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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.
We exhaust ourselves, and then we're no good to anyone, including ourselves. Nervous system healing allows us to make more while doing less. A nervous system that is in its range of resonance makes better financial decisions. Welcome to Plenty. 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. 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. Welcome to 2026 or whenever you are listening to this. If it's the beginning of the year for you or if if it's any time, but if it's the beginning of the year for you and you already feel the pressure to reinvent yourself, set goals, new year, new you, rebrand, you know, resurrect, all of those things, and you're feeling that pressure, I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you if it doesn't feel right.
Kate Northrup:The truth is that January 1 being the start of the year is arbitrary, and the Gregorian calendar was created by Pope Gregory the eighth in the year 1582. So at that time, he just made it up that the year would start on January 1, which, by the way, cyclically speaking, is the dead of winter. It is not new beginning vibes whatsoever. We're gonna get into that in a minute. It's important for us all to know that this was a political and agricultural control mechanism so that it could standardize time across empires and economies.
Kate Northrup:In no way, shape, or form is the the Gregorian calendar that we follow aligned with life itself. And so I'm gonna talk about the important things to know about that calendar, how aligning with it exclusively may be harming your health and your bottom line, and what to do instead. So today's episode is a real reclamation of time and reclamation of energy, and it is instructions for you to become your own power and prosperity source by aligning with life itself instead of an externalized idea of time that was based on economic profit, not supporting life. Okay. So the Gregorian calendar is solar.
Kate Northrup:It is linear, and it is transactional. It's really built around production, not regeneration. And if you have ever felt like you start January full of intention, and by February, you're already burned out and grinding your gears and exhausted, there's nothing wrong with you. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the history of time and why our experience of the Gregorian calendar may not actually be in alignment with our experience of living life in a human body.
Kate Northrup:Pre Gregorian calendar, we looked at time more cyclically and community based, and it was connected to growing cycles, planting cycles, and the moon. And many indigenous and eastern cultures like the Chinese culture, Hebrew, and Islamic still follow the lunar or what's called lunisolar, so a combination calendar which honors rest, darkness, and renewal before emergence. Right? If you look at planet Earth, there are four seasons. If you look at the day, there's light and dark.
Kate Northrup:If you look at the way planting and growing works, how life itself grows, we know that there's a time of fallow. There's a time of planting seeds. There's a time of bloom, and there's a time of harvest. It is not harvest all year round, and expecting ourselves to be in perpetual harvest and expecting ourselves to be in harvest time when we're actually in the energy of darkness, of rest, of wintertime is extraction. It's purely extraction energy, and it's out of sync.
Kate Northrup:It's out of alignment. It's out of integrity with the truth of who we are and the pulse of nature itself, the rhythm of nature and life itself. Now the Gregorian calendar systemized times for harvests, taxation, and trade, and it made time measurable, but also monetizable. So the Gregorian calendar was primarily for economic gain, for standardization, for production, and profit. And there's a particular historian named E.
Kate Northrup:P. Thompson who noted the rise of clock time in the industrial age turned humans into time discipline machines. What if what if this was the year where you lost track of time? What if this was the year where you moved from Kronos time, which is measurable time, what we're talking about with the Gregorian calendar and standardization, to and linear time to Kairos time, which is timeless time, which is the moments where we're so present that we don't know how long has passed, where time expands and contracts, and it simultaneously feels like it's been thirty seconds and thirty years. When we look back on our lives, the times that are the most meaningful for us tend to be kairos times.
Kate Northrup:The examples I often give are the first five seconds that you held your child or your niece or nephew or godchild for the first time. Right? Time stands still. You're not sitting there thinking, ugh, you know, it's been thirty seconds already. It's been five minutes already.
Kate Northrup:You can just stare into those eyes or watch that baby sleep for an eternity and never move, or those moments in meditation where you just drop all the way down, and it feels so sweet, and you wanna stay forever versus when you're stuck in traffic and you're late to get to the airport, or you're trying to get your seven year old to tie their shoes in the morning so that you can get in the car at the right time so that you can make it to school on time to be in the standardized Kronos world. Right? What if this was the year where more often you were able to lose track of time and experience kairos. Important to also know that there's this study of, there's a field of study called chronobiology, which is the study of biological rhythms, and it shows that humans are in fact rhythmic creatures. If you've read my book, Do Less, and followed along, you already know that.
