How to Rest Deeply Without Losing Your Ambition with Maegan Megginson

Tati: Can you truly rest and be successful? In today’s episode, I’m joined by holistic business mentor and licensed therapist Megan Meson, to explore what it really means to be deeply rested and wildly successful. We talk about the pressure high achievers feel to always be doing more what rest actually looks like beyond sleep, and how to recharge in a way that truly restores you without sacrificing your ambition.

Let’s dive in.

Hey Megan, so it’s great to have you as a guest on the podcast. I am really excited to have a conversation more because I know that your niche, your specialty, is helping people to be deeply rested and widely successful. And so just to get started, I’d love to hear more about. What that means to you and, and what got you into this niche or this, uh, topic.

Maegan: Okay, well first of all, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. And yes, I love talking about all things deep rest related. Um, typically I am talking to an audience of entrepreneurs, other business owners, but I’m also being. I’m staying really curious right now about like, how can we apply this conversation to more people than just business owners, to professionals and high achievers on a larger scale.

Um, so I’m, I’m hoping we can like, tease some of that out today too. As we, as we have this conversation, I’ll share just like the TLDR of like, what brought me to this topic, and then I’ll say a little bit more about. What deep rest and wild success mean to me personally or how I define them personally, if that feels okay.

Uh, I think the context might be a helpful place to start.

Tati: Yeah.

Maegan: I started my career as a therapist a long time ago, and I was a therapist for. I was actively practicing therapy for over 10 years, uh, when I just really felt a, a calling to shift my focus, to shift the way that I was, I was working with others.

Um, and as I was making that transition, lots of different things happened, including I started a group practice. As a therapist. So I was just inundated with referrals and was, you know, wondering like, what can I do next here? How can I sort of leverage all of this energy that’s flowing into my business?

And I decided to, um, start hiring employees like growing, growing my business. That seemed to make a lot of sense while I was kind of navigating and figuring out what my next steps were going to be professionally. And I find a lot, a lot of like. High achieving, highly anxious people go through this kind of journey, right?

Where we, we feel it’s like our eyes are bigger than our schedule, or our eyes are bigger than like our energy bodies, and we start. Doing a lot and exploring life in many different ways, and we can feel that, you know, we wanna grow and we have ambition, but all of a sudden we’re, we’re doing too much too fast and we get really tired and we, we start getting burnt out.

And that was true for me in 2018. I had a pretty significant burnout episode. That led to me kind of stepping away for a bit and taking a sabbatical to reassess, try to figure out like, what is not working for me here, and is it possible for me to live this life where I am doing and exploring and creating things in the world, but I’m, I’m doing it without burnout.

And that sabbatical is when the seeds of the deep rest message were planted in my psyche. Uh, ’cause I, I was connecting at that time to this deep inner knowing of being like, no, there is a way to do this. There is a way to be of service and to create and achieve. That doesn’t deplete my body, right? That doesn’t harm me emotionally or energetically.

And that’s when I became really curious about what does it mean to be deeply rested? What does it mean to tend to myself in a holistic way so that my garden is fertile and capable of growing, you know, all of my ideas and, and my ambitions. So that was how the deep rest message was born for me in 2018.

And of course, it’s evolved since then as I’ve continued on my, you know, personal growth journey. But I’ll say now what deep rest means to me. Um, deep rest is both like a state and an action, and deep rest is an action, is any activity, in my opinion, any activity that regulates your nervous system and recharges your batteries.

At the same time. So we’re finding balance where we’re calming ourselves down, but we’re also ramping ourselves up energetically. And I find that doing those two things simultaneously is really important because if you, if you lean too heavily into regulating your nervous system, becoming really, really calm, but you’re not ramping up your energy, you are gonna have a hard time stepping back into your life with that ambitious doing.

Creative energy and, and vice versa. If you lean into recharging your energy batteries, but you’re not actually regulating your nervous system, you might feel like you have a lot of energy to do a ton of things in the world, but you’re a bit like a Tasmanian devil and you’re just like whoof. You know, you’re pretty unregulated.

And that path isn’t sustainable. So for me, deep rest is any activity that helps me do both, calm myself down and recharge my batteries because I find that that is the space where we feel the best and we have the most access to our intuition and our creative selves. And to be in a state of deep rest, to be deeply rested means that I’m spending more time in my life.

Feeling grounded and energized than I am feeling something else, feeling stressed, feeling anxious, feeling tired. And when I’m really living my life in a deeply rested state, that’s when things get really rich and interesting, and exciting and sustainable. Yeah. What do you think about that?

Tati: No, I, I love that.

And, and how you describe the. Necessity of not just calming your nervous system, but recharging and doing those together. Because, and I know especially with a lot of my listeners, they struggle with rest and relaxation, and a big part of it is, I think they’re not. Doing that piece of calming the nervous system.

