#15 Author and Coach Tamu Thomas on toxic productivity, anxiety and redefining success

26:30Tamu Thomas:it's worth it. So it's about getting clear. What is that about? For me, as somebody who has overworked and over-functioned for the vast majority of their life, my number one goal, what I am ambitious for at this stage in my life is to be a well-rested woman. And in order to be a well-rested woman, I had to do some calculations. Because for me, if success is taking away from me being able to live a good quality of life, that's not success. That's commodifying myself. So to your point about the finances, the savings, the investments, the pension, the looking after yourself, I had to sit down and think about everything that gets in the way of me being able to rest.

27:14Tamu Thomas:And I wrote it down. Those are all the things I need to remove or mitigate or contain in some way so that I can live a restful life. Let me tell you something. It is very difficult to live a restful life when you're not making the kind of money you need to make. And I don't just mean, as you were talking about, to pay your bills. I sat down and thought to myself, how much do I want to save each month? How much do I want to put into my pension? What do I want to put into investments? What about the savings for my daughter? My daughter does some work for me. And when you read all of this financial literature, I was like, OK, cool.

27:51Tamu Thomas:Her pension starts now. So I've got to make those pension contributions. Where do I want to live? What is the kind of life where I wake up in the morning and I feel like I'm gliding? I went on to Rightmove. I went on to utilities websites to get as much information as I could about how much that would cost me. cool okay in order to be able to live that life it might have changed now because the last time I did the calculations was in 2022 but in 2022 I worked out that I need to pay myself a salary of 127 ,000 pounds that's paying myself that salary in order to be able to fund that life initially requires super hard work to set up the systems and structures that are going to enable you to do that.

28:40Tamu Thomas:And then it's a bit like climbing up a mountain. When you're climbing up a mountain, you're using so much energy to get up there. When you get to the top, you're not using your energy in the same way because that's just not sustainable. But when you're patterned to work really hard, it's even harder slowing down, focusing on high value work that is actually going to support progress because you've been programmed for doing and for busyness. So that in itself is not just a mindsets shift your nervous system is used to operating in survival so now you've got to repattern yourself to work in a state that enables you to thrive so it means saying no far more than saying yes when you've been brought up to think that as a girl as somebody who's productive as somebody who adds value to wherever if something needs doing i'll do it exactly roll up your sleeves get it done i'm a hard worker hard work gets you to a place but then you need to be strategic you need to be doing like the leverageable work and for somebody whose default is doing that is just as hard like doing that making that switch is just as hard as working really hard it's interesting because it's like I had the same process which is as someone that kind of grew up freelance self employed I started modeling when I was 15 so I was kind of like off my parents payroll when I was 16 and that is an industry where you're constantly in scarcity mindset you're constantly in competition mindset.

30:06It's not the kind of work where you're like, okay, I'll get really good at this. And then I can up my fee or I can have somebody else do it for me or is literally you have to show up and physically do the work and manual labor in many ways. Because of the way that the pay is given, it's six months after you've done a job, you might be paid something. And then like nine months after you've done a show, you might be paid something and then you're doing a whole bunch of test shoots that are free. And so you're kind of receiving this money and dribs and dribs There's no clear, this is your salary.

30:37This is how much you make a year. You might be getting paid this year for something you did six months ago. I mean, it's like really hard to, and you're not, you're not taught financial literacy at all. And so I was just sort of receiving these small bits of money and not really knowing what, what it even, which job it correlated to. So I started to keep like a spreadsheet and actually like chase my jobs and stuff. But what that then meant was when I started the creative agency with my business partner, who was also a model, I was you know 24 when we started it we sort of took the agency in that same model which was let's get a project and then get another project and this scarcity mindset of oh there's not much going on right now we should be doing something and then if four projects would come in we'd take them all because why would you not you don't know how long you're going to have to spend without any work coming in yeah so you would kind of and that's when I had that period of burnout because it was like the most amount of projects, the most amount of responsibility ever.

31:35Her and I were doing everything. There wasn't anybody else. We obviously hire freelance teams to come in and work with us, but I managed those teams and it's my personality type to go, it's going to take me longer to explain this to you than to do it myself. So I'll do it myself. Or if I can do it in five minutes, I'll do it right now. Or if you need something doing, just do it yourself kind of thing. Esther Perel says there are people raised for loyalty and people raised for autonomy. and I was very much raised for autonomy, super hyper independent. And maybe that also comes from the kind of immigrant parent, foreign family work ethic.

