Episode 21: Body Image and Busy Seasons: 5 Tips For Managing Stress and Your Body
Stress is the fisheye lens on the camera of how we look at our body. Stress impacts every single body system and it can also affect how we see and feel about our bodies.
Join Jess and Megan as they discuss their top 5 tips for navigating these busy seasons when it comes to managing stress and how to cope with our body image.
We know that a health and resilient body image is continual work and that why we’re here!
See if you can count how many times Jess and Megan say ‘seasons’ in this episode — it’s a LOT.
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Jess: 0:04
Hello friends, and welcome to Sturdy Girl, a podcast focused on strength, not size, where you'll hear conversations around healthy body image, cultivating confidence and being a resilient human in both body and mind. Sturdy Girl is the podcast where we shift the focus away from your appearance and on to living the big, rad life you deserve. Hello friends, and welcome to episode 21 of Sturdy Girl. Megan and I are doing a late evening recording and had to get some goofiness out before hitting record. So hello hi, we're here to be professional now. As professionals, we can get yes to talk about body image and busy, stressful seasons, and I don't remember what the original episode was. It was supposed to air this week, but I have had a hell of a season recently. Megan has had a super busy, stressful season, and I needed this episode for myself, for me, and I'm hoping that you as a listener can resonate as well. Maybe you need this too. We are all super busy. We a lot of times wear it as a badge of honor. I personally hate it, oh, I hate it, and sometimes stressful times are worse than others, and so it's looking at when things are stressful, it kind of strips bear of like what can I do? What am I capable of what is essential, what is non-essential, and how do I set non-negotiables? Does this level of tiredness mean I should work out or go to sleep and just figuring those things out? That's what we want to talk about Making choices that are supportive of the life we want to live. And then how the heck is our body image impacted through all of this? So, just starting off thinking about busy seasons, these usually feel like you don't have enough time, don't have any extra time, you have a different schedule than maybe you're used to or a different routine. It's harder to tune into your body's needs, your hunger and fullness cues, or even tuning into how we're feeling about our bodies or about our lives, and so these seasons can kind of feel overwhelming. So, with that thought, how does our body respond to stress? How does our body image respond to that stress? I was telling Megan before I hit record, when I was putting together the notes from this episode. All I could think about was that I think it was 1980s campaign about. This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs, and it's the cracked eggs in a sizzling pan. And this episode, this is your body on stress. It's not great. Every single body system is affected by stress. You get sleep issues, attentional issues, digestion issues, high blood pressure. Stress can make our immune system weaker. It affects cognition, our ability to concentrate. It can affect how we view and see our bodies, which I'll get to in just a second. The main takeaway here every body system is being affected by stress. A lot of times. Our body is down regulating a lot of those systems during stressful times because our stress response is kind of like way back in the day when you're being chased by a sabre tooth tiger. It's that immediate danger and your body saying how can I take all energy reserves and focused attention to escape that attack? That rest and digest piece not super important during that? And so that's how your body is responding when you're really stressed out, and so that leads right into the body image piece of you might not feel as good in that physical body with the way it's responding to stress. If digestion isn't as good, if you're noticing inflammation, bloating, things like that, then suddenly your clothes aren't fitting as well or feeling as good, or you're not feeling as good in your body or you're noticing like less muscle definition or different shapes of your body. Maybe you look in the mirror and feel like they're changing. And maybe they are in the temporary sense, right when you get super bloated, but it's not necessarily hugely changing.
Megan: 3:30
Well, I'm like even just lack of sleep, one of my biggest. I don't want to know what the good word for it is, but like consequence of really high stress for me is lack of sleep. And when I have lack of sleep it trickles into every single thing and then it just magnifies the stress that you're feeling, but also the imperfections that you feel about yourself. Oh for sure.
