Are you Feeling At War with Your Body?
On vitality, the messy middle, and why unclenching is harder than it sounds
Welcome to Morocco: I recorded this Joy First episode live from a sun bed sounds glamorous, until I tell you this is the first time I’ve been outside for days, as I’ve been dealing with a nasty stomach bug. This seems par for the course given my score in the ‘Vitality’ section of the Joy First Audit.
So, let’s get into it.
Struggling with vitality in a place where I’m supposed to be at peak vitality (sunshine, holiday, rest, the sea) seems just about right for this episode… but of course like joy, vitality isn’t a destination you arrive at when conditions cooperate, it’s something you’re always in some kind of relationship with, and that relationship can get very complicated.
Category 1: Vitality
The Vitality section of the audit is one of the two most heavily weighted categories, alongside Security, because the evidence is pretty clear that when your body isn’t functioning well, everything else in your life gets harder.
Joy certainly is harder to access when you feel like shit.
Patience disappears. Creativity goes quiet. You know this from experience even if you’ve never thought of it in those terms. You’ve had the days where you slept badly and everything felt like too much, or the weeks where you were under enormous stress and your body started sending you signals you couldn’t ignore.
The questions in this section of the Joy First audit cover energy, sleep, how you eat, how you move, whether you move in ways that actually feel good rather than just ways you feel you should, whether you listen to your hunger and your tiredness and your pain, whether you have real tools for anxiety, whether you’re overriding your body for productivity.
Read that last one again: Are you overriding signals from your body to optimize productivity? 👀 I’ve definitely spent a lifetime guilty of that one.
It’s not a surprise to me, but I scored 10/20
I knew this category would come in low, and the areas where I scored lowest weren’t surprising.
The hormones have been chaotic.
I stopped working out with my personal trainer in the autumn and haven’t fully replaced that structure yet.
The weather has been awful, which SAD is doin’ its thing, and my coping tools like long dog walks haven’t been happening, and I feel it.
There’s a question in the audit that asks whether you feel connected to your body rather than at war with it, and I have spent a lot of time this past year feeling very much at war with mine.
Can you relate to this? If not and you’re living in a middle age female body - tell me your secrets!!
What am I doing about it?
When I got my 10 out of 20, I made a few decisions.
The first one is HRT. I’ve been putting this off, circling it, doing the research, talking to friends who swear by it, talking myself out of it….
I finally made the appointment to follow-up on the appointment I had last year. So, by the time you’re reading this I’ll have started, and I have my fingers very crossed!!
Not because there’s any such thing as a silver bullet, but because so much of what I’ve been struggling with (the brain fog, the anxiety that doesn’t match the situation, just not quite feeling like myself) maps very directly onto what perimenopause does to a body. I will follow-up after I have that conversation with my Dr. to share how it goes.
I’m definitely ready to feel like myself again after feeling like a stranger in this skin suit for a very long time.
The second is getting back to weight training. I need two or three sessions a week and I’m working out the logistics of stacking it with the kids’ swimming so it actually happens instead of living permanently on the to-do list. The intention is there… now to build the habit.
But honestly, the shift that’s felt most significant to me lately isn’t a supplement or a workout plan… It’s noticing how tightly I hold my body when I don’t need to.
Take a breath and unclench!
I catch myself doing this constantly. Making dinner, folding laundry, making coffee. Moving fast when I don’t need to move fast. Stomach clenched, jaw set, like there’s an emergency happening when there isn’t.
And I’ve started asking myself, in those moments, what would it feel like to do this joy first? Not like it it’s punishment, but like I chose it.
Sometimes that’s turning on music.
Sometimes it’s adding some nice smells (fresh herbs, lighting a candle, bit of perfume)
Sometimes it’s just taking a breath and looking out the window for four seconds and remembering that making a cup of tea is not actually a high-stakes situation.
This sounds simple to the point of being insultingly obvious, but in practice it’s much harder than it sounds.
You have to remember to do it, which requires a kind of attention that’s difficult to sustain when you’re already running on empty.
And you have to be willing to slow down even fractionally in moments where your nervous system has decided that top speed is the only acceptable pace.
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of optimization lately
I’ve spent most of my life trying to be maximally efficient, and I’ve come to believe that the hunt for efficiency is one of the bigger thieves of joy that I personally deal with.
When everything is optimized, everything is also slightly tense. There’s no room for the moment to just be what it is. And when something breaks the optimization (the wrong checkout line, the errand you forgot) that micro ‘failure’ causes pain and drama, that it really shouldn’t.
I’m not saying throw out the systems. I love a system. But I am sitting with the question of whether all of it needs to be optimized all the time, and what I might get back if I loosened that grip a little.
Seasons of Life
I know some of what’s showing up in my vitality audit is just the season of life I’m in:” Young kids, a busy business, hormones doing what they’re doing, a year that was hard in a variety of ways.
So part of what I want to offer you alongside the audit, alongside the score and the action steps, is permission to see the full picture of why things are where they are, without judgement. Noticing without getting down on yourself for not having already fixed it.
You scored what you scored. You’re where you are. The whole point of the audit is to see it clearly so you can decide what to do next.
AND so you can really see and measure the improvements along the way. How satisfying will it be to see these scores improve, and being surprised because you actually forgot how far you’ve come!?
My 10/20 is telling me something real. I’m listening. Today it’s slowly, nesxt to my wet-from-the-pool kiddo, from a sun bed, soaking in the sun that finally came out today… being grateful I feel well enough to actually enjoy it!