Kate Northrup:Right? We are not the same every single day. We are different according to the seasons, according to our cycles, And this is true for men, women, and people of all genders. It's it's different depending on your hormonal makeup, but all of us are rhythmic creatures. And we have ultradian cycles, which are ninety minute cycles.
Kate Northrup:If anybody's ever tried to learn baby sleep, you know that we have these ninety minute cycles. And if you have a newborn baby, it's really great to help them get to sleep every ninety minutes or so because of the way our ultradian cycles work. We have circadian cycles, and that's our twenty four hour cycle. And then we have infradian cycles, which are more monthly and seasonal. So this is the field of study of chronobiology.
Kate Northrup:And when we work with these rhythms, it improves our focus, it improves our creativity, and it improves our well-being. And when we ignore our cycles, when we try to be these time bound machines, we actually oh my gosh. A deer just is crossing across my backyard as I'm recording this. That is so beautiful. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is.
Kate Northrup:So according to Harvard Business Review, if we ignore our chronobiology, it increases cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and it increases our burnout risk. Meaning, we exhaust ourselves, and then we're no good to anyone, including ourselves. Right? Because in the name of, quote, unquote, productivity, when we push and ignore the needs of our bodies, when we ignore our chronobiology, we end up having the opposite impact that we wanted, which was to be more productive. And instead, we end up grinding our gears, ending up in burnout, and then we are the opposite of productive.
Kate Northrup:Right? Okay. So a reframe for you is that time itself isn't the problem. It's the way we've been taught to measure it. So now let's talk about the truth of renewal.
Kate Northrup:The body and the earth do not start fresh on January 1. January 1 is just a made up date. It is irrelevant and arbitrary. I really want you to hear that. So no matter when you are listening to this, just know that the whole calendar is somewhat irrelevant, and it is much more important to listen in to the needs of your body and also to the cycles and seasons of nature as our guide to access, to align with, to unlock ultimate prosperity.
Kate Northrup:So winter in the Northern Hemisphere, which is right now, is a time of deep rest and integration. Nature isn't starting over. It's composting what's complete. Okay? So this is a very important concept.
Kate Northrup:Nature does not start fresh on January 1. Instead, wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere is a time of laying fallow. It's a time where underneath the surface, there's so much happening. When our bodies are at rest, there's so much happening. There's a whole chapter in do less about sleep as a spiritual practice, and there's incredible data in there about all of the healing and the regeneration and the integration that happens during our sleep.
Kate Northrup:The same thing is true on the planet. The same thing is true of all of us when we rest even if it's not like sleep sleep. There's a whole field of study of deep rest, which maybe we'll get into in another episode. But the truth is that true energetic renewal doesn't really start to bubble up until the lunar New Year, until the first new moon of the year. It's also right around the time of Groundhog's Day, which is the same day as a Earth based holiday called Imbolc, which is the halfway mark between the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, December 21, and the spring equinox, which is the day when the amount of sunlight and the amount of darkness during the day is equal, and that happens around March 20.
Kate Northrup:My birthday is March 21, so it's always the first day of spring, the first day that the light begins to return. So when we sync up with the natural light and dark cycles and seasonal patterns, we actually regulate our circadian rhythms, and we regulate our serotonin and dopamine production. There's some really good research from Stanford on light exposure and mood regulation. And what do you think happens when we sync up our our work and our lives with the light and dark? It makes us more tapped into our power.
Kate Northrup:It makes us more tapped in to being an energy source. It makes us more aligned with the rhythm of life itself, which by nature of being aligned with the rhythm of life and resting when it's time to rest and running when it's time to run and doing the in between when it's time to do do the in between, it actually makes us more powerful, more insightful, more innovative, more creative, more magnetic. So when we actually align with the true cycles and seasons of nature, we tend to get more meaningful work done. We tend to have a bigger impact literally and then also energetically. Now when we slow down in winter, it actually primes the nervous system for sustainable growth just like a tree drawing sap inward to prepare for new shoots.
