If you’ve been with me for a while, you might have noticed I don’t tend to talk about specific work or life situations and that’s intentional. Because wherever we find ourselves—at work, at home, in relationships—we take our whole selves with us everywhere, whether we like it or not.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor, meditation teacher, and writer best known for bringing mindfulness into mainstream medicine and psychology.

He coined the phrase “Wherever you go, there you are” and it’s so true!

When things feel difficult, it’s rarely just one situation causing it. More often, it’s a culmination of different factors coming together, resulting in a whole host of emotions including overwhelm, anxiety and frustration and it’s not necessarily down to one specific situation or place.

Which is why I don’t just focus on “the problem.” I work with the whole person, not just the parts where work is challenging, or where a particular relationship is difficult to navigate.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could leave some parts of us at home sometimes? The overwhelm or the anxious feelings, so we can get on with our day – but we can’t.

The reality is, it’s not just you, almost everyone you interact with today will be carrying something of their own, things you don’t see, and that’s a lot to navigate.

That reality shows in the 2 photos below. The first photo is me feeling good with life and the second one is when I’m feeling overwhelmed – spot the difference?

A lot of the work I do focuses on nervous system regulation – so what does that mean? 

Our body is constantly surveying our landscape, asking whether we’re safe or not and it’s our nervous system that looks for patterns of similar events that have happened before.

If our nervous system says we’re safe, we’re all good – we feel calm, capable, rational and we’ve got this! However if our nervous system decides we’re not safe, it sends a different signal to the brain and we go into survival mode – our fight or flight mode. 

That’s how it’s supposed to work – to be adaptive to our surroundings, events and patterns with the goal of protecting us and keeping us safe.

An adaptive nervous system knows when to alert us or not and when we’re operating as our best selves, this is how it works and it knows when the danger has passed, bringing us back to a capable, rational state. But sometimes it can get stuck, so every event in our life, however big or small, can keep us feeling anxious or overwhelmed because the nervous system thinks we’re still in danger and is constantly scanning to make sure we’re safe. It’s exhausting!

 Check out my testimonials from people who’ve taken the first step and transformed their lives, and if it feels like a good next step, let’s start a conversation.