In this insightful and vulnerable episode, Kristen is joined by longtime friend and author Sarah Boyd to unpack the often misunderstood world of nervous system regulation and how chronic stress shows up in parenting, entrepreneurship, and everyday life.

They explore how hustle culture isn’t just a mindset—it’s often a nervous system coping mechanism, and why high achievers struggle with stillness, rest, and emotional connection. Sarah shares practical tools for recognizing overstimulation, building emotional regulation, and deepening relationships at home—especially for parents who are also business owners.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re stuck in “go mode” and can’t seem to slow down without guilt or anxiety, this episode is a must-listen.

What You’ll Learn:

• What nervous system dysregulation actually is—and how to spot it in your own life
  
• Why high performers often struggle with parenting and connection
  
• How hustle can be a trauma response masked as productivity
  
• The hidden role of overstimulation in burnout and disconnection
  
• Tools for re-regulating your nervous system—especially during transitions between work and family life
  
• How entrepreneurs can build deeper emotional awareness and healthier coping strategies
  
• Why rest might feel unsafe for you—and how to change that
  

Timestamps:

• [00:00] Intro and heartfelt reunion with Sarah Boyd
  
• [04:00] How Sarah’s new book reframes overstimulation and parenting
  
• [08:30] The science of stress: what your nervous system is trying to tell you
  
• [13:00] What keeps high performers stuck in chronic dysregulation
  
• [17:00] Kristen’s personal story of entrepreneurial vigilance and internalized scarcity
  
• [22:00] A hard truth: many entrepreneurs are dysregulated and calling it “ADHD”
  
• [27:00] The role of parenting in nervous system awareness
  
• [30:10] Why entrepreneurs struggle to connect with their kids
  
• [35:00] How to move out of “fight or flight” and back into empathy
  
• [38:45] Reclaiming rest: learning to downshift your nervous system after work
  
• [42:00] Hustle as a flavor of dysregulation—and recovering from it
  
• [44:30] Why EQ (emotional intelligence) is the future for our kids
  
• [45:36] Final reflections + where to find Sarah’s work
  

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About Sarah Boyd:

Sarah Boyd is a writer, child and adolescent development expert, and founder of educational company, Resilient Little Hearts, a platform helping parents and children navigate big emotions in a chaotic world. Her book, Turn Down the Noise, helps readers understand the impact of overstimulation on the nervous system and offers practical tools to find calm, especially for parents raising children in the modern age.

Follow Sarah:
Instagram: @resilientlittlehearts Book: Turn Down the Noise – available now wherever books are sold

Learn more about Kristen by heading to her website: www.kristenboss.com

Call to Action:

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Screenshot it and tag @thekristenboss and @resilientlittleheartson Instagram to let us know your biggest takeaway.

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“It wasn’t overworking that burned me out—it was living in a constant state of internal pressure, solving imaginary problems, and never feeling safe to rest.” – Kristen Boss

Transcript for episode 237: “From Hustle to Healing: Parenting, Pressure, and the Cost of Always Being ‘On’“

Kristen Boss (01:00):

Hey listeners, welcome back. I’m super excited about this week’s episode. I have a very dear friend of mine on the show with me, Ms. Sarah Boyd, I’m so

Sarah Boyd (01:11):

Glad you’re here. Oh, I am so glad. It’s so lovely to see your face as always. So I’m pumped to be here. I know Sarah and I are the type

Kristen Boss (01:19):

Of friends where we won’t talk for six months and we won’t, but we won’t miss the beat in between. And literally, I think we just had a 15 minute, I miss you. Before we clicked record, I was like, we should probably actually record a podcast, otherwise this is going to turn into a catch up call, which it kind of did. And I’m like, okay, we’re about to start talking about the good stuff. We should probably start recording. But for my friends who don’t know how amazing Ms. Sarah Boyd is, she, you probably follow her social media account. It’s resilient little hearts and it is Sarah has friend. You just have such a beautiful way of, oh my gosh, just bringing empathy and compassion and accessible language to living the human experience in our everyday life and how to do that. Well, and I’m excited about this conversation this year. You came out with the book, turned down the noise, and when it came to my house and I ordered it and I just read just the back of it, I looked at Scott, I was like, Scott, do you know Sarah’s such a baddie? I always knew you were a batty. But then when I read this, I was like, you’re such a humble person. I just want you to know that Sarah walks very softly and has just, you’re very deep. You’re a well of wisdom, my friend.

