Your Stress Doesn’t Care About Your Deadline

Two weeks ago, I sat in a doctor’s office, which, for me, is practically a historic event since I hadn’t been for a checkup in four years, and the nurse asked me a very simple question.

“What was the name of your previous doctor who ran those tests?”

And I just… stared at her. Blank. Like she had asked me to recite the periodic table in Mandarin.

I couldn’t remember my doctor’s name. I couldn’t remember the hospital I had gone to. I couldn’t even remember the city I drove to for those tests.

The nurses were genuinely confused. I was genuinely mortified. And I sat there thinking, ” What is wrong with me?”

But nothing is actually wrong with me.

And if you have ever felt like someone wiped your brain clear of important information, you should probably be able to recall like a whiteboard that someone erased in a hurry and now all that’s left is a faint smudge where the important stuff used to be…

Nothing is wrong with you either.

But stress? Stress will absolutely make you feel like something is very, very wrong.

And if you have ever felt like someone wiped your brain clear of important information, you should probably be able to recall like a whiteboard that someone erased in a hurry and now all that’s left is a faint smudge where the important stuff used to be…

Nothing is wrong with you either.

But stress? Stress will absolutely make you feel like something is very, very wrong.

Here’s the thing about that doctor’s appointment. It wasn’t just recent stress that wiped my memory.

It was the collision of two different seasons of completely overwhelming stress, separated by four years, finally meeting in one very awkward front office moment.

When those original tests were done, I was running on fumes.

I had just launched my online business, working as an integrator for a boss who was, to put it diplomatically, an absolute nightmare, setting impossible expectations, incapable of providing the details I needed to even come close to meeting those expectations, and left me in fits of crying rage after our calls on the regular.

Meanwhile, my husband and I were preparing to move.

But we weren’t just selling our house. We were selling our house, 90% of everything we owned, buying an RV, and preparing to homeschool our kids while driving off into a life we had never lived before.

That’s not a transition. That’s a controlled demolition of your entire existence while hoping the new thing holds.

Now fast-forward to today. After 2.5 years of the RV full-time lifestyle, we’ve been renting a house without wheels for eight months while starting the process of becoming homeowners once again.

I’m rebuilding my business almost from scratch because AI, the very thing I teach, has completely disrupted the landscape, and I refuse to give my clients anything less than the best, so I keep my nose to the grindstone to make the necessary changes.

I went from a team of four to essentially a team of one practically overnight. Which means all the admin I wasn’t handling? Suddenly mine. All of it. On top of everything else.

So there I was in that waiting room, standing at the intersection of then and now, and my brain just handed me a white flag.

What chronic, compounding stress does

Stress doesn’t just slow you down; it shuts down the parts of your brain you depend on most. Your memory. Your creativity. Your ability to think through even the most basic things you would normally handle without blinking.

High levels of cortisol, your stress hormone, while excellent while you are running for your life from an angry bear, are not your friend in normal daily life.

In fact, it is actively working against your cognitive function when it stays elevated for too long.

And have you noticed that work stress and life stress don’t stay in their lanes? What is the deal with THAT?!

We love the idea of work-life balance, but stress doesn’t respect boundaries.

It bleeds and mixes, and when you’ve got pressure coming at you from both directions at full speed, you end up feeling like you’re failing at everything simultaneously.

Not just failing at work. Not just struggling at home. Everything, all at once. And even if it is not actually true, it feeeels true.

I had a coaching call with my business coach a couple of weeks ago, and I was in full hyperventilating, completely unraveled tears.

She kept redirecting me to my wins and my perseverance in the past, but I could not hear any of it. My brain was too full of pressure and too empty of capacity.

There was literally nothing she could say in that moment that could cut through it, and that wasn’t her fault. That was my brain, completely maxed out, waving that same white flag it waved in the doctor’s office.

The only way out is through, BUT, hear me on this, friend, “through” doesn’t mean pushing harder. It means unplugging and resetting, deliberately, before you completely bottom out.

Weekly Challenge

This week’s challenge has three parts, and I want you to actually do them, not just nod at them.

First, identify your person.

You need at least one human in your corner who has been in the trenches with you.

Someone who will let you fall apart without making it weird, and who also loves you too much to let you wallow indefinitely. Not a cheerleader. Not a coddle-er. NOT AI. If you can’t name that person right now, finding them is your first assignment.

I am super blessed to have more than one, and you can bet that I tapped into them for support!

Second, build your escape route.

Not a plan for someday, an actual, specific thing you can do when you hit the wall. A walk, a workout, a weekend away. Make time for your favorite hobby or just pick up a non-business-related book you can disappear into.

Whatever works for you specifically, because what resets me won’t necessarily reset you, but you have to know what it is before you need it, because when you need it, your brain won’t be in great shape to figure it out from scratch.

Third, and this is the one we resist most, identify what needs to be cut.

Not just the bad stuff. Sometimes it’s the good stuff that has to go, at least for now. Good things that don’t fit your current bandwidth are still taking up space and energy you don’t have. Cutting them isn’t failure, it’s a self-saving strategy.

Survival Mode Engaged

One of the reasons I was able to get through last month and pull myself out of that fog faster than I’ve ever done before was because when everything around me was chaos (lost team, restructuring, the emotional weight of it all), the systems I had already built just kept running.

I didn’t have to think. I just had to follow the plan that calmer, more put-together me had already set up.

The business didn’t stop because my brain stopped, and that’s what a real operating system does for you.

If you’re in a season of stress and one of the things making it worse is that your business has no real home base, no system holding it together when you can’t, DM me with the word CEO, and we’ll get on a call to talk through what that could look like for you.

Because the goal isn’t just to survive the hard seasons, it’s to have something solid enough underneath you that you can push off of to actually get back up.

Now go find your person, pick your escape route, and make the cut you’ve been avoiding. You’ve got this, even when your brain tries to tell you otherwise.