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You Weren’t Failing. You Were Practicing.

There is a particular kind of frustration I see in women all the time. They know a lot. They have read the books, listened to the podcasts, tried to eat better, move more, manage stress, sleep better, and take better care of themselves. They are not uninformed, and they are certainly not lazy. If anything, they are usually trying very hard. But after enough starts and stops, something begins to shift. They start wondering why they cannot seem to follow through. Why does everything feel harder than it should? Why do they know what to do and still feel so far from themselves?

That was part of what made my recent conversation with my friend and client Johanna Kodlick so meaningful. Johanna is a yoga instructor, musician, arts administrator, mom, and someone who has spent years interested in holistic health, homeopathy, Ayurveda, and the mind-body connection. She already understood a great deal about wellness before we ever worked together. She did not need another person handing her a list of things she should be doing. What she needed was help seeing what was actually happening underneath all of it.

When the Bucket Is Already Full

When Johanna and I first met, she had been carrying an enormous amount. She had experienced the loss of several family members and close friends. She was raising a daughter, working a full career, trying to stay connected to her creative life, and at the same time moving into a different hormonal season. None of those things existed separately. They were all happening inside the same body, at the same time. She could feel herself reaching a point where something had to give. She described it as heading toward an inevitable nervous breakdown.

I think this is where we sometimes miss the bigger picture, especially in midlife. A woman starts having anxiety, trouble sleeping, brain fog, digestive issues, mood swings, or a body that suddenly seems much less forgiving than it used to be, and we immediately want to find the one thing responsible. Is it perimenopause? Is it stress? Is it her gut? Is it her diet? But real life is rarely that neat. Hormones matter. Grief matters. Sleep matters. Relationships matter. Work stress matters. What happened three years ago can matter. What you are holding together every single day matters.

I often describe it as a bucket. Every demand, loss, responsibility, unresolved stressor, sleepless night, and hormonal shift puts something into that bucket. For a long time, you may be able to carry it. You adapt. You keep going. You make dinner, answer the email, drive everyone where they need to go, show up for work, and tell yourself you will deal with yourself later. Then something relatively small happens and suddenly you cannot cope with it. That is often the moment a woman decides something must be wrong with her. But the problem usually was not the final drop. The bucket was already full.

For Johanna, the strain eventually showed up physically. She developed a musculoskeletal flare that temporarily took away something she had depended on for years: the connection she felt to her body through yoga. She could not access creativity in the same way. She could not find the sense of satisfaction or happiness that had once felt familiar. And for someone who had spent years cultivating a mind-body connection, losing access to it was deeply disorienting.

Why We Didn’t Start With Food

One of the things Johanna pointed out in our conversation was that during our very first session, we did not talk about food at all.

I think that surprises people because of the work I do. They assume we are going to begin with what someone is eating, what she needs to stop eating, what supplements she needs, or what exercise plan she should follow.

But Johanna’s anxiety was taking up so much space that adding a meal plan, food rules, workouts, or another list of healthy behaviors would have been one more demand placed on a system that already felt overloaded. Before we could talk about what she was eating, we had to understand what her body was responding to.

That is such an important distinction because so many women think they need more discipline when what they really need is less pressure.

If your nervous system is already reading your life as too much, piling another perfect routine on top of it does not automatically create health. Sometimes it simply creates one more place to feel behind.

The meal plan may be wonderful. The workout might make perfect sense. The supplements might be appropriate. But if your entire system is saying, I cannot take on one more thing, then the first step is not necessarily doing more.

Sometimes the first step is figuring out why you are already at capacity.

Your Labs Are Not the Whole Story

This is also why I do not believe an intake form or a lab panel can tell me everything I need to know about someone. They matter. They give us useful information. But they are still only pieces of a much bigger picture.

You are a human being living inside an actual life. Your body has been with you through every loss, every stressful season, every sleepless night, every relationship, every job, every major transition, every time you pushed through when you really needed rest.

That does not mean every symptom is caused by stress. It means stress is part of the physiology, too. When I work with someone, I want to know what is happening in the body, but I also want to know what is happening in her life. Because sometimes the thing that looks like a food problem is actually an exhaustion problem. Sometimes what looks like a motivation problem is really overwhelm. Sometimes the woman who keeps reaching for sugar at night is not lacking willpower. She has been going nonstop since six o’clock in the morning and her brain is looking for the fastest moment of relief it can find. That is the kind of thing we miss when we look at symptoms in isolation.

What If You Weren’t Failing?

One of my favorite parts of my conversation with Johanna came when she talked about how differently she sees her past attempts at getting healthier now. For years, she would try things with her nutrition, movement, and emotional health. If they did not stick, she would quietly decide she had failed. Then something shifted. She realized she had not actually been failing all those years. She had been practicing.

