safety, control, belonging, avoiding shame or failure
  
  In my startup example, the benefits I got from staying the same and working like a total psycho were: approval, safety, belonging, and avoiding failure

• Complete this sentence honestly:
  ”I’m committed to not having [the thing you actually want] because…”
  Examples: “…then I won’t fail publicly,” “…then people won’t expect too much from me”
  
  For example, I was committed to not having better work-life balance because then I wouldn’t disappoint anyone, I could continue to get external validation from my boss, and I wouldn’t have to face whether I still felt worthy without overworking.

Once you (lovingly) out the unconscious commitment, this is how you shift it

The work isn’t to eliminate the unconscious commitment or get rid of it or shame yourself for it. We all have them. It’s just to get curious about it and bring it into the light! So when you find yours, look at it without judgment. You can even thank it and send it some love for protecting you (because that’s all it was trying to do) and then let your nervous system know that the old danger isn’t present.

From here, you get to rewrite the commitment. You decide to no longer operate from a belief formed in a past version of you. You consciously choose a new commitment that matches who you are now and what you truly want!

Back to my startup sitch, I realized that my overworking wasn’t actually about ambition or passion (I was actually 0.00% passionate about growth marketing lol)—it was all about safety. Being constantly “on,” staying late online, and tying my whole identity to my job gave me a sense of control and protection. If I was indispensable, busy, and productive, then I felt valuable! Slowing down felt scary because it threatened the story I was telling myself that my worth had to be earned in Corporate America (lol).

When I was able to bring that unconscious commitment into the light, I could then shift it. I saw that my worth didn’t actually come from my job (duh) or how hard I worked. It wasn’t conditional. I was inherently worthy, period. I didn’t need to prove anything!

Once my nervous system started to reeeally feel that truth—not just intellectually, but in my body—I didn’t need to overwork to feel safe. And from that place, choosing better work–life balance wasn’t a failure of discipline or lack of drive; it was a regulated, conscious, grounded choice that came from someone who believed they were worthy no matter what. I actually ended up quitting that job because I realized it wasn’t aligned whatsoever.

When you bring your unconscious commitments into awareness, they stop running the show from the shadows and you get to choose new commitments from a place of truth and trust instead of fear.

And then your behavior will follow suit—you’ll finally be able to get out of your own way.

Until next time!
Bri

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Hi! I’m Bri, I’m so glad you’re here 💌

I’m obsessed with all things related to our inner worlds. Personal growth, the mind-body connection, spirituality, the mysteries of the universe…I write about all of it here in a way that’s equal parts practical and woo.

when you nurture and tend to your inner world, your outer world transforms ✿

You can learn more about me and my work here. I offer coaching, breathwork, and corporate workshops!

When things feel extra out of control, I love to come back to something I can control: my breath! The breath is a magical portal back to your body and back to the present moment.

When we’re feeling overwhelmed or anxious, it’s often because the body is holding excess energy that doesn’t have anywhere to go! That’s why we might feel angsty or edgy or antsy. This breathwork practice is designed to help that energy move.

The first half of the practice is activating—it’s meant to give any stored tension in the body a safe way to move and release, and in the second half, we slow the breath down and shift into a grounding visualization. I’ll guide you to bring all of your v precious energy back to you!

All you need for this practice is yourself and your breath. So let’s breathe!

A couple of notes on this particular practice: do not practice breath holds while driving or in water! This particular practice is not safe for anyone who is pregnant.

PS. How plugged in you are to the literal circus that is the mainstream media does not equate to the amount you care about other humans! It’s okay to take care of yourself. Take breaks, unsubscribe from “breaking news” alerts, turn off notifications, delete Instagram for a while, tune it out entirely, and intentionally seek out calm and joy in your real life!

Love,
Bri

And this is a good thing! It’s leaps and bounds ahead of where we probably were as a society 50 years ago when everyone just pretended like feelings didn’t exist at all. At least now we’re acknowledging them! Progress! And as therapy has become way more commonplace, most of us have a basic understanding of our feelings and why we might feel the way we do.

I myself have spent a lot of time in talk therapy (my mom put me in therapy when I was 8 a few years after my parents got divorced), and while it was absolutely valuable and helpful, I still just felt stuck. After years and years of therapy, I had a really strong intellectual understanding of why I might feel a certain way or act a certain way based on my childhood and life experiences, but I wasn’t actually moving through any of the emotions associated.

It just felt like I was talking about the same issues and experiences on repeat over and over and all the while, I wasn’t finding relief or feeling any better. I was frustrated! And I was also tired of hearing myself talk about the same shit. How many hours can one spend talking about their daddy issues, ya know? (In my experience…a lot 😅)

The reason I wasn’t feeling any better is because I was missing the part where I needed to actually feel all of the feelings I had spent so many years holding in.

I think this is a common experience! A lot of us live exclusively in our minds.

We wrap our feelings in stories and replay them until they feel familiar. It looks like processing, but it’s really just circling the drain—thinking instead of feeling. We spend a lot of time talking about feelings, in therapy or with friends or in our journals, but what we’re not talking about is: our feelings are really just meant to be felt. Not rationalized, analyzed to exhaustion, defended against, weaponized, or outsourced for validation by anyone else.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t talk about our feelings at all or go to talk therapy or vent to a friend—of course we should! We just don’t want to get stuck there or skip the feeling part.

Because ultimately, our emotions are our responsibility, and the only thing we’re actually responsible for is allowing ourselves to feel them.

And btw, what even are emotions?

One of my favorite teachers, David Elliott, (and neuroscientists alike) describe emotions as e-motions: energy in motion. And the key word is motion. They are meant to move, to flow through us like water. When we’re sad, letting the tears flow instead of choking them down. But when we interrupt that flow by cutting them off, shoving them down, suppressing them, we create little dams in our body.