Sarah Boyd (02:43):

Oh, well I love you. I feel like maybe that’s why we love each other. You are like the leadership extroverted person, so we just connect and have a good laugh. So I love you. I appreciate that. Yeah.

Kristen Boss (02:55):

This conversation we’re going to have about the nervous system and regulation dysregulation, kind of what that means. And I think there’s a little bit, I think this is just starting to become more mainstream conversation, but I still think there’s a still isolated to the world of therapy. People are like, oh, that’s a therapy thing. That’s something you do with your therapist and they kind of isolate nervous system work to that world and like, oh, if you’re going to do some healing, but high performers tend to kind of not see like, okay, well, but how does my nervous system actually impact my everyday life? And your book turned down the noise. I love that you are actually doing it through the lens of parenting and our children, and this is such, I will, to be fully transparent, actually, it was my own recognizing my own overstimulation and dysregulation that actually did have me go to therapy in how I was specifically interacting with my daughter who has just so much to offer this world. She’s everything I want her to be. As a grown woman sister really drives me to my knees in prayer as a parent,

Sarah Boyd (04:19):

Yes, there’s always the ones that we love their gifts inside and they’re going to be incredible adults, but the parenting journey is particularly challenging and yes, a lot.

Kristen Boss (04:30):

Yeah, She’s the one that humbles me

(04:34):

Where I’m like, I don’t know. I’m like, listen, I could parent this one by the book. This one takes the book, lights it on fire and then laughs in my face while she does it. Well, this cute a parenting book. Lemme just, oh, you have rules. Lemme just throw this around. But Sarah, for our listeners that are maybe not, I’m going to say maybe outliers to the nervous system conversation and even the sense of regulation dysregulation, I’m wanting to bring it in because it really does touch every part of our life who we are in business, how we interact with our spouse, how we show up in high stress moments. So first of all, tell me a little bit about what led you to writing this book and literally about, again, even your tagline in the back, overstimulation is an invisible epidemic in our world. No truer words have been said. Amen. That’s the end.

Sarah Boyd (05:37):

Yeah. Well, as you mentioned my background, my specialty is child and adolescent development, so that’s really the lens I started writing this through and our online community started talking. And you’re right, there’s a lot of language from the therapy world that comes into other worlds. And I think one particular topic which I’m glad has had a lot more awareness is trauma. I think there needs to be more people aware of that word. But one of the things we were finding in the space of parenting, which is where I kind of share a lot of content and stuff about is that so many parents were like, well, does that mean my child has trauma? Have I given them trauma? And I just felt like there was something missing from the conversation because a lot of these times they weren’t, they were just children and they have their own strengths and own challenges and parents doing the very best they could, but parents are reacting in ways they didn’t want to react.

(06:33):

Children are having heightened emotions and behavioral challenges past normal developmental times. And one of the things that I was aware of is just even the neuroscience of overwhelm and how our brain intakes information and just how busy our world has become that it’s just when you are living in it, you just accept it as normal. You’re not comparing, I mean we all were like, do you remember the nineties? How good was the nineties? But it’s really because we are remembering this time where this wasn’t this constant onslaught. And so that’s really where the book came from is just wanting to unpack. It’s not something wrong with you, it’s actually the world we live in today. Our world back in the nineties or probably more eighties, used to have inbuilt boundaries that created limitations of how much our nervous system was taking in and basically our nervous system to put it really, I mean I’m sure you’ve explained it really clearly before, but a really basic way to understand it is it’s our stress system.

(07:32):

And so it’s designed to work in a dance between stress and challenge and then recovery and rest. And without any stress or challenge, you don’t grow. But without any rest and recovery, you burn out and experience a lot of mental health symptoms and a lot of different stuff going on in your life. And the way that we live with our phones and the stores are always open and you can call someone at any time and the schools are giving you 400 emails and your business is really stressful. That is putting you in a state of stress and challenge almost indefinitely. So even when we take our breaks, when we go to these leisure activities, we’re staying in a state of stress and never really getting that recovery. And so being just aware of it and knowing what to do with it can help you a lot in learning to take care of yourself in that.

Kristen Boss (08:28):

Yeah, that’s so good. And I love how you explained that in the lens of we have to have enough stress to challenge us. I kind of think of building a muscle. Well, you have to actually put strain on the muscle for it to grow, but if you never strain the muscle to actually it atrophies. And so it’s the same for our nervous system, and I think this is really important for people to know. I think people have maybe a misconception what stress is because if you had asked me a year ago in my business, are you stressed? I wouldn’t have said yes and you would’ve never heard me say, I’m just so stressed. I would’ve said, I’m overwhelmed. I have a lot of deadlines going on. I have a lot of projects. I’m would tell you I’m very busy. But stress to me, how I looked at it was like, okay, that’s somebody who I saw someone under collapse or going through a crisis.

