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At some point in our lives we all get scared – of making the wrong decision, of not being a good parent, or that everyone will figure out we’re just making it up as we go.
I’ve spent years helping leaders work through fear, stress, and uncertainty. Now I’m making a podcast about how they face their fears and come out stronger.
It’s for founders, leaders, and business owners who feel like they’re constantly fighting uphill and not finding the balance they need to be effective at work and present at home.
Sally-Anne 00:02:00 You are what you eat as a popular cliché, isn't it? But an increasing amount of scientific research seems to indicate a strong connection between the gut and the brain, and even that digestive system activity may affect cognition and mood. In your experience, how is this borne out?
Sarah 00:02:17 This is a huge question, and I could probably spend a whole lecture talking to you about the role of the gut and the brain. The one thing I'd like to say is you are what you absorb, not necessarily what you eat because. Yeah. Even at the beginning, let alone the association between guts and brain. You know, if your digestive capacity isn't optimal, you may not be even absorbing certain nutrients that we need right at the very base level, there are nutrients we need to eat for the body to function, including the brain. So that's just about making sure that you are eating those. And then B you have the ability to break those nutrients down and that will be the role of your stomach, the stomach acids, your pancreatic enzymes, your gallbladder, and then the absorption of those nutrients into the bloodstream.
Sarah 00:03:08 The second side of it is that what we see is a connection between the role of the bacteria in the gut. So how healthy those bacteria are. And when we say healthy. What the research seems to point to is this idea of diversity. So the more diverse those good bacteria are, so the richer that diversity, the more potential health that you have. And the reason being is that the bacteria in the gut have a direct relationship to us and have a really important role in our health and our function and our immune system and our brain health. And so what we see is when those bacteria are fed and they thrive, they produce metabolites which are sometimes, well, well known as short chain fatty acids or sometimes known as post biotechs and these metabolites essentially produced by the bacteria. And then they travel through our entire system to modulate our immune health, to modulate our hormone health, to modulate our metabolic health, but also have a role in our brain health. And we know there's this connection between the gut and the brain via the vagus nerve.
Sarah 00:04:19 And we see that certain post biotechs can help with the nervous system regulation. When you look into the studies of certain particular post biotechs, we see a connection in terms of reducing inflammation, supporting the immune system, supporting, you know, metabolic health. The second part of this, or a third part of this is the fact that there's this term called leaky gut, leaky gut, leaky brain. So we have a gut lining barrier that is an integral or system to stop things traveling into systemic circulation that could cause a potential inflammatory response. The gut's job is to assess the environment of everything we eat. We breathe, go into the digestive system and only pull into the bloodstream what it needs to do, what it needs, the nutrients. And to do that, we have the gut is that protective organ. It serves as an organ that's establishing friend from foe, what should be into the bloodstream and what shouldn't be. And the way it does that, by making sure a lot of the immune system sits in the gut so it can distinguish between friend or foe.
Sarah 00:05:22 And then secondly, we have this gut barrier lining, which stops things from traveling from the gut into the bloodstream. And that barrier lining needs to be integral strong. And on top of that, barrier lining is what we call a mucin layer. And that mucin layer acts as a protective layer that protects that barrier lining. Now, that mucin layer is built by the bacteria in the gut. So the good bacteria, when we feed them, they build that mucin lining. That mucin lining then protects that epithelial lining. So we don't have anything that's going to travel through the systemic circulation. What we see in the research is a connection between that lining degrading or the mucin degrading the lining become less integral and what we call leaky gut and leaky brain. And so we see when the gut lining is less than, there is this connection between the potential that the brain becomes a little bit leaky and things can travel into the brain that shouldn't be in there. So when I think about this from the very basic perspective, when I'm working with clients, one of the first things I'm always doing is thinking about gut health, because there's no point in giving somebody good nutrition if they can't digest their food, if they can't absorb those nutrients, if the gut is inflamed, if the gut is under assault, if they're feeling digestive issues, then we need to work there because that's going to protect the entire body all the way up.
