Welcome to The Calm Worklife
A nervous system-informed lens on burnout, ambition, and creating a more human way to work.
I see you.
You haven’t taken a deep breath in you don’t know how long. Your mind is constantly racing. Your body carries the tension to keep you going. Your emotions are all over the place and heavy at the same time.
Calm feels like a foreign concept.
You’ve done everything you were told to do. You climbed the ladder. Stayed on top of it all. Checked every box.
And still… you feel off.
You don’t recognize your life anymore.
You are disappearing inside a version of success that doesn’t fit anymore.
Here is what I learned… It’s not you.
We’re living and working in a system that asks too much of us and offers too little in return.
Your nervous system is knocking. Let’s hit the pause button and shift to a different rhythm.
The Calm Worklife was built to help you get there— gently, subtly, and sustainably.
Survival can look a lot like success.
Before creating The Calm Worklife, I managed corporate wellness programs for over a decade. I was hired to create strategies that helped employees feel supported. I oversaw benefits to enhance their lives for all they were giving.
I believed work didn’t have to feel like a grind. That organizations could be places where people didn’t just function, but actually felt cared for. That employees deserved to feel good.
But I kept running into walls: Budgets. Bureaucracy. “That’s not how we do things.”
I was struggling too. Not just with my job, but with the quiet unraveling I felt underneath everything. I was exhausted, anxious, over-functioning. On the outside, I looked successful. Inside, I felt like I was disappearing.
I’d been to doctors and therapists trying to explain the heaviness. Everyone told me I was fine— successful even. Their consensus was I was being too hard on myself.
Eventually, I learned my nervous system was trying to survive a system that was never designed for my humanity. I was feeling my nervous system gripping to function, not because I wasn’t strong enough, but because I had stayed strong for too long.
Burnout rarely arrives all at once.
It’s a crack that forms slowly. A quiet unraveling that you do your best to stay on top of.
Until one day… something gives.
For me, it came through a single, absurd meeting so disconnected from reality that I finally asked myself: Am I going to keep tolerating this?
That was the moment the heaviness broke.
I thought, I can leave.
Suddenly, I had power again.
Leaving a job I once dreamed of was a calculated and strategic decision. I had to be honest with myself about the risks and if I could afford to take them. After much thought, and a continued decline in my workplace happiness, it was time.
I left in July 2023 with nothing lined up.
What I thought would be a short break turned into two years.
I now lovingly call it my self-care sabbatical.
Hitting pause
A few weeks after leaving, someone I respect said to me:
“Nothing happens in August. Why don’t you hit the pause button?”
That one line gave me permission I didn’t know I needed.
I took time to breathe. To be still. To sit with myself.
When I finally stopped, what had been buried under the layers of pushing through started to emerge. I began meeting parts of myself I didn’t know existed.
In time, I met my calm self. She has changed my life.
The version of me who wasn’t always bracing or rushing. Who could simply be.
Once I connected to my nervous system, everything changed.
It was like I had been given a new lens to view my life and the world. It transformed how I viewed wellness, defined success, and how I understood the workplace dynamics.
You might be thinking: That’s great for you… but I can’t leave.
You’re right, my story isn’t a prescription. I don’t want you to leave.
It’s been humbling, disorienting, and honestly the hardest two years of my life.
Not only because I wasn’t working, but because I was meeting myself for the first time.
But in that pause, I began to see:
How much I had been over-functioning in a system that rewarded burnout
How deeply disconnected I had become from my body and power
How urgently we need new ways to work that include the full human experience
After years designing wellness programs from inside the system, I see the systemic issues leading to the burnout epidemic. It’s not only the workload, it’s the culture.
It’s the pressure to over-function, while tolerating subtle and (not so subtle) disrespect.
The lack of humanity woven into the day-to-day.
Until we reclaim our nervous systems, the system will keep burning us out.
The Calm Worklife was born from that reclamation.
It’s not a productivity hack. It’s not a plan to make your job feel better by fixing yourself.
It’s a nervous system-informed rhythm. A way to define ambition on your terms.
A shift in how we move through the workday and the world.
Here, we explore:
Why burnout isn’t a personal failing
Why nervous system capacity, not balance, is the real key to sustainable work
How small shifts in awareness can bring you back to yourself
How you have more power and control than you think you do
This space is for…
The high-achiever who doesn’t recognize herself anymore
The leader carrying silent weight while still being “the strong one”
The woman who doesn’t want to leave, but doesn’t know how to stay
The body screaming because the nervous system is whispering this isn’t working for me
You don’t need to quit your job. You don’t need to overhaul your life.
You need a place that reflects back what your body already knows:
There’s nothing wrong with you.
This system isn’t working.
What to expect here
Free Monthly Essays that explore workplace culture through a nervous system lens
Coming Soon: Paid Community Content with reflections, practices, and themes to support calm, capacity, and clarity
A rhythm you can return to, especially when the noise gets loud
If something in your body said yes, you’re in the right place.
→ Subscribe to get new posts in your inbox
→ Share with someone else holding it all together
It is so nice to have you here,
Tracey