Yeah. And maybe continuing, you know, thinking, oh, you know, I’m gonna unwind with some TV tonight, but their mind is still racing about work. Right. Or responsibilities or, or whatever else. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and I definitely wanna talk more about that. I wanna first back up a little mm-hmm. To what you had mentioned with reaching a point of burnout.

And I’m curious mm-hmm. For you, you know, what were. The warning signs, or what did you experience that got you to realize that you were in a state of burnout?

Maegan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s such a great question, right? ’cause I mean, you and I know that we all experience burnout in such different ways that the way it manifests in our bodies can be so different.

So I love this question, and for me, burnout shows up primarily as physical pain. In my body, Sally. So I experience burnout, sabbatical. I have a lot of joint pain. Uh, I have a lot of like physical fatigue in my body. Um, cloudy mind, right Brain fog. So I, I really, I, I feel, in fact, when I was in college, I went through this whole, this whole era where I was convinced that there was like something wrong.

I was like, do I have ra? Do I have, like, what is wrong with my body? I’m in so much pain. And I went through, um, the gauntlet of doctors from one doctor to another and finally ended up with a rheumatologist and was like doing all of these tests and taking all of these medications. And they were like, yeah, our best bet is that you have some really strange kind of arthritis that we can’t confirm, but here’s all these meds that we need you to take to treat it.

And it wasn’t until, um, I started really learning more about myself as a highly sensitive person, that I realized I didn’t have that, that wasn’t true for me. I just wasn’t tending to my body in the right ways. So my body really talks to me and communicates to me in physical, somatic ways when I’m nearing burnout.

Um, but also emotionally. I, some people around burnout, I find they look depressed. They, they look like lethargic and blue and hopeless, and there’s like a listlessness about them. Um, for me, when I get burnt out, I get really angry, so I find that like I become really irritable and it’s like I have PMS all the time.

I. I’m just like cranky and mad. I hate everybody and like everybody pisses me off. And so I’m in this state where my body hurts and I feel angry, uh, and I feel resentful and things just get like really dark and, um, joy is absent. It’s like I can’t find joy no matter how hard I look. So those are my biggest indicators that I am oof, like heading in the wrong direction.

Tati: Yeah, and and I think that’s so powerful for you to notice because a lot of times, many people, and you know, especially if I think you’re somebody who’s like a go-getter, the tendency can be to be stuck in your head and maybe ignore the warning signs that your body is giving you that

Maegan: Yeah.

Tati: Something isn’t right.

Maegan: Well, and the. The fact is you have to have a certain baseline level of mindfulness and awareness. To notice that this stuff is happening in your body, which is often when we start going a million miles a minute, or when we’re letting our anxiety lead the show, we lose connection to our body awareness, to our emotional mindfulness.

So yeah, I think that it’s, it’s so true, right? When we’re heading towards burnout, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. At some point, we’re like heading towards burnout. Um, and, and eventually we, we crossed the threshold into burnout because we’re. We’re not attuned to the signals our body is giving us that something’s not right.

But the beautiful thing about the body is that it never leaves us until the very end. It’s with us and those signals don’t go away. So it’s, it’s never too late to learn how to slow down and listen in a more attuned and intuitive way.

Tati: And what would you recommend for somebody who is wanting to shift from.

Maybe a state of burnout or feeling overwhelmed and into a state of starting to listen to their body of starting to shift more towards that deep rest that you were discussing.

Maegan: Mm-hmm.

It’s such a big. Beautiful question, and I’m gonna start with everybody’s least favorite answer. It depends, um, right, like of course this, the answer to this question really depends on who you are and like how your patterns are showing up and what’s happening in your life right now. So I’d love to make a couple of broad stroke suggestions just with that caveat that there’s no, there’s no single roadmap.

To get you out of burnout. I, I don’t know if you find this Tati, I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts. ’cause I know you talk about this a lot too, but I feel like part of what capitalism and Patriarchy sets us up to believe is that, that there, there’s always a solution. Like we can always buy a solution to our problems.

Like someone has the roadmap, someone has the blueprint, someone has the course that will help me overcome this thing. And I think that when we’re burnt out, we’re so desperate for relief. That we’re often willing to like throw our credit card or our email address at like anything that promises to make us feel better.

So part of what I feel really called to do in, in my work in the deeply rested world is to say, first and foremost, I don’t have the answer for you. Um, I have a lot of ideas and I I wanna present you with a whole menu of options. The most important thing that you can do on this journey is learn. So here’s, here’s what my advice is gonna be, um, to learn how to slow down and start listening to your intuition about what you need in this moment.