When we don’t allow our emotions to move through our bodies and get released, that energy gets stuck and can start to weigh us down both physically and energetically over time.

Science supports this:

• Suppressed feelings keep the body in “fight-or-flight” mode, which redirects energy away from digestion. This can show up as bloating, IBS, constipation or acid reflux

• Suppressing anger. grief, or fear has been linked to higher blood pressure, increased heart rate, and greater risk of heart disease

• When suppressed feelings build up, they might erupt as sudden mood swings, anxiety attacks, or seemingly “out of nowhere” anxiety

• Suppressing your tears increases cortisol

But I think we all know this even without the science to prove it.

We know how our throats burn when we swallow back our tears or how hard it is to hold back laughter when joy wants to burst through. The energy just wants to move.

And we all came into this world knowing exactly how to move it. We were born with the innate ability to express and release our emotions perfectly.

I know when my 1.5-year-old son is sad because he makes the world’s cutest pouty face (I know I’m biased but it’s sooo cute) and cries. I know when he’s mad because lunch is over and he slams his tiny fists on the counter and yells.

Emotions are our first language.

And then, somewhere along the way, we’re taught to stop speaking it. We cry and dad tells us to toughen up. Mom tells us anger isn’t ladylike—or never shows her own emotions, so there’s no space for us to show ours. We get sent to the principal’s office for melting down at recess. A good friend tells us we’re too sensitive.

Slowly, we learn the lesson: feeling feelings is bad. It’s unsafe. Push them down at all costs!!!

And after a while, it’s no wonder we forget how to let ourselves feel! So let’s refresh our minds with what our bods already know.

How to feel your feelings

I strongly believe kids should be taught how to feel their feelings in school. How about instead of teaching them what a rhombus is (no shade against geometry lol) we teach them how to express their emotions in a healthy way??? Or at least at the doctor’s office! When’s the last time your primary care doctor asked you if you’ve been healthily releasing emotion? Most likely never. (But if yours did, leave their number in the comment section so we can all make an appointment)

I digress, there’s no better time to learn than right now. And then you can teach your friends, teach your partners, teach your parents, teach your kids!

Here’s how to process emotions, according to neuroscientists:

1. Notice the emotion

Any RHOBH fans here? Name what the emotion is, ie: anger, sadness, fear. Consider what might have triggered this feeling and notice the self-talk you have around it. Validate your feelings! They’re just feelings—they’re not good or bad, they just are. Don’t get lost in a shame spiral or blame yourself for feeling this way. Just name the feeling with neutrality and move along.

2. Notice what’s happening in your body

Do a body scan to identify where you physically feel it. Notice the sensation and breathe into them. Continue to take slow deep breaths into the sensations until the sensations begin to subside. This practice can be a little challenging if you’re not used to paying attention to your body in this way. This emotion sensation wheel can be a helpful tool to find the most common ways emotions feel in the body!

3. Reframe any negative self-talk

Be nice to yourself, don’t judge how you’re feeling! (This one is always hard for me lol) If you notice any negative self-talk, imagine that you’re speaking to a friend. Would you judge them for their feelings or beat them up about them? No, you’d just hold the space for them and be there for them. Show up the same way for yourself. Accept that you’re feeling how you’re feeling, and that’s completely ok, normal, and sooo very human. If you’re struggling to continue with your day, find a positive, enjoyable distraction. Put on your favorite song, go for a walk, move your body. And know that emotions always pass.

That’s it!

Neuroscientists say that an emotion moves to completion in only 90 seconds! 90!

When something triggers you, your brain releases a chemical cascade (stress hormones), and that initial surge moves through your body in 60-90 seconds. If nothing re-stimulates it, the body will naturally return to baseline. The pure emotion is oh so brief. Emotions feel longer when we replay the story in our mind, judge the feeling, suppress it or resist it, or we re-trigger it with thoughts, memories, or meaning-making.

To clarify, this doesn’t mean that grief, trauma, or buried emotions are only going to last 90 seconds or that “you should be over it” quickly. It just means the body knows how to complete emotional cycles when it feels safe enough to do so.

If you’re someone—like I was—who might have years and years and years of stored emotions that you haven’t, there are more powerful practices that can help shake things up in a safe, healthy way.

My personal favorite is Active Breathwork (aka Transformational Breathwork or the 3-Part Breath). It wasn’t until I found this type of breathwork that I actually started to bring my emotions to the surface and let them go. That’s when I truly started to find relief and feel better. It’s why I decided to get certified in teaching it; it has a really beautiful, gentle way of stirring up that stored energy in our bodies that was never processed or felt.

Breathwork isn’t the only way! There’s also somatic experiencing, massage, and even yoga! Basically, anything that gets you back into your body and out of your mind. Do whatever sounds good to you—if you’re feeling super angry, a kickboxing class or screaming into a pillow (don’t judge until you’ve tried) might be nice. If you want to let some sadness go, put on your favorite sad movie, grab a pint of icecream and let the tears flow.

Feeling your feelings matters because emotions are not problems to solve, they’re just sensations that want to be released. They’re our bodies way of communicating with us. When you allow yourself to fully feel whatever emotions are popping up, you give your nervous system the message that it’s safe to complete the emotional cycle instead of storing it in the body.

Unfelt emotions don’t disappear (sadly); they show up as tension, fatigue, anxiety, numbness, or disconnection. But when you meet your feelings with presence and patience instead of resistance, they move, soften, and release—often MUCH MORE quickly than we might expect.

With that, I hope you cry this week! xoxo,
Bri