In this week’s episode, I want to share something that’s very real for me right now. Something I went through just last week.

I found myself spinning in stress and overwhelm. 

Not because I had too much to do — but because even the things I wanted to do — like this podcast — felt heavy.

It was like I couldn’t move fast enough.

Every task I started made me feel like I should be doing something else instead.

Time felt slippery. I felt like a failure, like I was falling behind. I had to catch up on life. 

I had found myself in a dysregulated space. And even with all the inner work I’ve done—
I slipped back into doing more, overthinking, over-efforting.

Until I paused. And in that pause, something shifted.

In this episode I’m sharing what I saw in that moment, how I came back to calm, and why doing more isn’t the answer when everything already feels like too much.

The Struggle to Slow Down

Last week, I found myself spinning. I was struggling to feel aligned and present, and found myself switching back to my old default operating system — hustling and stressing.

Last week, I found myself spinning.

I was struggling to feel aligned and present, and found myself switching back to my old default operating system — hustling and stressing. 

It creeped up on me in sneaky ways. Things that I actually wanted to do, like this podcast, read, learn and engage in the communities I’m in, felt like pressure. 

As soon as I started on one task, I felt anxious and convinced myself that the other task is more important and more urgent. 

I kept task switching and it felt like time, my dreams and my life was running away from me.

I had the thought that I’ll never have the time to finish all the things I want to do, read all the books I want to read or go to all the places I want to go. 

I was convinced that it’s a ridiculous idea to step into the role of a coach, mentor and space holder, that my dreams are too big and that I should get a grip and come back to reality. 

I was overwhelmed. I felt like life was a competition and I was losing. I fell into a black hole of LACK.

I recognized this feeling. 

The first time I remember feeling it was when I was 13 or 14 years old, we had just moved back to Finland from Sweden, I had started a new school.

The school system in Finland is very different from the system I had experienced in Sweden.

Suddenly, everything was very serious, and very disciplined. The class had to stand up for the teacher before every lecture, we had grades and tests and overall it felt like I had stepped from childhood straight into adulthood without any transition period. I

I hated my new school and I missed my old friends and my old teacher. I cried more or less every day before school. 

Because we had grades we also had A LOT more formal tests than what I was used to – we had a test every single week. I spent every single Thursday to Tuesday studying for the coming test, only taking a break for tennis lessons, piano lessons and Friday family dinner. 

The number of books I had to consume, and the amount of information I had to memorise was extremely overwhelming.

I remember sitting at my desk in my room looking at the books, looking at the days I had to learn it all and just concluding that it was an impossible task. I did raise this with my teacher, and she basically just said “tough luck, that’s how it is as a you grow older, the pressure increases.”

I interpreted that as, “you’re on your own honey”. 

So there I was, with too many books and too little time, and no one really to help me figure out how to manage it all. 

The feeling – time is running out. I am behind. Everyone else’s got this. And if I fail, I will die. 

This is the exact feeling that showed up last week. And my 14 year old showed up with her strategies – more effort, more work, more doing.

My 14 year old self didn’t believe she was safe, worthy or loved unless she memorised all the information and aced it at the test. She was alone in the experience, and for her, time WAS running out and it WAS scary. 

I’m stepping outside of my comfort zone more than ever right now – with this podcast, with my coaching program, and with my business. It felt scary and overwhelming and triggered my nervous system. 

When I was triggered, I lost connection with my True self. And so I assumed that I actually was lacking something – time, worthiness – and tried my old strategy of pushing to get what I needed.  

Did it work?

No.

The result was that I just created more of what I was being – I added more things to my to-do list, I started second-guessing myself, and procrastinated the things I wanted to do and the things I actually did manage to do were created in a state of stress and fear. 

I was reinforcing self-doubt. 

The Power of Awareness and Pausing 

Now, I’ve created quite a bit of awareness around my pattern, we’re old friends after all, so I caught myself. 

I paused. 

This is the win in this story. This is why I am sharing this story, to show you how small of a step it is to step into your future self. 

I paused and I noticed. 

I noticed that I was in fight or flight mode. 

I was feeling jittery, I couldn’t sit still and I was trying to overcompensate by working harder. 

This turned into flight after a while – I started cleaning the kitchen counter and organising.

This is a classic flight response – getting busy with something that’s completely the opposite of the situation at hand in the hope that what you actually have to do will just go away on its own.

Fight or flight isn’t just screaming or hiding. For high-functioning, sensitive people it can show up as an invisible pressure to overcompensate through doing. It’s that “I can’t stop, even though I know I need to” –feeling.

And I wanted to slow down, but it felt impossible. Rolling out my yoga mat or meditating wasn’t what I needed. 

In fight-or-flight (sympathetic activation), your body is mobilized. Your system believes there is a threat, and it prepares you to run or fight.

But here’s the glitch: When there’s no physical outlet (because the threat is conceptual—deadlines, pressure, time scarcity, “not being enough”), that energy has nowhere to go. So it gets stuck, and you either:

• Stay hyper-aroused and spin in our heads
• Dissociate into freeze if we can’t act on it
• Or “overfunction” by doing more and trying to control the chaos

Slowing down feels unsafe in this state because it mimics collapse or helplessness, which your system is trying to avoid.

To regulate yourself, you need to meet your body where it is, not where you want it to be.

What I did was to let my body do something physical so it wouldn’t feel trapped:

• I did a few squats with strong exhales.
• After this, I pushed my hands into a wall. This meets the fight energy and roots it.
• Finally, I oriented myself back into the room. Just noticing the space I was in, letting myself take in objects, colors, smells and sounds. 

