E210: Why ‘Slow Living’ Might Be the Missing Piece for Your Hormones And Your Sanity, with Stephanie O’Dea

Ever feel like slowing down is a luxury you can’t afford while juggling kids, a business, or an endless to-do list? You’re not alone - I’ve been in that same boat. What if the solution isn’t doing more, but doing less more intentionally? 

Here’s the truth: You can’t pour from an empty cup. When you’re always in go mode, your body pays the price, whether through exhaustion, mood swings, or missing out on precious moments.

In this episode, slow living expert Stephanie O’Dea shares her wisdom:

• The "tortoise mindset" - Make meaningful progress without burning out. Slow doesn’t mean lazy
• How to spot the hidden hustles in your life, from over-packed kid schedules to saying yes out of guilt 
• A simple journaling trick - Align your day with how you truly want to feel, not just what you see on social media
• Real-life time-blocking - Start with just one routine. Stephanie swears by evening first  

If you’re ready to trade chaos for calm and still crush your goals, hit play now.  

CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE:
@stephanieodea
Slow Living Podcast
Slow Living Book
Worksheet

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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

[00:00:00] Leisha: Hey, friend. Welcome back to the podcast. I have Stephanie O'Dea here today, and this conversation is gonna be really fun because she talks about and teaches slow living, and this is something that I think can feel like a very foreign concept to those of us who are in the thick of things with motherhood and business and all of the things that we have going.

So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today. Stephanie, would you just. Give us a little intro. Tell us about you and your family and all of that, but also how did you get into teaching Slow Living? Because I know there's a story behind that.

[00:00:35] Stephanie: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Slow living in a nutshell is meeting your personal and professional goals in a slow, steady, and sustainable way. So it's essentially the tortoise, not the hare, from the classic children's fable with the idea that if you just. Keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep trying.

You will get to the end result, but you don't need to rush. I think right now we're living in this kind of hustle culture society where people think that they have to do more. And if they're not productive 24 7, they're gonna fall behind. And that's not true. So let's just take a deep breath and realize we're playing the game of life here.

We're not playing chutes and ladders. Taking a pause doesn't mean you're gonna slide backwards. And especially if you're raising children, I don't want the next generation to think they're not good enough if they don't know how to relax, if they can't, go out and just lays around and look at the clouds and feel fulfilled in that way.

So slow living isn't really about doing nothing. I definitely teach productivity, time management, and goal setting and achieving, but in a sustainable way. And then the slow acronym, which really ties into what you teach is simply look only within a lot of times the rules we're following, the goals we're chasing. I. They stem from early childhood of this is what's gonna be on the test. This is how you have to learn. So it's things that other people have told you need to do and achieve. But with slow living, if you do take the time to look within, you start thinking like, is this really what I want?

Do I even want a fancy car? Do I even want to go do this or that? Or am I actually really content in that piece? On a really long hike with my kids.

[00:02:33] Leisha: Something that I am hearing women, , kind of like looking at and trying to figure out. And I definitely have been in this place it's cycles, of like, is what we're doing actually working for us and what do we want in this next season?

And so we're recording just after the new year, which is of course the perfect time to be thinking about what do I actually want in my life? And. I know that's a theme that I hear a lot is I just wanna slow down a little bit. It feels like we're, things are moving so fast, we're going so fast.

I like that you're, breaking it down to an acronym into, like a tangible piece because I think that it can feel so. I don't wanna say incongruent because I think that it feels pretty aligned most of the time, but it feels almost like impossible to slow down when you know all the things are happening.

And especially with little kids, because there's only so much slowing down. That feels possible, but I know that it's a mindset too. So I would love for you to kind of speak into that piece. If it feels like, okay, well that sounds nice, maybe when my kids are bigger or something like that.

, What do you have to say and what advice do you have for that?

[00:03:44] Stephanie: Absolutely. A lot of slowing down, especially when it comes to little children, is being. Intuitive and paying attention to their wants and needs and maybe saying no to things that you're doing out of guilt or obligation, especially when they're really little. If they're not yet in school and you're not being forced to get them outta bed at a certain time and do this or that. Follow them, follow their whims and read their little faces. And if the idea of getting fully dressed and shoved into a car seat to go do something on a certain day doesn't feel right to you, it probably doesn't feel right to them. And obviously. In the real world and in real life, if you've got to do things, you've got to do them, but then maybe you don't do something after the event or after the day's work.

It's okay to have a simplified schedule, especially when they're really little. So when my kids were little, we had one morning thing and then we came home, took a nap, ate lunch, all those kind of things. And then maybe one afternoon thing. So if your child is in care all day long, maybe then they don't need.

