If My Plate Could Talk: “Strong But Exhausted”

Hydrosphere. Here we are. Another opportunity to be together and make sure that we have our minds right, our heart in order, and our body as physically well as we possibly can. If this is your first time on a live with me, welcome to if youf Plate Could Talk where I come to you every Sunday and we talk about that beautiful and powerful intersection between life, well being and how we nourish ourselves. Come in. Let me know how your week is going. Right. Your week. 1, meaning it's been a rough week.

10, meaning given the context of your week, you feel like you are doing as well as possible. And where are you in the world? I am still here in Charlotte, melting. So if you see me perspiring, just know. Hey, Kelly. It is not. I'm not glistening. I'm. I'm melting. Hey, Mel. So a little bit earlier today, maybe an hour or two ago, I was like, oh, let me see what time you know what the temperatures it is outside. Maybe I want to go for a walk. And then it said the temperature was 100. Feels like 107.

Yeah. Nope. Hello. T. i had to get it right. Hello, Northern Minnesota. I was like, nope, staying in. Yep. This heat is as well. Joycelyn, Phenomenal that you have a nine. Always know that rating yourself is not a matter of judgment. It is awareness. It's an opportunity for you to go, how did I start the week? If you're with me on Wednesdays, how am I doing midweek? And how did I end? Because I always want you to believe that you can end better than you begin. If we get to the place in life or in our week where we feel like, oh, it's been a terrible week and all is lost, that's, you know, that's definitely not true.

So, hello, Detroit is hot here too. How hot is it there? Because someone was telling me that Michigan was a little bit better than here. And I was like, I need to take a visit. Because this is the kind of weather where it's like, you're not gonna see me very much unless it's online. That being said, let's get into our focus of tonight. I try to give these things a title and sometimes I'm giving them a title and then I go off. But today is one that I want to stay on and I want us to focus on strong but exhausted.

So this is specifically for. Oh, 88 is not bad. Oh, that sounds so good. That sounds better than 100. Strong but exhausted. This is definitely for those moments or those of you who people constantly say to you oh, my goodness, you're so strong. You're always so happy. You always seem like you have it together. Has anyone said that to you? And then your internal voice immediately says, but I am so tired. I want to acknowledge a few things when it comes to the dynamic of strong yet struggling or strong but exhausted, it doesn't mean that we are necessarily exhausted because there are a lot of bad things happening in our lives.

One area of stigma that I am always trying to battle is people that believe that their mental well being is only something that they want to address when things are hard. I mean, you. No. Right. That's a great time to address it. But it's also about how do you stay aware? How do you make sure that you are conditioning your life and creating a life and making choices and decisions that help you maintain a harmonious. I'll use that word, level of health and wellbeing. When we are in chronic states of stress, whether that's a good stress or a challenging stress, it's going to have impact.

It's going to have impact even if you're not showing that impact to other people. It is very common in culture all across the globe for us to be outwardly successful. We're meeting the deadlines, we're caring for other people, we're setting goals for our life. But underneath, we sometimes feel some anxiety. We might feel emotionally drained or even unworthy. Hello, Margie. You know, so I want you to do two things for me. I want you first to tell me what's one stressor that you are currently navigating?

And remember, it can be a stress that is because it's something difficult, but it can also be a stressor that you're like is a good stress. This is a stress that I signed up for. Maybe you're training for something, but it's still a stressor nonetheless. And while you're doing that, I want to talk a little neuroscience. Of course. It's so important for me to help you understand that not addressing your stress isn't just about looking a certain way or just being able to sleep at night. It's having us constantly understand and be aware of what we allow to go unnoticed.

Unaddressed or untreated impacts our nervous system. And our nervous system is core. It runs all the way through our body. Oh, Kelly. Yes. Having a daughter leave for the first year of college is so emotional, especially if she's your first and you're not quite used to that upcoming knee surgery. Joycelyn, please keep us posted on when that surgery is going to happen and how things go. I'll keep you in my thoughts and prayers. And yeah. Work. Trying to pull ourselves out of work. Burnout, recognizing.

Yeah, Jules. It's not an instant process when we're coming out of burnout. It's slow. But our nerves system is going to be one of the primary things that we want to stay connected to. And we want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to try to keep it from being activated for prolonged periods of time. That chronic activation is going to create cortisol. And that level of cortisol that stress hormone can feel astronomical. Let me stop and say this, S. Littleish. I hear you. I've been there.

Where I have felt like I have communicated and said everything that I could to let people know that I'm tired and didn't feel like I was heard or adjustments were made. So my heart goes out to you. I hope that while you're waiting for other people to pay attention that you will pay attention to yourself. Right, Andrea? Also, keeping your difficult situation in mind as well, when we are in that chronic state of activation, our cortisol levels get high and then that actually dulls our emotion regulation and weakens our immune system.

So those are actually the moments that we'll find we are very reactive or tearful or it's difficult to stay in a level of calm. And your immune system will begin to break down. You'll start getting summer colds or just little things start to flare up and can become big things if we're not careful. So high functioning individuals. The challenge, if that's you and I have a feeling quite a few of you fall under that category, is that you might be normalizing an amount of stress that is actually way too much.