32:09And so we actually sat down about three years into the business. And sorry, on top of that, we were also striving for what other people told us was the goal, which is you surely want to scale and sell this business. That's the goal, right like why else have you started a business if not to scale and sell it and that advice came exclusively from men who are older than us and so we had this idea of okay we're supposed to be scaling and selling this we need to start hiring people we need to start doing xyz and never had we actually thought what does that scaling look like that then means i need to be a manager of people that then means i need to be worried about the salaries and overheads of those people i have to see a very clear way that this will scale and sell and what that timeline looks like we'd never sat and considered those things.

32:55And so after about three or maybe four years, we sat down and yeah, had that conversation really for the first time. And I think it had been causing a lot of friction between us because I was like, we have to be doing X, Y, Z. And we did exactly that. We actually wrote down what is the number in terms of a salary annually that we would be happy with in order to live the life that we want to have, which is to be able to take several holidays a year to be able to work from home work from abroad yeah um how much is that and then when we wrote that number down also around 100 000 pounds we then went okay both of us that's 200 000 pounds in an agency that's 5x in terms of how much you need to be bringing in because a lot of that goes to production costs yeah we then went okay how many projects do we actually need and that was the first time we'd ever looked at that and we wrote that down and we said okay well we probably need about four to five clients a year which look like six to eight projects a year priced at different price points so we want to have the like 100k plus project with the big brands we want to have the like 40 to 80k projects with a mid-sized brand and we would love to work with startups and charities right like but that has to sit within a bucket because we don't make any profit on those projects and then of course all of our own stuff we have an event series we have lots of community things that don't make us any money.

34:16But we were over indexing on things that don't make us any money. So when we put it all down like that, we went, oh, okay, it's actually this number. And then this was all happening in, let's say, August. And we looked at what we'd actually done that year. And we were like, we've already done this. And we would have spent the next five months of this year breaking our backs to do more. Now, the counter argument is obviously, you don't know what the next year will bring. You know, if you can get a bit more do, of course, but I think for us, it was a real like awakening and understanding of our finances of like, and a real kind of sense of relief and release of, okay, this is the goal.

34:53It's really clear. We know, for example, if we're not, if we feel like July has come, we haven't hit that goal. We need to work harder. But if we feel like comfortably, we will hit that goal. Okay. Like it's going to be okay. You know, I think that was like super important moment.

35:12So I actually don't have a sponsor and there aren't any commercial breaks in this season. Instead, I wanted to use this little pause to say how much we would love to hear from you. We want to get to know our audience better. There are lots of different ways to practice slowing down and lots of different people and stories we can hear from. So please leave a comment or a review on this episode to share your thoughts. Tools you use to slow down, someone you'd like to suggest for the show, or just your thoughts on the episode. This really helps us plan future episodes and cover things that you might be interested in.

35:43Now, back to the show.

35:48We obviously mentioned women a lot in this conversation. Why is it that you think women disproportionately have this issue with productivity and boundaries and the things that you talk about?

35:59Tamu Thomas:Well, it's very gendered because we live in a very gendered culture. So when we think about the like, not all men, obviously, not all women, obviously, not all people. Let me get that caveat out of the way, because sometimes the Internet doesn't like to exercise critical thinking. But for the most part, women still do the lion's share of domestic emotional care labor. So I remember there was a quote that was going around. I can't remember when it was, but it was something along the lines of we expect women to parent like they don't have jobs and work like they don't have children. and in order you know for us to in the 80s there was a big drive to get women into the workplace particularly middle-class white women because working-class women women that came from other countries generally speaking had to work they had no choice but there was an economic downturn and they needed more women in the workplace so they started talking about you can have it all and then women were like okay but if we're having it all who's looking after our children who's maintaining the house and they're like you can have work-life balance you can do both so we were sold these myths that were not ever brought into reality there was no policy there was no structure no infrastructure put in place to support women going into the workplace and then we didn't want to be seen as weak or not as effective as men so we started over functioning even more because we know how to do that very well so there are lots of like invisible social contracts in place about in order to be a successful woman, you need to be a martyr.