To go to swimming right after care, or maybe they don't need to go to the rec center art class, especially if they're already tired, hungry, that kind of stuff. It really comes down to that. And I had to do a little bit of training with my parents especially my mom and grandma at the time because they wanted, they wanted the kids at church 9:00 AM every Sunday. And then they wanted us to go to the picnic after, and then they wanted us to go to the tea party and it wasn't working for our family. And I could tell that I was stressed because I wanted their outfits to stay nice, and I wanted to be a quote unquote, perfect mom and not be snappy.

But I wasn't taking care of my needs. I wasn't. Eating properly, hydrating properly because I was trying to perform to get other people other people's approval. So when you do slow down and you ask yourself these kind of open-ended questions, is this what I want for my family? Do I want my three-year-old, my four-year-old, my five-year-old to actually feel stressed right now on a Sunday?

Or is the right thing for us to do, to go put a blanket out in the backyard and have a picnic and look at birds?

[00:06:04] Leisha: And I think that as moms, we do have that intuition where we know, and I think that can add to the stress in our bodies when we know what is and isn't working, but we feel obligated or we feel whatever that we continue to do that. So what are some of the, if someone wants to journal, like, is this working for my family?

 how would you go into that on a more specific level?

[00:06:31] Stephanie: Absolutely. I like brain dump journaling. if you have a very bouncy, noisy brain, getting this stuff out of that is really helpful and useful, especially if you're hushing out the past. But if you're trying to move forward , on goals and dreams and a certain vision I actually like guided journaling.

I have a guided. Worksheet, it's we can drop the link in, but it's at stephanie odea.com/daily, D-A-I-L-Y. And the first question on that daily journaling worksheet is, how do you wanna feel today? Maybe depending on your mood, depending on your cycles, depending on the season maybe you wanna feel productive, maybe you wanna feel confident, maybe you want to feel lazy and have that be okay.

And then the next question is, okay, great. How are you gonna achieve this feeling today? If you're trying to feel productive and you have a really large to-do list, I ask that you pay attention to each of the kind of quadrants of your life. So your health, your finances, your relationships, what do you need to do in order?

To feel to capture that feeling you're trying to create. And so that's a way of really trying to whittle down your to-do list and cross off things that aren't maybe necessary or won't really move you forward to whatever it is you're trying to achieve in life.

[00:07:54] Leisha: That's definitely helpful. We'll link to that because I do think that a lot of times when you are in a season of just lots of things happening, even if you're not necessarily going so many places, but it's just like there's a lot happening when small kids live in your house.

There's always something going on. I think that it can be really hard to take that space to look at the big picture. I know that it's always helpful for me to have a little bit more guidance there versus just sitting down and being like, okay now what?

[00:08:22] Stephanie: . Yeah, so being proactive with the planning is really helpful and I teach time blocking and time blocking is actually. Very similar to how a school day is structured. So you know you're not gonna finish your entire history book. In third period, but that's okay. 'cause you have third period again tomorrow and you can do a little bit more.

 If you're inching forward to whatever it is you're trying to do. If you're trying to maybe build an online business, or for me, I write books, write a book. I can't sit down and write 50,000 words in a book write here right now. Even though maybe. I want to, 'cause I still have things to do. I have people to feed, I have stuff to do but designating a certain hour or a certain part of my morning or evening routine to whatever the goal is in this kind of time blocking way, I. Is it's really advantageous and you can get an awful lot done. So I definitely want to reiterate the point that slow living doesn't mean you're not doing anything but you're doing it in a way that feels aligned with your priorities and your ethics and your morals, and you have strict boundaries on what doesn't feel good and what's not helping you or your family. It's the idea of giving yourself permission to do what's right for you and and be okay with it.

[00:09:43] Leisha: I really like the concept of. Seasons in life and whether it's lined up with the actual seasons or not, I find that it's really helpful to reassess things every three months or so and just like different seasons for you. So for example, we just moved a month and a half ago and so that's a new season even though it wasn't technically like change of season.

 I'm curious if that is similar to how you have people reassess.

[00:10:07] Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. And what's interesting, and especially if you're looking at your hormones maybe on a specific. Wednesday you were really productive and you knocked out your to-do list really quickly, but then the following Wednesday, you're just not feeling it, and then you start beating yourself up in your brain because last Wednesday I did all of these things.

What's wrong with me? The fact is. There's nothing wrong with you, and you are in a different season, and so for you for moving right now, unpacking and getting your house organized is gonna take precedent over all of the other things, and that doesn't mean you're falling behind. They're just put on pause for a little while while you're doing the most pressing, stuff at hand. And a lot of times what's interesting, especially with little kids in the house sometimes you're playing triage if somebody gets hurt or if something huge is happening or an enormous tantrum is happening, you do have to stop and pivot and be okay with it. And it doesn't mean you failed if you didn't paint.