So I can’t tell you like what your path out of burnout is going to look like, but I can say that I know and I trust that you hold the answer inside of your body. So if you’re listening to this. And you’re like, but I just want the roadmap. Like, okay, well, the first step is to slow down. I’m a big believer in closing your eyes.

Some people don’t like that. If you don’t like that, you don’t have to close your eyes. I like closing my eyes because it just eliminates so much input and it helps me go a little bit deeper into myself. One thing I like, I’ll, I’m gonna suggest this. Some people might be like, that’s like really woo and stupid, and if you feel that way, no problem.

Just ignore this part. I like to close my eyes and breathe, and I like to imagine when I’m trying to connect with my body, especially when I feel a million miles away from my body, I like to imagine that as I’m breathing, there’s like a tap root. Imagine like a potted plant in your house, right? And it ha they have these big roots growing out of the bottom of the pot.

Imagine that there’s a taproot that grows down your spine and extends out of the bottom of your tailbone. And spirals down into the earth and really let yourself stay with this for several minutes, and I like to imagine that every exhale. On every exhale, that taproot growing out of my body, connecting to the earth gets longer and stronger, and it just spirals.

It spirals down through the floorboard of my house, through the concrete foundation, through the dirt and the mud, and the mantle, and the rock and the crystal, and it keeps spiraling until it snaps into place with the very core of the earth. If you can stay in this place and imagine that connection between you and the earth and breathe often, if you stay here long enough, you’re gonna start to receive some messages from your body.

You’re gonna start to feel a little bit of insight into. What you need or what’s true for you, or how you’re really feeling. And you can ask yourself really specific questions in this place. So I might ask myself in this place, what is the next right step for me right now? What is the next right step for me right now?

Whatever comes forward as you’re going quiet and you’re listening, trust that, follow that thread because that’s the thread, in my opinion, that’s going to help lead you out of burnout.

Tati: I love that exercise. I actually did it along with you as you were describing it, and I found it to be very grounding, you know?

Of course. Yeah. Kind of like connecting with the earth. Yeah, and I also really. Agree with what you’re saying with, you know, I think oftentimes we’re conditioned to expect there’s like this quick fix or this one size fits all solution or, um, you know, just wanting the answer. And I think maybe, of course, that’s influenced by, you know, capitalism and patriarchy on our culture.

And I think also from the fact that we have become more. Disconnected from that listening to our inner voice or what it is that we deeply want. Mm-hmm. Um, that then makes it easier to look outside than to look inside, right?

Maegan: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s like how can I start looking inside? Um, that was just one example of what I do in my body and with my clients, but other things are like, can you take a yoga class?

Right? Can you just sit in silence for five minutes? Can you let yourself dance instead of answering emails? If you’re feeling really stressed, I find dance movement can be really helpful. Just put on a song that you love and step away from your desk and move your body. Can you lay down? This reminds me something that might be helpful is there’s many different ways to rest.

I think many of us are conditioned to think that rest is laying down and taking a nap. Or getting, you know, enough hours of sleep and like, yes, those things are important, but rest can really happen in any way, right? Rest, deep rest is anything that calms you down and recharges your batteries. So that might be watching Schitt’s Creek, right?

That might be doing watercolor painting. That might be sweating it out on your Peloton, right? That might be going to a happy hour with friends. Rest is, can be any activity that like rebalances your system. So I do think that just getting really curious about where am I feeling a little bit depleted in my life and how can I start to add little micro doses of that back in to the rotation.

Just to experiment and see what actually helps me feel better. And as you start, I always, I imagine like a big control board, like a NASA control board, you know, and this is like the control board of my life. And as you start twisting and turning all of these knobs and dials, you have to pay attention to notice what’s working.

And when you find something that’s working, turn that dial way up. Follow the thread and trust that what is going to work for you is going to look totally different than what works for me or what works for Tasi.

Tati: Yeah, I think that’s such a great point. And you had mentioned to me before the different types of rest and, and you kind of like touched on it there.

So I’m curious if you can speak more to that. Like, you know, ’cause I know especially with a lot of my listeners, they. Struggle with things like meditation or slowing down because I think they’re, they’re so like, kind of, um, keyed up and, and it’s difficult to, to do the kinds of rest that we might normally think of.

Um, so I’m curious if there’s any kind of, you know, for the people who are interested mm-hmm. And, uh, can benefit from passive rest, but also maybe more active types of rest.

Maegan: Yeah. Love it. This is one of my favorite conversations because I do it when I do deep rest workshops, um, out in the world. My, my favorite moment in these workshops is always like the shock and awe on people’s faces when they hear that rest can be active, that rest can be something that you do, not just something that you don’t do.

So it opens up a whole world of possibilities. Okay. Here’s a couple things I wanna say about it. First I wanna give a shout out to a researcher and an author, uh, named Sandra Dalton Smith. Um, she has researched rest and she’s come up with in, in her work seven different types of rest, which I think is a really cool starting place.

