If you’re high-functioning, capable, and holding a lot together, but quietly relying on alcohol or other coping habits to get through your days, this episode is for you.

I explore what happens when “it’s fine” actually isn’t, through a nervous system lens. You’ll learn why high-capacity women often use alcohol for relief, how stress and self-abandonment build over time, and why coping eventually stops working, even when life looks good from the outside.

This conversation is not about labels or rock bottom. It’s about understanding how chronic stress, productivity-as-worth, and nervous system dysregulation quietly shape behaviour and what your body is actually asking for instead.

In this episode, I cover:

• What it means to be a “high-functioning drinker”
• How alcohol becomes a nervous system permission slip
• The difference between coping and capacity
• Why stress drinking often escalates gradually
• How self-abandonment disguises itself as competence
• What supports regulation without white-knuckling

This episode is for women who are tired of surviving their own lives and ready to build relief, safety, and capacity, without forcing change.

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

If you quit drinking and feel more emotional, anxious, or dysregulated instead of better, you’re not alone and nothing has gone wrong.

In this episode, I explains why quitting alcohol can initially feel harder, not easier, through a nervous system lens. You’ll learn how alcohol acts as a form of stress regulation, why emotions and anxiety often intensify after quitting, and what your body is actually asking for during this phase of change.

This conversation is especially for women who are alcohol-free or sober-curious and navigating the emotional aftermath, feeling raw, unsettled, or unsure why relief hasn’t arrived yet.

Inside this episode:

• Why quitting drinking can increase anxiety and emotional sensitivity
• How alcohol numbs the nervous system and what happens when it’s removed
• The difference between dysregulation and failure
• Why white-knuckling sobriety often backfires
• What actually supports nervous system healing after alcohol

This episode is not about willpower or labels. It’s about understanding your body, building safety without numbing, and learning how to support yourself through the middle chapter of change.

Ways to continue the work:

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🤍 Community: She Walks Canada— an alcohol-free community for women navigating life after drinking.

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

Drinking, stress, and the nervous system’s role in the stop/start cycle...

On January 1, 2019, I told myself I was done drinking.

By January 4, I said fuck it and drank.

In this episode, I share the truth about the year my drinking quietly became a problem I couldn’t ignore, not through a dramatic rock bottom, but through a slow erosion of self-trust, safety, and standards.

I talk honestly about drinking every night, blackouts, and making decisions I wouldn’t make sober. About grief, stress, and why willpower alone kept me stuck in a stop/start cycle for years. And about the moment I realized alcohol wasn’t the real craving, relief was.

This conversation isn’t just about drinking.

It’s about why change is so hard to sustain, even when we want it bad.

I explore:

• Why the stop/start cycle is so common, especially for women
• How stress and the nervous system shape our capacity for change
• Why we default to comfort and familiarity, even when it hurts
• Why “just don’t drink” fails without regulation and support
• What actually changed when I quit drinking in January 2020, and why it finally held

Our nervous systems are wired for survival, not success.
So real change doesn’t come from trying harder, it comes from feeling safe enough to stay.

If you’re navigating change of any kind, drinking, boundaries, relationships, work, or rest, this episode is an invitation to understand yourself with more compassion and less blame.

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

So you want to quit drinking ... or maybe you’re still thinking about it.

In this episode, we explore why quitting drinking isn’t a single decision, but a change cycle and how understanding that cycle can remove shame, normalize stop–start patterns, and make lasting change possible.

We begin by breaking down the stages most people move through before quitting drinking, including making rules around alcohol, negotiating, taking breaks, and why willpower alone often fails. I share my own journey ... years of stop/start cycles between 2015 and 2019, a short quit in 2019, and why quitting for good in 2020 finally stuck when I added breathwork and nervous system healing.

From there, we walk through what actually happens after you stop drinking ... physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, and energetically, across:
• the first 30 days
• the 3-month mark (and why it often feels harder than the beginning)
• 6 months
• one year and beyond

We talk honestly about anxiety after quitting drinking, emotional overwhelm, identity shifts, changing relationships, energy returning, and what truly supports your nervous system when alcohol is no longer your coping mechanism.

This episode is for women who are sober, sober-curious, or stuck in contemplation and want a compassionate, body-based approach instead of shame, rules, or white-knuckling.

Because quitting drinking isn’t about discipline.
It’s about capacity.

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

Three days before Christmas, you don’t need another podcast episode with lessons, takeaways, or mindset shifts.

You need breath.

This 6-minute guided breathwork episode is a gentle nervous system reset designed to help you release tension, slow your breathing, and come back into your body during one of the most emotionally charged times of the year.

Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed, emotionally raw, overstimulated, or navigating the holidays without alcohol, this short practice offers simple, supportive breathwork you can listen to while walking, resting, or sitting quietly.

No fixing.
No forcing.
No pressure to feel any certain way.

Just breath.
Just regulation.
Just presence.

If Christmas feels heavy… if your nervous system feels fried… if you’re learning how to stay with yourself instead of numbing or pushing through… this episode is here for you.

Press play.
Breathe.
Let your body soften.

PS-If this six minutes helped you feel even a little more steady, and you want to say thank you, there’s a “buy me a coffee” link in the show notes.

No pressure at all. Just there if it feels right.

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

For years, sobriety has been part of my life, but I underestimated the power it had not only in my own healing, but in my work, my leadership, and the women I was meant to serve.

In this episode, I share why I’m finally naming sobriety as a core pillar of my work, how stigma and assumptions kept me from fully leading with this story, and why I created the 100 Women Project, a mission to support 100 women in building alcohol-free, nervous-system-rooted lives they genuinely love.

This conversation is for high-functioning women who don’t resonate with rock-bottom narratives, but know their relationship with alcohol isn’t neutral anymore. For women stuck in stop-start cycles, feeling scattered, overwhelmed, or quietly disconnected from themselves.

I talk about why word of mouth is so hard in sobriety, how shame keeps women silent, and how real change often begins when one woman speaks the truth another hasn’t been able to say yet.

If you’ve ever wondered whether alcohol is costing you more than you realized…
If you’re craving steadiness, clarity, and self-trust…

This episode is for you.

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

If you find yourself unraveling every December, overwhelmed, overstimulated, resentful, exhausted, or suddenly questioning your entire life, this episode will land.

I break down the reason high-functioning, high-capacity women hit their emotional and energetic limit at the end of the year… and it has nothing to do with discipline, motivation, or time management.

It’s about the nervous system.
It’s about survival mode.
It’s about the pressure you’ve been carrying for eleven straight months.
It’s about the identity of “the strong one” that no one checks in on.

And December, with all its demands and expectations, simply reveals what your body has been trying to communicate all year long.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why December exposes the truth of your stress load
• How performance mode quietly becomes your default
• The emotional and physiological cost of “holding it together”
• Why sobriety (or wanting sobriety) intensifies December overwhelm
• The moment your body says, “I can’t keep doing this”
• What your December crash is actually inviting you into

Toward the end, I share a few gentle, practical shifts you can bring into your days — small changes that help your system feel safer, softer, and more spacious as you close out the year.

If you want 2026 to feel different, calmer, steadier, more rooted, this episode will give you the clarity and compassion you’ve been missing.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The SheWalks community
• Steady - Micro-Regulation Toolkit
• The Deliberate Way: Freedom From Alcohol

You don’t have to finish the year on empty.
Your capacity isn’t gone, it just needs restoration.

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here

In this episode, I’m breaking down the hidden ways drinking culture keeps women overwhelmed, exhausted, and disconnected from themselves, even if they “don’t drink that much.”

After seeing a reel glamorizing wine and mocking Dry January, I knew this conversation couldn’t wait. So I bumped this episode to the front of the line and hit publish.

We’re diving into:

• how alcohol is marketed to women as self-care
• why stress-drinking feels normal (but quietly drains you)
• what “healthy relationship with alcohol” really means
• the truth behind Canada’s updated alcohol guidelines
• why high-achieving women use wine to cope with burnout
• the nervous system patterns that make drinking feel like relief
• how cultural messaging keeps women stuck in survival mode
• and what actually creates long-term, sustainable change

This isn’t about shame.
It’s about awareness, autonomy, and understanding that nothing is wrong with you, there’s a lot wrong with the messages you’re being fed.

If you’ve ever wondered why you’re tired all the time, why your sleep is off, why your stress feels unmanageable, or why you can’t seem to “cut back” even when you want to… this episode will give you the clarity you’ve been craving.

This is the episode every sober-curious, overwhelmed, high-capacity woman needs to hear.

other episodes mentioned:

- Why We Keep Choosing What Hurts - listen here

-When Speaking Your Truth Makes You 'Too Much' - Listen here

Ways to continue the work:

🔁 Ongoing support: The Deliberate Practice — a steady rhythm of nervous system regulation, breathwork, and integration.

Free: The Complete Guide to Quitting Drinking .. a nervous-system-based guide for understanding cravings, stress, and stop/start cycles.

🧭 Personalized clarity: The Personal Power Map — a personalized nervous system and identity audit with a video walkthrough.

Explore everything at thedeliberateone.com
Connect on Instagram @thedeliberateone

If this episode supported you, you can buy me a coffee here