Stephanie: Hi, friend. Welcome to The Big Four Oh. It's Stephanie, and today you have me all to yourself.

My recent conversation with Anna Brooke inspired me to dig into another one of the common themes of midlife transition that so many of us go through. This one is the power of slowing down, and the benefit of doing it long before your body makes you.

So today, let's explore what happens when the hustle breaks us, whether literally or figuratively, and what we might discover when we stop pushing and start listening.

We live in a world that glorifies hustle, but at midlife, that relentless push often comes at a cost. For many of my past guests, slowing down wasn't a choice. It was a necessity, one brought on by burnout, illness, or the sheer weight of doing too much for too long.

I don't know about you, but I was raised on a steady diet of hustle. Be productive, be helpful, be busy, do more, and then do a little bit more after that. It was a character trait that came from both sides of my family.

I remember one of my dad's brothers saying one time that my grandfather was the kind of guy who could make you hate Saturdays. And on my mom's side, it was practically criminal to sit still. So as I bloomed into an adult, I was primed for hustle.

Through college, I maintained at least two jobs, a better than 3.5 GPA and a social life. Romance is here and there as well. After I graduated and started my career, I dropped down to just two jobs in the social life. And somewhere in my middle or late twenties, I dropped down to just one job and a very active social life. And again, romances along the way I. There was always something going on, something to do. There was very little quiet time. I was one of those people who did not know how to sit still. And for a long time, that served me, or at least I thought it did.

Hustle, made me feel useful. It made me feel productive like I was getting somewhere or accomplishing something. And it really, it was all I knew.

And then in my early forties, my body cried uncle and made me take notice of things that I had been overlooking for a long time. And my story isn't unique. Somewhere along the way, usually around the time we hit our late thirties or early forties hustle culture starts to break down. The body says no. The mind checks out. The soul sends up a flare that makes it very clear this isn't working anymore.

And today's episode isn't really about burnout, although I talked about that recently in another, reflections episode, though burnout can often be the wake up call. But this was really focusing in on what happens when midlife forces us to slow down.

Sometimes we get to make the choice, other times we don't. But either way, something unexpected happens in the stillness. And today I am gonna pull together some stories from past guests whose lives were interrupted, either gently or dramatically, and who discovered that slowing down wasn't failure.

There's a moment in so many midlife stories where things just stop. Sometimes it's subtle. It might be a chronic ache or a tiredness that doesn't lift, an injury that won't heal, an illness that won't go away. Or a vague sense that you're just not feeling like yourself.

But other times it's abrupt. It's a collapse, a diagnosis, a dramatic fall. But no matter how it shows up, it forces a pause. And in that pause, you start to realize I can't keep living this way.

For my recent guest, Anna Brooke, that moment came through her body, Anna's injury was a full stop, physically and emotionally. And what followed was grief, identity loss, and a reckoning with the pace that she had maintained for years.

Here's how she put it.

Anna: It became very clear that the way I had been living my life was no longer tenable.

Stephanie: I got depressed.

Yeah.

Anna: I got really, really sad and I did not have any experience with dealing with grief at that level, kind of body grief.

Stephanie: I was so used to just being able to do whatever I wanted to do. It's like one of the gifts of having a healthy able body.

It often doesn't feel like a choice at first.

Another one of my guests, Tina Bakehouse, her body literally took her voice away, a symbolic and devastating interruption for someone who made her living as a speaker and teacher.

Here's how she described it,

Tina B.: One day I actually opened my mouth to speak in my speech class and nothing comes out.

And I stand there going, "What now? What am I gonna do?" This is irony at its worst, right? I'm teaching speech. How am I going to convey the message? How am I going to help students with their speaking if I can't say a word? So I had a student go down to the office and bring in the principal. And she's like, "What are we gonna do?" I'm opening my mouth, it's like a mime. It's bizarre, and not even a squeak can come out. And so she has to take over my class and she's like, "You need to go home, get rest." And I thought, well, maybe it's just a day or whatever. I do all the things like hot tea and lemon and all that you do that singers and speakers do to take care of the instrument we call the vocal cords.

Stephanie: And then came an alarming diagnosis.

Tina B.: I go to the speech therapist and she looked into my throat and was giving me relaxation techniques and things like that, and she's like, "You have vocal cord nodules, like a severe level." "You have two choices. You can either choose to have surgery and it may work, may not. Or you can have six weeks of silence."