Jess: 3:49
And that lack of sleep because maybe you're stressed, and then suddenly you're so stressed that you're not sleeping as well, you're not falling asleep. Also, suddenly you have insomnia or you have weird ass dreams, or you're waking up multiple times in the middle of the night or you can't fall back to sleep, and so you're not well rested or recovered enough, and so then you think about the fallout of all of those things. Well, suddenly, like your hunger and fullness cues aren't the same and your body is looking for easy carb sources to give you quick energy, you find yourself reading the pantry more and you're like this isn't the behavior that I normally display, and then that can turn into how you feel about your body too. Yeah, I also think about like busy seasons. A lot of times there requires more going out clothes and, megan, you work from home, I work in scrubs so when you put on normal clothes and suddenly you're like the hell is this waistband?
Megan: 4:33
This is hard pants.
Jess: 4:35
Oh, that's right, I forgot you call them hard pants, wastebands, buttons, like no, and those don't feel as good or fit and feel differently than maybe the last time you remember wearing them. And it can direct more attention onto our bodies. You know, and that's something too like you and I can kind of speak on this, as we've been doing the work and going through the process and working on that healthy, resilient body image and we still struggle with this because our relationships with our bodies are never perfect. It's continual work. Body image is a practice and body image is the lens that we look at our body, not necessarily the truth of how our body appears. So when we think about stress, it can amplify, it can distort what we see. So it's like putting a freaking fish eye lens on your camera and then thinking that what you see is real and it's just that lens needing to be adjusted or maybe cleaned, I don't know, but it's looking at stress in so many different forms. You're feeling sad, alone, unworthy, unsettled, overwhelmed, exhausted. Even a new job or a big project, something testing your confidence or your sense of self worth, some situation in your life Like it's so easy in those stressful times to zero in on our feelings about ourself and hyper focus on our body as the issue.
Megan: 5:46
Yeah.
Jess: 5:46
If we're feeling less satisfied or accepting of our body, it's not necessarily that your body's the issue right. It's the feelings about our body. It can be a symptom of other emotions, not the actual issue.
Megan: 5:57
I mean anytime I am feeling more stressed out or more anxious or just more overwhelmed, whether that be with work I mean I just started going back to school, you know, just adding more things onto your plate it does affect how I feel. I'm looking in the mirror, you know. 100%, I feel like I do focus on those things. My face looks different, my stomach looks different. Part of that is is, like you know, in that busy season, not being able to do a lot of those activities I was doing before. So the really high intensity cardio, like all the time, isn't happening. Yeah, yeah.
Jess: 6:29
And it's an adjustment but it's not wrong. And it's those emotions coming up and you're turning it onto yourself, because a lot of times we do that as a sense of control, whether we recognize it or not. For you, right, work is super busy. You're doing some extra schooling for work stuff, you're working on so many different things, so a lot of your time is taken up. You are dealing with an injury, so it has changed the way that you were able to move your body right now, and so all of those emotions that are coming up and suddenly you're like it's so easy to fall into that spiral of like man, you've really let yourself go, you're not moving like you used to. Yeah, see, this is what your body looks like without high intensity cardio, and I say that only because similar season, where I have so many things on my plate right now, that movement hasn't been as consistent for me and that's on me just with time management and the other things taking priority. But I get into those thoughts viral so easily of like it's your body, like your body's the problem. When it's not, there's these emotions that come up about your body, but it's usually a symptom of something else.
Megan: 7:28
Yeah, yeah.
Jess: 7:29
And I mean at the end of the day too, we say all this of like this isn't saying your feelings are wrong or your emotions are wrong or that the things you feel about your body are untrue, but it's just saying like, hey, there might be a reason those thoughts are coming up and those emotions might be coming from another place. At the end of the day, you know your body best, especially if you've taken time to develop awareness around feelings, your thoughts, reactions and how your body does respond to stress. But I think the next thing, too, I wanted to talk about was the idea of seasons. So we've talked about already in this episode of just taking a seasonal approach. For any of you listeners who have done team sports, you understand the benefit of off season versus in season. We don't train the same way year round, but when you're an adult, there's just such a sense of like well, I should be able to do it all. Well, I set out to do these things, I set these goals, so I'm going to do them. And I think about like Megan, you and me in our early 20s and just being like oh, I'm going to arbitrarily train for this race and do all this lifting and just keep adding on to all the things we could do. Like I ran my first marathon, my first year of dental hygiene school and I look back at that, taking 20 something credit terms with full time clinical schedule.
