BONUS E196: Decrease Stress & Overwhelm During PMS and All Month Long with 3 Daily Habit Shifts, With Colleen Kachmann

Ever feel like you need that glass of wine (or third coffee) just to get through the day? What if your cravings stem from a stressed-out nervous system, not a lack of willpower?

If you’re a high-achieving woman dealing with fatigue, PMS, or hormonal chaos, your nervous system might be the hidden culprit. Chronic stress can disrupt your body’s balance, driving you toward quick fixes like alcohol or caffeine, only to leave you more drained.

In this episode, Colleen—a mindful drinking coach and busy mom of four—shares:

• The surprising link between nervous system dysregulation and hormonal issues, and how to break the cycle
• Three daily habits (like the caffeine-to-wine pipeline) that keep you stuck in stress mode, plus healthier swaps for better energy
• A 60-second reset technique to stop stress spirals—no meditation required!

If you’re ready to trade survival mode for sustainable energy, hit play to break the cycle without completely quitting caffeine or wine.

NEED HELP FIXING YOUR HORMONES? CHECK OUT MY RESOURCES:
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Join Nourish Your Hormones Coaching for guidance

CONNECT WITH COLLEEN:
It’s Not About the Alcohol Podcast
TT: @hangoverwhisperer
IG: @thehangoverwhisperer

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Don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review. Your support helps us reach more women looking for answers.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

​Leisha: Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. I have a guest with me today and her name is Colleen and she is here to talk to us about the nervous system, which I think is gonna be really helpful for so many of us who have all the things going on all the time. But we're also gonna talk about some healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms and why the unhealthy ones.

Actually really make a difference in your body in a way that you don't want them to. So we're gonna dive into that as we go. But Colleen, I would love for you to just introduce yourself. Tell us about you, who you are, why you're here, and you know how you got here.

 I'm Colleen and I'm actually a mindful drinking coach. So my specialty is working with women who have gotten a wee bit in the weeds with alcohol. And that's honestly how I came into coaching and the coaching world was. I was a high functioning, high performing, high achieving perfectionist for years, and I used alcohol to cope.

And in our society, there's two types of drinkers, the normal good ones, and then of course the dreaded alcoholics who shouldn't be drinking at all. And for me, I hid my drinking for years because sometimes I could. Control it and I could moderate and then other times with stress and a dysregulated nervous system as we'll get into, I really struggled.

And the more I hid it, of course, and increased my stress around the topic and didn't wanna talk about it the worse it got. And so I became a coach so that I could help other women navigate the perils of overcoming alcohol use disorder over drinking and just becoming somebody who's confident in their own ability to manage their minds and their body, because ultimately that's what it's really about.

It's really about understanding how your brain works and how your body works. And not misinterpreting the way you feel as a product of what's going on in your world, and being able to properly diagnose the problem as a dysregulated nervous system allows you to deal with it and to fix things.

So I'm a coach. I'm a mom of four kids. I've recently gone through a divorce, I'm 50 years old. I'm through menopause. So I have lots of experience with hormones and life and overcoming challenges and all of that.

I love that. We're so thankful to have your experience and your wisdom. I'm here today. What I wanted to start with was really just having you talk a little bit about the nervous system and I know we are gonna get into alcohol and that's a big topic for today, but. You don't just start drinking more alcohol typically because just like for no reason.

And so what we were just talking about before we started here is, the nervous system being dysregulated is a huge issue when it starts to come to these, unhealthy coping mechanism. So let's back up and talk about the nervous system. It's a big buzz word, but what actually is the nervous system and how do we know if your nervous system is dysregulated?  

Colleen: Your nervous system is dysregulated if you feel agitated, anxious, scared, worried, anytime you're not feeling safe. Calm, connected in your body, then you are in some level of a stress response. We all know what , fight or flight is. We all know what it means to be in survival mode.