Kate Northrup:So when we really give ourselves permission to be in rest mode from the darkest day of the year, which is December 21, all the way until that in bulk time right around February 2 or whenever the lunar New Year is, which tends to be a little bit later, and we when we gradually allow ourselves to emerge from the darkness just like a plant, just like an animal waking up from from hibernation. Right? The bear doesn't awake in its den from hibernation and just start sprinting and, like, try to hit all of its quarterly goals. No. There's a there's a slower process of making sure that the blood flow begins, making sure that there's a slower wake up.
Kate Northrup:Because when we allow ourselves to take our time, we preserve our energy reserves, and we actually fuel our energy reserves rather than burning all of our fuel fast. Right? Like, when we a good analogy for this is when you drive a car, if you have a car that tracks your mileage, mine does because it's a it's a hybrid, so it'll kinda show me how efficient I've been being. If I accelerate super fast, right, if I go from, like, zero to 60 in my little Toyota Prius, which is hard to do, and I try to accelerate and go from, like, zero to 60 really, really fast, it's wildly inefficient, and it not only burns up my battery if I've charged the car, it will burn a lot more gas. It makes my gas depleted.
Kate Northrup:Our bodies are the same. If we go from zero to 60 and try to override our body's signals, we actually burn up the fuel reserves that we had to begin with. This is a a money connection now. When we force ourselves to be hitting the ground running January 1, we often over effort, and we create brittle new beginnings. What do I mean by that?
Kate Northrup:Well, I mean, it's fine. Listen. It's fine if you launch in January, and that's part of your rhythm and you've planned for it. So I'm not saying don't launch anything in January. All I'm saying is when we go against the rhythm that our body and our business and commerce, that our body needs and and and that the bodies in our businesses or in our workplace needs, we tend to burn out hot and fast.
Kate Northrup:And what I mean by brittle new beginnings is that they don't have the root system for sustainability. Right? It's like you do a promotion one time, and then you're never able to get it up and running again because it required so much of your fuel to go from zero to 60. Or it required, like, let's say you align with the season and you're feeling the fresh energy in the in the spring, it's not going to require as much energy, time, or resources to get something going when the season supports it, when the rhythm of the earth supports it. It's like being able to coast down a hill versus if you are trying to get something going when you're already exhausted, when the season doesn't support it, when half your team is on vacation or whatever, it's like trying to push a boulder up a hill.
Kate Northrup:It just takes a lot more energy, and you can't get the traction as easily as you would if you were to do it in alignment with the cycles and the seasons. Now when we rest, restore, and plan cyclically, like I teach you how to do inside Heal the Way You Work, we make decisions from clarity. Right? We're able to focus in and and drop in with all of our wisdom, with all of our connection to source, with all of our communication superhighway between ourselves and our higher power or the divine or whatever you wanna call it. And so the decisions we make are more powerful, are more aligned, and are aligned with the big dreams that we have for ourselves and the world, and we're able to make progress actually much more powerfully.
Kate Northrup:And it allows us to work less and make more money because we're not fighting our biology. When you stop fighting your biology, it allows you to make more money while working less. That's the power of aligning the way you relate to time with nature itself. Let me remind you, you are nature itself. Now let's talk about aligning your year with real rhythm.
Kate Northrup:So I'm gonna offer you a new map for time that supports life, creativity, and profitability. So right now until the equinox, so this episode is coming out in early January twenty twenty six. This is a time for really composting and clarity. What do I mean by composting? It's taking that which is no longer needed and allowing it to recycle into fertile material to prime new growth.
Kate Northrup:That's what compost is. So here are a couple of journaling prompts. What from last year is still unfinished? And does it need completion, or does it need to be released? Am I gonna complete it, or am I gonna compost it?
