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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 really need to pop ourselves out of the matrix and realize, like, being busier doing more things does not actually equal better results. It just equals looking busy and doing things all the time. 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 going to dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups.
[voiceover]: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 Northrop or anyone who works within the Kate Northrop brand.
Kate Northrup:Today, I wanna talk about a really important topic, which is productivity as a trauma response. Years ago, I was scrolling through Instagram, and I saw a post by Erica Chitty Cohen that said productivity is a trauma response. And I knew instantly, because my body recognized it, I got chills, and I knew for myself that was true. Later on at a retreat with Ra Goddess, I was handed a book called Patriarchy Stress Disorder by doctor Valerie Rein. And as I read the book, I was so struck by the truth, which is that as a woman in our culture, specifically, it has not historically been safe, just period, safe at all to be female in the world for 1000 of years.
Kate Northrup:And so we have adaptive strategies that we've taken on that our body thinks is keeping us safe. And one of those strategies is being productive, being a high achiever, getting straight a's, being the one who always gets the job done, being the type a person. Why is that? Well, it's because the way that our bodies respond to stimulus in the world is based on our history. It's based on 3 layers of history.
Kate Northrup:1 is our own personal lived experiences, 2 is our collective experiences, and 3 is our ancestral experiences. All three of those layers live in the body. And if you've read the body keeps the score or so many of the groundbreaking books on trauma and the body, you already know this. But the piece that doctor Valerie Rein brought in that I did not know before was that the the the sheer experience of growing up in a patriarchy for women is actually traumatic. Like, living in a world where the masculine and men are pedestalized as more valuable is actually just innately traumatic.
Kate Northrup:And then we have these adaptive responses. So particularly for high achieving women, for women who love getting the job done, who get off on productivity and getting more and more done, which is certainly something I identified with for many, many years. For us in particular, productivity has actually been a coping response. It's not always an inherent desire for actually wanting to do something. Sometimes it's actually our conditioning.
Kate Northrup:It's our it's our brainwashing and and actually, like, deeper neural patterning. So coming back to these three layers of experience that impact our bodies, that impact our unconscious, which is wired in by our nervous system. Our nervous system, again, is the neural patterns that the neurons that run all throughout our brain and body. They impact every single organ system. There's not one part of our body, therefore, not one part of our lived experience that is not in some way impacted or mitigated by the nervous system.
Kate Northrup:And the nervous system is patterned by our personal experiences, our collective experiences, and our ancestral experiences. What's important to know about living in a culture that historically has put one kind of group of people over another kind of group of people and and, of course, this is impacts women, this impacts all kinds of groups of people, whether it's around your sexual orientation, your race, your culture, you know, your neurodivergence, any of that, like, this will apply. If you are someone who does not fit the somewhat unspoken cultural ideal, which by the way not one human being on the planet feels like they fit the cultural idea ideal 247. Even a white cisgendered heterosexual male, like, this impacts everybody negatively. So no matter who you are, this applies.
Kate Northrup:If you are someone who at some point has not fit into your idea of the cultural ideal, there will be an unconscious patterning of trying to prove that it's okay for you to take up space on the planet. That on some level, there's an element of proving that you are enough. And one of the ways that that shows up is through doing more things, through being productive. And if we think about our ancestral lineage, if we think about collectively, and I'll just speak as a woman because that's, you know, that's the experience I've had. I think about my granny, for example, who grew up in the great depression, and her family stood in bread lines, and her father was a bootlegger and left her family and started another family, and she slept in a crib with a with a bullet hole, like, in the wall above it.
Kate Northrup:Like, who even knows what was going on? And I think about she went to Catholic school and she cleaned the toilets in exchange for her tuitions. So she was there in Catholic school in Buffalo, New York with, you know, primarily wealthy girls who were paying tuition. Their families were paying tuition, but my granny was working. She was needing to be productive and deliver a particular result in order to receive that education.
