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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
I want you to know that if you are in a trauma response around productivity and achievement and if you are using productivity and achievement as a way to keep running because your unconscious and your nervous system feel like I have to be sprinting at all times in order to be safe, you're not gonna be able to look at your calendar. You're not gonna be able to look at your schedule. You're not gonna be able to look at the tasks that are on your plate with a logical capacity to decide are these things important or not? Welcome to Plenti. I'm your host Kate Northrup, and together we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level.
Kate Northrup:Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups.
Voice Over:Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrup or anyone who works within the Kate Northrup brand.
Kate Northrup:Today, I wanna talk about how to slow down and have more stillness in your life without feeling guilty. And all of the mechanics of what's happening under the surface, both from an energetic perspective, from a nervous system perspective, from a cultural conditioning perspective, and also from a productivity perspective. So all of those layers, we're going to address today. Number 1, let's start with cultural conditioning. If you are a woman, if you are a historically marginalized person of any kind, know that part of identity work is pulling out the threads of where we identify with being productive or being busy or staying in motion as part of our proving of our worthiness.
Kate Northrup:In a world, in a culture that has conditioned us to believe that our value is dependent on how much we do, That has told us that our value is dependent on how much we work, on how many hours we've put in, on what results we get. So I just wanna clear the slate here and say, your value is inherently as a human being is completely unrelated to how much you get done, to your productivity, to the results that you create, to literally anything that you do. You were born inherently, infinitely worthy, and you will die inherently, infinitely worthy, and lovable. Now I understand because I have these deeper wiring patterns as well that that tell me, no. No.
Kate Northrup:No. It's not true. You can't lay down right now in the middle of the day because it's not safe to do so because you need to stay busy because there actually can feel like there is a true threat to you physically if you slow down. Now there's a couple of different layers that could be going on there, but if you resonate with that, if you get anxious when you even think about slowing down, the cognitive mind, the logical mind, the prefrontal cortex may tell us, well, the reason I can't slow down is because I have too much to do, and it's because the results in my life, the results in my business are dependent upon me doing all these things. Well, we're gonna get to a conversation about that in a minute of how you can start to dismantle that and actually give yourself alternative data to prove that wrong.
Kate Northrup:But let's just be over here where, okay, you're telling yourself, I can't slow down. I can't take time off because there's too much to do. What is underneath that is the belief that, a, you have to be staying constantly busy in order to get results, and, b, that your value is dependent on staying constantly busy. And your value, not only just your value, but a deeper layer there, your survival is dependent on staying constantly busy. Now there's so many things that go into the neural programming that literally has us firing all of these neurons unconsciously, keeping us in go mode, but one of the things is ancestral inheritance in our DNA.
Kate Northrup:So what we know from the field of epigenetics is that we carry in our DNA imprinting the traumas and joys of our ancestors. So when something happened that was emotionally activating to our ancestors that was associated with survival, that can get imprinted in the DNA that then gets passed down to offspring. So I've talked about this study before, but I'll mention it here again. There is a an a deeply impact impactful study that around the field of epigenetics where they took rats in the lab, and they piped in the smell of cherry blossoms, and then they shocked the rats' paws. So over time, they shocked the rats' paws.
Kate Northrup:So over time, they shocked the rat's paws. So over time, they were able to take away the shock part, so take away the actual physical pain part, but the parts of the rats' brains and nervous systems related to fear and protection would still light up. Right? So that they had created a neural pathway, also known as a neurotag, which is a trigger, the smell of cherry blossoms, associated with an entire patterning physiologically through the nervous system that runs through our entire bodies, that is the fear response. And it you know, there's all sorts of things that can happen from that.
Kate Northrup:You can, you know, go into a sympathetic dominant nervous system response where all of a sudden, now your your blood is being funneled into your outer extremities as opposed to to your inner organs to prepare for fight or flight or sometimes freeze and flop, which is other responses. Okay. So they took those rats. They created the neuro pathway with the cherry blossoms and the and the shocking of the pause. They got rid of the actual physical pain stimulus, and yet their bodies were still lighting up in that same fear pain patterning.
Kate Northrup:Then they looked at rats who were several generations away from those original rats, so they were like the grandbaby rats of those original ones, what they found is that when they piped in the smell of cherry blossoms for those rats, those rats had a fear response physiologically. They never shocked the paws of the grandbaby rats. There never was an actual pain stimulus. The only stimulus was the smell of cherry blossoms. So it was a olfactory stimulus that was not associated in any way with pain in the lived experience of those grandbaby rats, but their bodies remembered.