(09:26):

I associated stress with crisis. Like, okay, that’s a medical emerging emergency. Somebody’s throwing up in the backseat while you’re driving down the freeway. That’s a stress. What I couldn’t understand was what are tiny stressors that, like you have said, we normalize in our day to day. I think because for me, because of that, I never understood that I was therefore constantly in a stress response. I am a fight flight response. So I have a nervous system that propels me into activity when I feel that when I feel the dysregulation, I throw myself into motion. I am so busy stillness, which is so interesting because we need rest and recovery to get us out of that overstimulated stress response. But I would love for you to speak to this. How do we manage this when we don’t feel safe to rest and have stillness? Because for me, I didn’t realize that that’s why I was never slowing down is because I felt deeply unsafe with quiet and stillness and not being productive. Can you speak to that?

Sarah Boyd (10:40):

Yeah, well, I think you’ve touched on, I mean we’re human. We are messy creatures and none of us have this pure amazing motives for anything we get into. And I think the brilliance of high achievers and entrepreneurs is that is the go-getter spirit, the high activity, you’re doing something purposeful in the world, you’re making a difference, you’re making a mark. But the very skillset that helps you to do that is often the very thing that keeps you stuck there.

(11:12):

One of the things that we don’t often realize is in order to get that level of success, you have to get good at denying your emotions. So if you talk to a young entrepreneur and you say, Hey, you feel scared to share that offer, to take that risk and they listen to the feelings of fear, they’re not going to get the results that you need to get in business. And that becomes a muscle that you need as an entrepreneur of deny it, push it down. This airplane has to take off this launch, this product launch has to happen. And I think this is where the nuance of conversation really needs to happen because that is a healthy skill in situations. But if you stay in that space, that’s when you’re going to get into trouble. And essentially that’s exactly what you’re talking about. The dysfunction of the nervous system is when we stop the dance, we just stay in the high stress, high growth always on.

(12:14):

And a lot of times it is exactly what you said, we don’t think rest is productive. We don’t believe that we feel like stillness is confronting because what actually happens when we slow down. And one of the practices I talk about in the book as an idea to try is a technology sabbath where it’s like one day a week you put your phone away and it kind of helps you detach from the dopamine and the stress. And one of the things that you’ll experience if you do that is this full nervous system kind of let down of all of these thoughts come to the surface. And they’re typically very anxious thoughts of like, but what about this? But what about that? And the feeling like you have to hold up the world and the world’s dependent on you and exactly what you said, they’re all coming from these non-safe things.

(13:04):

I have to provide for my family. This has to get done. I can’t do any of this. This is all reliant on me. And it’s not until you stay in that space for a little bit of time that it’s also a sign of tiredness. Quite honestly, those thought patterns come from exhaustion as well. Sometimes they’re like a traumatic thing from the past where you felt like it was never safe just to be. And sometimes they come from exhaustion. Our brain does not do well in tiredness. So one of the things I suggest too is when you’re actually having those times of stillness is to do a analog distracting activity. So something that’s offline, but it’s actually your inactivity. So anything you enjoy, whether it’s exercise, activity, gardening, crafts, whatever your my paint by

Kristen Boss (13:50):

Number, listen by numbers. We can talk about how many paint by numbers I did

Sarah Boyd (13:55):

In my healing. But what that does is it just allows your whole nervous system to reset that distraction isn’t bad unless you’re staying in that state chronically. And then as you come to that stillness again, then you can work through what’s coming up for you. And a lot of times it’s confronting like I feel exhausted or this particular situation is really overwhelming, but I feel stuck. I don’t feel like I can change that. I’m the business owner. I’m the person running it. So that’s your invitation at that point to what’s this next thing I need to look at?

Kristen Boss (14:30):

I love how you called that an invitation. That’s really what it is. Man, it hit me really hard when you said earlier in the entrepreneurial experience, you are taught to deny and suppress your emotions. Like ignore your fear, push through the pain. And while that is healthy in some context, if you don’t know how to shut that off, it will become your, at least I will tell you, for me, it became my internal operating system and how we just ran our life. And so what was interesting was it took me a long time to realize that I could intellectualize and talk to you about my emotions, but actually feeling them was a whole different work for me and realizing like, oh yeah, I could even say I feel really, I would say I’m overwhelmed, but I would actually, I would notice it and then run from it, distract myself and be in this form of dysregulation.