And then we also have to be careful that we're not in. What's the word I want to say, communities that socially reward us from going overboard because your nervous system will pay the price. And yeah, limited sleep and physical symptoms are a big part of your nervous system. Saying to you, I am not okay. So here's some common signs that might indicate you're here. You feel guilty when you do rest, or you kind of battle thoughts that other people maybe have said to you about resting. Sometimes we even have inherent family beliefs that teach us that resting and taking time for ourselves is a form of escape and makes us lazy.

So really making sure that you're aware of that we might numb with food or overwork or perfectionism. Now, isn't that interesting? Some of you said that, you know One of your stressors is work. But there are definitely dynamics where we overwork because of other stressors that feel outside of our control. So we then pour ourselves into something that doesn't feel as emotional, and then we find out, you know, then we get ourselves to a place where like, oh, no, this. This is what I'm doing here. So I've got this stress here.

I was trying to feel successful here, and now I'm burnout in both places. You might also over identify with your productivity. So if you feel like you're not a good person, if you're not constantly moving, if everything is not constantly done, if you're not taking care of what everyone else needs, you're going to find yourself in the strong yet exhausted category. Or you may emotionally flatline. Give me some hearts. If you've ever been there. Emotionally flatline, you're like, yeah, I'm fine, but you're not really present.

Things are happening around you, and you're like, I. I don't even have the energy to care. Right. Hearts. If you have been there. If I could do hearts, I would. I need to tell them to make that an update so that we can do the same. So if your plate could talk, and we're talking your tangible plate right now for a moment, maybe it would say, you feed everybody else's needs while starving your own peace. I'm gonna give myself a little credit for that. Is that you. You feed everyone else's needs while starving your own peace.

If that is you, it is okay. If you're recovering from that, it is okay. I know that you mean well, but we don't want your achievement to be a cover for your grief or for your anxiety because that will impact the way that you eat. Food then becomes this functional way of coping. Instead of nourishing yourselves, you might skip meals, you might binge late at night, you might eat emotionally while multitasking, never truly pausing long enough to notice your hunger, your fullness, or your satisfaction.

I would even say there was one day this week where I was just eating all the things I don't have a problem with eating. I think all foods fit. But I am aware enough to know something was going on because I wasn't satisfied. I just kept kind of jumping to random things, and then I stopped and was like, okay, this is not within your typical pattern. What is going on? And then recognized that I was carrying some stressors that I needed to stop, and I need it to address and I need it to reflect on, and I needed to do something.

With those things, I needed to take action. And then once I started to do that, it really, really died down and my appetite went back to kind of its normal place. So always pay attention if you're on the spectrum of not eating, or if you're on the spectrum of you're just kind of eating all the things that are there, because that's also a sign that you're nervous system is letting you know it doesn't feel safe. I want to give you one key tool that I want to encourage you to use if you find yourself in this moment.

Interrupt the I'll rest later narrative. So ask yourself, what am I postponing rest for? And then write a new affirmation like my worth is not in what I produce, it's in who I'm becoming. You know, you can pair this with stopping to actually check in with yourself, take some deep breaths, but I want you to be aware of why am I delaying rest? What do I think is going to be different? What am I saying to myself and what do I believe about myself if I give myself this opportunity? Here's another really important question to ask yourself.

If I delay rest, what are the consequences? And that one might get you even more than the first question. If I don't honor the fact that my body is telling me you're doing too much, you are burnt out, you can barely think straight, your mind is going a million miles an hour, you don't feel like you have clarity, you're struggling to make decisions, you're feeling anxious, you're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling tense, you're irritable. All the things, if I delay rest, what are the consequences of that?

And another opportunity for you to engage. What do you know about yourself when you delay rest? What typically happens? Let me know in the chat. For me, when I delay rest, it's interesting. I don't necessarily get more tired per se. I become wired. So I have pushed past that point where I need it to rest. And then my neurodivergent mind will not slow down. And so then I find it very, very difficult. And it takes twice, maybe two to three times as much work for me to actually bring myself down. So that's going to impact my sleep, that will start impacting my short term memory.

So I will put things down and not remember where I put them down even more than I would normally. I am kind of moving too fast and leaving things open, or misplacing simple things or double booking things. So I can see it mentally, cognitively. And then my sleep Again, diminishes because I'm so wired. And it won't even necessarily be on one in particular thing, but it's just this constant state of my body thinking. We can't rest because there's too much going on. So I want you to be able to track Andrea.

Don't laugh at me. My sister Andrea, if you guys see that she's laughing at me because she's probably like, yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that in action. Now I'll tell some of your stories, too. Play with me. No, I'm kidding. But it's important for you to know, what are the consequences? What are the downside to. Because we absolutely want you to not experience those. And thank you, Mel. I'm glad to know I'm not the only person to become scattered. Whether it's you or people that you know, I want to remind you that behind our polished exterior, many of us are quietly struggling.

But we don't have to prove our value by pushing through pain, right? Our wholeness, our healing harmony comes when we match our outer pace with our inner truth. Rest is not a reward for your effort. It's to prepare for your soul. You don't have to earn ease. I just want you to allow it. So I want you to keep that in mind as you go throughout the week. Plan for rest. Right. You know, by midweek, what it's going to look like. You know, if you're coming off of a busy day, that the next day we want to be a little lighter.

But I want to encourage you to do that. And then come back midweek. Let's reconnect on Wednesday and we will go from there. I hope you all have a really great week. Thank you for all of your shares. I will keep you in my thoughts. And remember, give yourself grace. You really are doing the best you can. I'll see you soon.