We all know when it feels to be rushed and hurried and overwhelmed, maybe close to burnout, but we don't often associate those things with the actual state of our nervous system. Again, , we tend to attribute our feelings. To what's going on around us and understanding that. Your body has an autonomic nervous system, which turns on whenever you are triggered, which means your body perceives a threat in your environment, and we evolved to handle threats in the external world, 10,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, humans, when there was a threat, you needed to run fast as you can. You needed to focus on the problem and get through the day you needed to live through the day. Our stress response is designed to keep us alive physically. The problem is in our modern society, most of our stress is mental.

It's the way we're perceiving the world. It's a number on a piece of paper that says how much money is in our bank account, or how much money we owe, that we have debt or that we have an abundance. So it's all this perceived threat that isn't necessarily anything to do with our physical wellbeing.

 What happens is we get stuck in our head. We're trying to always, get more money, get the job, get the promotion, take care of the kids, do all 8,000 things on our list, and our brain gets ahead of our body. To answer the question, a dysregulated nervous system is when your brain is either three minutes.

30 minutes, three days, three years ahead of your body chasing or fixing a problem or vice versa. It's lagging behind. It's stuck in the past. It's going over a conversation that you've already had and you're going over it and over it. And so , a dysregulated nervous system is when your brain and body are out of sync.

An analogy that I like to use. Is if you're mountain biking or if you're on a bike with a bunch of gears, if you're going down a hill and you're in the wrong gear, the pedals get going so fast that you have to pull your feet off the pedals because you can't control the revolutions of the pedals.

Vice versa, if you're trying to pedal a bike up a hill, but you don't have it in the right gear, the resistance on those pedals is so much that you can't actually keep pushing. If you take the bike and you put it in the right gear, you can pedal up the hill, you can pedal down the hill, but when you are dysregulated or your gears aren't correct on your bike, then you can't actually get where you're going.

You're either going too fast or too slow. That's what's happening in your brain. Depression is when your brain is going too slow, or like when you're dissociated, you're not really present in the moment. It's really just a disassociation or the brain's doing one thing and the body's doing another.

So signs of nervous system dysregulation would be really the number one thing is a perception of time that you are rushed or hurried, like all time is now. Your perception of time. How much you have is a reflection of how your nervous system is synced up. If you are thinking that you can't get everything done, that is because your body is dysregulated, your brain is moving faster than your feet can move.

It just seems , all the balls are coming at you at once. When you are feeling rushed and hurried. What you need to understand is that you're in control of your time and slowing yourself down, slowing your mind down to actually match the pace of what you're able to accomplish tasks on so that your brain and body are in sync, actually make you a lot more productive and able to move through the world.

Even better. It's when we get all this stuff in our head and we start getting overwhelmed and I can't get it all done, that we tend to not get anything done. We either start procrastinating or cutting corners, or we give up because something feels hard. So a dysregulated nervous. System is when you are overthinking and under feeling and you're ignoring the experience in your body.

You're not giving yourself a break. Maybe you are tired, but your brain is telling you have to push through and get everything done. And that just creates a disconnect between the brain and body. Other symptoms would be feelings of overwhelm or burnout. Feeling like there's not enough time feeling like.

You have brain fog and trouble making simple decisions. When you're in a state of stress biologically, your brain is designed to have very myopic focus on whatever problem it is that you think you're facing and you can't see big picture. You don't have a big picture perspective, and so you get very intrusive thoughts, repetitive negative thinking patterns when you're in a state of stress because that's.

Your body trying to keep you alive, not realizing that the problem is your mind and not the external world. Making simple decisions is tough when you're in a dysregulated nervous system because what's for dinner? I. Should I wash my hair in the shower? Who cares if I'm not gonna be alive tomorrow?

So it feels really complicated to make simple decisions, and that's a symptom of stress. It is not a symptom of your inability to decide what's for dinner, it's really just a lot of being caught in your head, brain fog, all of that stuff.

Leisha: I know that mostly everyone listening is okay, that's fun that my nervous system is dysregulated because you're talking to a lot of moms who are either home with their kids, working with their kids, homeschooling, like all of these things. And. There's a lot going on. So I hear you saying that you don't have to have a dysregulated nervous system even when there's a lot going on.