(15:29):

And so I really like how you talk about, I don’t know, the thing that serves us. It can be the very thing that limits us later. And that was a hundred percent true for me. And what’s interesting is I think people have a misunderstanding or maybe a narrow view of burnout as well, because if you had asked me a year ago or even two years ago, what is burnout? I probably would’ve told you, well, it’s overworking yourself. It’s too many hours on the calendar. But if you had looked at my calendar, I was only working 12 to 15 hours, so a week. So why did I burn out? And I can tell you it’s because the version of me that started my business was the version of me that was trying to survive literally paycheck to paycheck. Money was never, there was always, it was in scarce supply, limited supply.

(16:21):

So because of that, I had to essentially go find my food. If we’re going to talk about survival, it’s like I don’t have enough food. I have to go out and hunt and gather. And then however, even when I became well-resourced and I could look at all of the food around me, my old survival brain was like, yeah, but okay, but what if there’s a drought tomorrow? Okay, yeah, but what if there’s not going to be any food tomorrow? So I never, ever, ever felt safe not hunting because I still had a nervous system that was like, if you stop hunting, you will not have resources, and if you do not have resources, you’ll die. And because of that, it was even my brain, even if I wasn’t only working 15 hours a week, my brain, my nervous system was on, I’m going to call it entrepreneurial vigilance where I was, I was solving problems that didn’t even exist because my brain’s like literally, I’m like, doesn’t everybody have imaginary problems they’re solving in their business in the middle of the night?

(17:27):

Doesn’t everybody think of five alternative scenarios for what might happen with this launch and solve for them ahead? I had no idea. I thought, this is just business, this business, how often? I’m just wondering how much of us are walking around. I didn’t know it was chronic dysregulation, meaning my body was constantly in that high state. How many of us are walking around just chronically dysregulated? I’m going to offer you a big saying, and I’ll be curious what you think about it. How many of us are walking around chronically dysregulated and calling it a DHD?

Sarah Boyd (18:05):

Oh, yeah.

Kristen Boss (18:07):

What do you think about that? I had that epiphany maybe the other day.

Sarah Boyd (18:11):

Yeah, no, there’s a huge, obviously the world I work in is child and adolescent development, and I do not want to put down any people’s experiences, but there has been a huge uptake in not only diagnosis, but people’s experiences and behavior that looks like a DHD and what is true, whether it’s autism or A DHD or any type of neurodivergence, is this even in the environmental change? You are still experiencing all of that because a lot of the time we are now living in an environment that is inducing that in some people, definitely not all, but in some people, if I put a child who is still in their language learning stage of development in front of a screen for 12 hours a day consistently over time, we are seeing reports where their language are delayed and they show autism like symptoms. Is that autism or is that environmental?

(19:07):

That’s something that we have to untangle. And I think it’s true. First of all, I think the entrepreneurial brain is naturally a little bit A-D-H-D-A hundred percent. But I think what’s something to consider, first of all is context. So you do have to look logically are you in an actual survival season because there are some seasons in life that are survival, but if you are not and someone was to come in and just take your laptop and take your computer and take your phone away from you for 48 hours, what would be your kind of response?

Kristen Boss (19:44):

Oh, I would’ve panicked. I would’ve full meltdown. The same with my children taking away an iPad, being like, we’re taking

Sarah Boyd (19:50):

This away. Yes, because like you said, the way you regulated anxiety was through activity. So you’ve basically taken away the regulation tool, and that is not bad. If that’s one of the tools in your tool belt, if it’s one of the things you can lean on, that’s great, but if that’s the only thing you have, that’s your only emotional regulation tool, you’re going to struggle because you’re always going to default to that thing. When Colin and I first got married we’re both really bad at DIY, and so we were having all these little issues around our rented apartment, and so he went up to the shop and bought this hammer that’s also a screwdriver inside the hammer, except it was one of those things from Hobby Lobby. It’s got a floral pattern on it. Oh my gosh. And then his dad came over to help us with some things and totally embarrassed that his son had this floral hammer tool because he’s a full man, man, and got the whole thing and the next, we were having all these problems that we couldn’t fix around the house, like little things.