Stephanie: That silence turned out to be not just physical. It was emotional and existential.

And for Jennifer Arthurton, the pause wasn't a moment. It was a complete shutdown that came after a cascade of losses that landed her literally in bed. Here's what she said.

Jennifer: By all measures I was living the perfect life. Like, I got to go to Olympic events, I was standing on stage with Lady Gaga. I had these incredible experiences. I was really well paid.

And there was still this like little niggling inside me that I would shut it down and I shut it down over and over and over again. Until I really had no choice. And what happened was

Stephanie: all in within under a year, I found myself divorced, an empty nester. My kid moved 3 hours away to go to school. I was let go from my career and I was bedridden with a stress related illness.

Oh, God. Well, the universe had your attention.

Jennifer: Oh, boy, did it ever. And, it was as though, all of my identities who I thought I was in the world was literally stripped away from me in a very short space of time. And I most days, I couldn't get out of bed. Going grocery shopping was a feat that would require, like, a 3 hour nap before I could actually put the groceries away.

I was, mentally, physically, and emotionally completely spent. And I would lie in my bed and like, first of all, throwing myself a big old pity party. What I realized was what, like, if I'm not a wife, if I'm not a mother, if I'm not a corporate executive, then who am I?

Stephanie: These three moments paint a vivid picture of what happens when we ignore the quiet whispers to slow down until the body or life itself roars to get our attention. These are the moments when everything we've been carrying, the pace, the pressure, the perfectionism becomes too heavy to continue carrying.

For some of us that breaking point knocks us flat. For others, it can be quieter.

Stephanie Rose didn't crash, but when her youngest child turned one and life became just a little less chaotic, the quiet that she experienced revealed things that she had been holding at bay. Here's what she said.

Stephanie R.: It really became clear when my youngest was about a year or so and you're finally getting more sleep. And like finally getting to that point of okay, like It's been a rocky, what, five years. I think the boat has settled in my life I was getting more sleep. Sleep is so important, it's like once you actually get sleep, Oh, you feel like a whole new person. And I, I think that was like the kickstarter of like, okay, things are slowing down. I finally have a bit more capacity to explore this now and that existential, like, well, what next?

A year and a half ago I left my corporate career because I couldn't not have enough capacity to do what I really want to do in life. I'm still scared by it, but I, I think there was some burnout and just this is a lot to keep juggling. And I still loved what I did to a degree. I like the people I work with. It was a great company. It very aligned with my values. All those moments of why would you leave this? Everything's so good. But I, I couldn't stay. It was soul sucking in a way too, that it's, really hard to articulate. And there are times I'll look back and like, well, was that the right choice? Should I have stayed? And then then I really think back and like, no, I was not happy in the deepest of ways.

Stephanie: Steve Vincent's unraveling came slowly as well. This one took years and he ignored it until it couldn't be ignored anymore. Here's what he had to say.

Steve: I just had this feeling that, is this all there is, and if I can swear, this shit ain't working for me anymore.

And the thing was, though, looking back, for years and years and years, I ignored that and I pushed it down.

And I pretended it wasn't there. And I believe that was a big disservice to me and my spirit because I lost myself. I got busy in work, you know, I mean, look, I've got four children. We had four children under five at one point. You know, like life was busy and life was crazy. And I think a lot of that was part of the distraction of if I'm busy doing other things, I don't have to face the lie that I feel that I'm living.

And that, that led to a point of a lot of self reflection and, it was, yeah, it was an uncomfortable time.

Stephanie: So however it arrives, it brings the same message, which is you can't keep going like this.

So what happens after the breakdown or that slow unraveling? Well, according to my guests, there's often a strange moment of quiet. And sometimes we resist it. We try to go back to the hustle right away. Sometimes we resent being made to

sit still or be quiet, thinking of all the things we could or should be doing. But eventually, if you give it just a little bit of space, something softens.

And let's be clear, the time it takes to get to that eventually is directly proportional to the vigor with which you fight against the stillness.

But stillness, when we stop fighting it, becomes the place where we begin to hear truths that we've been too busy to notice.

And let's pause for just a moment so I can ask, when was the last time you gave yourself enough stillness to hear what's true for you? Have you ever?