But I'd love to hear some thoughts on, we hear this slow down, right? But it feels really hard to figure out how to do that when you're already, pedaling your bike faster than you can pedal it, essentially. What are some more healthy coping mechanisms? Or what are some of the starting steps to, if we've assessed right this minute oh man, my nervous system is dysregulated.

I am always thinking in the future, I am always feeling overwhelmed. What's the first step to starting to change that?

Colleen: I would say it starts with a belief. It starts with a belief that operating in a state of stress does not actually produce good results. And honestly, that's how most perfectionists are wired. We are rewarded, especially as moms and females, for accomplishing and achieving and making sure everybody around us is happy.

As kids, that's what regulated our nervous system. That's what made us feel safe. Getting the gold star, getting the. Pat on the back getting the approval. A lot of us are operating on very childlike nervous systems in a grown ass adult body where we're still believing that if we take time to go to the bathroom, somehow we're letting down the whole entire world and we're not gonna get the gold star.

 It starts with a belief that my needs are just as important as anybody else's. And I say just as, because as a mother of four myself, I understand that I sacrificed my own needs for years because I thought that's what it meant to be a good mom. My opinion, was the only one that was the least loud.  

I could tell myself no, or tell myself I don't have time to take care of myself. , I could feel that disappointment, but listening to my kids complain that I wasn't going to, help them or do this or produce that, it was easiest to let myself down. And as women, we get used to ignoring our own bodies.

And that just perpetuates the dysregulated nervous system because there's, again, there's a disconnect between what we feel and what we're thinking. And we think we have to go. So the. Fundamental domino belief, if you will, like the domino that has to fall first is the belief that. It's better for everybody if you don't operate in a state of stress and that your needs are just as important as everybody is around you.

We've all heard the analogy, you have to put your own oxygen mask on, and as a mom we can go days, months, and years ignoring ourselves. But that's how this mom woke up with a drinking problem. I was drinking half a fifth, the vodka a day while still performing and doing and teaching hot yoga and driving all the kids.

I didn't drive drunk or anything, but , that's how we end up with autoimmune disorders mental health issues, substance abuse or eating issues or. Whatever, because we're trying to cope. We're trying to soothe our nervous system without actually putting the fire out. We're just trying to bandaid it through it another day and you just can't continue like that forever.

Leisha: and I think that's just such an important point that we have to hit home so much for moms because. A lot of times it is about which dog is barking the loudest, right? And not even dog, but which kid needs the most in that moment. And with four, there's always somebody who needs something or probably always four who needs something.

I have three. All three of mine typically will, have needs at the same time or be talking at the same time. And , this is what we talk about a lot on this podcast is. Being able to create that safety in your body again. And we do that really physically through, starting steps of nourishment and improving your minerals and actually eating and not just like ignoring that you are a full grown human and you need more food than just your toddler's leftovers. 

It's laughable when you say it like that and you think about it, but also what are we doing? It's so easy to just in the moment feel like this is just a little thing. Like I'll just skip breakfast this one time, and then it becomes a habit. Or I'll just, skip taking care of myself today.

Leisha: I won't work out today because other things are more important. But when it continues to snowball like that, you're absolutely right. We're not listening to our bodies, so our bodies give up giving us those signals a lot of times, then we end up feeling very empty essentially. And we're looking for that just that little joy somewhere or getting those neurotransmitters boosted.

 So I think you're absolutely right, this is where we show up with those more negative coping mechanisms. And we talked about before this, alcohol is definitely one that is fairly accepted as moms. Of course you need a glass of wine to cope with your day. I personally think that a lot of times it's like caffeine all day and then it's alcohol at night.

And from a adrenal perspective, which is, similar part of your nervous system, we're propping ourselves up with these fake cord, like to prop up our cortisol all day with caffeine just so we can get through and do more than we're meant to do. And then we're exhausted, but tired, but wired and we need to, we quote unquote, need to feel happy.

To be able to , hang out with our husbands, to be able to just chill by ourselves. Whatever it is, you need something to wind down when you've been ignoring your needs all day. I absolutely, see how that becomes a pattern.  

