Why Am I Still Anxious AF After Doing So Much Inner Work?

When self-development becomes self-exhaustion

When you’re building your own business, the work doesn’t just stop at business. The constant inner work as you evolve as an entrepreneur is ongoing. 

But have you ever felt that, despite all this ‘extra work’, you’ve thought,  

“Why am I still feeling anxious AF and stuck in this pattern? I’ve done so much work on myself.”

Because I have.

I remember getting my first self help book around 27, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And my entire universe opened up. I then went onto Gabby Bernstein’s books, joined her membership, went on to study The Course in Miracles. 

I became what I now jokingly call a ‘self-help junkie.’

And actually, a lot of those things were incredibly valuable to me. They shaped who I am today, and eventually became part of the work I share with other women now.

But there came a point where I started to question whether all this self-development was actually helping me in the way I thought it was. So much of the language around self development and inner work encourages you to keep looking deeper. Find the block. Heal the wound. Understand the pattern. Work on yourself. Become the next version of you.

But what happens when that starts to become exhausting?

Of course, I didn’t arrive at that realisation through a neat, linear journey. I had to experience it in my own body.

I’ve known anxiety for most of my adult life

I first remember really struggling with anxiety in my early twenties, when I was about to graduate from university. At the time, there wasn’t the same awareness or support around anxiety that there is now. I went to the doctor and was offered medication. I was 21 and was prescribed beta blockers. I had some horrendous side effects, which scared me enough to come off them.

I felt let down by the healthcare system and, looking back, I can see that I was experiencing panic attacks. But I didn’t really understand what was happening to me, and I certainly didn’t know what to do with it.

So I did what I think a lot of us learn to do, I pushed it down.

I told myself, Nope. I don’t want to feel like this.

And eventually, the obvious body sensations went away, but deep down, they hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Over the years that followed, I experienced mild palpitations at times and a chronic underlying tension that I wasn’t even consciously aware of for much of the time.

Meanwhile, I got on with life. I built a career in corporate marketing, I worked hard, and I kept moving. 

Then in my late twenties, I went through a volatile divorce. I felt a huge amount of relief when that relationship ended, but it was also the first experience in my life that I would now describe as significant trauma.

I was struggling at work too, and there was a lot going on behind the scenes that I was trying to hold together.

So I started looking for ways to manage it. I started to use the mental health apps that were beginning to appear and started meditating. I threw myself into fitness and channelled a lot of my energy into my physical body. And I started to build a deeper relationship with my own being beyond trying to ‘fix’ things about it.

My body started telling me things my mind couldn’t

It wasn’t until lockdown in 2020, when I was practising yoga (cliche that I am), that I really started to notice the relationship between what was happening in my mind and what was happening in my body. If my mind was busy, I could feel it in my body. If I felt off balance, there was usually something happening underneath that I hadn’t quite acknowledged.

I became curious. Rather than just trying to make the feeling go away, I started to notice how my body was responding.

I loved yoga so much that I trained to become a teacher in 2022. Alongside that, I started exploring women’s circles, reiki, spirituality, my own cycles and the connection between my body and the world around me. I was opening myself up to everything.

The yoga training I completed was very somatic in its approach. It wasn't about how a posture looked from the outside; it was about how it felt in your own body. That distinction really stayed with me, as there was something about having agency over my own body and my own experience that felt important. 

After qualifying, I stumbled across somatic coaching almost accidentally. There wasn’t a big logical career plan behind it, I just knew that I wanted to go deeper into this work.

And when I turned up to my somatic training, something happened that I hadn't experienced in the same way before.

My body responded.

I softened.

I felt at home.

It was like my body knew before my mind did that I had found something important.

The thing that changed everything: doing less

By this point, I had tried a lot of different modalities. I had spent years searching, learning, understanding and working on myself.

But somatic coaching felt different. 

It was about slowing down. Taking time. Paying attention to the felt sense. Learning to listen to what was happening in my body rather than immediately trying to change it.

And that was a huge shift for me, because I realised how much of my personal development had involved ‘doing’ too much. Even healing had become something I could be good at, work harder at. Somatic work showed me another possibility.

What if I didn't need to keep digging?

What if I could pause long enough to actually feel what was already there?

This became particularly important as I left my corporate career in 2023 and started working for myself. Building a business brought a whole new set of things for my nervous system to navigate. There was so much uncertainty, and the emotional rollercoaster of creating something of my own.

And I could see just how much the things happening in my business were connected to what was happening in my body. The somatic work I had trained in, gave me a way to support myself through that without turning every difficult experience into another thing I needed to fix.

The biggest turning point

There was another turning point in my story that happened alongside the end of my somatic training.

At the beginning of 2024, I was supporting my sister-in-law through secondary breast cancer,  and the final week of my somatic coaching training coincided with the final week of her life. I had to stop everything I was doing, and the only ‘job’ I had to do was to focus on presence, within myself, and with her. It was one of the most challenging weeks of my life, but it was then that I decided I wanted to pivot my own business from business coach to somatic coach.

I had been telling myself that if I wanted to be successful in business, I needed to be a business coach. My marketing career had given me a huge amount of experience, and I had started using that experience to mentor other female founders.

But it wasn't what I wanted to keep doing.

I couldn't ignore how powerful the somatic work had been for me, not just in my own healing, but in navigating the reality of building a business while life was life-ing at the same time.

There is always going to be something happening behind the scenes. Your business doesn't exist separately from your life. There are relationships, family, health, grief, uncertainty, change and all the things you can't neatly put aside while you go and run your business.

And that is why this work matters so much to me now.

Maybe you don't need to do more self help

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are ebbs and flows in this, and you have to go through these life experiences to then learn what’s on the other side. But, I think there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that can happen when you’re constantly trying to become a better version of yourself. Especially when you’re a woman who has built a business around your own expertise, experience or personal transformation.

But that road can lead to burnout itself. You’re already so busy trying to build a successful business, that the inner work becomes yet another full time job you don’t have time for. 

Where’s that freedom lifestyle you thought you signed up for? 

Maybe you don’t need another podcast, book, or mastermind to work on yourself.

Maybe sometimes you need to come back to what is already happening in your body.

The tension you keep ignoring.

The knot in your stomach.

The shallow breath.

The feeling that something is slightly off, even though on paper everything looks fine.

And when you start to notice these sensations, these patterns, it’s not about becoming perfectly regulated, healed or finally arriving at some version of yourself where nothing difficult ever happens again. It’s about developing a deeper relationship with your own body, so that when life and business inevitably throw something at you, you have somewhere to come back to.

For me, that has been the most profound shift of all. After years of looking for more, I found something in doing less.

And that is the work I want to share with other women building businesses.

Learning how to become more deeply rooted in themselves, so they aren't so thrown around by the inevitable ups and downs of life and business.

Download the Nervous System Rewilding Guide for free

I get it, this might feel kind of ironic now to offer you my free guide and off you more information! But if you're at point in your own path where you want to slow everything down and start really listening to your own body's wisdom, this guide is for you.