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Have you ever caught yourself thinking:
“I don’t even know what I want anymore.”
Or…
“Nothing really excites me the way it used to.”
In today’s episode of The Feminine Business School, I’m exploring a pattern I see in so many ambitious, capable women: the gradual loss of aliveness.
Not because they’ve failed.
Not because they’re ungrateful.
Not because they lack ambition.
But because years of responsibility, emotional labour, perfectionism, caregiving, achievement and chronic pressure can slowly disconnect us from our desires, intuition, creativity and capacity for pleasure.
• Why so many high-performing women feel flat, numb or disconnected
• The hidden impact of Good Girl conditioning
• How perfectionism and body policing drain life force energy
• The emotional labour women carry and its impact on health and wellbeing
• Functional freeze and why life can look “fine” from the outside while feeling empty on the inside
• The surprising signs your nervous system may be stuck in survival mode
• The real cost of losing access to aliveness
• Why desire, pleasure and excitement matter more than you think
• How the Alive + Awake framework helps women reconnect with themselves
This conversation is an invitation to stop asking:
“What’s wrong with me?”
And start asking: “What have I had to suppress in order to survive?”
Because aliveness isn’t something you earn after success.
It’s something you return to.
If this episode resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me a message on Instagram and tell me:
What part of you is ready to come back to life?
Alive + Awake (Private Mentoring)My most bespoke, high-touch space for women ready to build a fully integrated way of living and leading…where your capacity, business, body and desire are all held together in one aligned system.
This is where capacity becomes embodied, leadership becomes sustainable and expansion becomes safe and pleasurable. Send Ainslie an email to learn more ainslie@startingwitha.com
The Capacity CodeA self-paced immersion designed to help you map, understand, and restore your nervous system capacity so you can stop cycling between push and collapse and start building a more stable foundation for your life and business.
This is where we begin — awareness, mapping and restoration. Unlock Your Capacity Now.
REVIVEA 90-minute deep-dive session designed to help you identify and begin rewiring the nervous system patterns that keep you stuck in overdrive, inconsistency, or shutdown.
This is where we shift patterns at the nervous system level so you can hold more without collapse. Book Your Session Here.
Hi and welcome to The Feminine Business School, I’m your host Ainslie Young and today I want to expand on what I shared in the last episode, which was a somatic practice I did and what it revealed in terms of my aliveness.
If you haven’t listened to episode 49 I encourage you to go back and have a listen, but just to give you an abridged version, I shared how my quote on quote “success”had become a subconscious gateway…and the only gateway to aliveness and how our ambition can become emotionally over-loaded, which resulted in me slowly losing that spark of aliveness and excitement…and this is a very common challenge I see in high performing, ambitious women.
So this isn’t necessarily just a me problem, it’s a we problem and when I say we I mean a collective problem.
Because our cultural conditioning does a really great job of dulling our sense of aliveness as women in a myriad of ways including demanding compliance, prioritizing others’ needs over our own and treating our valid emotions (like anger and rage) as a liability rather than a source of power.
And I want to expand on this by going into these invisible frameworks that subtly or not so subtly embed themselves into our thoughts and ultimately affect our bodies and our behavior including:
The “Good Girl” conditioning > From a young age, women are socialised to be agreeable, accommodating and self-sacrificing. If we’re found to set boundaries or express a strong, independent identity we can be viewed, and even pathologised as “difficult,” which ultimately forces women to swallow and bury their true feelings and desires.
Perfectionism and Body Policing is another sneaky invisible societal framework that inhibits women’s ability to feel excitement, desire and aliveness. As I grow older it’s becoming even more infuriating that society ties female worth to outward appearance, size and how young we look despite our actual age. It’s no surprise that the constant scrutiny (both externally and internally from our inner mean girl) and the endless pursuit of an unachievable aesthetic, drains our physical and creative energy, making our bodies an object to be managed rather than an ally for experiencing and enjoying life.
And it’s not a cultural critique if I don’t share about the impact Emotional Labor that women take on in their lifetimes – research shows that women are conditioned to and take on the lion’s share of managing the emotional well-being of their families and workplaces. The relentless caretaking, day in and day out, in the many environments we engage in often requires us to suppress our own complex feelings—especially righteous anger, leading to burnout, autoimmune diseases and other nasty health conditions all while dulling our experience of life.
And if we want to reclaim our sense of aliveness, we first have to recognise these invisible frameworks.
But now I want to examine this slow kind of drifting away from feeling alive and desirous to feeling a sense of blah and numbness.
Now most women don’t wake up one day and suddenly feel disconnected from their lives. It’s much more subtle than that.
It’s cumulative. It’s years of carrying responsibility.
Years of suppressing your own needs.
Years of being the reliable one.
The capable one.
The one who keeps everything moving.
Until one day you realise you’re functioning…But you’re not fully alive.”
“You’re getting through your days.
You’re ticking things off.
You’re showing up for work.
You’re taking care of everyone else.
But underneath it all there’s this quiet feeling of:
‘Is this it?’
Or maybe:
‘I don’t even know what I want anymore.’
Or:
‘Nothing really excites me the way it used to.'”
What I see with so many women isn’t laziness or them losing their edge.
It isn’t a lack of motivation. It isn’t even burnout in the traditional sense.