Megan: 8:37
I missed the feeling of being 20. I could just go out and run like eight miles and I was like, oh, it's fine, fine.
Jess: 8:43
Our point, though it's like seasonal approach is you can't do everything at once, and it doesn't mean like just because it's not the season to become an ultra marathoner or complete like a 52 high challenge, it doesn't mean it won't ever be the season If you have these goals. It's saying like this is not the season to do this thing, but there will be a season. You know you're not going to pick up training for a marathon at the same time that maybe your work schedule is super ramped up, both of your kids are in team sports and maybe you're battling some like small health issues. We can expect our bodies and our brains to make drastic changes during these super busy or stressful seasons. That is the whole point of talking in terms of seasons and especially to if you're like what season am I in? Right now? I am in this really busy season because of this. This thing is something that I don't have control of. So, how can I best manage myself and my time and take care of my needs?
Megan: 9:35
Yeah, I'm not at all trying to put the blame of a busy season back onto myself, but I will say that you know, one thing that I've found is that the time management piece for me and sometimes I create more of a busy season than I actually am in because I am a terrible time management Sometimes I think that I don't have any time to work out right, and it's that feeling of being stressed and busy and I think that we're all pushed to our breaking point because everything that's going on like we're just constantly stressed out, and so I think that that also trickles into my time management. That feeling of yeah, I got off at five and all of a sudden it's eight o'clock and I haven't worked out or done anything because you know you have that time of decompressing. And then you're like oh no, I'm stressed.
Jess: 10:16
And then sometimes you look at it and you're like, was that decompressing, or did I just mindlessly scroll for an hour Mindlessly? Scroll for an hour or let yourself thought spiral about how stressed you are, how busy it is, and then being like oh, it was not used for self-care things. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like, I truly believe that actions that we take have a reason. So in your mind, that mindless scrolling, like there are times there's a name from and I'm blanking on it, but when you go from, like finishing work and then moving on to another task, having that buffer time of like, maybe it is a little bit of scrolling, maybe it's meeting 10 pages of a book or something and then moving on to the next task, there's nothing wrong with that. Oh, no, just manage your buffer time. I think to just that paying attention to where our time is going. I've had that conversation a lot with clients recently about just starting to bring more awareness, like non-judgmentally, but that realization of like, oh, you know, I work from home and I clocked out from work at 430 and suddenly it's seven o'clock and I don't know what happened between 430 and seven. But I'm mad at myself because I didn't get up early enough to work out and I don't really like working out in the evenings. But you had this time. What were we doing? I'm not really sure what I was doing. Bring a little more attention to it to say like, okay, is this something where you could get a run in right after work and then just relax the rest of the evening, or what makes the most sense. One more point I want to mention before we get into kind of the main part of this episode on just managing body image and ourselves during these busy and stressful times. And that's just like us saying now's not the time for a marathon or competing in powerlifting or whatever it is these big goals that you want to tackle. When has there been a time in your life that you don't feel busy, that we don't feel like our schedules are full? Never. There really isn't. So. It's looking at like, considering how stressful and busy is this season, am I making it worse on myself? Are there ways I could make it easier? Are there ways that I could make small steps towards these goals that I've set? What can I accomplish, even in the busy and hard times? Because that says a lot about you as a person, too. Like, as soon as things get hard, are you the person that's like, oh yep, well, I don't have any time for exercise at all, I'm just not going to do anything? Or is it like you know what these dogs need to walk as much as I do, I can start getting in a couple of 20 minute walks a day. Or is it I've set this goal to eventually run a marathon? Can I start running once a week? Can I make that eventually twice a week? And just with the context of we're always going to be busy, how are we managing our time?
