I thought I was protecting my energy. I was just getting smaller.

About a month ago, I was lying in bed after one of the hardest stretches I've had in a long time.

I had tried a new medication. It went badly — the kind of badly where your mental health crashes in a way you didn't know was possible, where you're experiencing things you don't have language for and wouldn't wish on anyone. I stopped taking it. And I was lying there, still shaky, starting to piece things back together.

Here's what came out of that experience, though. Clarity I hadn't been able to find in seven months of desperately searching for it.

My doctors and I had already suspected my nervous system was at the root of what I've been going through. But the severity of my reaction to that medication made it undeniable.

My body wasn't just stressed. My nervous system was (is?) dysregulated in a way that nothing upstream was going to fix — not the supplements, not the dietary changes, not carefully avoiding anything physically taxing.

I had been treating symptoms. But the source of the leak was somewhere else entirely.

And lying there, I started to actually look at how I'd been trying to take care of my nervous system for the previous seven months.

I had been either working or was fully shut down. That was it. That was the full range.

When I wasn't working, I was zoned out — scrolling, lying around, doing nothing. I had told myself that was rest (largely because that’s what SO MUCH of the medical advice agreed was rest).

I had also, slowly and without fully noticing it, made my life smaller and smaller and smaller.

I told myself I was protecting my energy.

What I was actually doing was removing every source of joy and meaning from my life in the name of healing — and then wondering why I wasn't healing.

Here's the part I want to be honest about: my work was the one thing that still made me feel alive.

I love what I do. Genuinely, deeply, in a way that isn't performance and isn't workaholism dressed up as purpose.

Building Essentialist CEO, coaching clients I feel so deeply honored to serve, watching someone finally see the thing that's been holding them back — that lights me up in a way nothing else does.

And I don't want to understate that or apologize for it. Hell, I want to shout it with pride and joy from the rooftops because it took a long time and a lot of work to get here.

But work and zoning out were the only two settings I had. And a life lived entirely between those two poles — no matter how much you love the work — is not a sustainable life. It's just a slower way of running out of road.

Every year, instead of setting resolutions, I set a theme.

Not a goal. Not a target. A theme — a word or phrase that acts as a filter for how I want to show up, who I want to become, how I want to move through the year. I've been doing this for several years now, and it has genuinely been one of the most useful practices I've built into my life. It's not about what I want to achieve. It's about how I want to be. (I wrote about why I do this — and how to set your own — here.)

My theme for 2024 was Craftsmanship — learning to treat my work like something worth doing with care and intention, instead of always winging it at the last minute.

My theme for 2025 was Slow is Smooth — because I kept moving so fast I was creating the very friction I was trying to outrun.

For 2026, I chose Constraint Breeds Creativity.

I chose it because I'd seen it play out over and over in my clients' businesses — the consultant who finally niches down because she literally cannot afford to keep being everything to everyone, the founder who builds his first real system because he has no more capacity to scale himself.

Real constraints force real creativity. I believed that intellectually. I wanted to embody it.

At that point, my body was already forcing those constraints, but I didn’t fully realize that even 7 months later, it would be completely non-negotiable.

If you read Thursday's newsletter, you know what I've been watching my clients do over and over. They diagnose their own problem incorrectly.

They think they need more leads, better marketing, a VA. They pour more water into a bucket that has a hole in it.

The real issue — the one foundational gap that everything else is downstream of — stays unfixed, and they keep working harder around it.

Lying in that bed, I realized I had been doing the exact same thing to myself.

I have Hashimoto's — autoimmune thyroid disease — which means my baseline hasn’t been normal for a long time. I had a dental infection for nearly a decade that nobody caught. When it was finally found and fixed in late 2024, everyone expected a lot of my strange, compounding health issues to resolve. For a while, it seemed like they might.

Then October came, and a whole new set of symptoms arrived. Histamine intolerance that would floor me for days after eating the wrong thing. Crashes I couldn't explain. I changed my diet. I added supplements. I rested more. Some of it helped a little. None of it held.

I knew the nervous system was involved. I kept thinking that as long as I didn't push myself physically, that was enough.

It wasn't. Because I wasn't treating my nervous system. I was just not aggravating it. There's a difference. And I was filling the time I saved by doing nothing — literally nothing — that made me feel present, connected, or alive.

The leak wasn't "doing too much." The leak was the complete absence of anything that made my nervous system feel safe and regulated. Joy isn't a luxury when your nervous system is dysregulated. It's medicine.

I want to be specific here, because vague inspiration isn't useful to anyone.

What I've learned — still early, still learning — is that my nervous system doesn't just need me to stop pushing. It needs me to actively create experiences that move it into a different state.

That looks like working a maximum of five hours on a full workday, with real breaks — not scroll breaks, but actual nervous system resets. Meditations that put me into parasympathetic mode. Saying yes to seeing people I love even when it feels easier to cancel.

Letting my life be bigger, not smaller.

It's been about a month. I'm already working more than I could for the previous two.

My life feels more joyful. Things feel lighter.

I can't tell you yet what this looks like in six months — but I can tell you the direction finally feels right in a way the previous approach never did.

I turn 44 this week.

For as long as I can remember, I've had two natural self-audit points in my year — not one. January 1st, when the calendar resets and I set my theme. And my birthday, half a year later, when I get to ask a different question.

→ January asks: who do I want to become this year, and how do I want to move through it?

→ My birthday asks: is the life I'm actually living moving me toward that, or away from it?

Those are not the same question. And for most of the last seven months, my honest answer to the second one was: away from it. Not because of the health challenges — those aren't in my control.

But because of how I was responding to them. Getting smaller. Removing joy. Calling it healing.

The constraint was always going to be real. The creativity — the actual response to it that moves me forward — that part was mine to choose.

I'm choosing it now.

I tell my clients this all the time.

Your buyers aren't problem-aware. They're symptom-aware.

They know something feels off. They know they're not getting the results they want. But they haven't identified the actual root cause yet — so they keep trying to solve the symptom and wondering why nothing sticks.

Here's what I've learned the hard way this year. We do the EXACT same thing to ourselves.

We're aware of the symptoms. The exhaustion. The feast-or-famine. The feeling that we're working harder than ever and still not moving. The business that's growing but somehow feels like it's consuming us instead of serving us. We feel all of it.

But most of us never slow down long enough to ask: what if this isn't the problem? What if this is just the symptom?

What if there's one thing — underneath all of it — that, if I finally addressed it, would change everything?

That's the question worth sitting with this week. In your business. And in your life.

You don't have to have the answer yet. You just have to be willing to ask it honestly.

In love, growth, and hope,
Kasey

P.S. My birthday is Tuesday, the 7th. If you want to send a little love, hit reply and tell me the one thing you're working on finding the root cause of — in your business or your life. I'd genuinely love to know.