Kate Northrup:Journaling prompt number two. Where am I craving more rest, reflection, or silence? And here's a business and wealth reframe. This is the perfect time for visioning, focusing on what's working, really savoring in contentment everything you've already planted, bloomed, and harvested, and also a great time for pruning. It may be the time to lay fallow to allow your proverbial fields to re fertilize, to allow for the nutrients to bubble up and prepare for a new growing cycle, but it may not be the ultimate time for launching and scaling unless that's how your business works, in which case, great.
Kate Northrup:And then ask yourself, how can I do this launch? How can I do this promotion? How can I do this campaign or this initiative while honoring the season I'm in? Because you still can absolutely have a wildly successful launch this time of year by still honoring rest, by setting great boundaries, by not overdoing, by focusing on the 20% that gets you 80% of the results. Those are all incredibly effective strategies.
Kate Northrup:So please don't hear what I'm saying as gospel. You can absolutely receive what you're hearing right now and apply it to whatever you've got going on in your work life. Now the next phase would be from equinox to the summer solstice. So around March 20 to June 21. That would be the next season, and this is the season of planting an action.
Kate Northrup:In my framework of the upward cycle of success, I call this phase emergence. So we'll have the springtime energy in the year, but then we also have an emergent season for any project or, in our business year. And so look at this as emergence. By the way, the previous season of composting and clarity, I call the fertile void. Okay?
Kate Northrup:But now we're in kind of springtime energy. So this is a time to begin to plant seeds from the clarity you received from going within the last season. A great nervous system tip is to expand gradually and not burst into growth. I talked about that with my Prius trying to go from zero to 60 and burning up all the battery power or burning up all the fuel. In order to become a regenerative power source, we need to be aware of how we can best steward the resources we have, and going from zero to 60 tends to not be the best way to do that.
Kate Northrup:Now a financial reframe for you also is that small consistent action creates compounding trust in the body and the bank account. Right? So deposits made over time in accounts that earn you interest create compounding interest, which really, I think, Einstein said it was like the eighth wonder of the world. Same thing in our bodies. Nervous system work compounds.
Kate Northrup:It's not like brushing your teeth where you just have to do it twice a day every day, and your teeth are the same amount of dirty when you wake up in the morning as as they were yesterday. Nervous system work and training your body to remember that it is safe is actually cumulative. So the work you do on your nervous system today becomes the floor from which you start tomorrow, and then tomorrow's work, the the ceiling that you end at tomorrow becomes the floor for the next day. Next up is the next season is the summer solstice, which is around June 21 until the fall equinox. And the fall equinox usually happens around September, somewhere in there.
Kate Northrup:So that season is summertime energy, and I call it visibility in the upward cycle of success. And the work around this time is really about expansion and bloom and becoming visible with the with the seeds you planted last season. So here are some tips. When energy peaks, so does your ability to be seen, to share, and collaborate. So this is a really good time to be out and about.
Kate Northrup:Maybe it's a great time to socialize. Maybe it's a great time to launch something. Maybe it's a great time to just, like, have that visibility energy of summertime. For us in our company, we actually do our biggest launch of the year at the turn of the season from springtime to summer. So it's like late April, May is when we do that biggest promotion of the year for the Relaxed Money live cohort.
Kate Northrup:So I'm not saying you have to launch every single thing in your business during the summertime, but it is important to know that that summer energy is gonna be peak energy in terms of being out and about and being visible, so you wanna ride that wave as much as possible. And then the fourth phase, the fourth season, is, of course, autumn, and that's from the fall equinox until the winter solstice. So from around September 22 to December 21, and this is a time to begin to cross your t's, dot your i's, begin to turn within, reflect, simplify, see what needs to be cleared out to allow you to have an actual rest in the coming winter season. And a wealth principle that you can apply here is to celebrate your harvest. So often, highly successful people who are achievement oriented like you move right on past their achievements without celebrating them, without taking time to integrate the win, and they just breeze on past.
Kate Northrup:And it what that does is it perpetuates a feeling of lack. It perpetuates an experience in which your body and your nervous system have not been able to catch up with the achievements themselves, so you're in this empty spin of always feeling like you're doing, but always feeling but never feeling like it's ever enough. Right? So celebration actually sustains prosperity. What's a celebration that you could do of what you've harvested in that autumn season as the harvest comes to a close, as you move towards the winter season, how could you celebrate so that you integrate and update your nervous system about how far you've come.