Sarah 00:06:41 Nutrition plays an absolute fundamental role within the gut health and within brain health, but so does how we live every day. So how our relationship with light, dark, stress, movement toxins all impacts our gut health. And so yes, nutrition is really important because actually we're eating three times a day and we're putting food into the gut. And if we put food in that is processed or high in sugar or got lots of emulsifiers in it, then you're going to degrade the good bacteria in the gut. That's going to have an impact on that integral mucin and that gut lining. And that could open up risk factors of inflammation and things traveling systemically. So yes, nutrition plays an important role. And so does not eating. You know, when we don't eat, when we have a good gap between our meals, you know, 3 to 4 hours the gut repairs, it heals, hoovers itself up, it gets rid of the debris so that it can then prepare for the next time that we're eating. So there's this relationship between eat, rest, eat, rest.
Sarah 00:07:50 And as I said, everything else around, you know, your light nutrition, your stress, your sleep, the environment, the air you're breathing. All are linked to our gut health.
Sally-Anne 00:08:02 Gosh, what a rich picture you've just painted. So many questions are coming into my mind, but I guess perhaps the key one is if I feel you know, I'm not ill. Well, speaking hypothetically here, because I feel pretty well, but nevertheless, you know, let's imagine as someone listening to what you're saying here who's just feeling under the weather, you know, just not feeling quite themselves, and they don't know where to start. What would you recommend?
Sarah 00:08:26 You know, my job is to think about all of the inputs that that person is being exposed to within their life. So the external input. So taking their daily rhythm, what do they do over the course of those 24 hours. What are they eating. What are they feeding on from a stress perspective how much lighter they're getting. What's their movement like? What's their sleep quality like? What's their relationships like? How stressed are they? What is their system doing? Do they have any gut issues? Are they struggling with digestive symptoms? Have they got any skin rashes? I'm doing like a 360 assessment, and what I do from that point is make a suggestion of where to begin to help that person find their energy or their vitality back and to feel better.
Sarah 00:09:11 And once I've done that little assessment, I normally think about, okay, at the very beginning would be to look at their circadian rhythm. And what I mean by that is how do they get up in the morning? What is their relationship with the light outside? Are they moving? How are they beginning their day? What are they eating for breakfast. And then how are they sleeping at night? How are they preparing for rest? I always like to begin with circadian health and then I will begin with nutrition. But the starting point is really dependent on what I believe with that client is the biggest driver for how they're feeling today. But I'm sort of assessing all those inputs. And I start by looking at light dark nutrition stress and then sort of layer up by then. And it really depends on the client. I can't give that direct answer, but there are certain things I always begin with. It's definitely circadian rhythm.
Sally-Anne 00:10:03 Yeah. Because it's giving you information isn't it. So what I'm hearing is a very holistic approach to understanding the person in front of you.
Sally-Anne 00:10:10 And your response to that is going to be a nutritional response. You're going to be looking at the best foods for them to support. All of the things that you talked about in terms of the good bacteria, gut health and so on. Leaky gut, leaky brain. Your response is nutritional. Is that correct?
Sarah 00:10:27 Well, my response is nutrition and lifestyle. And I'll give you an example actually, because it might help is I had a client came to me recently and she was struggling with bloating and she had read my book and was like, I really want to work with you to sort out this issue that I'm feeling. And having spent the first 90 minutes with her. What I really recognized is that there was a few nutritional gaps within her diet, and they were really quick to address. Right? We had we actually dressed her eating habits and her breakfast. It's the first thing we did. But the most important thing that shifted her system and supported her digestion was to look at her recovery. She was working in a 4500 company.
Sarah 00:11:09 She was incredibly stressed. She was getting up early in work, working long hours back to back meetings, taking her lunch breaks, eating on the move, coming home, putting a daughter to bed and working so her rhythm around her life was on. Persistently on. Active stress. Overwhelm. Too much blue light. Not enough time outside. So we worked on micro recoveries, really strict eating schedules and timings and what she was eating within those meals, and then put some boundaries in place. And actually within four weeks her digestion improved. And this was a balance of okay, let's look at what are you doing every day that's causing you to feel stressed and not allowing your gut to do the job it needs to do. And then also what's the nutrition that's coming in? But her thing was really about recovery, rest, repair. And I think about the work that I do. Yes, nutrition is fundamental. It is definitely part of the picture. What we're eating, how we're building that diversity of the gut, how we're taking on those nutrients.