37:38Tamu Thomas:You need to be spreading yourself thin and have this notion of balance, which does not exist. We are not butter. We cannot spread ourselves thin all over the place, which is why I encourage people to think about work-life harmony or work-life integration as opposed to the balance. So you've got all of that going on. And then the wave that I got caught up in was the girl boss culture. So me with ideas about wanting to have my own business that sat really well with me i used to think for example people who claimed about having pms post-menstrual whatever that's an excuse unbeknown to me i experienced that i just learned how to punch it down so that i could continue to over function so because of our gender stereotypes and the gender expectations it's more challenging for women additionally on a biological level our hormonal cycles our hormonal fluctuations impact who and how we are throughout the course of the month that then changes again when we enter perimenopause and then our postmenopausal so we've got all of these things going on it impacts our circadian rhythm our circadian rhythm tends to be earlier than men's so we need more sleep naturally we tend to wake up earlier because of our biology the way our amygdala functions which is like our alert center for danger is impacted by our hormonal fluctuations so our amygdala tends to be more responsive to perceptions of danger and threats so our ability to handle stress is different to men's and then things that we can do to relieve stress we're much less able to access that because of the caring responsibilities and all the other things we do outside of work.

39:26Tamu Thomas:And then we've got all of these notions about what it is to be a good woman, a good mother, a good friend, a good employee. And all of those rely on us suppressing our nature as women to be able to be productive, convenient, and just toe the line. So there's a whole cocktail of things that are sociological, psychological and biological, which is why in my book, I spend a lot of time on exercises and things to help women get to know themselves intimately and to move away from shaming ourselves for what we need as human beings. I'm Gen X. And one of the things about Gen X women was about priding ourselves about not having needs.

40:14Tamu Thomas:Oh, I don't need that. I can just keep getting on. I can do without, I can go without, I can be a martyr, I can sacrifice myself. That's how you were a good woman. So it became the conversations we're having about our menstrual cycles and how they impact how we work and what makes us feel safe and making sure that our relationships are aligned and congruent with who we are. Those didn't exist when I was growing up. It was about putting up with it, shutting up and being strong. And it meant that we were suppressing our nature. And I'm really grateful that my generation started the conversations and millennial women just came and took them over so that we recognise we're not little men.

40:56Tamu Thomas:We cannot be productive in the same way men are. I shared a post on Instagram. I didn't even think that much about it. And it was like, stop gaslighting yourself with productivity books by men and the carousel that was speaking to that. And so many women were like, I never thought about this. Oh, my goodness, thank you very much. That's why I stopped reading these books. Because that 5am business, that's all good when you don't have responsibilities. But if you are the person who is responsible for running the household, if you have got small children, invariably, the mother is the person that wakes up with the children.

41:30Tamu Thomas:Again, not all the time, but most of the time. I'm perimenopausal right now. There are some times of the month, my sleep is really broken. So it's like having a newborn baby again. Waking up at 5am is a no-no for me. And then consistency for women because of our hormonal fluctuations is different. A man, like when you look at a man's testosterone levels, they're pretty much steady throughout the month. We've got our testosterone level, which varies slightly. Then we've got estrogen doing her thing, progesterone doing her thing. We've got so many things that make us different versions of ourselves throughout the month.

42:08Tamu Thomas:But we're taught to put who we are when we're ovulating on a pedestal and try to aim for that version of ourselves all throughout the month. And when we're not functioning like we are Beyonce, Michelle Obama and whoever else rolled into one, then we're failing when that's not exactly the case or that's not the case at all. And we are taught because of the scarcity culture we live in, that what you're doing right now at this moment is all that matters. So if you're not being hyperproductive, if you are not optimised and working at your, you know, optimal potential at this moment in time, you're a failure.

42:44Tamu Thomas:When actually, if you zoom out and look at the month, there are so many women who will say during that ovulation week, they are doing so much, it's almost like they've done a month's worth of work in one week. Let's zoom out, slow down and look at the bigger picture so that we can look at ourselves as productive beings over the passage of time, not defining ourselves moment by moment. Yeah, I mean, amen. It's so interesting. I also did a post about this around our hormonal cycles, because I'd never thought about it before, because the idea of being productive and waking up driven and just doing what needs to be done every day is just what I've done.