For Jennifer Arthurton stillness wasn't optional. It was imposed by her body. But in it, she found something she didn't expect.

Okay, so now you are flat on your back, in bed, can't get out and trying to figure out who the heck you even are. Tell me about that process of uncovering who the heck you even are.

Jennifer: I was starting at the beginning, like, you're presented with a stranger, and that's literally who I was. I was a stranger to myself. And so I started, I was a little bit forced to, because I was forced into this place of stillness. It was like, okay, I'm just going to sit with myself in stillness and see what comes up.

What thoughts am I thinking? How do I feel? I was asking myself these, really, really basic questions and the more that I spent time with myself and started listening to myself, like, listening to that inner voice, right? Like, what is she saying to me? And paying attention. Sometimes it might be today I'd like to eat an orange.Or,a lot of times it would be asking me to go into nature. And I was so burnt out that I couldn't walk very far or very long. So I would go to the park across from my house, and I would sit under a tree, and

see what came up. And then after a process of doing this over time, started to understand things about myself.

Stephanie: That's one of the most disorienting parts of this transition, realizing we don't know ourselves as well as we thought we did. And it's strange because we come to this point in adulthood. We're in our mid thirties, our late thirties, our early forties, and all of a sudden we realize, I don't know who I am.

For Tina Bakehouse, her voice was taken away, but what replaced it was something unexpected. She found a deeper connection to others and to herself.

Here's what she said.

Tina B.: I was pissy and annoyed and it was frustrating. How am I gonna cope? And I was like, resistant. And then I to the experience and it became this powerful connection with myself and other people.

Stephanie: Was the surrender a conscious choice or was it just sort of part of the process of that's what happened after you went through grumpy and yucky?

Tina B.: I think it had to happen. I had a choice, right, of being grumpy and resistant and angry, and the anger was not serving me, and it was exhausting me. And I'm like, well, what's the point of this? This isn't any fun. And I really had to reflect on those times by myself of why am I so angry? That's where the real healing happens, is in the stillness.

Stephanie: Not everyone has to collapse to arrive at stillness. Some people, like Steve Vincent, step into it gently, but the shift is just as profound. Here's what he said,

Steve: I just had this feeling that, is this all there is, and if I can swear, this shit ain't working for me anymore. And the thing was, though, looking back, for years and years and years, I ignored that and I pushed it down.

And I pretended it wasn't there. And I believe that was a big disservice to me and my spirit because I lost myself.

You know, like life was busy and life was crazy. And I think a lot of that was part of the distraction of if I'm busy doing other things, I don't have to face the lie that I feel that I'm living.

And that, that led to a point of a lot of self reflection and, it was an uncomfortable time.

If I reflect I've written poetry, probably on and off for all my life.

And again, I've had this weird thing going on where I have these latent talents. And they pop their head up and I get a little bit scared of them, the creativity and so forth. And then I push them back down. And I ignore them until, I don't know, something happens and I revisit them.

And, and again, that was looking back, that's been a mistake as well. Not, not embodying or embracing that, that fullness of all I am with my creativity and my, my systems and, and, my desire to work hard and do good. And And I got to that point where, It almost like, it was almost, I couldn't ignore it.

Stephanie: And then there are those moments that just sneak up on you. The ones that start with exhaustion and end with the question, what if I just don't push so hard anymore. For Stephanie Rose slowing down gave her access to something she hadn't felt in years, space. Here's what she said.

Stephanie R.: I'd come to the end of the things. Like I've had all these major events. These are the events that people planned for. These are the milestones in your life. I've had so many of them all pretty quickly. Well, then like now what? Most people, might have a gap between having the kids and then another identity shifting thing.

So I went through all of these and I was really just like, who, who am I? What in myself can I count on? What do I really like? What makes me feel most like me? And for the people in my life, how do I want them to see me? Am I showing up in ways that I'm really happy? Like I have that satisfaction that they know me. And I don't think I was ever truly hiding who I was but I don't think I was living it so boldly. Glimpses definitely got out.

Stephanie McL: Mm.

Stephanie R.: I always like own my sense of weird but I don't think I was celebrating it as much or making as much space for it. So it became this intentional look at who am I? What do I want? Where what do I want more or less of? How do I want to shape this story going forward?

Stephanie: Stillness doesn't always come with a dramatic soundtrack. Sometimes it's just the absence of noise.

