271: Why You Quit Before You Actually Hit a Wall

You started the plan. You were doing well. And then one hard day, one moment of friction, one week where everything felt like too much, and it was over. Not because you failed. Because your brain did a calculation and handed you a verdict before you ever actually hit a wall.

This episode started with a run. A slow, hard run on bad sleep, where Elizabeth's brain told her to stop long before her body had any reason to. What she noticed in that moment, and what she's been thinking about ever since, is the same pattern that takes down a good eating plan, derails a packed calendar day before it even starts, and keeps high-achieving women stuck in the start-over cycle.

The problem isn't follow-through. It's that we've been asking the wrong question at the wrong time. We project forward into all the discomfort we might feel and respond to that future feeling as if it's happening right now. We call it knowing our limits. It isn't.

And when we look back and criticize ourselves for quitting, we do it from a comfortable distance, without accounting for the actual conditions we were in. This episode is about what to do differently, in the moment, before the verdict comes in.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why your brain keeps telling you to quit before you've actually reached your limit, and how to tell the difference between real exhaustion and projected exhaustion
• The one question to ask yourself in the moments you want to give up, and why it changes what happens next
• Why all-or-nothing thinking is the most expensive pattern a high-achieving woman can have around her health, and what the third option actually looks like

The Listener Takeaway: Why This Episode Matters

If you have ever woken up exhausted before a hard day started, abandoned a plan that was working because one moment of restriction felt like too much, or looked back at a goal you quit and thought "I could have kept going", this episode is going to feel like relief. Not because it tells you to try harder. Because it explains exactly what was happening in those moments and gives you a practical way to respond differently the next time.

The conversation you have with yourself when you want to quit is the thing that determines whether you build momentum or start over. This episode gives you the words.

RESOURCES

• Total Health Systems Audit Quiz

Free Quiz: Still saying "I know what to do, I just don't do it"?  You don't need more information. You need to know why you're not applying the information you already have. This free quiz identifies the exact reason your healthy habits keep breaking down, and it's not willpower. 15 questions. 3 minutes or less. 4 possible patterns. 1 honest answer. 

Go to https://elizabethsherman.com/quiz

If you’re a woman in midlife who wants better health without obsessing over weight, you’re in the right place. I’m Elizabeth Sherman, a life and health coach and host of the Total Health in Midlife Podcast.

After coaching hundreds of women, I know the real problem usually isn’t “not enough information” – it’s too much of it, and not knowing where to start. With close to 300 episodes, this show can feel that way too.

To make it easy, I created a free Listener’s Roadmap that helps you figure out which episodes are right for you right now. Tell me what you’re struggling with – low energy, emotional eating, stress, sleep, exercise, or all of the above – and I’ll point you to a curated path of episodes and resources to get you moving.

Download your free roadmap at https://elizabethsherman.com/roadmap.