Megan: 12:31
It's funny because I just talked to my therapist about this, like last week, because she does check-ins like are you doing this? But it's about recognizing those small accomplishments. So, yeah, I might not be going to the gym and lifting and running and doing all of these intense things that I did before, I might not be spending two hours, but it's hey, did I put on my gym clothes? Go there for 45 minutes, do some cardio, get moving. Just recognizing the small accomplishments on those days where you just don't feel like you have anything in you. Yeah, that's huge.
Jess: 12:59
It's been really important for me because, you know, as someone who's pretty active, Well, and you think about not just the physical health but mental health benefits that come from your Olympic lifting from the higher intensity from mountain.
Megan: 13:10
It's a huge way to deal with my stress.
Jess: 13:11
Yeah, and it's not to say like oh, my gym is my therapy, please go to actual therapy.
Megan: 13:16
But yes, please, when you have.
Jess: 13:18
Let's say, your training hours are like eight to 10 hours a week and suddenly you're down to like four or five, on a much lesser intensity.
Megan: 13:24
It's a mind fuck it really is, Especially if what you're doing at the gym is completely changed. I mean I can't touch a barbell and so everything has been moved. You could touch it, I could touch it, but you know I can't grip it. But just that shift in it was a mental kind of mind fuck for the first like two weeks, trying to be like all right, I have to use machines. What are machines?
Jess: 13:47
Because I'm so used to doing everything, yeah, and then modifying. What can I do in this season?
Megan: 13:52
Yeah, yeah, it's going to look different but it's okay and I'm still moving, Just also having that self compassion, just like it's okay. This is the best you can do right now with your circumstances.
Jess: 14:03
For sure, and that's exactly like getting into how we manage body image, how we manage ourselves during these stressful times. That's the very first thing that I wanted to mention was that self compassion yeah, Because you're not going to get anywhere berating yourself and being an asshole. It's leaning into that self respect, taking care of yourself of no matter how your body is functioning, no matter what your brain is thinking. Your body is deserving of that respect and care. It can be so easy to turn our focus on to our bodies and all the things we don't like and searching for something within that that we can control. So it's asking yourself in these seasons like what is the next right thing For me in this season, with all the things I have going on? It's usually evening and I'm asking myself okay, are we going to run, we're going to lift, we're going to go to bed? Are we going to modify or run or lift? What do we have capacity for and what is the most self compassionate thing that I could do? How do I take care of myself? What are my needs? And understanding that, especially when you're stressed and sometimes during stressful times, you actually just need more sleep.
Megan: 15:02
Mm-hmm, I think I don't want to say like self compassion is only the relaxation part, because sometimes it's like I don't know.
Jess: 15:10
Yeah, sometimes the self compassionate thing is like rolling your ass off the couch and taking yourself to the gym and sucking it up and using the machines, when all you want to do is touch the barbell.
Megan: 15:19
Yes, exactly, and it's just about finding that balance.
Jess: 15:21
And sometimes, when you're learning self compassion for a while, you skew way in the direction of sitting on the couch and then you're like, actually, okay, self compassion is this I don't want to use the word balance of taking care of myself mentally, physically, emotionally. So compassion isn't letting myself go, it's holding yourself accountable and responsible, but still taking care of you and not ignoring your feels and your needs. Exactly, I'd like to think of this as like the friend test too. Like if my best friend was going through what I am, what would I say to them and how would I encourage them to act? I've had to kind of distance myself recently of okay, what do I need tonight? Because it's usually it's the end of a you know, 10 plus hour workday, plus time in traffic, and it's okay run, lift, sleep or a modification. How am I feeling? What are my energy levels? Like? Did I eat enough today? Did I drink enough water? How did I sleep last night? What are my sleep needs tonight? If my best friend were explaining this to me, what would I tell them to do? And it helps me to better tune in to you know what I'm going to start this, lift and see where I'm at, and nine times out of 10, I can do the whole lift, and maybe I've modified a couple of things, or maybe I skip accessories Anyway. So self compassion being thing number one in managing busy, stressful seasons. The second one we want to talk about and we kind of alluded to this earlier is non-negotiables. If you are a client of mine listening to this, non-negotiables are something that we talk about every single week because they're important, and this isn't a list of all the 15 habits you want to do every single day. No, this is leaning into basics. This is the understanding that in a busy season, you're not going to put yourself on some crazy new diet, you're not going to completely start a whole new workout routine. What are the basics? How are you showing up for yourself every single day in a way that you're taking care of you? Is it carrying a water bottle with you everywhere you go to make sure that you're drinking at least half your body weight in ounces of water a day? Is it recognizing that when I'm stressed, I have this propensity for staying up way too late trying to get one more thing done? I set a bedtime for myself, and so it's lights out by 10pm to make sure that I get at least seven hours of sleep at night. You know, is it 10 minutes at the beginning or the end of the day to like word vomit in a journal or just have some focused decompress time with yourself? Right, these are basics. This isn't putting all these things on a list. It's saying what are the things in this busy season I tend to forget and how can I show up for me and keep taking care of me?