Sarah 00:12:06 But it's also about how well is this person recovering to be able to deal with their daily stressors, daily demands? We're living in a inflammatory world. We have a lot of things up against us. That's potentially driving down what I would call our metabolic reserve, our defenses. And so our job is to recover well. And a part of that recovery is not just appropriate sleep. Yes, sleep is really, really important. And actually sleep is so important. It's when the body does a lot of the recovery. But to enable good sleep, you've got to start off with how you wake up in the morning. And in this particular client now saying earlier she was missing certain moments in the day to enable her to have micro breaks to enable the system to recover little bits of moments of recovery to be able to function better.
Sally-Anne 00:12:57 And so you recommended certain things that she could do in the day. And within four weeks, I think you said she was beginning to notice the impact of that.
Sarah 00:13:06 Yeah. We worked together for three months, and the first thing I did with her, as I said, was micro recoveries.
Sarah 00:13:13 And I changed her breakfast and immediately the digestion improved. What was so interesting about this particular client is for her. I opened up those connections between the guts and stress. I opened up the connections between sleep and the guts, and what she said to me was she was to see her system as separate from herself, if you know what I mean. We identified what her red flags were. What the first things you feel when the body is off balance. What are your blacks? How do you take stock to know that you're moving into that space of, if I continue on this journey, I'm going to reach burnout. In this particular plant, I had had several histories of burnout, and so we identified her red flags so that she could go away. Now, moving forward without working with me, knowing that if some of these symptoms started playing for her or started raising their head, she knew that she was off balance. And this is what's really important about the job that I do is that we experience symptoms from the body, which is a communication network that's telling us that something's not quite right, whether it's a headache, whether it's bloating, whether it's skin rashes, whether it's nausea, whatever the symptom is, it's a feedback to you that something in your environment is driving you off.
Sarah 00:14:31 And we live in a world that can be happy just to numb the system. Forget the symptoms there, take something and move on. And if you continue to do that, what happens is your body starts to shouting at you and the symptoms will get louder, bigger, brighter and you'll feel worse. Where I try and work with my clients is to identify those symptoms as a feedback that something's just not right, and it's your opportunity to work out what that is. When we think about what those things could be, it's many different inputs. It's nutrition, it's light, it's stress, it's sleep, it's relationships. They all have a massive impact on how we function and sync every day. So yes, in my job I do talk about nutrition, but I talk about all of those things. And my job is to identify where I believe the input may be needing a little tweak with this particular client. It was recovery that was big for her.
Sally-Anne 00:15:23 I love the individual approach to this. Not, you know, that you're looking at each person who they are, where they are, what they need.
Sally-Anne 00:15:32 And I'm you're pulling from all the different sources of supportive recovery and aligning your approach to that individual. And what I'm hearing is that essentially what you're doing is raising their awareness, their self-awareness. Yeah, supporting their capacity to build a kind of a mind body connection, so to speak, to understand and notice. I mean, first notice, then seek to understand what's happening in the body and noticing how that affects how we think and stress. And given the subject of this podcast, you know, exploring how we face our fears, what do you notice about the people who come to you in terms of the let's call it resilience? Mental physiological resilience I'm imagining would be depleted. That's why they're coming to you. But have you noticed any connections there with people's relationship with fear, if it's even a thing that you. I just wondering what you might have noticed there in working with people.
Sarah 00:16:30 That's a really interesting question. In terms of the relationship with fear. One of the things that I think so many of my clients are guilty of, and whether this is directly connected to fear, could be questionable, but I believe it is.
Sarah 00:16:43 We're always on there, always on. The people who come to me are spending a lot of time in this space where they're doing stuff. They're actually they're busy. They're reactive. They are persistently trying to get to the bottom of their to do list, or they're just trying to get through life. Right. So it's this 24 over seven on go go go go go. And a part of that is that maybe their demands are high and to maybe from a relationship of fear. Could it be that they are unable to slow down because they're in fear of what that could look like? I don't know. It comes back to this last client. It was probably a good way to look at it is we feel like we have to always be on. And when we're always on, maybe we don't have the propensity to slow down and look at what really matters.
Sally-Anne 00:17:35 I guess I remember when we originally spoke and you spoke about the connection between fear and resilience. I wrote down the role of health and nutrition to overcome fear, and I wrote down, see what's important.