(20:53):

And once he gave us that whole toolbox, it was amazing how easy it was to fix certain problems because we were just using the one tool for everything. And it’s the same in our emotional life. It doesn’t work. There are certain things that work when you’re in the context of go time with business, but that doesn’t work when you’re parenting your child or that doesn’t work when you’re trying to connect with your spouse. It’s a whole different set of circumstances, which is why sometimes very successful entrepreneurs struggle to connect with their children or struggle in their marriage because it’s a different toolbox. But the good news is, is there are all skills that we can all learn and grow in. Just like you learned and grew in your business skills, you can learn and grow in all types of skills, which is why I love what you guys are doing. So I think it’s really cool.

Kristen Boss (21:40):

Oh man, that’s still good. You’re dropping so many mic drop moments. I’m like, okay, what do I want to unpack with everything you just said? But I love the idea. It is, first of all, I love that you are not shaming what’s actually happening. And I think it’s really important because we tend to shame ourselves for how we show up in the world and how we do tend to regulate or manage stress. And some of my work was understanding like, okay, if work was my only regulation tool when I felt fear, anxiety, or even unworthiness or needed validation, that was the tool I ran to. And eventually kind of what happened was I’m thinking of some scientific study where it’s like the mouse keeps going back and then eventually it gorges itself to death.

Sarah Boyd (22:30):

That

Kristen Boss (22:31):

Was kind of me. But then eventually what my business was able to give me as far as maybe the dopamine I was seeking, if it didn’t deliver, what ended up happening was I started looking in other avenues or other places for that dopamine or even to recreate the adrenaline cortisol experience I would get with my business. And this is also my therapist talked to me about this too. This is also why we see very successful people sometimes engage in risky behaviors because they’re actually looking for either some form of either stimulation or it’s a coping mechanism. And if we haven’t been given the right tools and we haven’t been taught those skills, let’s just be honest, you and I were both millennials. These are not the conversations our parents were having not even close. And so even as my parents are watching me raise our kids, they’re seeing how different it is.

(23:35):

I think they think we’re a little too soft. Well, but what we’re trying to do is teach our children the tools while we are also learning the tools at the same time. It’s almost like it really requires so much as you are learning the new skills. Because just like with everything, you don’t learn to ride a bike and your first go, you’re going to fall. It’s not going to be great. But will you speak a little bit to why entrepreneurs do have a hard time connecting with their kids? Speak to that person that’s like, yeah, I’m grinding out my business. I’m really focused here, but connecting with my kids, slowing down to connect with my spouse. Can you speak to that?

Sarah Boyd (24:23):

Oh, yeah. I would love to mean we live it. My husband and I are both entrepreneurs, so I know it very well. I think that there is a couple of different things going on. A is the speed at which our lives work in business and that you have to run in order to be successful. I think the other thing is business is a game with very clear metrics. You put input in, and for the most part, the market decides and your input decides what result you get. So you can see, hey, I did A, B and C and here is the result that I got. It is within a timeframe of business. Most of us can finish a workday and be like, that was a good workday or that was a bad workday, whatever it was. It’s clear metrics, whereas relationships are not clear metrics. And particularly with children, they’re often a very slow investment over time that you may not see the result of your investment until years and even decades later. The other thing is children require us to be present and in time with them, and we often finish our day giving 100% of ourselves to this business.

Speaker 1 (25:38):

So

Sarah Boyd (25:38):

We come home absolutely exhausted with nothing left to give. And so whether it’s their defiance, their talking back to us, their needs, we just don’t have anything left over to respond in patience or understanding. And I think the other thing too is sometimes, again, we as entrepreneurs, our strength is that denial of, well, who cares if you’re scared? You need to show up. Who cares if you’re a shy person? You need to show up. Who cares if you are introverted, overwhelmed, stressed? You need to be growth mindset, resilience, David Groins, push through. You need that. And sometimes our children do not have that as a personality temperament. Sometimes they have other things going on and it becomes real. And almost all of us have at least one child that we really struggle to understand. And when you struggle with that understanding, you struggle with capacity or empathy to connect with them.

(26:42):

It’s just almost like instant, why are you not responding the way I would respond or the way I’ve taught myself to respond? So it’s all of the combination of all of those things that I think create conditions that can make it very challenging for high achievers to be present in their children’s lives to really connect. And so one of the things I always suggest to parents who are high achievers and entrepreneurs is find one activity that you also enjoy doing that your child enjoys doing that you can do together. So it just creates moments of connection outside of the boundary holding the yes, you have to do the dishes. Yes, you need to do your homework. Yes, you need to clean the room. There is this moment where it’s also enjoyable for you, maybe for you. It’s like paint by numbers what me and my daughter do, paint by numbers, crafts.