I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think that’s exhaustive, but you know, based on her research, she’s distilled rest down into these seven different categories. Um, and I think that’s so cool. So Google her, if you’re interested. But before I tell you, or give you some ideas for more active types of rest, for people who are more active, who, who really struggle to slow down, I wanna remind you, first of all, write it down.

Deep rest, any activity that regulates my nervous system and recharges my batteries. ’cause every idea that we’re offering you today, like you have to measure that idea against yourself. Is this thing going to help you regulate your nervous system and recharge your batteries? If yes, great. Try it. If you know for sure that it’s not like meditation is a great example.

Maybe you hear meditation or slowing down or doing deep breathing and you know that for you, that is not going to regulate your nervous system. Like, you know, when you sit down to regulate, it stresses you out. It gets you all worked up great, beautiful noticing. You’ve done an amazing job. Don’t meditate, don’t worry about it.

Find something else to do. So make sure again, you’re measuring it against these two markers. Does that make sense?

Tati: Yeah. And, and I’m wondering, can you describe what you mean by regulating your nervous system? Oh, sure.

Maegan: Yeah. Let’s see, the simplest way to say this without going into a, uh, a whole conversation on trauma responses.

I don’t know if you have any episodes about that already, but I’m sure we could put like some resources in the show notes. Yeah. If people wanna learn more. Um, yeah, definitely do. About trauma responses. Great. Okay. Um. Yeah, so how’s your nervous system? When I ask people, how’s your nervous system? I think like the easiest way to tune into that question is to, is to see in your body, like how scared do you feel on a day-to-day basis?

How scared, like, do you, do you kind of walk around feeling kind of freaked out all the time, right? Are you walking around feeling like super anxious? Do you feel yourself? Do you wake up with like racing thoughts at 3:00 AM and you can’t go back to sleep and then you’re kind of sweating for the rest of the day.

You know, are you, are you doing things because you’re afraid If you don’t, your world will fall apart. Right? These are, these are signs that your nervous system is in, what we would call a, a hyper aroused state, right Where you are on like high alert all the time. But the, the reverse of this can also be true, right?

If, if, you know, your nervous system can be what we call hypo aroused, if you feel like you can’t get out of bed, right? If you feel like totally deflated, if you feel like your body is made of lead, if you feel just this sense of hopelessness, like nothing’s like you just can’t do anything. These are great signs from our bodies that our nervous system is out of alignment.

Because we want to feel like we’re in this window of tolerance in our life, which means that we have ebbs and flows, we have fluctuations, but we feel really regulated, clear, calm. Most of the time. We feel like we, we know what we’re doing. We can choose our actions. We can slow down, use some critical thinking skills to kind of inform what we’re doing next.

These are some of the ways I invite my clients to think about their nervous system and how their nervous system is responding. Um, but what about you? What would you add to that or, um, or amend?

Tati: I think that that’s a great description and you know, I can, I think you really encompassed that extremes of, of what it can be like and feel like.

And, um, you know, I think a lot of my listeners, I would guess, resonate with. Being hyper aroused and yeah. That fear, if they stop or slow down, then mm-hmm. You know, something terrible is going to happen. Kind of focusing on the worst case scenario. But, you know, I think also it’s important to acknowledge the, and this connects with what you were saying previously with the burnout.

You know, some people go into that state where they just don’t have any motivation or desire. Yeah. But yeah, long story short, I don’t think I would add anything. I think, I think you put it very well.

Maegan: I think that, um, most people who are listening to podcasts to try to feel better are probably in more of that hyper aroused state.

Tati: Yeah.

Maegan: Right. Like where, and, and that’s where I default into hyper arousal. So we’re the ones who are like doers. You know, we’re like, we’re gonna do so much, and then we’re gonna do a little bit more to also listen to a podcast about how to recover from burnout while we’re doing 18,000 other things. Um, and when we fall into hypo arousal, when our nervous system like deflates, collapses.

We’re a lot less likely to have the bandwidth or the energy to do things like seek out podcast episodes or go to the doctor or find a therapist. Um, so that might be, if you’re listening to this right now, chances are you’re probably more in this like hyperactivated state. Um, so, you know, get curious about that.

But either way, I heard someone describe the nervous system once as, um, the body’s compass. And I love that, right, that your nervous system is really here to communicate to you. How are you doing? What do you need? So we wanna make friends with your nervous system. We wanna like love on your nervous system and be so grateful for all of the data and information that it is sending to you through this beautiful machine that is your body.