Sally-Anne 00:17:49 So I'm guessing what you're suggesting is that because good nutrition, good health supports our cognitive capacity, that it will therefore help us to differentiate fear from reality or whatever. But it was that idea, right?
Sarah 00:18:03 It was more physiological, wasn't it?
Sally-Anne 00:18:05 Yes.
Sarah 00:18:05 So I guess then the connection between fear and nutrition is one of resilience. That's the point here, is that if you are feeding the body the nutrients it needs and you are nurturing yourself, then you have a greater capacity and propensity to deal with fear or to deal with what life throws at you. A very simple way of looking at this is from a blood sugar regulation perspective. If we eat in a way that causes your blood sugar to rise very, very quickly, you will get a blood sugar drop, right? An immediate blood sugar drop as the body's trying to recalibrate. And in that process of recalibrating it over produces insulin, we overproduce insulin. Blood sugar drops incredibly low. As blood sugar drops low or below normal levels. Your body starts to get a little bit stressed because your sugar is below functional optimal area.
Sarah 00:19:01 So you get a high and you get a low. At the point it becomes low, it activates the stress system to bring that sugar up. Right. Because when we're stressed, the body produces sugar. So if you're eating in a way that's driving blood sugar dysregulation, and this could be 3 or 4 times a day, you're activating your stress system to manage that blood sugar dysregulation. So you are naturally less resilient because as that blood sugar is dropping, you're losing your energy. You're becoming agitated. You start to potentially get shaky. Your brain is putting you in a stress system. You're not thinking with your prefrontal cortex. You're thinking with your amygdala. Your body is in a moment of fight or flight. What are you doing in a fight or flight? You are trying to survive. Your body is trying to survive. So if you're in an environment of which is high stress, high demand, and you're eating in a bad way, then you're not going to have the capacity to deal with that environment.
Sarah 00:19:57 Well, unless your nutrition is balanced, unless your blood sugar is balanced, it's almost like your reserve capacity is depleted. You don't have the reserve to deal with that moment as well as you could do if your blood sugar was balanced. And why this is really important is when you think about metabolism. Metabolism is a big word. I look at it as it's essentially the body's master control system. It is assessing all the inputs from the external environment, creating an internal response for that moment for you to survive. So it is a stress management system. The body only wants to do things. Two things keep you alive and procreate, right? So if you're in an environment that's high demand and you're eating inappropriately, your body is in a stress state. What can we do in a stress state, just not as well as we can do when we're in relaxed state? When we are in a place where blood sugar is balanced, you have focused. You can think clearly. Your energy is there. You have an ability to deal with your environment better.
Sarah 00:21:03 This is the problem that many people struggle with in high demand roles is that they don't create the time or the energy to think about the food that they need, because they don't associate food as a way to maintain resilience. It's like baseline foundational. You know, we get up in the morning, we drink coffee, we don't see any light. We run to work on the way, you might pick up a crust and we get into the office. By that point, you've probably looked at your phone already by two hours. The brain is overwhelmed. You've got no actual nutrition that's coming in and you might be having a micro stressor. So nutrition is a tool. It is a tool to build resilience. It's a tool to maintain resilient almost your reserve capacity so that you can deal with what's around you better. And that's what I teach my clients when it comes to food, because it does really matter.
Sally-Anne 00:21:53 It makes so much sense the way you're expressing it, sir. And I'm thinking in my exploration of fear, I've noticed that it has immense power to distort the way we see the world if we're not careful, and if our physiology is depleted.
Sally-Anne 00:22:09 Through all the things you've said, our capacity to see clearly is going to be diminished. And so fear is going to have more power. We're going to lose the sense of balance. Fear is normal. Think it's a normal and often helpful emotion. But when it gets out of whack, you know when it's too big, it's going to put into risk. Oh sorry, Mark. Can we say this more clearly? Yeah. So fear is helpful feedback. Whenever we experience fear it's telling us something. But if we're not well, if our gut health is poor, we may not understand the message clearly enough. So I guess what I'm getting at here is that nutritional health supports our capacity to understand ourselves and the world more accurately, in the sense of the gut. Health is feeding. Cognitive health is feeding clarity. It's feeding resilience. I wonder if it might be a bit of a stretch, but is it also feeding compassion? It's making us gut health, I guess is making us more human, isn't it?