(27:36):

And it’s those things that I think too for me as an entrepreneur, when I sit and actually do art with my daughter, actually I’m like, oh, why do I not do this more myself? There’s something about being with her that makes me slow down a little bit as well. So yeah, I think it’s just something that we need to pay attention to and also pay attention to the fact that our children are not us. They’re separate people that we’ve been given the opportunity to steward, and it’s an honor. It also requires sacrifice. And so it’s about navigating that I think within the midst of everything else. So good.

Kristen Boss (28:13):

I think it is when I think on it and how I’m interacting with my kids, again, there’s the one that we struggle to connect with, and honestly, it’s the one that forces, it has to force me to slow down because if I don’t slow down, I become very sharp. I’m apologizing 10 minutes later I’m saying, mommy really messed up again. And if anything, I just want to encourage any parent. If you’re listening and you’re like, gosh, I am messing up all over the place, one of the most powerful things I was told was, your children will remember your effort in making repair. They remember those things. And so it is an invitation to repair and it’s not too far gone. And so for me, I’m just like, what I’m really good at is saying Mommy was wrong, and I’m sorry. She’s heard that more in her life than I ever heard in her eight years than I heard in my 40 years.

(29:10):

Oh my gosh, Sarah, I almost overaged myself and said 45, maybe it’s because this last year has felt like five years. Wow, I’m only 40. Okay. Wow. That was really alarming. But I do think there is something to conditioning ourselves or giving everything to my business, all of that, and then being so tired, so depleted. I think there might even need to be a gear shift between when I shut down for the day to when I enter into putting on my mom hat. But I do think it is like, yeah, if I’m denying and suppressing my emotions for the sake of getting stuff done and moving forward, and because the business can’t afford me having a meltdown, so we’re just powering through. If I’m denying my human experience and I step into the emotional chaos of a child having their human experience, if I’m shutting down mine, then of course I’m going to shut down theirs too.

(30:10):

I’m going to be like, let’s move on. Why is this so upsetting? Get over this. So it’s like, yeah. So it does force us to be like, oh, it’s messy. Like you said, business could be this linear. We get feedback and then we enter chaos, non-linear, too nervous systems interacting with each other. And I joke that I get overstimulated, so I too much touch. Don’t touch me. My daughter, she seeks stimulation, and so that makes it real fun when I have a nervous system that’s like, don’t touch me. And her nervous system is like, I need to,

Sarah Boyd (30:51):

But it it’s really true too, because when they’re having their meltdown over the fact that you cut their dinner the wrong way or they didn’t like what you want, and you are thinking to yourself, I just got through holding my company on so I don’t have to let anyone go. Your problems are so much bigger and you think you even just do this small thing. But I think what you spoke about is very true, that transitional space between work and home, we used to have that before any of us were given the opportunity to work from home. We used to have a commute where it was this time in the car on public transport where you would actually be in between, and it almost gives you that moment of breathe. I think we all joke that we’ve all had moments where we just sit in the car in our driveway and not get out.

(31:39):

Yes, I was actually going to talk about that. Yes. Yeah. But it is, it’s about extending a lot of compassion. Children are incredibly forgiving, and if you are apologizing and making that repair, it’s never too late for the relationship. It can always grow and get better, but it really is also about extending compassion to ourselves. Most of the time, our reactions to our children that we shame ourselves for because we are not okay ourselves, and we don’t have someone standing there a lot of the time saying, Hey, how was your day? Are you doing okay? What’s going on for you? And we just shame ourselves in that, and that just creates this cycle of guilt, and then we shut it down again. I think we need more compassion. One question to ask yourself that can sometimes help that is, what would I say to my best friend if they were in my situation?

Kristen Boss (32:34):

That’s so good. I’ve even heard the term we have to, it’s compassionately reparent ourselves in the moment. So even talking to ourselves in a way a loving parent would. And so even that work, it’s just like, how do I access compassion in this moment? And it does require, I think if we’re in survival and our nervous system is super dysregulated, we’re in that stress fight flight response, it’s almost impossible to access compassion from that place because it

Sarah Boyd (33:07):

Actually is neurologically.

Kristen Boss (33:09):

It is, yeah. It’s in the different part of their brain, right? Because in order to have compassion that’s kind of in your frontal lobe, that’s where you’re empathizing able to see a situation differently. But when you’re in fight flight response, your amygdala’s on fire, the back of your brain being like, no, take control. Must survive. Put out the fires.

