045: Why You're Exhausted Before the Day Even Starts (And It's Not Your Age)

[00:00:01] In this episode, I want to talk about phase one, which is wake up the body, enhance and activate your focus. So you can imagine she gets up in the morning, she makes coffee before she's fully awake, she checks her phone before her feet hit the floor, she's moving technically but her body is still asleep. By 10am she's already tired, not from what she's done, but from what the day is about to ask her to do.

[00:00:32] This isn't a sleep problem, or a discipline problem. The body, that's a body that hasn't woken up and is running her day anyway.

[00:00:51] Tired of feeling stuck, unseen or like your body isn't yours anymore? It's time for a reset. Welcome to An Ageless Life, the Midlife Reset Show,

[00:01:03] where science, movement and mindset help you feel strong, energized and like yourself. I'm Diana Devi, a clinical pharmacist, Argentine tango dancer and instructor, and your guide for redefining how women thrive and grow in midlife and beyond. Let's get started.

[00:01:28] Welcome back to Midlife Reset. I'm Diana Devi, clinical pharmacist, Argentine tango instructor, and someone who has spent 35 years or more watching what happens when a body stops moving the way it was designed to. In the last episode, I introduced the daily shift tango inspired. Five phases built from the ground up using what Argentine tango taught me about how the body actually comes alive.

[00:01:57] And there's some neuroscience and some other kinds of fun things thrown in there. In that episode, we did phase zero, which was breathing. So you can go back and listen to that if you haven't heard it yet. Or you can just jump in right here. And yes, I'm going to actually walk through what it actually does in your body that is phase one, not in a trust the process way, in a here's what happened at a cellular level.

[00:02:27] Because you deserve to understand your own body, not just being told what to do. So let's start. But before I begin phase one, I want to name something. Most of the women that I work with are in not only in the clinical pharmacy world, but also in Argentine tango are not lazy.

[00:02:52] They are disciplined. They are not making horrible choices about sleep, nutrition or stress management. But what they are is exhausted because their bodies have been stuck in emergency mode for years and sometimes decades. I should say for many of them decades. Your nervous system has two settings. Think of it as two gears. The first gear is emergency mode.

[00:03:21] What scientists call the sympathetic nervous system. That's the fright, flight, freeze. It pumps adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream. It's designed for short bursts of very high demand situations, like running from a saber-toothed tiger. It's very good at keeping you functional when there's a threat. It's very bad at being the only gear you use.

[00:03:48] The second gear is recovery mode. We're a scientist called the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the rest, digest, repair, recover. This is where your body actually levels out and heals, where real energy gets rebuilt, where your brain consolidates memory and clears out all of the cellular waste overnight. I kind of refer to it as taking out the trash.

[00:04:14] All the stuff that you don't need that's kind of hanging around there from the day. Here's the problem. Chronic stress, the kind that comes from years of doing too much for too many people and not allowing enough recovery time, becomes where you are all the time. You're basically stuck in first gear. Your body can't shift into recovery mode. It still thinks there's a threat.

[00:04:43] So you sleep, but your body spends the night running the low-grade emergency instead of repairing. You wake up tired. You may wake up at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and just have this wide awake. And that's part of the challenge is when you wake up in the morning, you're not rested. You're tired because you never fully recovered.

[00:05:15] And the day starts asking you for things. And you agree because that's what you've always done. You use caffeine, maybe sugar, carbs, determination, and the particular kind of strength that's gotten you this far. But there is a cost. And the bill is starting to become due. This is not aging. This is a body stuck in the wrong gear.

[00:05:45] And fortunately, phase 1 is how you shift it. So phase 1 of the daily shift, I call it, and this again is tango inspired, but you don't have to be a dancer to use it. It is called Wake the Body. And the focus is simple. We start from the ground up, feet and ankles first, then slowly work up through the body.

[00:06:11] Now, I want to be really clear about what this is and what it isn't. This is not a warm-up routine. I mean, you can use it before you do your exercises, but that's not what it's designed for. A warm-up routine is something that you do before you exercise to get your muscles ready for the workout. This is not that.

[00:06:34] If I were going to do a warm-up, I would do the reset before I would actually do the warm-up. And I'm sorry, the daily shift before I do the warm-up. The daily shift resets your entire system, your nervous system. The lymph system, that's the one that sends all of the chemicals throughout your body.

[00:07:00] Your circulatory system, your brain, before the day starts. Before your meetings, before decisions, before everyone and anyone asks you for something. And this is an important difference. Because if you think of it, this is something you do before. If you think of this as something to do before a workout, then you will only do it before you do the workout. And that's not what this is for. This is for every morning.

[00:07:30] Or it can be other moments during the day when you've been sitting too long. When you need to come back online. You need to reconnect your brain and your body together. So let's talk about what actually happens in your body when you move through phase one. So your body has a waste removal system.

[00:07:54] And there's something called the lymph system that helps what flush out. You can think of it as kind of like when you use a hose to clean off a deck or something. And your body has this internal network of those kinds of things that really help to get rid of all of the waste products that are there.

[00:08:15] It moves out, you know, old cells that you don't need, chemical toxins, every kind of everything that's left over in your body that it doesn't need anymore, that it's finished with. But here's something that many people are not aware of. Is that unlike your heart, which it has a muscle that pumps, the lymph system has no pump system.

[00:08:41] The lymph system moves through your body or lymph moves through your body through muscle contraction. In other words, when you move your muscles through movement, through your body actually doing something physical. So when you've been still overnight or at your desk or in the car, that waste removal system, easy for me to say, stalls a bit. And the waste products can build up in the tissue.