The wall in the kitchen that you told yourself you were gonna do, who cares in the great big, huge scheme of things, it really doesn't matter. What would matter is if you decide, oh, I didn't get to paint that wall today. Now I'll never do it ever again for the rest of your life. That's when you failed.

[00:11:30] Leisha: It's all about the way that we react and what we're telling ourselves in the meantime. I do teach a lot about the different seasons of hormones and things like that too, and I do think that's really helpful as you're looking at. Assessing your life. Even if you are reassessing your life when you are ovulating, you're gonna be looking at it differently than when you are on your period.

And I actually really love to recommend that we do a lot more of our analyzing and assessing and journaling in that menstrual phase because we have. More connection between the sides of our brain and honestly I just feel like we're more realistic in that time of what we actually want and what we don't actually want.

And during ovulation it's so easy to be like, I want everything. It's all gonna be great. I can totally do it all. And you can for that week. But typically outside of that, not so much. I think that just giving yourself grace in those, in all of the different seasons, whether it's like a three month season or a weekly rotation of seasons, it really makes a difference to give yourself that.

Ability to realize that you're not always going to have the same capacity. So I love that you brought that

[00:12:36] Stephanie: It's really interesting. I'm older and many of the women that I work with are in perimenopause or the early stages of menopause, and for many of them, they did not pay attention. To their cycles and just now are beginning to realize oh, that's why I was that way. , And now that things are so sporadic and they can't count the days and pay attention. There's good days and bad days and all around. And what's fun with humans is we're not spreadsheets. Like we're actual real humans. And that's one of the reasons. I've never been a big fan of bullet journaling in a way that Makes people feel bad about themselves. So yes if tracking data is good for you, okay maybe it's helpful.

But if you find that you're feeling anxious and you can't sleep at night because you didn't color in all of the squares in your bullet journal, that's something to reassess and it might not be helpful and useful for you. And that's a okay. We're all completely and totally different. And I think, big part of slow living is understanding that and being okay with it and and filtering out maybe the noise and the nonsense from quote unquote internet experts and marketers who are really just trying to sell us things.

[00:13:54] Leisha: , 

I think that is so true because it can be another fad, right? It can be another like, oh, this is the thing I'm gonna try to do this year. But I think anything that is. Going to actually change your life has to be done slowly but surely. So when we go back to time blocking, if that's something that someone has not really done before or hasn't done successfully before, where do you start?

We're not gonna start with the whole day, right? So where do you start?

[00:14:20] Stephanie: If you have little ones in the house, probably starting with the evening routine and the bedtime routine makes sense because you're already intuitively doing it. Anyway, if you realize that after dinner you've got playtime for 20 minutes and then you tidy for a little bit and then you've got bath time. Book time bedtime, that is a time blocked thing and you don't necessarily need to assign an actual time to it, but it's this block that you know, no matter what, we're gonna do these steps. Once that's established and doing something similar in the morning is helpful. And depending on your sleeping arrangement, if you're co-sleeping at times it can be tricky.

But I was pretty good at like removing myself and then quickly putting a pillow in and getting away. But I found that I'm just a nicer person when I take time for myself in the morning and kind of. Treat myself to alone time before other people want things for me. So for me, I like to take time to have coffee or tea in the morning and while it's brewing, I empty the dishwasher and reset the kitchen a little bit.

That is when I do my journaling page and kind of map out my day a little bit. I really like yoga I like to do that. My children are a lot older now, so they really don't need me. In the morning. But I vividly remember having babies and toddlers in the house, and even if I had 10 minutes to myself in the kitchen before the putter powder of little feet trying to find me and do things it was very helpful for my mental health.

[00:15:55] Leisha: I love that you said start with the evening routine. Because that's what I find so much of the time, like the evening routine is what creates the ability to have the morning routine. I think you could start with either one, but if you're really having a hard time getting up because the kids aren't going to bed when they need to or that's taking a long time, then that's what I find is a roadblock for me.

And I also find that I enjoy having some quiet time at night. Having a little bit of that quiet time at night without having to stay up too late, I. Is really key for me to be able to start my morning. It's really helpful to find kind of those bite-sized pieces of like, how can I just be, I think that slow living again, it feels a little bit less achievable to me than even just thinking of it like as being more intentional and less reactive.

And I think that I'm hearing a lot of that from you in what you're saying. 

[00:16:45] Stephanie: Yeah.