Sarah 00:23:10 Yeah, and it's not just gut health, it's blood sugar balance as well.
Sarah 00:23:13 It's all those things. It's I mean, you said it so beautifully. It's when we are in balance, we have a greater capacity to understand those symptoms with feeling, with compassion and relevancy to our environment. So, for example, if we are in a position where we're slightly fearful, when we are balanced, we can lean into the fear and understand what it is and have a response that is more considered. But if you have that fear in an anxious body, because the body is Body's anxious because it's depleted potentially there's inflammation from gut dysbiosis. Potentially you've got blood sugar dysregulation. Then you have a fear response that comes in that may just be too overwhelming for you to be able to consider an appropriate response to in the context of your environment and to be able to, as you say, see the world in an appropriate way, because fear is a natural response to there's something I'm worried about, right? We all want to have those fear. You know, fear can be a good thing when we see it clearly for what it is, but we can't see things clearly if the body is under physiological stress because the body can't see things clearly.
Sally-Anne 00:24:25 No, indeed. I love the idea of the body seeing things clearly. I know what you mean and thinking of, you know, my listening audience here as well as myself. You know, as we get older, that becomes more difficult, doesn't it? Hormonal changes in our body are gonna make that harder.
Sarah 00:24:41 Yeah, absolutely. And as we get older, the natural process of aging means that we have less resilient capacity, as we did when we younger. That's that's obvious, right? But we also have had more time in the world to understand our bodies better, right. So that's also an important thing to be aware of a thing. But when it comes to hormonal changes, and particularly when it comes to women going through perimenopause to menopause, this is a period of time where hormones are fluctuating. They're fluctuating first, at the very beginning, you're getting this erratic flux, and towards the end you're getting this hormone sort of deficiency. And the body is trying to keep up with these changes.
Sarah 00:25:26 It's trying to find equilibrium balance. That's what the body's always trying to reach homeostasis. And so in that period of time as there's a lot of shifts, our resilient capacity does go down. So when I work with women in perimenopause going to menopause, the biggest job I have with them is about recovery repair. It's about appropriate sleep. It's about dialing up everything to that a little bit higher layer as your body allows you to shift. Almost like you're a caterpillar, you go into a chrysalis and you come out as a butterfly as that caterpillars in that chrysalis. There's so many changes happening. And then you come out as this butterfly, and this is what's happening in as a hormone shift. The body is having to catch up with these changing demands, and it's directly changing your physiology, how you store energy, how you feel energy, how you use energy, how your muscles are working, how your brain is working. All of these things are changing physiologically, but we need to just allow more time and patience for that process to happen slowly.
Sarah 00:26:27 And you need to give your body greater rest and recovery and dial up everything within that time frame. So how you wake up in the morning, type of movements you have, who you're socializing with, what are you having across each of your meals? How are those meals balanced? How are they supporting your gut health? How are they supporting your muscle mass? Your bone health? What are you doing before you go to bed at night? How are you recovering? How you're sleeping? It's a time of shift. It's a time of change, and you need to allow your body to change. Because what we see in the research is as you become menopausal, things get better, you'll pass the change and you feel like a wise woman.
Sally-Anne 00:27:07 And a wise man. I hope for different reasons, a wiser human being, if we've been paying attention to the natural changes in our body and moving with them. So you've mentioned a few things, and I'd love to pick up on a couple of them that might help us all.
Sally-Anne 00:27:21 As everyone listening in the start of the day, you've talked about light and you've talked about breakfast. Just two simple parts of the many things you've helpfully share with us. For the average human being at any stage of their life, what would be the optimum way of starting the day to enable our body best to cope with what's to come for the rest of the day.
Sarah 00:27:42 Ideally, you wake up naturally. If you don't, then an alarm will wake you up and we can come on to what natural waking looks like. But say you wake up naturally. The ideal scenario is you wake up, you get up out of bed as soon as you wake. You drink. Good amount of water 450ml 500ml of water. You have a bit of breakfast and then you get outside, or you get outside and then you have your breakfast. But what's really, really incredibly important is that the body works on what we call a circadian rhythm. That means every organ in the body is working to a particular time particular clock, and we want all of those clocks to oscillate.