Sarah Boyd (33:28):

Yeah. Well, because when you’re under stress, your body shuts down all the non survival skills, so your digestion slows down, your fertility slows down your, anything that’s not essential to the moment of survival slows down also empathy because you’re not going to sit there and have empathy towards the attacker or the lion or the stressor in front of you. And so I think that is one of the things that we have to just be mindful of is in this world that we live in where we’ve been fighting things all day in business, what it is, you’ve kind of got to be a warrior and go out there and run it. And that when we are coming home of putting on a different, taking time to actually try and essentially move ourself out of that place. And you can’t think yourself out of stress. A lot of times you need to move yourself out of stress. And whether that’s practices of walking water is a really great nervous system, even if it’s just saying, I’m going to have a quick shower before when I come home from work and then I’m with you or changing of your clothes, or if you can’t do that, running your wrists under cold water can be something that can help. Just something that helps you physically change your state.

Kristen Boss (34:41):

Yeah, that’s really good. When I was a hairstylist back in the day, one of the things they taught us when we had a particularly exhausting client was to put our hands under cold water and just vigorously shake our hands out. And it just kind of, again, it resets your state and you said it Well, we cannot out logic a stress response because that, by the way, logic, that’s the part that shuts off. I like to think of the front of your brain is the wifi signal. There is no wifi signal when the back of your brain’s like, Hey, we’re going to be mauled by a grizzly bear, even though the grizzly bear is just a poor review on Google about our business. Unfortunately, I love those sayings where it’s like, unfortunately, my nervous system can’t tell the difference between a grizzly bear and my child telling me I suck.

(35:28):

So it’s just this isn’t something we master. I think we’re constant and forever students of this. I just think we get better at choosing regulation faster and spotting our dysregulation. I think that has been my work. It’s just like, oh, this is how dysregulation or a stress response shows up for me. This is Kristen boss’s flavor of it, and turns out Kristen boss’s flavor, it made me a lot of money. Yes. However, the thing that serves us when it goes unchecked becomes the very thing that hurts us. And that was part of the healing work I had to enter is like, okay, what does it look like to serve without my amygdala being on fire? I’ve been calling, I’m calling it success sobriety. How do I steward a business while also staying sober minded? What does it look like when stress or pressure enters the picture?

(36:34):

Because when you have a business, you are intentionally choosing pressure and stress in some level. You’re signing up for that. So it’s like, all right, knowing that I’m putting myself in high stress, high pressure moments, how am I going to stay sober minded or notice when the stress is hijacking my brain and I’m not in my frontal lobe, I’m in my rear lobe and I’m dysregulated. What does it look like to slow down, take a moment, take a breath and return back to my truth and who I am and who I want to be and how I want to show up? And it is, I will say it has been a work, especially when I operated for five years, I like to think of it. I think of those stories where they talk about children that grew up in food scarce environments where food was not plenty or even predictable, like studies kids in orphanages in third world countries.

(37:34):

And so even when, and this has happened to actually a couple of friends of mine that have adopted internationally, and they were in food scarce areas, and even with pantries full and food everywhere, the child would still hoard food. They would find it under the bed and stuck in the crevices. And that’s because even with evidence, there still is the experience that’s like, yeah, but what if the food runs out? And just understanding, oh, that’s a survival response. That’s still kicking in, and that is how they’re choosing to survive in the world. And so I kind of see my entrepreneurial story as the scarcity never left me even with millions. It never left me. And it took me a while to realize there was no milestone or revenue goal that was going to solve my hunger problem. And so I realized, oh, this is an inside job, and that’s not sexy. It is so not sexy, Sarah saying like, oh, by the way, your answers aren’t in another launch or making, and I do think this is part of my entrepreneurial, I don’t know if I want to call it the disillusionment being like, oh, wait, oh wait. This is the external thing, cannot serve an internal thing. And this is the invitation to our work. Even as parents in our marriages, this touches every area of our life. So I don’t know. That’s just kind of my,

Sarah Boyd (39:06):

I love that you share that though, because I think whatever we choose to do or whoever we are in the world, there is a shadow side of it, and it’s going to come for us if we don’t look it in the face and actually get honest about it. Because if you look at any gift, you look at a creative gift, oftentimes they struggle with depression. You look at intelligence gift, they often struggle with anxiety. Every gift, the entrepreneurial gift comes with so many gifts, so much that you can build for your family in terms of money and opportunity and freedom and so much that you can do good in the world with what you’ve been given. And there’s just a shadow side of it of this stress that you have to learn to navigate. And that’s why I love everything that you’re doing, because you’re helping people with the tools to say, Hey, keep shining in your gift. And also let’s deal with the shadow side so it doesn’t undermine the very thing that you’re hoping to create.