Megan: 17:44
Yeah, I know one thing that you had listed in here was taking time to do a skincare routine, and that one kind of made me giggle because as I get older I've noticed that you know, you know your skin changes, right. But I have started doing the little eye patches and stuff like that and I keep them in the fridge and I will say I don't know if it's doing shit for my skin, but it makes me feel good.
Jess: 18:05
Hey, that's half of it, right. It just feels like a nice relaxing thing to do. I put that in there in this list of like leaning into basics in addition to like eating at least three servings of plants a day, skincare routines and I don't want to like get down the rabbit hole of people on social media and there's 27 steps skincare routine. But just in context of like that is something for me that when I'm stressed, it is everything I can do to like take a shower every day and washing my hair and washing my face and going through that skincare routine, knowing that if I actually wash my face and put on the lotion that makes my skin feel the best, my skin doesn't look so shallow the next day and it legitimately feels like an act of self-care. But it is one of those like I set that as a non-negotiable for myself for a while, because I usually will just use makeup remover, skin cleanser, whatever wipe and I'm done.
Megan: 18:52
Oh, I wouldn't even do that before bed. I was just like I'm going to bed.
Jess: 18:55
But, yeah, non-negotiables. What are the small little things that you, I'm going to say, demand of yourself every day? How do you show up to say these are not negotiable. For me, I will get these done? You know, for one of my clients the last couple weeks, their non-negotiable was making their kids's lunch and their own lunch every day before work, and that was the single non-negotiable we worked on for the week. Yeah, that's great, okay. The next thing I'm going to talk about is finding the joy, and I hesitate in putting this in here Anytime. We talk about, like, finding the joy, finding gratitude, focusing on the here and now and, you know, remembering you're not going to get another today, right, it's true, but it's so oversimplified to people and there's a lot of benefit from gratitude and finding joy. But I liked this piece of. I read oh, it's probably been close to a month ago now about finding glimmers in your day, and it's this idea of finding small moments of peace or happiness, because, again, we're always going to be busy, we're always going to have stress, all of those things finding those glimmers of. I don't even want to say positivity, right, but just this, like earlier today I went out for a walk and it had been weirdly snowing and then raining, it was still drizzling, and then the sun came out and I was like sunshine on my face, what this feels so good, but those moments of just glimmers, finding those little bits because not everything is bad, or at least, for your sake I hope not everything is bad but finding those pieces of enjoyment. And this is something that I have again in this season, trying to do for myself too, a being grateful. Some of these things that are making my life busy and stressful right now are good things. They're going to be bigger things, gooder things as they grow, as they change, and I know everything is moving forward. But in the season it was like all right, where are the small moments of joy? Or standing on a dining room chair yesterday, megan, taking pictures for a sturdy girl apparel. I was so anxious about getting pictures done and all the thought and then trying to find those moments of just being present. And one thing I want to call this back to last season we did an interview with a stress coach and they talked about, in the stressful times, doing a couple of different grounding exercises. So I do want to mention those real quick and then we can kind of move on. One of them is the five four, three, two, one, so five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. So taking that moment from that like thought spiral to go through that list can help bring yourself back to the present moment. Or is it stopping and taking five deep breaths, five seconds inhale, pause, five seconds exhale and you can touch your thumb to the pad of each of your fingers.