Kate Northrup:Really, really important. So when you honor your time as a circle instead of a line, you stop chasing beginnings and start living inside momentum. So why does all of this make you more prosperous? So I wanna really close that gap between rhythm and revenue and tell you that a regulated nervous system, a nervous system that is in its range of resonance, makes better financial decisions. Less impulsive spending, clearer pricing, more trust in the timing, much more magnetism in terms of energetic embodiment.
Kate Northrup:Like, customers wanna buy from you more when your nervous system is in resonance and is in presence. So it's a very prosperous place to be. When you align with seasonal and circadian rhythms, you reduce adrenal fatigue, you increase creative output, and you allow natural efficiency to take over. So rather than you having to kinda buck up and always be efforting, you actually allow yourself essentially to be riding the wave of nature So you're not having to generate fresh energy all the time, but instead, you're allowing yourself to plug in to the power source of nature itself, and that is a completely renewable resource. We're never gonna run out.
Kate Northrup:Right? So cool. And this is really what working less and making more actually looks like. It's not a hack, but it's a biological inevitability. When we work cyclically, it is a biological inevitability that we get more results with less effort because we are in that cyclical momentum as opposed to always trying to go in a line, which requires more and more efforting, and it also includes more and more friction.
Kate Northrup:So this methodology reduces friction and increases flow. Years ago, we used to be in a sort of launching something all the time mode. We always had a launch going because we had a whole bunch of different programs. We had a whole bunch of different products, and they all required a slot in the calendar. Through years of running our business according to the cycles of nature and our bodies, what ended up happening is we actually got into a sweet enough momentum coupled with a lot of nervous system healing with myself and the team as well.
Kate Northrup:The pairing, and this is essentially the body first business second method, pairing body based planning, which is what I've been describing here, nature based planning, with nervous system healing allows us to make more while doing less because over time, we were able to feel enough safety to let go of certain offers so that we could double down on the 20% that was getting us 80% of the results. And if you wanna know how to actually apply that to your business, you can sign up for Heal The Way You Work. We actually have a special bonus annual planning session happening this coming Friday. So if you enroll now, you'll get to have access to that live touchpoint. But we were able to really eliminate a lot of our offers, and we, last year, crossed the biggest revenue year we've ever had, multi, multi seven figures.
Kate Northrup:And that happened with fewer offerings and fewer promotions than ever before. So my company is really the living, breathing example that doing less really does allow you to achieve more. However, what's really important to know about that is that most of our nervous systems are wired so that doing more feels like it is keeping us safe. There's an illusion that staying busy is the way to stay alive. It's really a survival strategy, and for many of us, it's ancestral as well as, you know, from this lifetime.
Kate Northrup:However, when we get on board enough compounding of nervous system healing and we work in alignment with the natural rhythm of life itself, we actually begin to have revealed these portals, these inroads, these opportunities to make more while doing less, like when my company eliminated 90% of our offers, doubled down on relaxed money, and watched our revenue grow tremendously. So I offer that as a possibility and inspiration to you to really know this works. So I want to invite you as we close to pause and breathe. Let's take one long breath for the year you thought you had to start, and then one for the year that's waiting for you to arrive. So one long breath for the year you thought you had to start.
Kate Northrup:Let it go. And then a second breath for the year that's waiting for you to arrive that does not require pressure or stress or hustling or hitting the ground running. Let's feel that. Inhale. Let it out with a sigh.
Kate Northrup:What a relief. You're not behind. You're just early. The year technically have hasn't even started yet according to the time keeping of mother earth of nature. If this conversation felt like an exhale to you, send it to a friend who's already maybe feeling behind in 2026, or who would love this philosophy as a pulse, as a foundation for planning their 2026.
Kate Northrup:And if you wanna begin working with your natural rhythms around money and work, stay tuned. This season of Plenty is all about relaxed wealth and right timed action. I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Plenty. 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 katenorthrop.com/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 katenorthward.com/breakthroughs. See you next time.