This reminded my nervous system that I am here now, and that it’s safe enough to soften.

When I was back in my body, I reached out to my coach community. I shared my experience and what I was going through. 

Being seen and held by others helped regulate me further. Connection is regulation.

We heal when we are being seen by others.

My coach reminded me to get to the root of the pattern

I realised that this didn’t show up randomly. There was a reason my 14 year old made a visit. 

My coach told me

“Life force exists in the bottom of an emotion. You unlock new energy, more vitality, and more of your life force by going to the emotion and feeling it at it’s depth.” 

I asked myself: What’s going on really? What am I resisting or fearing? What’s scary here?

The answer that came to me was that slowing down felt scary.

If I slow down, I won’t be able to complete all the things I need to complete.

I’ll fail and if I fail, I’ll be rejected, alone and ultimately die.

This might feel dramatic, but that is the fear that my 14 year old self actually had. It was very real for her, so it’s very real for the triggered part of me. 

Fears are seldom rational, so don’t laugh at them, feel them.  

I have big plans and dreams – with my business and with my personal life – and I am creating this “new” life from a different place. I’m not doing it like I used to. 

Instead, I’m acting on my intuition. I’m prioritising BEING, not DOING. This BEING is making time for rest, movement and fun things.

And this is all happening, while I’m going for bigger and bolder ideas. 

In the last few weeks there’s been a lot of new things happening – I released this podcast, I released my website and my coaching offering. I’ve expanded my yoga offering to include breathwork. I’ve spoken with many potential clients, met new people.

I’ve upgraded my dreams even further. 

The new way of doing things triggered the 14 year old in me who does NOT feel safe with doing things calmly. 

She saw my vision board and went into panic mode – screaming “If you want all of this, you better get to work and do it faster – what are you doing resting? You’ll be rejected and die if you fail!”

She was trying to keep me safe. 

That’s the thing. Your protective parts make sense. They parts aren’t bad, even if they do get in the way of what you want. They show up to protect you, using a strategy they had learned when that strategy worked.

I met her, and I felt the emotion at it’s depth.

Feeling fear is not comfortable, and it was scary because I was taken back to those awful school years, feeling lonely, abandoned and unseen. But I reminded myself that it IS safe to feel the feeling.

The feeling is not dangerous. Admittedly, this is easier to do when someone is holding space for you, and if you’ve never felt your feelings before, just the thought of approaching them might feel impossible.

In this case I do recommend working with someone. Be patient and kind with yourself. 

Getting to the root of this feeling was very liberating. It gave me the opportunity to peel off another layer of the onion, and get deeper into my truth. 

And I knew that this is what I had to do, otherwise I will keep on repeating the same pattern over and over again.

Time in itself doesn’t heal anything. 

You need new energy and new consciousness to break a pattern.

You can’t solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it.

There’s no point trying to think yourself through a trigger. Don’t even engage the mind. In this state, you cannot trust your thoughts. 

When you go into I need to overwork, and then you try to solve it with overworking or thinking yourself through it, it’s just going to create more of what’s going on. 

You are Here Now – There’s No Where to Go

My coach shared a great analogy with me.

When you are triggered, you’ve fallen off the boat. drowning. When you’ve deep in the water, you need to swim to dry land, you need to get back to ground, to shore. You can help yourself when you are drowning.

This is what regulation does. 

From this place, you can take ownership of your situation. 

When I was regulated, I asked myself: How my future self would act? This helped me step into presence and gratitude. 

In this state, I realised – there is NO where to go.

I am here. I am already doing whatever the destination is.

The illusion that I have to get somewhere is a lie. 

You’re not behind, and you never will be.

There’s no future, there’s no past.

And nothing has meaning. It’s only our mind that gives things meaning. And the default mode of the mind is negativity, lack and fear. Because it’s wired for survival. 

In this I had a realisation: I am becoming the kind of person who accepts where she is. And actually feel grateful for it.

It so simple, but so profound:

This is my life now. What I am doing now, feeling my feelings and regulating myself IS my life. This IS my growth. This is my becoming.  And I can love it here. There’s no where to go. 

In that acknowledgement, my body relaxed.

My invitation to you is to stop resisting the moment. 

Stop making your current reality wrong.

Stop chasing the future in a way that disconnects you from now.

That is where your power starts to flow back in. 

And from this empowered state, you can choose to be the person you wanna be.  You can step into your future self. Now. 

You don’t have to wait for all the things to come to you before you can feel at peace. 

Before you can feel happy, before you can feel joy.

And in this process, I once again realized something I’ve read in multiple books and something you probably already know:

The freedom you seek is the freedom from your own mind.

You might have projected the feeling onto something else, but in reality that is the freedom you’re seeking.  

We are literally our own worst enemy, and that might feel difficult to hear, but it’s also liberating.  

The funny thing is when you free yourself from the mind.

When you stop believing all of your thoughts, you align with your True Self, your higher self, you align with an intelligence that is so much bigger than any of us, and you have access to this intelligence, which means you are infinitely creative. 

From this place, you can create effortlessly.

You will always have ideas and you will always know the next step because it will be just in front of you. 

Essentially you can manifest anything and everything you ever dreamed of.  

That was it for today!

If this resonated with you, I invite you to take even just 30 seconds today to pause and check in with your body.

If you want go deeper with this work, head to Work with Monika or email me at monika@nulltheselflovepath.com

I’d love to hear what part of this episode landed most. 

Sending you all the love.  See you next week. 

And remember: Your worth is predesigned. You don’t need to earn it.