Megan: 21:31
I actually do that a lot.
Jess: 21:33
And that brings you back to your body, back to the present moment. And so, instead of the spiral way out of control, it can bring you back down and that's not gonna say like, this is gonna solve your problems, no, but it can slow down that spiral, yeah, and that's fantastic. And the next thing that we want to talk about in busy, stressful seasons is stop blaming your body. We've talked about how stress and busyness can affect your actual processes of your body. It can affect the lens with which we look at our body. We can get a lot more hypercritical, and it's so easy to blame our body when all it's trying to do is support us through this busy season. Your body's not the problem. A lot of times, it's the thoughts about our bodies that are. So can we acknowledge those thoughts that come up about our body in these seasons and ask yourself where is this thought coming from? Is it really true? Like, if you can get to the point, beyond the just acknowledging the thoughts, right, that's a whole skill in itself. But as they come up and you recognize that they're coming up, can you challenge them? Can you say is this really true? The wild thing here is you know our feelings are a signal that something is going on and a lot of times our brains aren't great about interpreting what that something is. So take skill to recognize the where and why of that feeling coming up. If getting dressed in the morning feels even more like an ordeal, standing in front of your closet, going what the hell do I wear, can you lean into the season of wearing clothes that you feel good in, clothes that are comfortable because, like we've said so many times before, fashion really has no rules. So, where what you want, right, the season of where what's comfortable, is it t-shirts and leggings? Incidentally, we have an episode coming up later this season I can't remember two or three episodes from now on how to manage your self-talk when it comes to looking in the mirror, and how to improve the skill of affirmations, which, yes, it's a skill and there's a right and wrong way to do it. So we will be talking about that shameless plug to keep listening. And one thing along these lines too, of the stop blaming our body, as we have talked so much about this already on this episode is, you know, if you notice the amount of movement you're getting in has decreased? Noticing, not judging. Can you think about ways to increase that, even if it's just getting the dogs out for a walk. So this isn't saying, like you know, megan, for you you're not able to Olympic lift right now and you're not able to mountain bike. Okay, we understand that. But you are finding so many other modalities and ways to get in movement and figuring out how that can manage the mental health piece. Right, because movement can help our feels, help us process them, work through them and especially when it comes to those feelings about our bodies, it's almost like that thought of a nurse I like the more sedentary we are, the harder it is to work through those feels about our body.
Megan: 24:03
Yeah, I've been trying to like time myself and walk, like I used to use my GPS watch for mountain biking and fun stuff. But now I use it for making sure that I've walked a full mile. And it's not because I'm like, oh, I gotta go out and walk a mile, for mentally I'm like, okay, I need to take this break and just go out and take a mile break. If I reach more than a mile, great.
Jess: 24:23
If I don't, that's okay, especially to like sitting for your job, right? You're like, all right, I need to sit all the time. Yeah, I need this movement for my mental and physical health. Yeah, because our physical bodies respond to stress as much as our brains do.
Megan: 24:37
Well, it's so easy, when you work from home too, to forget about breaks, forget about your lunch. It's very easy.
Jess: 24:45
One thing I want to acknowledge here too it's okay to feel differently about your body during these seasons. It's okay to not like your body as much as maybe you normally do, understanding that this is temporary. And finding those small ways, those non-negotiables, incorporating little bits towards working towards your goal as a way to counteract or just working through that season. And then, last little thing to help us through these busy times is rewarding yourself. Now, this isn't the overuse like treat yourself. Even though I am a firm believer in my emotional support. Iced coffee as a little treat myself every time I go run errands. Same. This is more for the listeners that are overachievers, the listeners that gain those dopamine hits from checking things off the to-do list, who tackle a goal and then move immediately onto the next one. Can you take a moment when you complete that big project or you're making huge progress towards a house project or big things going on in your family, whatever it is? Can you take a minute to just celebrate all of your freaking hard work, bask in the progress that you've made, even if it doesn't feel measurable on how well you're surviving or thriving despite it all? Like that's the whole point here Is there's a small way to treat yourself, to reward yourself and take the time to actually acknowledge the things that you are working on, because I'm assuming that the busyness and the stress isn't for nothing, or hopefully it's not. Hopefully you're not like a slave to your job that you hate and it's ruining your life.