Kate Northrup:What we know about epigenetics is that the experiences of our ancestors continue to live in our DNA, especially if they were emotionally intense. There are stories my granny told my mom and told us about what it was like to grow up in that environment, and it sounded like it was emotionally pretty intense, like the time that, you know, she lost her family's last 50¢ in the snow on her way to the store to buy bread, or the time she was accused of painting the toenails of the blessed virgin statue in the church and was forced to stand to sit in front of it with her arms outstretched for hours and hours and hours even though she didn't do it. If you knew my grandmother, you would know she never owned nail polish. That was, like, not her vibe. So I think about for myself the ways that in my own ancestry, there's an element of needing to prove that I get to be here because there was a real risk of being turned out, of not receiving education, of not receiving resources.
Kate Northrup:There was an actual danger embedded in my DNA memory in terms of not getting the job done. Like, if you are not capable, if you are not productive, if you do not get results, there was a literal threat, certainly for my grandmother. And then, of course, I don't know the stories of the women who came before her. Then I think about the collective experience of of being a woman, in our culture, and I watched the film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the one that was, it wasn't a documentary. It was the one that was like a fictional, you know, fictional version of her life.
Kate Northrup:And she was in law school as a young young woman, and she was at a table of all the 1st years in law school. And I think she was the only woman or she was one of 2 women. I don't quite remember. But, essentially, all of the men in her class in her law school class were furious that she was let in because according to them, she was taking a man's place. And at that time, let's say it was probably the fifties, the forties or the fifties.
Kate Northrup:At that time, the overarching belief was if you are a woman in a quote unquote man's profession, you are literally taking the place of someone who belongs there more because they are more valuable than you. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg did everything she could, she worked twice as hard, she stayed up twice as late, She did everything she could to prove that she got to be there, that she was as valuable or more than a man. And I absolutely saw this with my mother. She was, you know, one of the trailblazers in the medical field and it was very rare even when she was in medical school to be a woman in medical school. It was the sixties.
Kate Northrup:It was the sixties, and it was a big deal. So in my not only in the collective experience of of watching what it's been like to be women still kind of with this proving energy, also in my own lineage, in my own DNA, there's like a proving energy underneath there. Then, you know, for my own personal experience, I just grew up in New England where there's like a hyper focus on higher education, at least in my family. And this idea that if you're not getting straight a's, if you're not at the top of your class, if you're not getting into an Ivy League school, if you're not, you know, like, doing things at the tip top of this completely pretend hierarchical hierarchical structure of the educational system that was literally invented by the very same people who are trying to keep you out in the first place. But if you're not following their rules and doing the song and dance as the best best best best best, then somehow you are a less valuable person, and somehow you do not get to be celebrated, to be loved.
Kate Northrup:So how many of us are out here working unconsciously as a way to earn love, as a way to earn acceptance? It's common. And when I read that quote from Erica Chitty Cohen, productivity is a trauma response, I just knew. And I thought about the version of me in college who would take out I would rip out this piece of lined paper from this one particular notebook every day. It was 3 hole punched.
Kate Northrup:And I would rip it out perfectly to make sure that there weren't any, like, little tear or tears or little, you know, uneven bits. And I would write down my schedule for the day, like, down to 15 or sometimes even 5 minute increments to try to do this ridiculous Tetris game of fitting more in. And it felt like if I could schedule myself within an inch of my life, then I would be safe. Because whoever was watching, they, you know, this deeply ingrained feeling of someone else is watching, my safety is dependent on someone else approving on how busy I've been, someone else approving of how productive I have been, how much I've gotten done today. If I could just schedule myself to fit enough in, then I felt like I would finally feel safe.
Kate Northrup:I would finally feel calm. Of course, that never happened because it's impossible to prove yourself in a system that is falsely based on the idea that how much you get done has anything to do with how worthy you are. That is a game you're going to lose because there's no one actually checking. Like, no one at the end of our lives, no one is going to be looking at you and being, like, well done. You got so much done in this lifetime.
Kate Northrup:You checked off so many items from your to do list. No. In fact, what we know is that people who are dying wished they hadn't worked so much. Nearly every single one of them, they wished they had given themselves permission to be happier. They wish they had given themselves permission to follow their hearts.