Sarah 00:28:25 Well, when the clocks are turned on at the right time, then the body knows what it needs to do by when. We're always looking to understand where we are in time to space so the body can function appropriately. The two biggest inputs. We have to tell the body what time of day it is. Morning, natural light and breakfast. Okay, so there are two what we call timekeepers. There's light divers is what they call it. Why? This is really important. If you can imagine, the moment we wake up 30 minutes later, we get a cortisol rise. It's an important cortisol peak cortisol seen as a stress hormone. It's negative. But we absolutely need it in the morning. That cortisol peak in the morning switches on your system turns on your motivation. Your serotonin starts turning on your thyroid hormones. It turns on your sex hormones, gives you the energy. It turns on your immune system. And when we get outside, the light that we see from the sun is literally telling the body what time of day is, sends a message through the eyes to the brain.
Sarah 00:29:26 Tells the supervisor it's morning, right? You are ready to go, go go go go. And then it oscillates everything so that morning light exposure will even help you get the appropriate nighttime exposure of melatonin to tell you it's time to sleep so you can repair well at night. So what's really important here is that morning signal of light and food are helping you to live in tune and sing a bit better. Helping a body do its job as well as it possibly can. The problem that we see today is not enough of us are getting those inputs, and we know what it is like when we travel to another country and we get jet lag, we feel a bit spacey, we feel ungrounded. We don't quite feel ourselves if we're not getting the daily inputs of light and potentially not food that's coming in, then you might have cellular jet lag is like, I like to call it, things just not spinning or turning on as effectively as they could. So if you imagine yourself as a dimmer switch, you're just not got that brightness that you could have about you.
Sarah 00:30:32 You're a little bit oscillating, a little bit lower. But if we get those inputs every day and every day matters. Then you can have that greater brightness to be able to do what it is that you need to do in your life. So get up. Drink your water. Get outside for at least 13 minutes when the sun is rising. Have breakfast before. Afterwards. Don't look at your phone. Keep the morning to yourself. Don't think about work. This is your opportunity to feel your best, to live your best life that day. And too many of us are distracted by phones or computers or work and don't get outside or it's too dark. We don't want to, or it's too cold and they distract us. They'll end up stealing your energy and stealing that potential vitality that you have. So that's my three recommendations. I think from a food perspective, we do really want to begin the day with protein. Protein is really important macronutrient. We have proteins are broken down to amino acids. And we have an amino acid pool availability of them per day.
Sarah 00:31:36 And the body cannot store amino acids right? So we use them within the capacity of that day. So when we're thinking about what amino acids do is they are structure. They are neurotransmitters. They're hormones. They are skin. They are muscle. They are. Every reaction in the body is built from an enzyme. Enzymes are built from protein. So protein is just a really important fuel. So we wake up in the morning and we want to give the amino acids to the body. So they can do the building it needs to do for you to function. If you don't get your amino acids in that one day, then your body is going to start taking it from other places. Where does it take it from? It will take it from your muscles, because that's where we store excess amino acids. There's nowhere else. So we want to fulfill that amino acid pool daily. So wake up get outside or wake up water outside. Have a breakfast that's rich in amino acids and amino acids is protein.
Sarah 00:32:30 So you're thinking you could have yogurt, you could have eggs, you could have leftover dinner if it was chicken. Breakfast doesn't have to be breakfast. It can be dinner. You can eat whatever you want. But what? We don't want to be in this shop bought cereal and toast. You know, it could be we scrambled tofu or scrambled eggs and greens or yogurt and nuts and seeds. But we want to fuel the body at that point because we've had an overnight frost. You have clear cleansed as you slept that night, and you want to wake up in the morning and you want to replenish to be able to get ready for the day ahead.
Sally-Anne 00:33:01 Fantastic. Thank you, Sarah, and I want to ask you this incredibly important work that you do that you're clearly passionate about. Where did it start for you? What was your journey into it? Because my experience is that often the work we love or the work we do is the work we need. Speaking for myself for sure, is that what about you? Is that also your experience?