Colleen: Part of my temptation here is I wanna get into how moms We expect way too much of ourselves. Culture expects way too much of ourselves, but instead of doing that, 'cause I think that's something everybody has to figure out. My youngest is 19, my oldest is 27. So I can say all of this that, the travel, sports and all of the activities in the school and everybody's, extreme everything.

That's something that's not really sustainable in our. Society, but everybody's gotta figure that out on their own. And I still did it. I just drank through it and I paid for it later. But what I would say instead is every day involves struggle. If you want the motivation to take care of yourself, if 80% of your day is going to be hard, then a question you can ask yourself is, what am I struggling for?

And if you are struggling because you drink caffeine all day and then you drink wine in the evening and then you don't sleep well, and so you drink caffeine all day and then you drink wine in the evening and you don't sleep well, your struggle, you are living in the effect of yesterday's choices. You are struggling to clean up yesterday's messes.

You are living in the consequences of yesterday. Whereas you can put from this side of having figured this out, you can put the same amount of struggle in difficult choices, doing things to cause tomorrow's happiness. So you're either living in the effect of yesterday or you are causing tomorrow's happiness with your struggle and your choices.

 If you can just understand when you're caught in a cycle, and most people know if they are, most people know, am I struggling today because of the choices I made yesterday? Because at some point you stop and you settle up your bar bill or you correct the deficit. You correct your sleep.

You get off the caffeine for a little while. For me, I love caffeine. I love a glass of wine, but I don't use these things to cope with yesterday's choices. You know what I mean? If you can get to a place where you live in a regulated nervous system and you prioritize and value balance for yourself, your needs, then the hard stuff you're doing today is actually helping you tomorrow instead of becoming a deficit tomorrow.

Does that make sense?

Leisha: Absolutely like being able to be putting something in the bank. This instead of just like making withdrawals all the time, because you're absolutely right when we're propping ourselves up with caffeine and then using alcohol at night. And then probably also like social media or some other form of dopamine stimulation or numbing.

Then you're staying up too late and then you're also not sleeping well because of the alcohol effects, and then you're tired again, and then , you're needing more caffeine and it's this cycle that you have to make a choice, where that stops. But I think you're absolutely right that stopping with a, or going back to, it's a belief that my needs are important versus just beating yourself up and I have to stop this.

Why can't I stop? Why do I keep making these choices? When we're putting in something positive and starting to, focus on what you do need and start to listen to your body again and listen to, even to your gut and your intuition. I think that when we're using numbing activities, we're just silencing our own intuition, which is not gonna help us as moms to.

Know what's really important for our kids and what's not, and , where do we say yes and where do we say no? So if we're not in touch with those emotions either, I think it just, makes the cycle last longer, even.  

Colleen: The other thing that works as a belief that I can share. It's a, what I would call a thought reversal. Most of us, I know for years I thought, I can't feel better. I can't take a break, I can't relax. It's not okay for me to be okay until I fix everything. I figure everything out, I finish right.

I can't feel better until I fix, figure, or finish everything out. And if you can reverse that and realize I need to feel better so that I can fix, figure, and finish everything, like I have a pretty firm policy. The moment I realize I am dysregulated, my brain and my body are not synced. Again, I'm feeling rushed or hurried.

The moment I realized I'm in a hurry, I slow down. 'cause unless somebody's chasing me, you can manually override because a lot of it's just get into the habit of being in a hurry all the time. Where are you going? You're late for the grocery. I think it's gonna be okay. I think so much of the state of our nervous system is not always.

Actual, even mental problems. It's just a habit that we get into. And so when you become aware, keeping your eye almost like you're driving a stick shift, you're always looking at the RPMs. When you can become aware of your own body and realize when your engines running too high and you need to shift.

To your gears down, or you need to stop and take a breath. This doesn't take hours of meditation every day. You can just go to the bathroom for 60 seconds without your phone and pee and take a break and just be quiet for a moment. The more often you reset your nervous system throughout the day, the less dysregulated you get.