Kate Northrup:They wished that they hadn't worked so much. That's what's real. And so this whole idea that the goal is to get more done, we really need to pop ourselves out of the matrix and realize, like, that's not the game. Not only that, but on just a purely logical level, being busier does not equal getting more results. I am less busy now, probably on some level, than I was in college.
Kate Northrup:Like I have more time to myself, even with 2 children, even running a multiple seven figure company, I have more time to myself, because being busier doing more things does not actually equal better results. It just equals looking busy and doing things all the time. But we have to really understand what is driving the doing. And for so many of us, what's driving the doing is trauma, is negative lived collective and ancestral experiences that have falsely conditioned us to believe on a deep cellular, neural patterning, unconscious level that we need to keep busy and be productive and get more done in order to be loved, valuable, and fundamentally in order to be safe. But that's actually just not true.
Kate Northrup:It's really common for people to say, like, oh, just slow down. You know? Just I wrote a book, right, called Do Less, and I had a lot of people who were like, f you. I can't do less. And I wish I had known when I came out with Do Less what I know now about the nervous system because what I know now is that slowing down, resting, and relaxation actually feels unsafe to folks who have nervous system patterning that doing more is safety.
Kate Northrup:That doing more and being busy and being productive is the path to salvation. If you have neural patterning that says the more you do the safer you are, it will actually feel like a threat to slow down. So what do you do then? What if you're someone who when someone says slow down, do less, just relax, like, if if that feels literally impossible to you and even sitting for 3 minutes to focus on your breath or stare out the window, that will actually what happens there is the busyness is a distraction from all the unfelt feelings that we never had the support, the resources, the education around the skills to feel. And so not only can productivity be a trauma response, it can actually be a way of self medicating.
Kate Northrup:And it's very common for folks to stay busy because they're unconsciously avoiding feeling uncomfortable feelings. And I know this has absolutely been true for me. Early days, if I saw a chunk of open space in my calendar, I felt panicked. So I would when I lived in New York in my twenties, I would have a walking date in the morning and then a coffee date and then a breakfast date with someone else, and then I would be going out to lunch, and then I would be meeting someone for dinner. And in between there, I would have back to back calls.
Kate Northrup:Like, it was so rare that I was alone in the quiet of my apartment with nothing scheduled. It was I and I did that on purpose because sitting with myself with spaciousness felt like I was going to die. So if you're that person, if spaciousness actually feels like a threat, anything around relaxation and rest as revolution and all of that is not going to feel available to you. So what do you do about that when you know logically doing more doesn't mean I'm gonna get better results? You know, we know this from Pareto's principle.
Kate Northrup:Only about 20% and maybe even only 5% really of what you do is getting you the measurable result that you're after. Like, we know in our company so far this year, relaxed money has accounted for 80% of our revenue. 80%. In an entire year, 80% of the revenue is brought in in about a week. What?
Kate Northrup:What are we even doing the rest of the time? Right? Like, that's a that's a that's an extreme example, and it's taken us years to get that focused down, but that's an example of busyness does not lead to the result. I'm not actually getting those results year round. Now, of course, things I do all year round contribute to that 1 week being incredibly successful, but I I can't delude myself in thinking, like, all these other things that I could be doing at any given time are relevant and important.
Kate Northrup:They're just not. And so I know when I feel like I don't have time to move my body, I don't have time to sit in the sauna, I don't have time to meditate, I don't have time to read a fiction book, I don't have time to stare at the clouds. Like, if I get into that and by the way, I've really worked on repatterning that over the past decade, so now I just sit around and look at the clouds a lot, and Mike is like, babe, what are you doing out there? I'm just like, just communing with the sky. But a decade ago, 15 years ago, that would have felt deeply stressful to me.
Kate Northrup:The silence would have felt deeply stressful to me because my neural patterning was set for intensity, pressure, some level of activity at all times, and the slowing of that brought so many feelings to the surface that I what I felt like were a threat. Like, I didn't feel like I could feel those things. And so the name of the game here, and if you've been listening to Plenti for a while or if you've taken any of my programs, you will have heard me use a word called titration. So titration in nervous system work is an incredibly important tool. It is taking slow, doable pieces over time.