Megan: 26:16
Those are my thoughts. I think I treat myself a little too much.
Jess: 26:19
I think there's a balance to be had. And then one little bonus thought here on setting boundaries, and Megan, you had kind of spoke on this one before we hit record, so do you wanna elaborate on that?
Megan: 26:29
I mean I think it's important. I am a person that has a very hard time saying no to anything, and so I mean I've worked really hard as far as, like, I think it's important to set boundaries in your own time, especially when your time is already so scarce and you're already having a hard time managing it and so in feeling overwhelmed or overworked, stressed, and so it's just kind of one of those pieces where it's okay to say no, it's okay to pencil in time for yourself and not over commit.
Jess: 26:57
Just because your calendar doesn't have something on it doesn't mean you have to fill it, Doesn't mean you yeah, exactly. So you're talking more like social engagements and that kind of thing, and that's really important. Don't over commit when your time is your most precious resource.
Megan: 27:12
Yeah, I mean it could be social engagements or it could even be with yourself, like I have a lot of times again because I struggle with time management. I have to work backwards, like if you have to do this at a certain time, let's work backwards from that and then let's work on how much you can commit to doing it within that timeframe. And if you struggle with time management and you struggle with ADHD, like I do, you can try and fit a lot of things in there and then all of a sudden that's what makes you late and then that's what makes you panic. It's a spiral.
Jess: 27:40
Yeah and I think this speaks really well to those that work from home as well of setting boundaries of when I clock in and when I clock out and when I need to be done and keeping that work life separation Cause that will filter in when you're like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling so stressed and there's so many things that I'm so busy and you're like, ew, I was responding to emails at 9 30 PM, what the hell.
Megan: 28:01
Oh yeah, especially if you have to jump on your computer like I'm doing some class stuff for work, and so I am finding myself on my computer at 9 PM and then, all of a sudden I am responding to emails and I'm like, wait a minute, what am I doing? I'm like, no, no, no. Sometimes that just means getting into a different workspace. So instead of sitting in my office at home like if I'm doing homework, I'll go out into the living room and set up in the kitchen. That separation I like it. Yeah, even though it's on the same computer, it's like mentally it's a little bit different.
Jess: 28:29
Okay, so let's wrap this up. Busy seasons are a fact of life. How we manage them is a skill. It is a freaking skill. So, looking at leaning into self-compassion, setting non-negotiables, finding the joy and the glimmers, not blaming your body for its response to stress, rewarding yourself and setting boundaries yes, your body's not the problem. Remember to treat it with respect and care that it deserves, no matter what is going on in your life. And that is the end of the episode. One thing I do want to mention before we say goodbye. This episode is airing on Friday, march 1st, and that is when Sturdy Girl apparel drops. Yay. This has been six months in the making, six months of research in all different types of screen printing and different t-shirt companies and all the things. It's finally here. So if you're listening on release day or afterwards, be sure to check out our apparel at SturdyGirlcoshop. All photography is courtesy of Megan. We're so stoked to bring it to you. I'm so stoked to see Sturdy Girl shirts in the wild. It's going to be awesome. Thanks for listening to another episode. Friends. Be sure to tune in next week to listen again. Megan will actually be interviewed next week. All about being a Sturdy Girl in the bike racing scene and all of the impacts that injury has had on your body image.
Megan: 29:55
Yeah.
Jess: 29:56
I'm excited.
Megan: 29:57
Don't sound too excited. Oh, my god, I am. I got a lot to say.
Jess: 30:02
We look forward to it. All right, friends, we'll talk to you next week. Bye, if you enjoyed this podcast episode, please feel free to follow, subscribe, like whatever the heck you do with podcasts. As always, stay Sturdy, friends, and we'll talk to you next week.