43:24It's what I spent all of my 20s doing. There was not a day that was different to another day. I still had to complete the task. And I think capitalism and kind of masculine success ideals have knocked out of me any semblance of understanding and knowing my own body rhythm. On top of that, I'm millennial. And I think a common experience, at least in London, is that throughout my teens, I was encouraged to go on the pill. Oh, my goodness. That was something that nurses recommended. They said it would sort of reduce my risk of cervical cancer and various other things. And so I effectively like medicated my hormones and controlled when I didn't didn't have a period for at least eight years.

44:08And so I was totally out of sync with what I actually came off the pill because I was like, I don't know if I have all these girlfriends who are like, I'm in that moment where I'm just a bit sad or a bit angry, a bit this. And I was like, my emotions are the same all the time. Like, I don't actually think I know who I am. because I've just suppressed this for so long. And so I was like curious about who I was. How far have we really come with this female freedom and independence thing? Because we now live in a world where it's like lean in happened, hustle culture happened, and women are striving very hard to prove constantly that they can do exactly the same thing that men can do.

44:46I have female friends in really interesting jobs that constantly have to prove themselves. a friend is a coach of a women's volleyball team and she has to constantly show that she is just as good as male coaches so in the sport world in the finance world in so many sectors women are like proving that they can do it just as good and we can but it's like are we now at some sort of tipping point where this is all creating a disservice for us where we've shown yes we can do it too but now we're like adding on top of that all of these other things of caregiving and so on And is it a female thing where just like our brains are wired to constantly keep this to do admin list of everything that's going on at home with our friends, with our family?

45:32Like, I just don't think my partner has the same mental load of the things that he thinks about. And a great example was I went to go and visit a friend recently who has two small children. And she said, when my partner is looking after the kids and he wants to make himself lunch, everything stops. kids get put into chairs he makes himself a sandwich he does what he wants when he wants um and lives his life like that she says when it's my turn i'm thinking about everything else what does everybody else need what do the kids need oh looking at his clothes okay i'm gonna need to buy him the next size up for that thing uh the dentist appointment is in a month from now like how are we going to get there by card is the car going to be uh in out of the shop by then blah blah, blah, blah, like all of these just past, present and future things.

46:17And she doesn't eat. And I think, is it because the sort of, you said the visual of the kind of the myth of the martyr mother is so strong, this be selfless, think about everybody else first. She says she's now gotten to a point where she starts her day and goes, what would my husband do?

46:36Tamu Thomas:Hallelujah. Literally, literally, like if that needs to be your mantra, so be it. And women function like this, not because we choose to, but because we've been socialized that way. People talk about women being better at multitasking. No human being is good at multitasking. Neuroscience shows us that it's no good for our brains. Women multitask, like are designed to multitask out of necessity when children are very young, because we were evolved for women to breastfeed children. We don't need to do that anymore because we have formula milk and whatever else, but we haven't evolved past, like in terms of how we function, our biology, our nervous systems, we haven't evolved much past that hunter gatherer society we were at that time.

47:30Tamu Thomas:But because we have been told that a good mother is selfless, if you then decide I'm going to put my children in the high chairs. I'm going to leave them to it whilst I feed myself. We receive over and covert messages that that's not being a good mum, that that's being selfish. That's not prioritising your children. Actually, making sure you're well fed and that you are nurturing your body so that you have the energy and resource you need to take care of your children is being a good mother. There's lots of research that shows that children's happiness rests on the happiness they see their mother's experience when they're growing.

48:10Tamu Thomas:That doesn't mean that it's the mother's happiness above everything else. It's that you become a priority too. So if you feel entitled to be a priority as well as your child, putting them in a high chair for 15 minutes or however long they can manage is not going to make you a bad mother and it's not going to scar them. Something I share all the time is when my daughter, like I can visualize it now, small children, they have a knack for being able to tell when you want to wake up early to do some stuff. And when I decided that I was going to start waking up early to do journaling and stuff to take care of myself, my daughter would just know.