Kate Northrup:Their bodies remembered the pain from their grandparents. So that can be really heavy to think about if you think about what your ancestors have been through. But when it comes to your own relationship with time, when it comes to your own relationship with work, it's really important to understand that you may be playing out the traumas and triggers of your ancestors who lived through very different times. You know, I know my grandmother lived through the great Depression. I would imagine many people listening, your parents or your parents or grandparents also lived through the Great Depression.
Kate Northrup:That was a time of tremendous contraction, tremendous fear, tremendous scarcity. And so that patterning, even though I have not ever lived through food insecurity, my granny did and she was only 1 generation away from me. You know, I knew my grandmother really well. Her cells, her DNA passed down that scarcity into my body through my mother. In fact, one of the cool things, and I've talked about this before too, but one of the cool things to understand is that every egg that a woman will ever have in her lifetime is already formed in her ovaries when she's at an age of 4 months gestation.
Kate Northrup:So at 4 months gestation, when a woman is pregnant with a baby girl, all of that baby girl's eggs already exist inside them, which means the egg that my body came from actually grew within my grandmother's body. Think about that from an energetic patterning perspective. And, you know, I unfortunately, my grandmother has passed, I'm not able to talk to her about all the things that were going on while she was pregnant with my mom, but I certainly know the stories of her life in her early years, and they were really intense around scarcity and being abandoned by her father and and a whole bunch of other things through the great depression. So that's living in my body, all the patterning around, you know, work that she had, that my mom had, all of it. Right?
Kate Northrup:So when it comes to slowing down and taking some time off, just know that the fear that may come up around that is partially ancestral. Some of it's not even yours, and that's okay. It's just like we need to know that, and we also need to know that the way out of those fear patterns is not talking ourselves out of it. Of course, it's irrational to to for your body ancestrally, lineage wise, there may very well have been someone in your lineage whose DNA you still carry, whose life actually was at risk from them slowing down, whose life actually was at risk from them taking a day off. And we can honor their experience by tending to those traumas in our nervous system today on behalf of the people who we come from, who didn't have the tools, resources, time, abundance, knowledge, data, any of those things to do this work.
Kate Northrup:So we get to do it, and it's such a privilege. And we do heal 7 generations forward and 7 generations back when we do that because we literally update our DNA to say, like, hey, sweet thing. It's actually safe to take the afternoon off. You know? Like, you can go read a book or watch some daytime television or go stare at the horizon.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So that's the ancestral piece. Also, to really understand that for so many of us, productivity is a trauma response, not only from our ancestral experience, but from our own lived experience. I first began to understand this through an incredible woman named Erica Chitty Cohen, whose work you can look up. We'll we'll put her in the show notes.
Kate Northrup:And there's there's tremendous data around our relationship to time and our relationship to work based and that is rooted in trauma. Another phenomenal book around this is doctor Valerie Raines' book, Patriarchy Stress Disorder. Mila Gros Phillips is another woman who teaches around this and especially in the lens of race, and her work is really important as well. So know that if your achievement focus, if your productivity focus is rooted in an unconscious trauma response, of course, slowing down is gonna feel like a threat to your survival. And so what do we do about that?
Kate Northrup:Well, we dial into beginning to tend to our nervous system. We don't try to think a new thought. We don't try to talk our way out of it. We don't try to logic our way out of it because it's illogical. Right?
Kate Northrup:It's illogical, but our body is scared. And so anytime we're having a limiting thought, a thought or a belief that's illogical, if we're having a physiological experience where it's like, I feel like if I take a day off or I feel like if I have blank space on my calendar, I feel panicked about that. It actually feels unsafe to me. It creates anxiety in my body. That's because your body is activating a neural pathway, which is a trigger of stillness and slowness with with a threat.
Kate Northrup:And so we can't handle that on the level of the cognitive. We need to handle that on the level of the physiological, on the level of the soma, on the level of the body. And so we can lean into nervous system healing tools. There's so many of them, but if you want to learn one of my favorites, you can go over to katenorthrup.com, and I have a guide called the pressure relief kit. And in the pressure relief kit, I explain to you one of my favorite nervous system healing tools.
Kate Northrup:You can also send me a DM on Instagram with just the word melt, and you will also get that guide. So we lean into nervous system healing tools to signal to our bodies, hey. You're safe. Right? So when you think about taking a day off and you feel a physiological response, and then that physiological response, you then label as an emotion of of fear, anxiety, constriction, whatever it is, and then you begin to have thoughts and thoughts and beliefs come up, which are simply the meaning our cognitive brain makes of repeated emotions, which are a physiological experience, then that that's how you know it's time to signal safety to your body.
Kate Northrup:When we are having limited beliefs limiting beliefs come up, when we are having negative thoughts come up, when we are spinning in fear or limitation in any way, we just need to know, oh, that's a sign that my body thinks it's unsafe. So now I need to signal safety to my body. Okay. And then you can readdress actually the logical aspect of what is on my calendar. Do these things actually lead to the results that I want, and do I actually need to do all of them?