“That whole time I wasn't trying things and failing. I was trying things because I was practicing,” she said.

I love this because the word practice completely changes the experience. Failure sounds final. Practice assumes you are learning. That is why I often ask clients what they want to test instead of asking what they are going to do perfectly from now on. Maybe you test eating breakfast before coffee for a week. Maybe you test going outside for ten minutes in the morning. Maybe you test putting your phone down earlier at night. Maybe you test eating more protein at lunch and see how your energy feels at three o’clock. Then you pay attention.

Did it help? Was it realistic? Did you hate it? Could you keep doing it? Do you need to make it smaller? That is information. It is not a moral judgment about whether you are good at taking care of yourself.

Small Still Counts

This matters because we tend to build health habits as though the only version that counts is the ideal version. If we cannot work out for forty-five minutes, we do nothing. If we cannot completely change our diet, we keep eating exactly the same way. If we miss three days of a morning routine, we decide the routine failed. But there is an enormous amount of room between doing everything and doing nothing.

Ten minutes counts. One meal counts. Going to bed thirty minutes earlier counts. Drinking more water today counts. Taking five minutes before walking into the house after work counts.

We underestimate small actions because they do not feel dramatic enough. But small actions are often the ones that actually survive real life.

Johanna connected this idea back to yoga. We call it a yoga practice for a reason. You do not arrive every day with the same body, energy, emotions, flexibility, or capacity. You show up, notice what is there, and work with the body you have that day. Imagine approaching the rest of your health that way.

Somewhere Along the Way, We Handed Away Our Time

Another part of Johanna’s story will sound familiar to a lot of women. Our time gets handed away in pieces. Work gets some. Kids get some. Parents get some. The house gets some. Appointments get some. The inbox gets some. The people who need us get some. And somewhere near the bottom of the list is the person living inside the body doing all of this.

We tend to think reclaiming time for ourselves is indulgent, but it becomes very difficult to practice anything when there is no room left in the day to practice it.

This is especially important during midlife because many women are navigating more responsibility at exactly the same time their bodies are becoming less tolerant of running on empty. We must understand that worked at thirty might not work at forty-five. The body changes. Life changes. Capacity changes. That means the way we care for ourselves has to change, too.

Coming Back to Who You Were Before Everyone Needed Something

One of the most beautiful parts of Johanna’s story came from the work we did around her deeper why.

I kept asking her some version of the same question: What is important about that? Why does eating nourishing food actually matter to you? Why does caring for your body matter? Why does feeling connected to yourself matter? Eventually, the answer moved beyond health goals. She realized that taking care of herself in this way was connected to who she already was.

“It’s a finding of something brand new that maybe was always there, but I just never identified it,” she told me.

That idea stayed with me because I see it constantly. We spend so much of adulthood believing we need to become a better version of ourselves. More disciplined. More organized. More productive. More healthy. More calm. But sometimes the work is not about becoming someone else. Sometimes it is about taking off everything that has been piled on top of you long enough to remember who was underneath it.

When I wrote my book, Secrets to Authentic Happiness, I imagined a woman covered in tar, spinning, with pieces of it flying away until the person underneath was finally visible again. That image came back to me while Johanna was talking. Life puts layers on us. Roles. Responsibilities. Expectations. Grief. Fear. Other people's needs. The stories we have told ourselves about who we are supposed to be. And sometimes healing looks less like creating a brand-new person and more like finding your way back to the one who was there all along.

Maybe You Don’t Need Another Overhaul

So if you have been telling yourself you need to get serious again, start another diet, find a new workout, buy more supplements, or finally force yourself to become consistent, I want you to consider another possibility. Maybe you do not need a bigger plan. Maybe you need to understand what your body has been carrying. Maybe anxiety or overwhelm is not the annoying side issue keeping you from working on your health. Maybe it is part of the health work. Maybe the plan you abandoned was not proof that you cannot follow through. Maybe it was too much for the season you were in. Maybe you learned something from it. And maybe you were practicing.

This week, instead of deciding you need to change everything, choose one thing to test. Keep it small enough that your actual life can hold it. Pay attention to what happens. Adjust. Try again. Practice. Persist. Be patient. And somewhere in that process, you may realize that feeling like yourself again was never about turning into someone new. It was about finding your way back to yourself.

Lots of love,

Rachel

Mentions from the Show:

• Lizard Toes Yoga: facebook.com/lizardtoesyoga

• Runaway Stroller: facebook.com/runawaystroller

• Johanna’s album, Why Would I Sing?: available on major streaming platforms.

• Episode 36: Shift Your Mind, Change Your Life: Chris Chitty's Inspiring Health Transformation

• Secrets to Authentic Happiness: by Rachel Carta

Rachel's Free Resources:

Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.

More Resources:

Eat Well Made Easy Course