Um. So we’re gonna stop. We’re gonna get curious what’s happening in my body, what am I feeling? What do I need? And now I’m just gonna throw out some different types of rest that might align more for you. If you’re the kind of person who really is having a hard time slowing down and getting quiet. I’m thinking, I’m reminded of a, a really good friend of mine, um, who falls into this category, and she is an avid Peloton user.

That’s why I said the Peloton earlier I was thinking about her. She absolutely every day has to do an intense cardio workout. That activity regulates her nervous system. It’s like she needs a way to kind of burn off this like excess energy that she’s carrying in her body. And yes, she has to be careful that she’s not over exercising.

We can overdo any of the things that we’re suggesting today. So we have to make sure that we’re, we’re using everything in in moderation. Of course. Um, but she really taught me that, you know, for me, I, I like to be still being, still helps me rest being, still reading a novel outside in a field. Oh, perfect Dream day.

I. That makes her itchy, that makes her feel agitated and restless. It’s not helpful. It’s not restful. She needs to get on the Peloton. She needs to sweat it out, right? She needs like the pumping music and the cheerleading of the Peloton instructor. I mean, that makes me literally want to die. Like the thought of doing that is just like a big, no thank you for me.

But for her it’s a lifeline. So for her intense exercise is a core. Form of rest. I think another type of rest that confuses people sometimes is socializing, and it’s all about balance again. But if you are feeling really stressed, really overwhelmed in your life, and you can feel in your body that what you need is meaningful connection, laughter, social engagement, then you might find going to dinner with girlfriends to be a deeply.

Restful activity because it calms you down and it charges you up. It’s like when you get home from a really great dinner date and you’re just like, oh, I needed that. And you can feel your energy flowing and you’re just like, Ooh, that was so much fun. And I’m like, riding high. Maybe it’s going to a concert.

Maybe that is like what feels really restful for you, engaging in art, going to see a show of some kind. Creating art, I think is a deeply restful activity for so many people. Maybe you can’t sit still and meditate, but what if you get a giant notebook and some colored pencils and you just doodle? Just sit there and you doodle while you play.

You know, you watch great British bakeoff on tv. It’s really about like, again, what is my body needing? What am I wanting to express and can I do it with intention? I think that is is another piece of the puzzle here. Can I do it with intention? Because if you get on that Peloton or you go to that happy hour and you are holding the intention.

To rest, to recharge, to calm yourself down. That is going to amplify all of the good results that you can experience in that particular setting.

Tati: Those are some great examples and I, I love how you describe the dichotomy of maybe some, like your friend who really needs to do that intense cardio versus you.

Mm-hmm. Who it’s more maybe like the low key reading a book. And it’s interesting ’cause that made me think. I can think of myself maybe like five to 10 years ago, and I think I was like the intense, like cardio running marathon, half marathons and, and now I’m in this place where I think I’m more of like.

Reading the book doing like I, I do crafts. I do like diamond painting. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but it basically sounds basically taking Sounds cool. Yeah. You take like these little plastic colored pieces and put them on a sticky sheet. I’m describing it horribly, but it’s basically like paint by number, but with like, is it like ink pads?

Like you dip

Maegan: it in ink and then you’re like stamping.

Tati: It’s these little circular plastic things, uhhuh, that you take with like a, you stick a wax onto them and then Okay, put them on a pa piece of, I’m, I’m describing it so terribly on a piece of paper that basically has a bunch of like little spaces for numbers.

Okay,

Maegan: cool. Cool. But it’s,

Tati: it’s a form of relaxation for me. But anyway, yeah. I mean it’s a

Maegan: type of meditation.

Tati: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, that makes me think of how, you know, and I’m wondering if you could speak to this even how maybe what it is that we might need, what form of rest can change depending on what season of life we’re in or mm-hmm.

You know, what’s, what else is going on internally, externally?

Maegan: I mean, yes. And I think you just answered that question with your example. We are not static beings. Hopefully, oh my God. I hope I’d never become a static being. How boring would life be if we were just one way forever and we never changed? Uh, we are in a constant cycle of death and rebirth as people, right.

Parts of us are dying off. New parts of us are being born. We’re changing, we’re growing, we’re transforming. I think that is particularly true for high achievers, right? For people who are on that like high anxiety into the spectrum, it’s like that the gift of the anxiety that hangs out in our bodies, I think is that it, it inspires us to move forward.

It inspire it like it’s a fuel in the tank. Many of us have way too much fuel in the tank, which is another problem, but it is a fuel in the tank that makes us like hungry for life and hungry for experiences and to achieve things and create things. When you’re on that type of life path, you probably are a person who’s experiencing a pretty rapid personal evolution.

You’re growing, you’re changing, you’re evolving as a person, and yes, the types of rests that you need are going to change as you change, and, but that’s, that’s true for all things, right? The types of friendships that we need change as we grow and evolve, the types of creative stimulation we feel drawn to changes, the types of books we like to read, changes.