Kate Northrup:I want you to know that if you are in a trauma response around productivity and achievement, and if you are using productivity and achievement as a way to keep running because your unconscious and your nervous system feel like I have to be sprinting at all times in order to feel to be safe, you're not gonna be able to look at your calendar. You're not gonna be able to look at your schedule. You're not gonna be able to look at the tasks that are are on your plate with a logical capacity to decide, are these things important or not? When we are in a fear pattern, when we are activating the neural tags that tell us that our survival depends on us being in motion all the time and looking busy at all the time. Maybe you've seen one of those bumper stickers that says, Jesus is coming.
Kate Northrup:Look busy. Like, literally, that's the that's the conditioning that so many of us have. Right? That our worthiness, that our our merit, that our value, that our holiness even, that our moral fortitude, like, our moral value lives in our busyness. If that's running the show, if that unconscious programming is running the show, you will not have the capacity to assess, are the things that I'm doing to stay busy actually a good use of my time?
Kate Northrup:Are these things actually necessary? You'll be so lost in the soup of a trauma response that you won't be able to do that, which is why we need to learn to and have practices on board every day to signal safety to our nervous systems. Because when we do that, there's an when we when we are able to tell our body that we are safe, not from a not not linguistically, not verbally, not from our mind, but in our body, physical safety to signal bot safety to your body is a physiological experience. It is not a mental experience. If I'm having a panic attack, telling myself, you're safe, or having somebody else tell me I'm safe, does not stop the panic attack.
Kate Northrup:Right? Like, it doesn't it doesn't work. It's not it's a it's a nonlogical. It's in a totally different part of our wiring. And so when we can learn to signal safety to our bodies, we actually increase our cognitive capacity to have smart decision making, to be able to look at our calendar and say, oh, what makes sense here?
Kate Northrup:What actually is related to my results? And at that point, what I recommend is going and doing an assessment of what you have on your plate and being able to look at what are the 20% of activities that lead to 80% of my results? So this is Pareto's principle, the 80 20 rule. You've probably heard it before. However, my question for you is if you've heard it before, are you implementing it?
Kate Northrup:Have you ever sat down and made a list for yourself of what are the 20% of tasks that get me 80% of the results. Have you ever done that? So if you haven't, it may be because you are running on a trauma response. Like, you're running your productivity. You're running your work life from an unconscious place of fear.
Kate Northrup:But when we can lift ourselves out of that through nervous system healing practices, we're able to then do something like take a look at our tasks in any given week, take a list look at our tasks in our business, and be able to do an assessment where we say, okay. These are actually the ones that get me the results. If you want support with that assessment, my book, Do Less, has this as a broken down exercise. It also, when you go get yourself a copy of Do Less, you can go over to the book page on katenersorp.com, and we have 5 bonuses that you can get for free along with the book Do Less. And one of them is a quick lesson.
Kate Northrup:It's about 20 minutes long. It's a video lesson where I break down even further how to practically assess which 20% of your actions are netting 80% of the results. The cool thing about that is when you get your cognitive capacity back and board back on board when you are now more capable of higher level cognition because your body feels safe, what ends up happening is you can look through and be like, oh, these are the 20% that are giving me 80% of the results. Now I can eliminate or at least automate or delegate the other 80% of everything I'm doing. And what ends up happening from that is that you end up with a lot more free time and space.
Kate Northrup:When we are being busy just for the sake of being busy because we've associated our identity or our worthiness or our safety with the amount of action we take, with the amount of tasks we do, regardless of whether those things are bringing us results, we are caught on the hamster wheel basically sprinting our entire lives, and it absolutely will will lead to burnout. But when we're able to lift ourselves out of that, you can actually do an assessment and get pretty clear pretty fast on, like, woah, wow. Okay. I was doing all this stuff, but it turns out, like, for example, if you have an online business and you're looking at traffic sources because you wanna grow your email list, make a list of all the different traffic So I've got my social media. I've got my podcast.
Kate Northrup:I've got guest posts that I do on media outlets, perhaps. I've got my backlinks from, you know, when I've been interviewed on other people's sites. I've got search engine I've got, like, Google, just when people do a search, that's a traffic source. I've got my Pinterest. I've got, you know so those are some just different examples of traffic sources that you may have, and then you can actually look at the numbers and be, like, oh, wow.
Kate Northrup:Okay. When I look at it, actually, 80% of my traffic is coming from Pinterest. Wow. That's so interesting. But I'm spending 80% of my time making Instagram reels, but only 3% of my traffic is coming from Instagram.