[00:09:09] And that's a lot of the reason for the biological reason for heavy, foggy, slow feeling when you have to get up first in the morning or after a long time sitting in front of a screen. Gentle ankle circles, light bouncing, starting from the ground up. This gets the lymph system moving within minutes.

[00:09:37] Movement, particularly rhythmical, gentle, ground up movement. Wake up the sensory receptors in your, from the bottom of your feet and in your ankles. And these receptors signal upward through the spinal cord and into your brain. The message they send is simple. You're upright. You're grounded. You're moving. The emergency is over.

[00:10:03] And that signal is starting to shift your body and your brain from emergency mode into recovery mode. And here's something that you may not know, but I really would love you to hear. You can't think your way into that shift. You can't decide your way there. You can't breathe enough your way to be there.

[00:10:31] Movement is the fastest, most reliable path your body has to change gears. Your brain comes back on. And I watched this firsthand. I did this series of movements in these phases in Osaka, Japan, outside of Osaka Castle. There were 20 people there, you know, all ages. The youngest one, I think, was 14. The oldest one was in his 70s.

[00:11:00] And different levels of mobility. Some had canes, some walking on their own. And at the end of that 20 minutes, without me saying anything, I could see their shoulders drop. I never directed them to have their shoulders drop. Several of them mentioned that they, when they looked at things, colors were crisper. Some could hear more things.

[00:11:28] They heard birds that they didn't hear before. And that was amazing. That just something this simple going through this series made such a significant shift. They recognized things in their body. They were hungry. They were thirsty. They could hear better. They weren't squinting as much. Shoulders relaxed. All of this. All of this changed. Their bodies were giving their information.

[00:11:56] And they could finally receive it. Because the information had been sent there. It's just they weren't open to receiving it. After going through the movements, they were able to receive it. That's what waking the body does. Not just your muscles. It does it to your entire body. Your ability to think, to function, and respond.

[00:12:23] In Argentine tango, you can't dance well from a body that isn't grounded. Everything in tango begins with a connection to the floor. The way your foot meets the ground. The weight transfer. The stability that lets you move from your center. Not from the edges that make you wobbly. Not from tension. Not from trying too hard. If you're disconnected from the ground, you're dancing in your head.

[00:12:53] Thinking instead of feeling. Bracing instead of flowing. And you and your partner can feel every bit of it. Your body works the same way every day. When you haven't woken your body up. When you're operating in emergency mode that is half asleep. You're in your head. Reactive. Having to use a lot of effort.

[00:13:22] Burning more energy than a task actually requires. Waking the body is how you arrive to your own day. The same way a tango dancer arrives to a dance. Present. Grounded. Ready to move from your center. Rather than reacting out of cortisol. Phase one restores two things specifically. First is energy.

[00:13:52] Not the push kind. Not the caffeinated kind. The kind that feels like aliveness. The feeling that you are actually in your body. And your body is actually on. It's a different experience rather than simply waking up. You can wake up and be completely offline. You can be awake and already running on fumes. Your real energy in the body is saying, I'm here.

[00:14:21] I'm grounded. I'm grounded. I have something to give. The second thing it does is it restores awareness. And I mean that in a very practical way. Awareness means your senses are receiving information again. You notice things that you might have missed.

[00:14:42] You make better decisions because you're working with more data from your body, the environment, and from the people around you. When you're stuck in emergency mode, your field of awareness narrows. You see threats and tasks. That's it. When you're grounded, it opens up. You start to see options, nuances, possibilities.

[00:15:09] And for the woman running a successful business and or a household or both, it's not a small thing. The difference between having a reactive day and having a responsive day. So here's where I'm going to hand you off. The daily shift to tango inspired is a body practice. And a body practice needs to be seen, not just described.

[00:15:39] So I'm in the process of video phase one of the movement on YouTube. And eventually we'll build out the whole sequence. I'm doing them one at a time. And then at the end, we'll put them all together as one. And as I said, it will all take you less than 20 minutes. I'll put the link in the show notes and you can go there. Try it out. Come back and listen to phase two.

[00:16:06] And what I will tell you now is a sequence starts from the ground up. Feet and ankles first. Gentle activation. You're just bouncing. Dropping your weight with your feet flat on the floor. And breathing. That's the first part of phase one. Think of it as you think about turning on your computer. You don't start running programs before the system is loaded.

[00:16:34] You have to wait for it to come online. Phase one is how your body comes online. I built this for the woman who has been busy taking care of everything and everyone else. And that her own body has become last on the list. She's running a successful business. She's been pushing and really going through this for decades.

[00:17:02] And now, now her body is starting to tell her we need a different way. It was built for the women sitting that I speak with in my clinical consults that have medications for symptoms, but still are not feeling good with the brain fog, fatigue, extra weight, sleep that's not really restful sleep.

[00:17:28] And no one asks them, when did you stop moving? And what did that stillness do to your body over time? She's managing herself, not restoring. This is restoration. And it starts where you are now. And it starts on the floor. I'll post the YouTube links here. Next episode will be phase two, the hips.

[00:17:58] And why tight hips make you feel stuck in life, not just in your body. This one will surprise you. If this episode landed for you, send it to someone who has been running on caffeine and determination for longer than she should have. I'm Diana Devi. This is a midlife reset. Aging doesn't make you smaller or weaker. Stillness does.

[00:18:27] Bye for now. That's it for this reset. Thank you for spending this time with me. If today's episode gave you something to think about, I'd love to have you subscribe so you never miss what's next. And remember to grab your free gift, your midlife superpower, five simple power moves to feel like yourself again.

[00:18:55] The address for this is or link is an ageless life dot com forward slash super power. Thanks again. Bye bye.