48:49Tamu Thomas:I wouldn't then say, oh, I can't journal now because she's up. She was three years old, still totally dependent. I would get her coloring book out and she would do her coloring whilst mommy would do her writing. I would get her a yogurt, something to have so that she wasn't hungry. And then once that was done, our morning began. If we, not train, but if we bring up our children to recognise that we are human beings as well, they will treat us like human beings and there'll be less need for all of that guilt. and also we are exercising agency we are deciding the type of people we want to be and the type of role model we want to be for our children so all of those societal messages will mean less and less because you'll see the benefit it's having with your family and last thing loads of things but when we operate in that way rather than nagging or hinting and hoping that our partner will see that we're overwhelmed and they will just volunteer you will be able to seek the support you need in a manner that isn't like oh you never help like from a place of victim consciousness you're able to have the conversations in order for our house to run smoothly these are all the things you need to do these are the things i'm naturally good at what are the things you're naturally good at and then we'll divide up the rest that you're talking about setting up your home in a way that works for everyone.

50:15Tamu Thomas:Whereas what often happens is women wait and wait and wait and hope and hope and hope and hint. And then they get really frustrated and resentful that their husband or partner, usually a male partner, isn't getting the hint, but you haven't articulated what you need. So he's just taking it for granted and repeating what he probably experienced and what you probably experienced when you were a child growing up in a household that was basically patriarchal. Yeah, and that's the thing as well on the other side is that for a lot of men, not all men, but for a lot of men, they were raised very much with the like, oh, don't do that.

50:51Like, I'll do that. Like, our mothers would do that for the boys, right?

50:53Tamu Thomas:My husband doesn't hoover very well, so I do the hoovering. My partner needs to be completely re-taught how to do this stuff. Like, he was raised with the knowledge that, you know, things would just get done around him and those were not things that he was asked to do. Yeah. And so for you to kind of wait for somebody to notice something that they've spent 40 years never having to think about, it's a huge thing. And, you know, one more question on the hormonal cycles thing, because, you know, I think if we do lean more into our cycles and we lean more into the fluctuations of those emotions and who we really are at different parts of the month and this feeling of not being like overly resilient women all the time.

51:32my concern is when I do let my emotions show in those moments and I'm frustrated or emotional or angry or anxious you know the response I get from friends or partners or people will be like oh well this isn't like you like what's going on like you're being crazy you know and suddenly you then have like a bigger problem of well people think that at this time of the month where I'm going through this phase people think I'm nuts you know and so I've often just like not expressed those feelings and suppress them instead because there isn't the cultural kind of wider understanding of emotions fluctuate what I'm saying today and how I'm saying I feel about myself today isn't the kind of universal feeling of me yeah well number one that's their business like really

52:19Tamu Thomas:and truly because when you get into that mindset it's almost as if I'm holding back now because you don't approve. Something I had to accept is that I've done various things and there have been various versions of my life that have been a little bit before their time. So one of the things that we need to recognize when we're having these conversations and we're operating in these ways that we're pioneers. We are doing things that aren't quote unquote normal, even though they are very, very normal. So we have to allow ourselves to take the risk of being misunderstood. understood we mustn't waste time over explaining ourselves however we must tell people and whether they accept it or not is not our problem I recognize that around this time of the month my emotions are much more fraught and I'm more sensitive so I may express myself differently I might be quieter during this time and I'm sharing that with you because I care about you you're involved in my life because what happens sometimes is we evolve and change and we don't share that with the people around us not in a way where we're seeking permission but to keep them informed so what we've done is we've changed the rules the unspoken rules of our relationship and we haven't said anything so now that person is confused who is this person they haven't been like this all the time so it's not necessarily because they're haters they don't want the best for you they don't care about you they don't understand what's going on so we do need to when I started my personal development journey it was like I'm not even sure what I'm trying to achieve here, but I can feel like I'm, I can feel changes.

53:54Tamu Thomas:And people saw that. And it meant that there were some people that were very close to me that were no longer aligned. So it's not that I cut them off. It's that our relationship parameters changed and maybe they're not as close or they're not as close as they were previously. And there were some people who resonated with me in that way. So they became closer. A lot of the reason we hold back and we suppress is because we become overly concerned that this person might not like me anymore. This person might not want to be in my life. And what I say is it is much better to experience the finite challenge of loss than to constantly manage the dull ache of abandoning yourself to be in a relationship that's no longer aligned.