If you wanna be balanced, the more you visit balance, balance isn't a place you get to, it's a place you strive to be. If you value balance and just revisit that place of balance throughout the day, then it's much less likely that you're gonna show up at night and wanna pound a bottle of wine or wake up in the morning and need to drink tons of coffee because you value that sense of peace and calm and safety in your nervous system.

And when you operate from that. That is what allows you to move faster through the world.  

Leisha: That's so interesting. It feels so counterintuitive to think that slowing down can actually help you speed up, especially in the culture we live in, where it's like you just have to keep going, 24 7 or you're not whatever, productive enough. Whatever the thing is. So I hear you saying that, it starts with a belief, but also just those small things that you do throughout the day where you can reset your nervous system, you can bring stress levels down.

Some of the things I love to recommend are like laying down and putting your feet up on the wall and taking a few minutes to breathe and bring that cortisol level down. Or doing, specific breathing techniques. What are a couple more of the little things that you would recommend if you're like, let's reset your nervous system throughout the day.

What do you use for that?  

Colleen: I have. A two part strategy that I teach and it is an internal narrative. There are techniques such as tapping or breath work or things that you can couple with this, but for me, the moment I realize I'm upset, the moment I realize I'm not regulated, I put my hand on my heart and I say, Ugh, okay.

It is safe for me to feel like I'm late. It is safe for me to feel like I can't do all of this. Like giving yourself permission to have the thought and have the feeling like, I don't need to go fix it. It is safe for me to feel like I'm not okay right now. And allowing the feeling, getting outta your head, trying to make a story of how you're gonna make this better and how you're gonna make it up and what other people are gonna think shh.

Stop, drop, put your hand on your heart. It is safe for me to feel whatever it is I'm feeling, which is usually a negative emotion. The second part of that is once you allow the sensations in your body, the second thing is it is safe for me to feel okay even though I'm late. It is safe for me to feel okay even though I forgot my kids' shoes.

It is safe for me to feel okay, even though I look like a hot mess and she looks amazing and I feel underdressed and imposter syndrome. It is safe for me to feel good about myself in my body right now as I am. So establishing safety in the body with that, verbal mantra. It's safe for me to feel the bad stuff.

I don't have to escape it. I don't have to keep running. I can just feel this. I can stop flinching. I don't need to go get a glass of wine. I don't need to go take a pill. I can just feel and process this energy in my body and then giving yourself permission to be okay. For me, that's like. Stop, drop and regulate skill, and then of course there's other things , that you can do or we can talk about , that calm you down as well. But I think giving yourself permission to calm down is step one.

Leisha: , I think you're so right. I love that because , you can do that anywhere. It takes only a minute. It's just that awareness. I think that. It is okay to feel what you're feeling and instead of us trying to, I know it's really common when you're overachieving, perfectionist, all of those things to try to be stuffing those emotions down because they feel like they're getting in your way.

Like they're in the way of you getting the things done when truly, stuffing them down is just continuing that dysregulation pattern. So I love that perspective. I would love for you to share with us. Any resources that you have that you'd like to share with my listeners and also where we can find you, for those of us who would like some more help with nervous system regulation and especially with, feeling like maybe you're in a place where you don't want to be with alcohol.

There's definitely some answers and Colleen has those.

Colleen: I have a podcast called, it's Not about the alcohol, and again, I'm a mindful drinking coach. I teach people how to drink like grownups and not like frat house hazing specialists that we met in college. Just how to slow your role, how to regulate your nervous system, how to use alcohol in a way that gives you pleasure instead of problems.

So my podcast , it's not about the alcohol, and then I'm on TikTok as. Hangover Whisperer. And then on Instagram, I'm at the Hangover Whisperer, so you can follow my reels and stuff there. But yeah, just podcast and social media is where you can find me the most.

Leisha: . Awesome. Thank you so much, Colleen. I'm so happy that we had this conversation and I know it's gonna be helpful for a lot of people.

Colleen: Thank you for having me, Leisha.