How a toddler's swim lesson explains why "more workouts" isn't the answer to a stressed nervous system
Before my son does his backfloat, his swim teacher asks him one question: song, count, or silence?
He gets to choose every single time.
I love this for so many reasons. I love that trust-building starts this young, that a three-year-old is already being handed the message you know what you need, and I trust you to know it. But what's really been staying with me is how often he chooses silence.
Not song. Not counting down. Just quiet.
He's not asking to be entertained or distracted from the scary part. He's asking for the space to listen to something in himself before he leaps. At three.
This is exactly how I want to teach yoga. Honestly, it's how I want to run every part of my work. Not a script everyone follows the same way. Not "here's the pose, here's the pace, keep up." Instead: if you need this, here's an option. If you need that, here's another. If you're not sure what you need, that's okay too — let's find out together.
Because the deeper goal was never "follow the teacher perfectly." It's building your own inner yes and no. Your own version of song, count, or silence. That's the thing that actually carries you in a yoga class, in a hard season, standing at the edge of something that scares you.
I've been sitting with that question all week. And then I got a message from a woman in one of my programs that made the whole thing click into place.
The 4 Pounds
She's 40. She's been doing the program for two weeks — every workout, no shortcuts. And she'd just stepped on the scale and found she'd gained four pounds.
She was doing everything right. She was also getting up at 3:30am for work every day, and had pushed through a string of late nights on top of it.
I know what most people would ask her. I know because I've been asked it myself, and I've watched it happen to clients for almost two decades: How many days of cardio are you getting?
More. The answer is almost always assumed to be more. More cardio, more discipline, more tracking, more willpower. As if her body gaining weight under those conditions was a math problem not enough output for the input instead of what it actually was: a nervous system running on fumes, trying to hold onto whatever resources it could.
Nobody was asking her the swim-lesson question. Nobody was asking: what does your rhythm actually need right now? They were handing her someone else's script and telling her to follow it harder.
What We Don't Ask
There's a concept in Ayurveda called swasthavritta — the daily and seasonal rhythms that keep a person in their own natural state of health. It's not a workout plan. It's not a diet. It's a framework for living in accordance with your own nature and your own season of life, instead of a one-size-fits-all script.
We don't ask people about this. We ask about cardio days and protein grams. We don't ask how are you sleeping, how are you digesting, how does your day actually move, what season of your life are you in right now — the questions that would have told us, immediately, that a woman waking at 3:30am and running on broken sleep needed rest and regulation, not another workout.
More output was never going to fix a nervous system that was already in overdraft.
Knowing When Enough Is Enough
Here's the part I don't always say out loud: lifting heavy, all the time, with nothing to balance it, can make you feel heavy. Not just physically — though tight hips and a locked-up upper back are real — but in a more general, low-grade way. Depleted instead of strong. Braced instead of grounded.
For a long time I didn't build mobility or rest into my own programming, because rest felt like it didn't "count." I've had to unlearn that, and it's a big part of what I coach clients on now too. Strength without mobility isn't really strength — it's just tension you've gotten good at holding. And rest isn't the thing you do when training stops. It's part of the training. A body that never gets to recover doesn't get stronger, it just gets more efficient at running on empty.
So when I say I still lift weights as a yoga teacher, I don't mean I lift the way I did in my twenties, chasing heavier and heavier with nothing on the other side of the scale. I mean I've built a practice where heavy days are balanced by mobility work, and mobility work is balanced by real rest — not rest I feel guilty about, rest I've actually planned for.
Why "Doing Nothing" Feels Wrong
Here's the part I find most telling: so many of the people who tell me how stressed they are can't imagine walking into a yin or restorative class. It feels like doing nothing. It feels unproductive, almost uncomfortable, in a way that a hard workout never does.
That reaction is the stress. A nervous system that's been running hard for a long time genuinely does not trust stillness. It reads quiet as unsafe, or lazy, or a waste of time — even when quiet is exactly what it's asking for.
It's the adult version of a three-year-old choosing silence in the pool. Except most of us have had that instinct trained out of us. We've been taught that the answer is always to add something, never to subtract, never to simply listen.
Health Is Not Just What You Can Measure
If you're not pooping, you're not healthy no matter how many grams of protein you hit that day.
I say that bluntly on purpose, because it's true and because we don't say it enough. Health was never only the measurable stuff: the macros, the cardio minutes, the number on the scale. Your digestion matters. Your five senses matter. Your mind matters. All of it is part of the same system, and none of it responds well to being handed a script it never agreed to.
Your Own Version of Song, Count, or Silence
So here's what I'm sitting with this week, and maybe you will too:
Where in your life are you defaulting to someone else's script more cardio, more hustle, more discipline — when what you actually need is to pause and ask your own inner voice first?
You already know how to do this. You knew how to do it before anyone taught you a single technique. The work now isn't learning something new. It's remembering how to ask.
Want Support Getting Started?
If you've been feeling the heat — in your body, your schedule, your nervous system — and you're not quite sure where to begin, I made something for you.
My free 3-Day Pitta Cool-Down Challenge walks you through three gentle, doable days of Pitta-pacifying practices: morning, midday, and evening. It's designed for real life — not a retreat, not a complete overhaul. Just a few days of intentional cooling that you can carry with you into the rest of the season.
👉 Join the free 3-Day Pitta Cool-Down Challenge here
I'd love to see you in there.
Nourished & Rooted
I have opened up spots in my 1:1, 16-week Yoga and Ayurveda program. We can meet in-person or virtual. I crafted this for those "it depends" questions — so you can have those answers for yourself. Learning Ayurveda can be like learning a new language and seeing the world through a different lens. If you want to go deeper with your yoga or Ayurveda framework, you can read more about this new program above.