And let's take a little detour here into rest because we like to say we want rest, that we crave slower mornings or gentler days, or less busy evenings or more space to breathe. But when it actually happens, when life forces us to pause, or even if we build it in of our own choosing, it can feel terrifying.

And that's because many of us, especially in our first 15 or 20 years of adulthood, were taught to measure our worth by productivity. Hustle wasn't just how we made money, it was how we made meaning. It was how we proved to the world that we were valuable. So when midlife takes that away, or if we choose to step back from it, it can trigger a deep panic.

If I'm not fill in the blank, then who am I? That question is uncomfortable, but it's also an opening because when we stop proving and performing and pushing, we can start to tune into something else, our own voice. And that voice is very rarely asking for more. What that internal voice is really interested in is truth. That voice inside the one many of us have tuned out for decades is often drowned out by striving, people pleasing, external validation, and let's be real, sheer survival mode. When we're moving fast, we can't hear much. We can hear what our boss thinks. We can hear what our parents would say. We can hear what Instagram's opinion is. But that small, steady voice inside. It barely registers as a whisper. And often that's because it's telling us to go against those other things that society and everyone older and wiser than us thinks we should be doing. It's scary and we don't really trust it, so we turn it down or tune it out.

So for many of us, midlife is the first time that we slow down long enough to realize that that voice has been there the whole time and it's been telling the truth. And it's been trying to get our attention.

And when we finally do hear it, when you finally do tune into that voice, it actually doesn't sound like pressure. It doesn't sound like all those external voices crowing about what we should be doing. It sounds like clarity, or as Anna said in our recent conversation, like discernment. Here she is,

Anna: My favorite antidote to judgment is discernment, which is simply the practice of figuring out what stays, what goes. Discernment is a, inherently neutral feeling.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

Anna: Instead of judgment, which is attacking value or assigning value. Discernment is just like, what's right for me? What isn't right for me?

Stephanie: I will let go of what doesn't need to be here, and I will receive what is meant to be here. And then I'll ask myself that same question tomorrow or a week from now or a month from now.

Yeah.

Anna: Sort of just like lowering the noise,

Stephanie: yes.

Anna: coming into the deeper question of like, what do I want to be doing, being, experiencing, achieving all of that.

, I take it as my body as being a barometer, and it's telling me the truth and I need to listen to it. My mind can spin a trillion different stories, but at the end of the day, my body is always gonna tell the truth.

My mind might take some narrative liberties, shall we say. But my body, all of our bodies, they always tell the truth.

Stephanie: Which brings me to this. Once we've stopped resisting, once we've started listening to that quiet voice, what do we find there?

For many of my guests, what emerged wasn't a grand vision or a dramatic change. It was something simpler and quieter, but more honest than what came before. For Marcy Langlois, another one of my past guests, slowing down meant learning to speak to her body with compassion. She had spent years worrying, bracing for the worst, spinning stories in her head,but in the stillness, she discovered a different way.

Here's what she said,

Marcy: I was constantly thinking about my safety, my survival, that I was hyper vigilant, that I was always worried about the future. Anytime that I had that, a thought that was associated with any of that, and I caught it in my mind, then I would say cancel. Out loud. What you've just done is all of those thoughts run on synaptic connections in the brain. And the synapses are literally like wired together. So when you say cancel, you interrupt that connection. And so you stop that thought from being wired, again and again and again. And then you implement the opposite thought of whatever it was you were just thinking.

Stephanie: New thoughts can grow, new ways of being, not because we've pushed harder, but because we've finally paused long enough to notice what needs our attention, what needs tending. For some people, what they hear in the quiet isn't a brand new idea. It's something old, something they loved or left behind.

For Jennifer Arthurton stillness brought a kind of reconnection with joy and curiosity and with parts of herself that she had long ignored while she was doing all the things that she was supposed to. Here's what she said.

Jennifer: One of my, the probably the greatest realization for me when I was in my bed, unable to get out, forced into a place of stillness, I realized that nowhere along the way, had I ever stopped to check in to see if it was what I wanted. What made me happy? What fulfilled me?

I was like the good girl, right? the good student.