We are constantly changing and, and so does. The way that we need to rest and recharge our bodies. I love your example that there’s a season of your life when you were a runner and now there’s a season of life where you’re doing this meditative type of craft that we don’t yet quite understand it, but we will ’cause we’ll Google it after this episode.

Um, so I love that, that it’s, it’s actually, yeah, it’s not helpful. Maybe it’s not helpful to think about like, okay, I. Here’s what it is. Sometimes people will say, well, what did you like to do when you were a little kid? And I think that’s an interesting question to start with. As long as you have the caveat that what you did when you were a little kid might not actually be what you’re drawn to doing now.

But I, it’s an interesting place to start. Like, because when you’re, when we’re kids, when we’re little kids, I’ll say like under seven. So something happens at seven ish for so many people. There’s some kind of like transformation that occurs. So think about yourself from like four to seven. How did you play?

What was your personality like? What kind of things were you drawn to? You can mine that, that chapter in your life to see if you can connect to like, oh, actually I loved, pretend I loved fantasy, or I loved socializing, or I loved solitude. And then you can ask, do I love those things Now? If yes, great. Go for it.

If no, don’t judge yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you. Just take the question a step further. Okay, well, who am I today and what do I feel drawn to right now? How can I calm my body down and recharge my batteries in this moment? Permission granted for what you need today to be totally different from what you need six months from now.

Six years from now. Fill in the blank.

Tati: If you’re enjoying this conversation and you want more support to feel calm, balanced, and confident in your daily life, then I invite you to join me free at my weekly ish [email protected] slash newsletter, I share practical tips, personal insights and resources designed.

Specifically for high achievers managing stress and anxiety so you can feel more grounded and in control. Again, that’s calmly coping.com/newsletter. I’d love to have you join us now back to the episode. I, I think that’s, that’s great to recognize that that is a helpful starting point, but not always where you are now because Right.

We adapt and, and change throughout our lives and, yeah. You mentioned. That like when somebody’s in this state of anxiety and, and seeking out more and doing more, that can be a period of large growth. And I, I think that’s an interesting perspective and I think that can then sometimes turn into the insatiable desire to always be improving.

To always be progressing. To always be achieving. Yeah. And. I’m, I’m wondering what are your thoughts on somebody who’s stuck in that place and, and I think, you know, I’ve noticed even that can sometimes turn rest or, you know, air quotes rest into mm-hmm. Like another competition, another job. Yeah, exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Maegan: Yeah. Immediately what comes up for me is that growth and improvement. Are two very different things. Growth is not something you have to work for. Growth is not something you have to force versus improvement. Self-improvement. Self-improvement is a task, it’s a job, it’s a competition. I’m thinking about Instagram.

I. Right now. And the way Instagram, I, I’m actually, I’m not on social media professionally and I have a Instagram personally, but about six months ago I deleted it off my phone. Um, I might like redownload it and check things out once a week, once every other week. But the longer I’m away, the least interested I am in going back into it.

So it’s like the more distance I get from it, the, the more clarity I feel. The more clarity I have about how going there makes me feel when I go on Instagram, I am bombarded consciously and subconsciously with messages that I need to improve. I need to do more. I need to be more, I need to buy something.

My house isn’t cute enough. My body doesn’t look right. My, I’m not doing the right thing in my business. It’s just like this constant, um, I just feel pummeled with messages of self-improvement. So the improvement, like self-improvement feels like an external, um, and like an external instruction. It’s coming from outside of me.

It’s coming from culture, it’s coming from society, it’s coming from colleagues. And it’s this message that says, you’re not good enough the way you are. Um, here’s how you can be better gross. We’re not here for that. I don’t want that ever. That is like never, it’s never good. It’s never good for my body or my mind or my spirit versus growth.

And growth I feel is something that I. Happens alongside us, and it happens in the deepest and most profound ways when we’re doing very little. So growth happens when we slow down. Growth happens when we’re present, when we’re really working on, what I talk about in my work is the difference between being and doing.

Doing is that self-improvement. World, right? That feeling of like, I gotta do, do I gotta prove myself versus being is saying like, actually, I just wanna get to the point where I can just be, I can just exist. I can listen to my intuition, I can connect to myself, I can create, but the create, the creating that I’m doing is coming from a deeper, more inspired place.

Healing. I think like healing. Healing my wounds. Healing myself is a really important part of that journey, and as I’m doing that, as I’m just being and healing and connecting to how I can put more love into the world and more creative energy into the world from a place of love, I grow so fast. It’s like that growth, that personal growth, it’s just happening.

I don’t have to force it. It is just happening as I live my life. Versus the improving, which feels violent, right? It feels really, um, if it can feel really harmful. I’m, I’m talking about this now and really talking about it as like a black and white. I. Thing. And I, I know that there is a place in the middle where these things overlap, so I don’t wanna be like too dramatic about it.