Through the nervous system lens, it’s what we call functional freeze
From the outside life looks fine.
You’re functioning. You’re working. You’re parenting. You’re being responsible.
But internally there’s a kind of emotional flatness.
A disconnect from desire.
A disconnect from pleasure.
A disconnect from possibility.
Other signs of functional freeze include overthinking everything. Even small, kind of insignificant decisions like what to wear to the gym or what to have for lunch feel like epic decisions, where you feel like you need to write up a pros/cons list…and you just can’t understand why you’re so indecisive…so you can imagine if you find it hard to make these somewhat small every day decisions, of course it’s going to feel impossible to make plans or decisions for your business and career moving forward…and this is a really common problem for the women who come to me. Because functional freeze often makes us feel paralyzed and unable to make a decision and take action. And what can be really frustrating, and I know this for myself and from clients experiences…even though you’re exhausted and fatigued, medical tests don’t show anything wrong, and doctors say you’re perfectly healthy. Interestingly, when we’re stuck in a freeze response we’re actually using just as much energy as when we’re in a fight or flight response. It takes a lot of energy to keep you immobile….so you may think ‘Why am I so tired when I’m not really doing a great deal or having a huge output?’ It’s because of this.
Another important but kind of strange sign of functional freeze is not tasting meals or food like you used to. If you’re in functional freeze you may hear everyone else raving about a really tasty Thai curry they had the other night, but you yourself won’t remember what your meal tasted like. So the thing is when the nervous system isn’t working properly (as is the case with functional freeze), food may taste more bland, or non existence, because part of the nervous system’s job is to facilitate taste and smell.
So who is prone to becoming stuck in functional freeze? Well unfortunately it’s those high-achieving women, who also have perfectionistic tendencies or who are overly responsible. And it’s because these women are really good at (or more accurately, conditioned to) ignore their own needs and over ride signs of stress or overwhelm.
And if we drill down a little further, research also shows that there are some common triggers of functional freeze which include:
And here’s a really frustrating challenge for the high performing women – our modern society rewards functional freeze. Society loves high-functioning women. We celebrate women who keep going no matter what.
Women who push through.
Women who hold everything together and we call ‘Superwoman’ at the school gate.
But nobody asks what it costs….to be stuck in Functional Freeze.
And let me tell you – there’s a real cost of losing contact with your aliveness.
Because when you lose access to aliveness…you don’t just lose joy. You lose access to information.
You lose access to desire.
You stop knowing what you want.
Not because you’re indecisive.
But because you’ve become disconnected from the signals.
You lose access to intuition.
Everything becomes a mental exercise.
You analyse.
You overthink.
You seek more information.
Because you’ve stopped trusting what your body already knows.
You lose access to creativity.
Life starts feeling repetitive.
Predictable.
Heavy.
The spark that once generated ideas and possibilities starts to dim.
You lose access to magnetism.
Not Instagram magnetism.
Real magnetism.
The energy that comes from being deeply connected to yourself.
The energy that naturally draws opportunities, relationships and experiences toward you.
You lose access to pleasure.
And if you’ve followed my work over the years you know pleasure isn’t frivolous.
Pleasure is one of the ways we truly experience being alive.
It is nourishment for the nervous system.
It is medicine.”
And perhaps the greatest cost of all is this:
Life starts becoming something you manage rather than something you experience.
You stop tasting your food.
You stop noticing beauty.
You stop feeling anticipation.
You stop feeling deeply moved by things.
The days become functional.
Productive.
Responsible.
But not particularly alive.
One of the things I hear most often from women is:
‘I don’t feel excited anymore.’
Or:
‘I know I should be grateful but I just feel flat.’
Or:
‘I used to have dreams and ideas and plans but now I’m just trying to get through the week.'”
And what I want all women to understand is that this is not a personal failure.
It’s often the predictable outcome of years of over-functioning inside systems that continually ask for more than they give back. These extractive success models I’ve been speaking about here on the podcast.
And this is actually where my Alive + Awake framework begins. Not with strategy. Not with goals. Not with productivity. It begins with what I call The Awakening.
The moment a woman realises:
‘The problem isn’t that I’ve lost myself.
The problem is that I’ve become disconnected from myself.
Because you cannot reclaim your aliveness until you first recognise where it was lost. It all starts with awareness.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
‘What’s wrong with me?’
Perhaps the question is:
‘What has my life and/or business required me to suppress in order to survive?’
My excitement?
My pleasure?
My anger?
My creativity?
My desires?
My truth?
And if that’s the case…
what might become possible if those parts of you were welcomed back?
And if you’ve recognised yourself in today’s conversation, I want you to know that aliveness isn’t something you earn after you’ve worked hard enough.
It’s not a reward waiting for you on the other side of success.
It’s something you can begin returning to now.
And this is the work I do inside my Alive + Awake mentoring container.
Together we rebuild capacity.
Reconnect you with your desires, intuition and inner knowing.
Untangle the patterns that have kept you stuck in over-functioning, self-abandonment or collapse.
And create a way of living, working and leading that feels sustainable, nourishing and deeply aligned.
Because expansion isn’t just about holding more success.
It’s about holding more of yourself.
If you’d like to explore Alive + Awake, you’ll find all the details in the show notes.
And until next time…
Remember:
Aliveness is the new ambition.