Sarah 00:33:21 Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah 00:33:22 It was my experience. I grew up knowing nothing about nutrition, not even thinking about the connection between what we eat and how we function. For me, it came at a really important moment in time when I had been left uni, gone into the workplace and was working in marketing events for a large agency. Working long hours and late nights, I was highly stressed and I sort of reached what I would call burnout. Now, from an outsider, you wouldn't really notice what this was like, you know, from an insider. At this point, I was still going to work. I was still functioning, but I was barely functioning well. So I had really bad sleep issues, hormonal imbalances, gut issues, anxiety. I was just persistently tired. Brain fog. I felt like I was barely functioning, though. I was present and it came to a real head when I was in London and I thought, right, I've got to do something about this. I cannot live like this. This is not normal.
Sarah 00:34:22 And I decided to start with just eating better, because up until this point I didn't really eat properly, let alone a meal. I would skip breakfast, I would have a coffee, likely skip lunch, jump into a chocolate bar and I may get home and eat dinner, but I was in the office every morning by 7 a.m.. I wasn't home until 10:00 at night. And this is this was basically what I was doing five days a week. Weekends. I was out drinking too much with my friends, trying to overcome reward the pathways when I'd been working so hard in the week and have fun with friends at the weekends. And as I said, I was just completely depleted. So this is just not right. This is just not right. So I thought, I'm just gonna eat three meals. That's it. I didn't think about the quality of the meal at that point. I just thought, I'll eat the best I can and I'll eat three meals a day. And this was an eye opening experience for me, because within a couple of months, just changing when I was eating and actually eating shifted so many symptoms for me, I thought, this is crazy, I need to know more.
Sarah 00:35:22 So I went into reading every single book as I possibly could, going on to a podcast, and what became apparent is that I was falling in love with this world of nutrition, and I was incredibly passionate about it. But not only that, I was overcoming some fears that I'd had when I was younger about learning reading, and I was reading more, picking up papers and going, I just need to know more. I want to know more and more and more. I thought, I've got to go back to school. So I moved to Bristol, left London, moved to Bristol. At this point I was still working in London, travelling back and forth from Bristol to London, pregnant. By this time I had my daughter in 2012, and then that year I went back to college for three years to study going I need to know more about this. And still to this day, I am still as passionate about learning about the subject because it's a continuous learning journey.
Sally-Anne 00:36:35 So the fear you mentioned of reading and writing, of learning in that sense, through the medium of reading and writing, was overcome by the passion and your need to learn and understand more about this amazing discovery you'd made simply by eating three good meals a day.
Sarah 00:36:55 Yeah, absolutely. And I think to give the context of that, I am dyslexic and I spent a lot of time as a child overcoming the fears of learning, having been chucked out of the education system several times and finally managing to get my A-levels, get to university, get a degree. Learning had been a real stress for me. It was an absolute nightmare. I thought I got my degree, it's finally done. I can just get on with my life and just put this all behind me. To be honest, I ended up just translating all of that into the workplace and lived in this place of having to work extra hard to overcome what I saw as not being good enough. So it just I had the work ethic that was incredibly high because I felt I just wasn't good enough. So I left uni within with that, went into the workplace, worked hard. I had this burnout piece and I was like, right, I am dyslexic and this is going to be a nightmare because not only am I going to go from a marketing degree, I'm going to go into the medical world.
Sarah 00:37:34 Right. So I'm learning about biochemistry. What the hell am I thinking? I'm doing stupid. I'm never going to get through this. I just had to do it. And it wasn't really about fear. Yes, there was fear that the the need to learn, the need to discover, the need to understand was just much higher. And I had to just do it. I was like, do you know what? It does not even matter if I don't pass. I'm just going to go through this. Take one day at a time. And it really showed me that a I've spent most of my life fighting the education system to get through it. Now, I found something that I loved, and I was able to move through the education system in a very different energy level because it was important to me. So when it comes to fears, when it comes to overcoming fears. For me it was the passion that changed everything. Yes. One of the things I still work with my clients today, no matter what all of them doing.
Sarah 00:38:32 What is it that you love and matters to you? Because that is the utmost important thing.
