Grind Mode
Why slowing down feels dangerous (and how to retrain it with food)
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A client said something that stopped me:
I can’t get out of grind mode. It’s comfortable and safe, even though I say I don’t want it.
She wasn’t talking about laziness or lack of willpower. She was talking about identity.
That isn’t a grind problem. That’s an identity problem.
When you’ve built yourself around capacity—around the ability to do more, faster, better—slowing down doesn’t feel like relief.
It feels like disappearing. Like becoming someone less. Less capable. Less valuable. Less you.
So you stay.
Grinding feels safe because it’s familiar. Because you know who you are when you’re grinding.
The volume of tasks isn’t even the real problem. It’s how your nervous system learned to relate to them.
The body learns what it lives
Here’s what nobody tells you:
There’s nothing wrong with your nervous system. It simply adapts. It does it well.
You’ve trained your body to thrive on urgency.
On the adrenaline hit of the next thing, the next deadline, the next accomplishment.
Your nervous system learned this was how to survive, how to matter, how to stay safe.
Slowing down doesn’t feel safe. It feels like danger.
Because it’s unfamiliar.
Your body doesn’t recognize calm as safe yet.
It recognizes grind as home.
But here’s the paradox a wise teacher once told me:
The slow cut is the fast cut. The fast cut is the slow cut.
Grinding looks productive. You’re doing so much.
But you’re also in fog. Making reactive decisions.
Wasting time on things that don’t matter because you can’t see clearly enough to know the difference.
You’re moving fast but going nowhere.
Slowing down creates clarity. Better decisions.
Work that compounds. Time that actually expands instead of disappearing.
The slow cut gets you where you want to go faster than the fast cut ever will.
It’s not added time. It’s reclaimed time.
I know what you’re thinking:
But I don’t have time to slow down. I’m already overwhelmed.
That’s external referral talking.
I said it too.
When I started this work in 2001, food was the entry point. I told my doctor:
“This takes so much time. It’s 3 meals a day, plus planning, plus shopping, plus cleanup. How am I supposed to fit everything else in and keep my sanity?”
“But that’s life,” he said.
“What is?” I was confused.
“That which nourishes. The rest is busyness.”
That sentence rewired everything.
I realized I wasn’t adding time to my day by slowing down.
I was reclaiming the time I was already losing—to fog, to poor decisions, to reactivity, to the crash at 3pm, to the scramble at 9pm because nothing got done.
To years of inefficiency because I couldn’t see clearly enough to know what actually mattered.
When I stopped measuring cooking and eating as lost time and started measuring it as invested time, something shifted.
Time expanded. Not because I suddenly had more hours, but because I was no longer wasting them to busyness.
If this is landing and you’re ready to stop outsourcing your decisions and start building internal authority, but you’re not sure how to retrain your nervous system, this is exactly what my paid posts walk through. The frameworks, the meal protocols, the troubleshooting for when your nervous system resists change.
Upgrade to paid membership for the step-by-step system, not just the insight.
Where to start: the extraordinary in the ordinary
Food is the training ground.
Not because it’s trendy or optimized, but because you eat three times a day whether you’re grinding or not. You have to eat.
Three times a day, you get to practice a different choice: choosing from your body instead of your calendar.
Not from urgency. Not from obligation. Not from what you should do. But from what your body actually needs.
This is how you retrain your nervous system.
Not through willpower or discipline or another protocol to follow.
But through the most ordinary daily practice, repeated until your body learns:
Calm is safe. Slowing down is safe.
The grit required isn’t in forcing yourself to relax.
It’s in sitting with the discomfort while new rhythms establish.
In noticing the tantrums your nervous system throws when it doesn’t get the adrenaline hit it’s learned to crave. And in seeing how much of what you thought was urgent is actually just busyness.
Once you live it—once you know what steady capacity feels like—you won’t go back.
It feels too good. It’s palpable.
The identity shift
A retired attorney in my group once said: ‘I feel like I’m all head, no body. I’m thinking all the time, but I can’t feel what my body is telling me.’
She’s brilliant. Successful. Respected in her field.
And she’d lost the ability to read her body’s data—the signals that tell you when you’re depleted, when you need rest, when a decision is wrong even if it looks right on paper.
That’s what happens when you live in grind mode for decades. You stop reading the instrument panel. You just keep driving until something breaks.
The practice isn’t about ‘getting in touch with your feelings.’ It’s about reconnecting to the performance data your body is constantly sending—data you need to make better decisions.
You’re not trying to become someone who relaxes.
You’re becoming someone who reads her body instead of her to-do list.
Someone who knows the difference between grind and grit. Between busy and full-filled.
That’s a different person entirely.
And that person is not less capable.
She’s more effective.
More clear. More present. More herself.
If you’re ready to explore what it looks like to retrain your nervous system through food—to build the frameworks and practices that make this sustainable—paid membership is where the how lives. You’ll get the tools, templates, troubleshooting, and the monthly meal protocols designed around your rhythm, not your rush. The system to break grind mode without losing your edge.
But first: notice.
What are you actually losing by grinding? —Time? Clarity? Energy? Presence? Joy?
That’s your answer. That’s your why.
The slow cut is the fast cut.
—Savitree
I teach women to restore the cognitive capacity their work depends on.
This gets at something real. The identity angle is what makes the grind feel so sticky, not just the actual tasks. When hustling becomes who we are rather than what we do, slowingdown starts to feel like losing something central. I went through a phase where I couldn't sit through dinner without checking emails because not being productive feltwrong. The point about the body learning patterns is spot on though. Once the nervous system gets wired to associate stress with safety, calm actually registers as a threat.