But now I’m just waxing poetic. Did I answer your question at all, or did I just go in a totally different direction? Yeah,

Tati: no, no, no. You, you absolutely did. And, and it makes me think of, to kind of connect to what you were talking about previously in the episode of the difference between like listening to yourself versus.

Maybe kind of responding to, in this case, you know, the external pressures of I need to look or, you know, do a certain thing.

Maegan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You don’t have to force growth, like growth is happening all the time and. Uh, my job isn’t a force force growth. Yeah. My job is to just listen to myself and every day I wanna become more deeply connected to who I am, separate from the rest of the world, separate from what society tells me I should be, or tells me how I should feel every day.

I wanna connect a little bit more deeply to my own inner knowing about what is true for me, but that. That task, air quotes task, right? That, that task of, of listening and becoming more connected to my own inner knowing, I can only do that if I’m rested. That’s a really hard thing to do when I’m burned out, when I am super anxious, when I’m going a million miles a minute because our minds are so busy.

When we’re in these like highly stressed states when we’re in these highly anxious states, right? You said this earlier, like our minds just like get going and there’s so much happening. There’s so much noise up here in our heads that it’s nearly impossible to hear the quiet whisper of our inner knowing.

Because that’s how I experience it, is that the intuition, the inner knowing, it comes in as a quiet whisper and you have to be listening and you have to quiet enough of the noise all around you to be able to discern that signal, to really hear what is the message coming from within. So how do we quiet the noise by practicing deep rest, right?

By doing these activities that help us slow down. Calm our nervous systems, recharge our batteries, embracing that, that’s gonna look very different for every single one of us. And it’s gonna look different for you individually from day to day.

Tati: Yeah. And I loved how, I love how like nuanced of a discussion this is, that this isn’t just go do these three steps, but this is about connecting with yourself.

And you said a word before that. Struck with me that I think could be impactful and, you know, important for our listeners to hear of, you know, giving yourself permission. Mm-hmm. And I think that’s a big piece when it comes to, mm-hmm. The deep rest that you’re talking about, I would imagine is even just sometimes there can be this resistance to even allowing ourselves to rest.

Maegan: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, we could spend a whole hour. Talking about that and, and why is that and where does that come from? Um, yeah, let me, how do I wanna say this succinctly? Um, when I’m, I mentioned this earlier when I’m doing our deep rest workshop with people, uh, there’s a whole section of that workshop that is about understanding why is rest hard for you.

And we can oversimplify that by thinking about the society in which we live, and then the communities in which we were raised. So societally, we’ve said this already, we live in a. These are big words. They might stress you out. That’s, but it’s true. We live in capitalism. We live in a patriarchy. We live in a white supremacist culture.

Uh, we live in a colonized culture. And these words, these oppressive systems, we can boil them down or oversimplify them in this conversation to say that we have been conditioned since birth. Generations of our family have been conditioned to believe that rest is a luxury we cannot afford. Right? We are taught that it is our job to be the cogs in the machine of industrialization, right?

It is our job to produce and to help, you know, make more and be more, and climb the ladder and, and, and extract as many resources as you can. We have been indoctrinated with this belief that we’re not safe and that it’s not okay to just be, we have to prove our worth by working and being productive. So obviously if that’s the system we’re indoctrinated into, we’re not naturally going to be great at slowing down and resting because it is quite literally the antithesis of everything we are taught to value in this life.

So that’s like. The big picture, which is huge. But then I like to zoom in and say, and, and let’s, so that’s true for all of us, but it manifests in our life in different ways, depending on the types of families and communities that we grow up in, depending on the kind of socioeconomic status that, uh, we, you know, lived inside of as a kid.

So then you can ask yourself questions about your childhood. Like, what kind of messages did I learn about rest as a kid? What did my parents or my caretakers or my teachers say to me when I was tired? How did I see grownups resting in my household? Who was working? What did that look like? Were, were people taking good care of themselves or were they in poor health?

What were was happening? What, what did I see? What did I experience, and how did that inform the, the rules and the messages that I internalized in my body? About what I am and am not allowed to do. And when you really get into that, when you sink your teeth into those questions and you start unpacking, what did I internalize just by osmosis growing up, and how has that translated into the rules I’m, I’m carrying in my body?

As an adult, you can really start to see and understand why rest is challenging for you Now. And when you get that clarity, you can then start to reverse engineer, right? Which this is where things get really fun for me. It’s like, okay, cool. Um, like, lemme give you a specific example. When I grew up, my dad was an entrepreneur and, um, and a really hard worker and there’s so many incredible qualities about that.