Kate Northrup:The nervous system does not move at warp speed. It moves at the speed it moves. And if we go into repatterning our neural pathways with intensity, with this high performance, like, go big or go home idea with this super agro energy, we actually run the risk of retraumatizing ourselves or at least repatterning deeper those neural patternings around, it doesn't count if it's not intense. It doesn't count if it doesn't hurt. It doesn't count if you're not suffering a little bit.
Kate Northrup:Right? What we wanna do is heal in a way that's different than the way the patterning was laid down in the first place. I didn't have a lot of support or modeling around easy does it or one of my favorite quotes of all time from Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown is, what is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can. What's true is that nature doesn't work harder than it needs to.
Kate Northrup:The lions aren't out there doing, like, HIIT workouts. Right? Like, in the middle of the day on the Savannah, they run when they need to catch their food, and then the rest of the time, they're lying around. That was a no pun intended. But, like, we have to really look at nature as our best guide for slowness, for using the right amount of energy and intensity and applying it where needed, but not just applying it all over the place because we're too terrified unconsciously of what will happen if we were just to frickin lie down and read a book or watch TV in the middle of the afternoon or just call a girlfriend to chat or look at the clouds, like those things are available to you.
Kate Northrup:Those things will not harm your results. In fact, the more relaxed we can get, the more powerful we can become, but you won't be able to go from running a 100 miles an hour for all the decades of your life to suddenly going slow. That jump is too big for most people. So titration is doing small, doable pieces over time. What does that mean?
Kate Northrup:Well, one of the ways that I started was I started when I would boil my water in the morning for my French press coffee. I would practice just for the amount of time that the water took to boil, which is, like, probably 2 minutes. I would just sit and practice breathing for just that 2 minutes. And that was a small doable piece. And then over time, that act gives you that much more little little window of capacity to slow down, and then you can grow it over time.
Kate Northrup:And there's so many nervous system healing practices that, you know, that I talk about here on the podcast, that I teach in in our programs. But just know that slowness will be available to you over time by leaning into nervous system healing. You can still do incredible work and very likely even more impactful work and bring in even more income if you are closer to your center. If you are doing what needs to be done from a place of wholeness, from a place of your full capacity to make smart decisions about what to prioritize and what to not. One of my favorite books is called The One Thing by Gary Keller, and he asks this powerful question, which is, what is the one thing that would make everything else easier or unnecessary?
Kate Northrup:Now for most people, they can't answer that question because their thinking is so clouded by a trauma response that tells them everything is important right now because being in a trauma response creates false urgency, and it creates a sense that everything is an emergency, and it creates hypervigilance. So even the idea of whittling down our focus to one thing actually feels like a threat to our bodies. But believe it or not, I'm here to tell you that over time in small doable pieces that compound, you can signal to your body that it is safe to do less. It is safe to do less, but better. And when you train your body that there is not going to be a threat if you slow down, there is not going to be a threat if you offer fewer things but make more revenue from those few offerings.
Kate Northrup:No one is going to suspend you. No one is going to come and get you. You are going to be just as valued, just as lovable, just as worthy as you were the day you were born, no matter how much you get done ever. And so I hope this conversation about productivity as a trauma response and self medicating with work has been helpful for you. If it set off some light bulbs for you, if you've got a personal insight, please go ahead and share that.
Kate Northrup:You can always send me a DM and share what's coming up for you. Text this episode to a friend if it was helpful for you so you can pass along the wisdom to them. And one more time, I wanna nail this home by saying how valuable you are has absolutely nothing to do with how much you get done. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time. I'm teaching a brand new productivity training called plenty of time.
Kate Northrup:And in it, we're gonna uncover the 3 mainstream productivity hacks that are keeping you overwhelmed, distracted, stressed, and busy unnecessarily, and what to do instead to get yourself signed up for this free live event that is only happening one time this year, head over to katenorthrop.comforward/time. Thanks Thanks for listening to this episode of Plenty. If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review. 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.
Kate Northrup:And if you want even more support to expand your abundance, head over to kate northrup. 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 katenorthrup.comforward/ breakthroughs. See you next time.