Sally-Anne 00:38:37 Yeah, starting with that. And for many people, that can be difficult to discern, can't it? It's not for everyone immediately obvious. For you. It became very obvious. And that was wonderful because it diminished your sense of fear and you moved forward. I think for some people it's harder. But if we can find the space to ask ourselves what matters most here, what am I not giving myself enough space to fully consider, much less embrace? I think if we can do that, if we can step back and take the time and give ourselves the space to consider that important question. My belief is, and my experience is, that we then do discover what we really need by listening to that which will then diminish our fear. The fear will still be there, but it will have less power. Sarah, thank you so much for sharing everything you've so generously shared today. I think there's a lot of tips there for those of us ready to listen to them.
Sally-Anne 00:39:34 And I'm curious, given where you are now in your life, and this is a question I ask everyone, what does Fearless Forward mean to you?
Sarah 00:39:42 I think that so the fear looks different for me now. Originally, the fear was changing everything and starting again, right? So setting up a career in what I'm doing now, the fear is maintaining it, right? I can't go back. I have to keep going. I've made the shift. I'm here now. I have to continue. But it comes back to the same. Learning from my first leap is that this remains an absolute passion for me, and a I'm incredibly grateful that I'm absolutely here, and I've had the opportunity to work with the number of people I work with, and I'm doing what I love. I'm incredibly grateful. So a part of being moving forward, fearless forward, is about just recognizing where I have come from and what I have done to be where I am, because I think to move forward, we need to feel compassionate and we need to feel grounded and we need to feel we need to have the truth about what's around us.
Sarah 00:40:40 Right? So that is really important to me. Secondly, is that without fear, I'm not going to move forward. So I think it's it's an important emotion to be able to listen to, because all it's doing is it's giving you feedback of where the potential risks are and in the world today. And so it enables me to adapt and move forward and continue on this journey. And I feel like, you know, maybe it's not about living without fear. It's about learning to live with fear and taking those small steps every day to continue on that journey of passion that's important to you. You know when you're following what really, really matters, then the fear is, is a little bit less because you can see through it stronger, because there's something else at the other end. I think maybe that's how I see it, because I'm not fearless. There is fear that I still have to face all the time. We should all be having to face that.
Sally-Anne 00:41:32 Thank you. Sarah. And thank you very much.
Sally-Anne 00:41:34 No, let me think about that. So listening to what the fear is telling us and being clear enough and passionate about enough about the work that's ours to do to move forward with it.
Sarah 00:41:47 And I would just add one part to that is which you said beautifully earlier, is sometimes we have to slow down in order to do that. One of the really important things in today's society is that our energy is always trying to be taken somewhere. Someone's trying to take our attention. In fact, we need to give ourselves more space because when we have that more space, we have a greater clarity. And I think, you know, I see that in everything that I do. And I'm coming up to something I don't understand or I'm worried about, or I take a walk, don't respond, don't answer the fear or the question just now. Just sit with it because the answer will always be there. The answer is within me that I need to allow space to appropriately address whatever that fear is or that answer is.
Sally-Anne 00:42:35 The answer is within us. Thank you Sarah.
Sarah 00:42:39 Thank you. Thank you Sally, and I really appreciate it.
Sally-Anne 00:42:44 Nutrition isn't just fuel. It's a way of nourishing your inner stability, your capacity to stay clear and calm in the chaos of life. And it's not just about eating well. It's about rhythm. When we eat, how we sleep, how we relate to light and movement and rest. Sarah's point is that all of it matters, because resilience is something you build from the inside out. It's about slowing down, not pushing through. It's in the slowing down that you notice what's really going on, what hurts, what we need, what we're afraid of, and what we're afraid of is amplified by poor sleep, blood sugar crashes, chronic stress, or an overwhelmed gut, and when the body is off balance, the message in the fear can get distorted. But the opposite is also true. When we're physically, well, well-fed, well rested, grounded in rhythm and routine, then fear becomes more like a signal we can interpret and work with.
Sally-Anne 00:43:47 In other words, with the right nourishment, we might just be better equipped to hear what our fear is trying to tell us. Thank you for listening. Fearless forward is edited and produced by Mark Steadman. I'll be back with you in two weeks for our next conversation about how leaders have faced their fears. Be sure of catching it. Go to Fearless Forward org or subscribe to my weekly bulletin at Skillful leaders.com.