Kate Northrup:Does that make any sense logistically? It doesn't Doesn't make any sense. So you could actually probably take away all the Instagram reels or at least, like, vastly minimize the time and energy over there, double down on Pinterest, and you'll get a huge spike in traffic from taking the 80% of your time that was devoted to things that were not getting you results and putting that time and attention on the thing that is getting results and just eliminating all that other noise. So so that's a practical example, and we all have those examples in our own businesses. But the problem is we're so busy trying to prove our worthiness and trying to, quote unquote, stay safe by being busy all the time that we don't take the time to take that 30,000 foot view and actually do an assessment on what matters and what doesn't.
Kate Northrup:And then the final thing I wanna say here is that the risk of slowing down is that you will then need to feel a bunch of things that you perhaps have been avoiding feeling for decades. That's why most of us don't slow down because being busy is an excellent numbing strategy. So what do you do about that? Well, I'm just gonna you know, I'm just just possibly hearing me say it was an for you, and I really recommend getting support. You know, if you do have really intense things that have happened in your past, getting support to work through those things emotionally is one of the best investments you can make.
Kate Northrup:And there are more and more resources popping up that make therapy and make that kind of mental health support more and more available, more and more accessible. But this will be no surprise to you. I don't think that traditional talk therapy is always the best way to go. I'm a huge believer in somatic practices that actually help us to metabolize our feelings physically because that's where the emotions live. The emotions do not live exclusively in the mind, in the conscious mind.
Kate Northrup:In fact, most of them don't live there. They live in the body, so just sitting around talking about them can actually, in my experience, make it worse because then you're just, like, chewing it over again, chewing it over again with your cognitive brain, and that is not the data doesn't show us that that is what actually liberates us from the old patterning. What actually liberates us from the old patterning is finally feeling the feelings with safety guards up. And the truth is that when we allow ourselves to actually feel a feeling, it tends to pass in about 90 seconds, believe it or not. Not when we are feeling a feeling and then telling a story about it and getting stuck in the story.
Kate Northrup:No. Just when we are riding the wave of physical sensation that comes with a feeling. All a feeling is is a group of sensations in your body. That's literally it. Our mind, though, tells us all these stories about what it means because we are meaning making machines.
Kate Northrup:But the truth is, if you're just in the feeling, not in the story, it will shift in about 90 seconds. And so the practice of doing feeling in small, doable parts is what I really recommend. It's called titration. It's, titration is a term in nervous system healing of doing a small doable piece. If you're feeling angry, could you set a timer for 90 seconds to give yourself permission and a safeguard to feel the anger and then just notice what happens after 90 seconds?
Kate Northrup:Could you put on an anger playlist and stomp around your bedroom or scream into a pillow? What are the ways that you could actually give yourself permission to feel what comes up? I promise you, when you give yourself permission to feel and know that feeling your feelings is an incredibly productive use of your time, like, probably way more productive than checking off everything on your to do list. What ends up happening is when you do get back to your to do list, when you do get back to your quote unquote productive tasks in your business or in your work or in your life, you're able to show up with so much more fullness because your bandwidth is not being taken up by holding all of these stuck emotions. And you'll probably get things done a lot more quickly and a lot more effectively because you're actually fully there as opposed to, you know, stuck at the age of 14, 15, 17, 3 3 months, 9 months, you know, all the different ages that are sort of, like, stuck in our psyche because we we didn't know how to feel, we didn't have the support how to feel, we were told that our feelings were bad or dangerous or irrational or scary or unacceptable or, you know, all the things that we were told about our feelings.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So in summary, if you are someone who feels guilty about slowing down, who feels scared to have stillness, you come by it honestly, and there's nothing wrong with you. There are very real physiological reasons that that you're having that experience, and I hope that this episode gave you some places to start in order to begin to lean into healing your nervous system so that you can give yourself the permission to finally slow down and savor your life, and also to take that 30,000 foot view and determine what are the things that are actually a good use of my time, what is not a good use of my time because you will be able to not only slow down and savor your life, but also skyrocket your results when you can get out of the trauma response enough to be able to take a smart, logical, cognitive look at your to do list and decide what to what to keep and what to eliminate or delegate or automate. Thank you so much, and I will see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review.
Kate Northrup:That's one of the best ways that you can ensure to spread the abundance of plenty with others. You can even text it to a friend and tell them to listen in. And if you want even more support to expand your abundance, head over to katenorthrup.comforward/breakthroughs where you can grab my free money breakthrough guide that details the biggest money breakthroughs from some of the top earning women I know, plus a mini lesson accompanying it with my own biggest money breakthroughs and a nervous system healing tool for you to expand your abundance. Again, that's over at kate northrup.com forward slash breakthroughs. See you next time.