Content Note: Brief mention of the US/Israel‑initiated war in Iran and the grind of "keep producing anyway." Not to analyze every detail, but to acknowledge the emotional and nervous‑system load many of us are carrying this week and how we might tend to our own needs in the middle of it.
This past week has felt like a collision of big and small shocks.
On the big side: another unnecessary war launched and amplified in the news. The kind that makes your stomach drop and your nervous system whisper, "Of course they did."
On the smaller side: today, if you're in the U.S. mainly but parts of Canada and a few other countries, we were told to "spring forward." Lose an hour of sleep. Pretend our bodies are clocks we can just drag ahead because the calendar says so.
While these two things are not the same, they often create a similar outcome for many of us: more pressure to override our bodies and just keep going.
Push forward. Keep moving. Keep producing.
And in the middle of all of that, or because of all that, you might be looking at your own life thinking, "Why am I wobbling on something I already worked so hard to change?"
Maybe it's the boundary you keep re-drawing with clients.
Maybe it's the more gentle planning rhythm you set up for this quarter.
Maybe it's how you pace your work around your symptoms instead of pretending you have a robot body.
You thought you were past this part. You thought you had it "handled."
And then something happens—a flare week, a news headline, a schedule shift—and suddenly you’re stumbling over the same old pattern again.
It feels like a circle.
It looks like: "Here we go again. I guess I didn’t learn anything after all."
But most of the time, what you’re in is not a circle.
It’s a spiral.
When I look back at my five burnouts, they used to look like laps around the same awful track.
👉 17 and falling asleep in class after closing up the tanning salon at midnight.
👉 20 and having panic attacks before I get out of bed during my first corporate job.
👉 26 and losing my entire hand-lettering career to carpal tunnel because I thought "doing what you love" meant I could ignore limits.
👉 29–31 and trying to build a business around burnout prevention while I watched myself hurtle toward burnout again.
For years, I treated each of those moments as evidence that I was broken.
Same pattern, different scenery. Clearly I just wasn't disciplined enough, healed enough, organized enough.
What I see now is that every burnout carried a different piece of data.
Each one moved me a quarter-turn around the spiral:
from "I just need to try harder"
to "maybe corporate is the problem"
to "maybe entrepreneurship will fix it"
to "oh, I can burn out doing work I love"
to "wait, what if the system is the thing that’s broken, not me?"
From the outside, it looked like I kept ending up in the same place.
On the inside, every wobble was happening at a slightly different height, with a slightly clearer view.
That's what a spiral is: same neighborhood, different floor.
The wobble is what it feels like to walk the stairs.
In weeks like this one, when the world feels volatile and your sleep is literally being stolen by policy, your systems are going to wobble.
The boundary that felt permeable and maintained last month might be feeling porous.
The planning view that felt like a perfect fit might suddenly feel itchy, restrictive.
The way you relate to your work might tilt, just a bit, under the weight of the news and the daylight and your very human body.
None of that is proof that your systems "didn't work" or that you "failed" at following through.
It's proof that you are alive, inside a culture that was never built with your body, brain, or values in mind.
The wobble is not the part where you push harder.
The wobble is the part where you keep going—gently.
Where you keep showing up to the experiment long enough to notice:
What stayed steady even when everything tilted.
What cracked immediately under pressure.
What actually helped your nervous system settle, even just 5%.
That information is gold.
One of the most powerful re-frames I ever gave myself was this:
"I am not starting over. I’m starting from data."
✅ Every time a boundary gets tested, you get more information about where it needs reinforcement.
✅ Every time a new planning rhythm creaks under the weight of real life, you get more information about what your actual capacity looks like on the ground, not just in your head.
✅ Every time your body calls a timeout — whether from illness, grief, or sheer exhaustion — you get more information about what your systems ask of you, and what you actually have to give.
Inside productivity culture, that wobble is framed as failure. The story goes:
"If this really mattered to you, you'd be consistent."
Inside a spiral-shaped view of growth, consistency looks different.
It looks like returning.
Coming back to the work of building a life and business that can hold you, even after a news headline knocks the wind out of you or daylight savings steals your spoons.
It looks like letting today’s version of you—with today's sleep, today's pain levels, today's grief—have a say in how the system runs.
It looks like trusting that re-learning a lesson doesn’t mean you never learned it.
It means you're learning it in a new context, with more information—more wisdom.
Try This
Name the Wobble
If you’re in a wobble right now, here’s a small experiment to treat it like data instead of a verdict:
Name the wobble. One sentence, no judgment.
"I keep abandoning my gentler workday plan at 2pm."
"Every time I get close to inbox zero, I panic and over-respond."
"The news has my brain buzzing and I can't drop into deep work."Locate the spiral. Ask yourself: When have I been in a version of this before?
Not to shame yourself, but to notice the pattern. Where were you then? What was different? What did you know then that you didn't at the time of the earlier wobble?Extract one piece of data. Instead of asking, "Why can't I get it together?" try, "What is this wobble trying to tell me?"
Maybe it’s, "This planning rhythm needs more padding on flare days," or "Checking the news before work is wrecking my focus," or "My boundary is clear in my head but not in my client agreements."Adjust by 5%, not 500%. Let yourself make a tiny, spiral-sized shift: move one meeting, add one buffer block, change when you look at your phone, ask for one clearer expectation. Then notice how that feels over the next week.
You don't have to "fix" the wobble.
You just have to keep staying in relationship with it.
Side note: If it feels strange to talk about boundaries, nervous system work, and even stolen sleep in the middle of war headlines, you’re not alone or wrong. There is real privilege in being able to pause and notice how all of this lands in our bodies, and I want to acknowledge and name that because I feel the tension too. At the same time, noticing how these shocks move through us (and refusing to pretend we’re robots who can just keep producing) is part of staying human in a world that demands otherwise.
So this is my reminder—to you, and to myself—that the intentional choices we make about what we pour where, what we build accommodations around in our days, and what we let be imperfect or undone are all part of how we stay resourced enough to show up beyond ourselves.
These little rebellions are meaningful, even when they feel small.
Currently Obsessed
Spring. In addition to DST, it’s been warm enough here long enough that I already need to get the mower out and Cade is stopping to smell the daffodils on our walks.
Nail trends. I go through seasons where I’ll paint my nails a lot and then will not for a good 3-9 months. I have to admit that these predicted nail trends have me wanting to pull my supplies out. The tattoo nails (not to be confused with people tattooing on their nails) are definitely making me wish I had steadier hands!
Writing Buddies. Last year I joined a writing community to help support me in the shift I’ve been making in my work outside of client focused hours. Part of the community is being matched with a value and needs-aligned buddy where you can build friendship and support around this particular type of creativity. As someone who always struggled making friends, both as a kid and an adult, the effects have been life-changing both on a personal and professional level.
P.S.
A Cozy Ruckus is where we go deeper with essays like this every Sunday. On Tuesdays, I share the more practical side with behind‑the‑scenes looks at what I’m building and implementing, plus occasional invitations to my work over on The Bridge. If you’d like to get those Tuesday emails too, tap the button below.