Kristen Boss (40:01):

Yeah, there was just, it’s interesting. I wrote my first book, pivot to Purpose, leaving the Toxic Hustles Culture behind, and that was almost five years ago, and I did not have words for it at the time. I was kind of speaking to the superficial girl, boss hustle, culture rise and grind culture. And I do think there is, I think that speaks to the early builds, the early phases of business. But what I didn’t realize was that hustle was actually my flavor of dysregulation. That is how Kristen boss seeks to find safety and certainty and security and worth in the world. And so hustling. I didn’t realize until years later, write a name for it was like, oh, oh, actually, that’s my flavor of how I respond when my brain tells me I have to survive.

(40:57):

And I was telling someone the other day, they’re like, oh, do you think I, I don’t know if they said something, have you healed from hustle? I’m like, healed. No. This is going to be my work for the rest of my life. Kind of like somebody, maybe a recovering alcoholic. They don’t say, say, I’m recovering. And to be honest, I did 12 steps around my relationship with work because I’m like, I’m always going to be recovering from hustle. I’m always going to be somebody that has to be aware. It’s not, oh, I’m never going there again. I have to learn to recognize the signs and slow down. And like you said, oftentimes the thing we are called to do in the world becomes a very thing we struggle most with ourselves. And so I think I even had to remove my shame from, I wrote a book on anti hussle, and I fell victim to it in the most catastrophic way possible. I’m like, Hey, everyone,

Sarah Boyd (41:59):

But I think that makes you the best person to talk about it though, because I just feel like if you were someone who never struggled with it, how does it help anybody who does? Because you don’t understand what they’re going through, but because you’ve gone through it, you very, very closely know what it is that they’re walking through.

Kristen Boss (42:19):

I think even more so now, I think my first draft now, I looked at it, I was like, oh my God, I was so naive when I wrote that book. I think it was, I have think there’s still a lot of rich lessons in there, but I look at the version of me now, I’m like, oh man, we have a lot more. That version of Hustle was cute. This one is the one I had to go toe to toe with, and battle for a sober mind around. It was very sinister and very subtle, and it didn’t look like hustle with ours. It didn’t look like that. But how it registered in my body, a hundred percent was it was the child hoarding that was so afraid? What if it all goes away? So yeah, I think again, it’s always, I think doing this work is just a constant invitation to how do I have compassion for myself in this lesson? I’m learning and realizing that I was never taught. Also, can I just say how excited I am for the millennials generation of kids that are growing up? I think our kids are Gen Alpha is who they are. I’m so excited to see who Gen Alpha is going to be and the conversations I feel like the millennials are having and the work we are doing. At least the pockets I’m seeing. I’m like, oh, are we going to have children that have better EQ at a younger age than our generation did?

Sarah Boyd (43:45):

That is my hope and my dream and everything, because I think EQ comes down to it’s behind everything. It’s behind all of our most important relationships. It’s behind how we work in a healthy way. It’s behind, honestly. It’s behind crime rates. It’s behind mental health. It’s behind a lot of social issues that we see as well. So I’m with you. I am actually very hopeful of the generation coming through, and I just think that’s why this work that we do in ourselves and do in our homes is so important. So yeah,

Kristen Boss (44:18):

I’m so thankful for the work you’re doing, friend. It’s just to have people with such big hearts and empathy and the knowledge to step into the space, the very hard, emotionally, physically, mentally demanding space of parenting. It is our greatest privilege and our hardest work and our most humbling work. I was going to say, nothing humbles me quite like parenting, but lately this chapter of my entrepreneurial journey, that’s, that’s humbling too. That’s fun. But I’m so thankful that we have access to these tools today. So this is for my friends who are listening. Guys, if you have not picked up the book, turn Down the Noise. Highly recommend with our sweet friend Sarah, if you don’t follow her account on social media, resilient Little hearts. We’re going to put this all in our show notes, but friend, I just appreciate, I appreciate you so much. You’re a good soul. You’re a good one. Same. I feel the same. It was so lovely to talk with you. Alright, everybody, you heard it here. We’ll catch you in the next episode.

Speaker 1 (45:36):

That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Listen, if you love what you heard here today, I would love for you to leave a real quick rating and a review. This helps the show get discovered by new people. Be sure to take a screenshot of today’s episode and shout us out on Instagram. We’ll shout you right back out. If you’d like to find additional resources or discover how to work with me, head to www.kristenboss.com.