But I remember something he said to me a lot growing up was like, you can sleep when you’re dead. You know, get up and do something. Can sleep when you’re dead. And he wasn’t being mean, right. He wasn’t being cruel, like this was just a belief that he carried in his body. So he was like passing that along to me.

So it, it instilled in me this, this guilt. I. When I slowed down, when I tried to rest, I felt guilty. I felt like I was wasting time. Uh, and fast forward to college. I told you this story earlier. I’m in the rheumatologist office and I’m like taking these like basically cancer drugs to help with this, like arthritis.

I didn’t really have the medicine was I needed to slow down. Tend to my body. Uh, but that whole system kind of set me up to believe that there really was something wrong with me. So when I was able to track back to that one little message, you can sleep when you’re dead. Oh, then I’m able to take a breath and say, okay, well that’s not actually what I believe.

What I believe is that I deserve. To be well in my body, and I believe that I can do my greatest work in this lifetime as a deeply rested person. Cool. So what’s the new rule for me in my life? Well, my rule is that I’m going to prioritize rest in, well, I’ll specifically, for me, I’m like, I’m gonna prioritize rest by honoring that I need nine to 10 hours of sleep a night.

That’s just true for me. That’s just true for the body that I’m living in, this go around. So I’m gonna stop making that a problem. I’m gonna honor that. You know, sometimes even though it, it sounds really fun to go out and have an adventure or like stay up late and go to a party that actually I just need to take a bath and then watch British reality shows in my bed.

And like, that’s okay and I’m gonna embrace that. Um. So that’s a, a specific example about my journey and I, I hope it’s helpful for those of you listening, but the takeaway for you here is to first honor that you have been indoctrinated into these larger systems that do not want us to rest. So, whatever struggle, guilt, shame you feel about that, it’s not on you.

It’s not on you, please stop blaming yourself. And then can you take that a level deeper and get really curious about the way you grew up. And really ask yourself, what did you learn? What did you absorb consciously or unconsciously about rest? And then can you decide what of those lessons do you agree with and, and what would you like to change?

And then you can start to change it, and that’s when the magic begins to happen.

Tati: Yeah. I think you did an excellent job of taking us from. The systemic influences all the way down to the individual and, and how that really showed up for you and that, that phrase you shared of like, I’ll, you know, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

I think that’s such a common one that we carry within us and just believing it without question and, and not realizing how those things that we heard can affect the way that we treat ourselves growing up. Yeah. Yeah, into adulthood.

Maegan: I think it also gives us a chance to really feel deep and profound love for everyone in our life, right?

Because there was definitely a season of my life, for example, where I was really mad at my dad. Um, I was really mad that those were the things that he quote taught me, and it, it took time and my own healing process and my own growth to go like, but wait. Oh, but he has been harmed by these systems, right?

These systemic forces. He was, he’s been harmed by them too. And, and that’s how that harm showed up for him. And he was just doing and saying what he thought was right. Um, so I, I find that the systemic element is a, is a really helpful way to put the blame where it belongs. To like point the finger to be like, actually this isn’t about us.

This isn’t about, you know, the people I see on Instagram who make me feel bad about myself, this isn’t about my parents, this isn’t about the school I went to. Um, this is about these, these larger forces that are setting all of us up to be challenged by our very basic human need for rest and love and a slower pace of life.

Tati: Absolutely. Yeah. And I feel like we could talk about this all day, uh mm-hmm. But this was a really excellent conversation and, you know, something that I think listeners will really benefit from. Mm. I’m curious to hear from you if anybody is interested in learning more about you, you know, continuing to follow you.

How can they do that?

Maegan: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. I loved this conversation, um, and I’m very excited to have you as a guest on my podcast. So if you’ve made it all the way to the end as a listener, first of all, thanks for hanging out with us this long. It’s such an honor. And, uh, if you liked this conversation, I would love for you to subscribe to the Deeply Rested Podcast to, um, listen to more conversations like this and to listen to Tatis episode, uh, as well, where we’ll be like reversing seats.

And I, I really can’t, I can’t wait to interview you and, uh, hear all of your, your brilliant, brilliant insights on this conversation. So the Deeply Rested podcast. Is where you can find me and more of my ideas. And if you’re more of a reader, I would love to invite you, um, into the deeply rested newsletter ecosystem, which I know you are there, Tati and mm-hmm.

It’s such a special, sacred place for me to share these ideas and have more of these conversations in, in a more personal way. Uh, so you can check that out and see what it’s all about. And decide if you want to [email protected] slash newsletter.

Tati: And I’m, I’m looking forward to being a guest on your podcast as well, and I would highly recommend the podcast and Megan’s newsletter.

And I’ll leave all of those links in the description for this episode. Um, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast, Megan, it was a great conversation.

Maegan: Thanks for having me.