The tagline of the slowing book is cultivating a life of purpose in a hustle driven world. I think when you do take the time to figure out like, what am I even doing here? What is my purpose? What am I trying to achieve? You end up being more intentional and less reactive. And the women that I've worked with they're yelling less. They're paying better attention to their health actually. Some are losing weight just because they're taking the time to ask themselves, am I actually even hungry right now? Or am I thirsty? And that type of thing. So it is mostly mindset. Switch of trying to do things intentionally instead of kind of in go hustle mode. Within the book, there's a three step success formula, which is silly, , but the internet loves bite-sized things, as I'm sure you know. It's mindset. Plus action, plus consistency equals success. So when you're in a good mood, and for me that comes usually in the morning when I'm calm and I'm by myself. I ask myself, what is it that I'm trying to do today? And then whatever comes back. And depending on your belief system, it could be God, it could be the universe, it could be a subconscious. Listen to that. 'Cause that's divine. Like intuition and action step that will feel aligned to you and then just do the thing over and over again.

So if your brain comes back Hey Steph, you'd actually feel better in the morning if you cut out the red wine. Okay. That's interesting to pay attention to. So have that be an action step and then. Continuously do it over and over again until it becomes a habit. Sometimes people ask how do I know if what I'm doing is working? And that's tricky. Many of us want to action our way through things. But give it a solid try. Give whatever it is that you think you should do a good 30 days, and then reassess that data.

[00:18:41] Leisha: I saw somewhere in the New Year's, whatever goals, resolutions, this is what you should do kind of thing. It was just like, do more of what you know you should be doing and do less of what you know you shouldn't. And it's like , isn't that what it comes down to? Most of the time it's not rocket science and really what we do to work on hormones or to work on, routines, like time blocking, any of those things.

It is pretty. Realistic and pretty obvious when you really take time to look at it, but it's hard to see that when you are so caught up in just like spinning around in circles essentially, and just feeling overwhelmed and feeling behind all the time. I really appreciate these simple, tangible steps of stopping a little bit to just take some stock of what are you doing and is it serving you?

And you're gonna know those answers to a pretty good extent without even having to spend, days and hours and weeks trying to figure it out, right? If you just take the time to actually ask yourself, I think that would be the first place to start.

[00:19:42] Stephanie: I'm glad you brought that up. And it's interesting. when we first started recording, you had asked how I got started and you said that there's probably an interesting story and I'm realizing I didn't answer your story. But what's fascinating is it was I asked myself, is what I'm doing working for me?

So I first got my start. Online because I followed through on a year's resolution to use a crockpot slow cooker every day for a year and write about it. And it went well. I ended up, it went viral. I ended up on tv. I had book deals, ended up on the New York Times bestsellers list. It all worked really well until all of a sudden it didn't. And I began feeling really fake and phony does the world need another pot roast recipe? It just didn't feel aligned anymore. And then the Instant Pot, which is pressure cooker, came out in 2016. And my literary agent and book publishers really wanted me to translate all my recipes into that. But I don't like it. Like I get it. The tech part of cooking a frozen chicken in 45 minutes is really appealing to some people for me. What was helpful for me was getting dinner on early in the morning. I was still caffeinated and coherent. I could push a button and then walk away and then spend the rest of the day with my kids.

I didn't wanna cook dinner at dinner time. I wanted to alleviate that decision fatigue for me. So I didn't wanna do it and so I got fired. And then I had to really reevaluate, okay, what's the next best step for me to take? my children were older and I already realized that the way I used the crop water, the slow cooker was in a really intentional way to set myself and my day up for success.

And so that's how pivoting to the slow living came about.

[00:21:29] Leisha: I love hearing that story and I think that is something that people don't talk about enough is like you can be so right and so aligned and so all in on something and a year, six months, three years later, things have changed. Whether it's you've changed, the world's changed, some things have changed and maybe for me in this season, doing a year of crockpot meals would be exactly what I need. But maybe it's not what you need. Maybe it's not what some of the people listening need. I think that just realizing that it's okay to pivot. It's okay to change what you're doing and what you're saying because yeah, we have seasons.

We're all different. So I love that. Would you tell us, so you've already mentioned the title of your book, we'll make sure to link that. Is there anywhere else we can find you?

[00:22:10] Stephanie: If you are a podcast listener and you must speak 'cause we're recording a podcast. I do have the Slow Living podcast and you get to be on it very soon. And I'm excited because I geek out when it comes to talking about, I. Hormones and cycles and planning days that way. And it's fun for me because I'm raising three girls and so watching that happen, there's a lot of that in my house right now. My poor husband. But we did get a boy dog, Sheldon. He's a good boy.

[00:22:38] Leisha: I love that. Okay. We'll link all of that. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for being here today and just for sharing some of that wisdom. I know it's gonna be really helpful.

[00:22:46] Stephanie: Thanks so much.