We're operating from a place of unconsciousness because we are so disconnected from ourselves, from our wants, right? Again, because all of validation comes from outside of us. Are we good moms? Are we good sisters? Are we good wives? Are we good corporate employees? And we ignore ourselves for so long that we become so completely disconnected. And that was literally my story. My forties was the period of disconnection.

Stephanie: And Steve Vincent had a similar experience.

Here he is,

Steve: I'm gonna get dressed, go to work, and then I'm gonna come home, and in those quiet moments, I'm gonna go, I didn't really enjoy that, and, I could squash that down. I could ignore it. I could, pretend it wasn't there

Stephanie: hmm.

Steve: for periods of time and then it would come back. And then I could pretend for periods of time it wasn't there. And then it would come back. Andthat continual, it's almost like a eroding of life force energy.

It's a sadness that is, is this all I was put on the planet to do? Am I really living my truth? And if I'm not, that's sad. That is really sad. And, I guess one of the other things too,

if my story has taught me anything, it's not to ignore that voice for too long.

Stephanie: And that's the gift of quiet. It doesn't always show us exactly what's next, but it reminds us who we are, and that can often go a long way to pointing the direction of what's next. Quiet reminds us that we were never meant to run on empty, that life isn't measured in productivity, and that the voice inside of us, the one that we're finally making space to hear, it knows the way.

And now that we've got 15 or 20 years of experience being an adult, we know that the world isn't gonna cave in if we start doing things our own way.

It was at some point after my body made me stop and pay attention that I put a couple of things together. Number one, I own the company, I'm the boss. Number two, I'm not a morning person, never have been. Number three, my brain doesn't really function well in the morning, and it takes me a long time to get up to cruising altitude. And number four, my best hours are three to 8:00 PM. I'm most effective, creative, and focused. Now, I'm not very good at math, but those things for me added up to why the hell would I force myself to be at my desk in the morning when I'm not functional or productive? And why would I leave work at five just because most of the rest of the world does, but my brain is finally on a roll. In my mid to late forties, I finally realized that I am the boss of me and of my company, and if I wanna work 11 to seven, then that's what I should do and could do because I make my own rules. And the world isn't gonna cave in if I choose to do things a little differently than everyone else, as long as my team and my clients are happy, then whose business is it? I mean, don't get me wrong, my brothers still give me a little bit of guff for not being up in the morning, but such is the moral superiority of the morning person.

So when my voice told me that that was the answer, I finally started to listen. Is it any real surprise that stories from when I was like a 2-year-old, talk about how I always got out of bed and wanted to be involved in whatever was going on at 10 o'clock at night? And that I had to be dragged out of bed for school every day of the 12 years of elementary, junior high, and high school? When I think of those times during college when I was hustling, and I was getting up at five 30 to make a 5 45 aerobics class before being at work at eight 30. Ugh. That was the hustle talking. That was the shoulds talking. That was most definitely not me talking.

All of these stories, whether they came from a dramatic collapse or a quiet shift, share a common truth. Slowing down isn't the end of our ambition. It's the beginning of wisdom. When we stop racing through our days, we begin to truly live inside of them. We stop doing life or performing life and start really inhabiting it, being in it.

And as Tina Bakehouse so beautifully put it,

Tina B.: We get so busy with the crazy in our minds, the distraction of the doing. And we're meant to be human beings, not human doers.

Stephanie: That one really gets me. We are meant to be human beings, not human doers.

And yet so many of us have spent decades proving our worth through what we do, how much we give, how well we keep it all together. Slowing down can feel like the scariest thing in the world, especially when your value has been wrapped up in your output.

But if there's anything these stories have taught me, and maybe now you are seeing it too, it's that there is power in the pause. There is wisdom in the stillness. When the noise quiets down, we finally have a chance to hear our own voice, and it's usually telling the truth even if it's whispering.

Is your internal voice whispering? Is it trying to get your attention? Is it time to finally listen a little bit more closely? And if you're already hearing it, even if it's faint, I hope you trust it because that voice definitely isn't asking you to hustle. It's not telling you to give up, it's just telling you to pay attention.

Okay, friend. Thanks for spending this time with me today. If this episode sparked something for you, come say hi, because I wanna hear about it. I'm on Instagram at the big four oh, or you can find me at the big four oh.com and spell out all those words. And if you know someone who's approaching their own breaking point, or maybe already in the stillness, share this episode with them. It might be just the thing they need to hear today.

I'll see you next time.