54:40Tamu Thomas:A lot of us don't say what we need to say and we don't express ourselves the way we need to express ourselves because we are worried about losing relationships because of that scarcity programming. We think that if we lose that relationship, we're never ever going to get another relationship. A lot of us have got the programming. It's better the devil you know. It's better to manage the challenges you have here rather than A, try to change them and B, if they don't change, make a decision about whether or not you're going to be able to move forward on that. We are so concerned about what we might lose, we don't pay enough attention to what we stand to gain.

55:18Tamu Thomas:So in those circumstances, it's not one of these things where you are operating in a way where you're dismissing people. It's not about that. But have the conversation with people so they can understand where you're at. And also they might want to make a choice and say, well, if that's how you're functioning, that doesn't align with me. Let people make powerful choice is let people make powerful choices let people be wrong about you we don't have to explain the inner machinations we don't need to explain that to people in order to justify our existence but we need to explain to people because otherwise we're changing the parameters of our relationships and that's not fair i also think a big part of this is what you mentioned earlier around who we are our ideas of success and what we want change so much over the course of our lifetimes And I think a lot of people, especially in this country, have like old school friends from when they were 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, that they feel a sense of duty and responsibility to still be friends with and that that still might be a friendship group that they are a part of.

56:21And they don't know how to disentangle themselves from that. And so I think this idea of having a level of self-compassion around I'm now in this new phase in my life. Like, who do I want to bring? I actually have a friend that had a great theory around wedding invitations. so they wrote between themselves who are the people that we see having a role in our future yes and in that future where we have children and in that future where we live here and we do this and if they don't fit that list they're not coming and so what they found is that they actually had quite a few people that were somewhat new friends like somewhat um recent friends but they could see exactly how those people would fit into their lives and actually inviting them to their wedding felt like the right move to make to really show that their interest and commitment in where that friendship would go.

57:13I think a big part of how all of this begins is tending and befriending our nervous systems, which people do not know, do not understand. I'm only recently understanding somatically when I feel anxiety. I used to not know what it was. And now I know exactly when it's coming on, when I can feel it, what triggers me in my body. What are the ways that you kind of teach and are starting points for tending and befriending your nervous system?

57:42Tamu Thomas:So in my book, there is a whole chapter dedicated to being your nervous system's best friend. First and foremost, it's by slowing down so it's little things like we our body is a sophisticated sensory system it's constantly scanning the world for signs of danger or safety and it is more on the lookout for signs of danger because you are going to survive by understanding where all the danger is that's going to bring you that that is going to keep you safe or in survival so there are things we do with our bodies that can either contribute to our feeling of safety or distance ourselves. So it's things like if you find yourself, this is my classic, when I was, I had a report to write, it was due in, I'd be typing like my shoulders are up, I'd be really stiff.

58:32Tamu Thomas:No one's chasing me, I'm not about to be shot. So it'd be like, okay, remembering to roll my shoulders back and not be holding my hands like stiff claws when I'm typing actually relax my body. It is, lots of people think it's all of these really complex things, but it's the things that we can do over and over again over the passage of time. So it's things like when you're at your desk, sometimes we've got loads of meetings scheduled via Zoom, very taxing on our eyes. And we think that because we're sitting still, we're not exerting ourselves, we are. We might not have that much time between meetings, It's things like kicking your shoes off, placing your feet on the ground, feeling your connection with the ground, feeling your body in the chair you're sitting on, feeling the connection between your body and your chair.

59:21Tamu Thomas:For people who say, I'm numb, I often don't feel myself. You can feel your connection between your body and the chair that automatically brings your energy and your focus into your body. That is embodied. That is somatics. You are bringing your energy back instead of it being scattered all over the place. taking a moment if you've got a window and you can gaze outside and look at the sky all of those things send you signs of safety if you don't have that like if you don't have a window because some offices don't look at something that your eyes find pleasing for whatever reason and take that moment regulate how you're breathing if you find like i'm a shallow breather because i'm often anxiously trying to do something and i have to remind myself so it's like breathe a little bit deeper breathe out a little bit wider these are micro things we could do anytime any place anywhere to bring that in and it's also recognizing when is enough those of us that are high functioning who like to get things done we are always like we pride ourselves on 110 percent number one there is no such thing as 110 number two it's not sustainable there was some research done in positive psychology that showed that we operate at our optimal capacity at about 80 % of our physical and mental capacity.

