Your Nervous System isn't the enemy! How survival mode shapes your money, relationships, creativity, and success (215)

Good morning, my friends. Imagine for a moment that the thing holding you back is not a lack of willpower but an ancient, well-meaning bodyguard living inside you—your nervous system—whose single question is always, "Am I safe?" In this episode Aubrey Barr invites you into a quiet, radical reframe: the moments you call failure are often your body trying to keep you alive the only way it knows how.

She begins with a plainspoken truth: most of the brilliant, driven women she works with are not lazy or broken. They have healed, sought guidance, and still hit a glass wall when visibility, rest, or receiving show up. Through intimate stories and clear examples, Aubrey shows how survival patterns—learned from childhood, burnout, postpartum seasons, and financial stress—live in memory and steer your habits, relationships, money, parenting, and creativity.

Hear the four ways the nervous system shows up—fight (irritability and control), flight (busyness and distraction), freeze (procrastination and numbness), and the people-pleasing "fun" state—and recognize the ways those states have been useful and now hold you back. Listen as she traces these patterns through the lives of moms who carry everyone’s emotions, creatives who wait for permission, and business owners who undercharge and overdeliver—stories that will feel like looking in a mirror.

Then Aubrey flips the script: regulation comes before manifestation. Safety comes before sustainability. Your body must believe expansion is allowed before the mind can follow. She brings this idea to life with a simple, grounding somatic practice—place one hand on your chest and one on your belly, slow the breath so the exhale is longer than the inhale, and whisper, "I am here. I am safe in this moment." That small act is described here as a teaching to your vagus nerve, a tiny but profound rehearsal for a new story.

With warmth and gentle authority, Aubrey weaves personal confession, professional wisdom, and practical tools into a narrative that refuses to shame and instead invites transformation. She reminds you that your next level is rarely behind more discipline; it's on the other side of a body that believes you are allowed to be seen, to rest, to receive, and to expand.

By the episode’s close you’ll carry a new vocabulary for your inner life—a different question to ask when you catch yourself thinking, "What is wrong with me?"—and a belief that nothing is wrong: your nervous system simply learned one chapter, and now it can learn another. Aubrey signs off with an invitation to update your body’s story and build without burning yourself down, leaving listeners both comforted and mobilized to begin the work of regulation and soulful expansion.