1:00:37Tamu Thomas:So it's starting to work out what's my 80%. What's your 80 % is when you can do a good day's work, when you're satisfied with what you've done. And when you go to bed and you're not collapsing like a heap, you actually are able to go to bed in a state that is you're feeling safe and you can rest rather than either your brain is wired and therefore you can't sleep or you feel so exhausted you get into bed and before you know what's what you've gone to sleep but you're not getting any restoration you're literally just sleeping for recovery and something else I recommend our environment has a huge impact it's our physical environment like the spaces we're in and also our relational environments consider the people you're around that leave you feeling like your cup has been filled and people who leave you feeling like, oh my goodness, you have drained the life out of me.

1:01:29Tamu Thomas:It doesn't mean that we've got to like, I'm never seeing that person again. I had somebody like that in my life and I had to have a conversation and say, I have started to experience that it feels like our conversations are just about you trauma dumping and then you going. And it wasn't like, you just call me when you're having problems and I feel drained I had to take responsibility what's my role in this why have I made myself available for this why have I made my place myself a safe space for this person to dump on and it's like okay I feel safe for her so actually I really cherish that but I want some of the joy that she experiences as well I don't just want to be the problem bucket I want to hear about the great stuff that's going on so rather than going in with victim consciousness I was able to say this is the kind of relationship I want.

1:02:16Tamu Thomas:This is what I'm available for. So that I was setting the scene for a relationship that would be supportive rather than feeling like it's just taking away from me. And I'll just add one more. PE. We need a lot of physical exercise, whether that is walking, whether that is putting on three songs in the morning and shocking out like nobody's watching, taking a lunch break, walking around your building, walking around your block doing whatever it is you can because that helps us to discharge unhealthy stress and it helps us to feel more energized yeah and we can come back to the problem with a completely new perspective which has always been super helpful for me wow i have so many other questions but i'm running out of time so hopefully there'll be a part two to this conversation i'd love it the last question that i always always ask everybody just because i think it's an interesting one is if I had to watch one film or read one book or see one piece of art that helps me understand you better what would it be?

1:03:19Tamu Thomas:Oh goodness me the book would probably be The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was obsessed as a child and when I felt really like I was piecing myself back together I returned to lots of things I did as a child and I reread that book. So I really relate to Aslan. Aslan was very strong, compassionate, kind, self-sacrificing. Aslan should have been a female lion that was just working far too much. And Aslan had a real sense of optimism and hope for what was possible in the future and uniting people. That definitely vibes with me. And then I have to reference a song. It's called Life is What You Make It and it's by Frighty and Colonel Something.

1:04:13Tamu Thomas:It is a 90s dancehall song and my mum used to manage a community centre near where we lived and she used to organise discos for under 16s and that was one of the songs. So it's got a lot of significance because of It Reminds Me of a Beautiful Time. It's a banger of a song. oh my goodness it is so joyful and it's like life is what you make it so darling my dear try and make it i know that you will and it literally is that life is literally notwithstanding you know structural stuff but we can impact structural stuff when we remember life is what we make it and we can have a huge impact when we take care of ourselves take care of each other and come together to make change wow what a beautiful place to end was there a lot of electric slide going on no it was way more gyrating and winding your hips and yeah yeah yeah it was it was much more in the hip gyrating section than the uh electric slide i'm sure you could because you can electric slide to anything exactly um well thank you so much for your time tamu thank you for having me thank you so much thank you for tuning in this episode was hosted and created by me, Tiana Tambridge.

1:05:30It's produced by Whitney Rosenthal. Sound and video recording, mixing, editing and mastering is by Brazen Studios. Cover art designed by Natalia Ruhe. Please subscribe to The Slowdown to be notified of upcoming episodes, tell a friend and leave a review because it really helps a new podcast like this get out there into the world. And remember, we're all heading to the same destination and there is no prize for getting there early, so we might as well slow down. Have we?