Transcript

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So the other morning I went for a run on bad sleep. And somewhere in the middle of my run, I really wanted to stop. And I almost did. But I caught something in that moment that I have been thinking about ever since because it's not just a running thing. It's the exact same thing that happens to my clients when they're eating well and doing great. And then one hard week takes the whole thing down. It's what happens when you wake up tired before the day has even started. It's what happens every single time you had a plan that was working. And then suddenly maybe the scale doesn't validate your efforts, or you just need a break from it all because it's been really difficult. Maybe it's a reason that you can't quite explain and you are done. There's a conversation happening in your head in those moments. And most of us have never been taught how to have the correct conversation. What I figured out on that run changed how I completed it. And I think it might change how you approach the moments that you've been quitting in advance, which is, I'm guessing, are more frequent than you would like. So let's get into it. Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don't have to fight with. Hey everyone, welcome to the Total Health in Midlife podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am really glad that you are here today because I had a huge aha moment on my run this weekend, and I needed to share it with you so that you can see it happening for you as well. So let me set the stage. This weekend I went for a run. I had not slept well. I was tired before I even got started. And once I got going, it was slow. Like I was running in sand, even though I was completely on pavement. And it was hard. And at some point, my brain just started telling me that I needed to stop. Now, here's what I noticed. I checked in with my body, and quite honestly, my body was okay. I was in my aerobic zone, meaning that I was able to breathe and I wasn't functioning at maximum capacity. I was at a pace and effort level that I could sustain. And it was hard, I'm not gonna lie, as running is, but I wasn't in pain. I was working, yes, but I was capable. The voice in my head said that it wanted me to stop was coming from somewhere else entirely. So I made a deal with myself. I wasn't going to decide anything about stopping or walking based on what might happen later in the run. You see, I started noticing that I was forecasting that I couldn't make it to the end. And that realization was a real huge eye-opener for me. I made the promise that I was going to keep checking in right now, this minute, this block, this hill. Like, am I okay right now? Can I keep going right now? And the answer kept being yes. And so I kept going. I was slower than I wanted to, that I've been doing before. It wasn't pretty, but I was going. I went further than I would have if I had kept thinking about the end, if I had listened to that first voice. And I've been thinking about this ever since because what happened on that run is exactly what happens to so many of the women that I work with around their health, around their new habits. The moment it gets hard or uncomfortable or just less fun than it was at the beginning, a voice shows up and says, you know, you should stop. This isn't fun anymore. You can't keep doing this. And we listen to it. And not because we're weak or because we don't want it badly enough, but because nobody ever taught us to ask whether that voice is actually telling the truth. And so that is what this episode is all about. Here's the thing about that voice: it wasn't exactly wrong. The run was hard. I was tired, and those were real facts, but my brain wasn't reporting on what was happening in that moment. It was doing a calculation, it was looking at the whole run ahead of me and everything that I still had yet to do, and returning a verdict on whether I could do it all at once. And the verdict was, oh no, that is way too much. And that is not a body check. That's a projection. And the problem with projections is that we treat them like they are current information. We feel the weight of the whole thing, the whole day, the whole plan, the whole goal. And we respond to that feeling as if what's actually happening in our body right now. And it isn't. It's a preview of a future that has not arrived yet. I do this all the time outside of running. Like, for example, if I have a calendar full of client appointments, I will sometimes feel exhausted before the day even starts. Not because I'm actually tired, but because I'm already living through the end of the day in my head. I'm projecting how I'm going to feel at the end of the day. I've skipped over the present moment entirely and landed somewhere around 6 p.m. And I'm already feeling depleted. And I'm responding to that imagined version of tired, as if it's the one I'm actually sitting in right now in the moment. It's a very efficient way to feel terrible for absolutely no reason. And it shows up constantly around our health as well. A woman will decide that she can't keep going with the way that she's been eating, not because she's fallen apart and not because the plan stopped working, but because she looked down the road and the road looked really long. And she was like, I cannot keep doing this. She felt the cumulative weight of every future moment of effort all at once on her brain and filed it under, it's impossible. And so we stop before we actually hit the wall, before we actually run out of road. We call this knowing our limits. Sometimes we tell ourselves we're being realistic. Occasionally we call it listening to our bodies, which, as I found out this morning, is not always what it is. What it actually is, most of the time, is quitting in advance, solving a problem that hasn't happened yet by deciding that you cannot handle it. And because the decision gets made before you actually have encountered the hard part, you never find out whether you actually could have handled it. You just have more evidence that you can't follow through when really all you did was answer the wrong question at the wrong time. Your brain asked, can I keep doing all of this? And the more useful question is, can I do this right now? Those are not the same questions. And the answer is almost never the same either. So let's talk about what this actually looks like in real life, because if it only happened on runs, it would be inconvenient but manageable. It doesn't only happen in runs. Think about the last time that you had a day that was completely packed with commitments, meetings, appointments, things you said yes to weeks ago that are now all landing on the same day. You wake up and before you've had coffee, before anything has actually happened, you're already tired and grumpy. Not a little tired, and not tired in the way that makes you want to, but but tired in a way that makes you want to cancel everything and go back to bed and just put a covers over your head. You just woke up. You haven't done anything yet. Your body is fine, your brain is recovered. What you're feeling isn't exhaustion of a long day, it's a preview of it. And your brain ran the numbers on everything ahead of you and sent back a report. And that report said, We do not have the capacity for this. This is going to cost a lot. And your nervous system responded as if the bill had already come due. You're not tired. You're pre-tired. You're preemptively tired. And if you don't catch that distinction, you'll spend the whole morning responding to exhaustion that you haven't even earned yet. You'll move slower, feel heavier, and look for exits. And by the time the day actually gets hard, you've already been running on fumes that you didn't need to spend. I see the same thing happen constantly with the women that I work with around food and eating. She's been following a plan. It's been working. She feels better. She has more energy. Her clothes fit differently. She's proud of herself. And then one afternoon, she hits a moment of restriction. Maybe she's at dinner and the thing that she really wants isn't on the plan. Maybe she's just tired of being careful. Maybe she's had a hard week and the effort of making the right choice in that moment feels like more than she has. And instead of adjusting, instead of giving herself a little room to breathe and keep going, her brain does the calculation. It looks at every future dinner, every future hard moment, every future choice between what she wants and what she planned. And it files it all under it's all too much. The switch flips. And now her only two options are to go back to perfect execution or be done and quit. And so she picks done. And not because she failed, and not because the plan wasn't working, but because her brain answered the wrong question and she didn't know to push back on it or to adjust. This is all or nothing thinking. And I want to be clear that this is not a character flaw. This is so human. It's not a sign that she doesn't want it badly enough or that she lacks the ability to follow through. It's a thinking pattern, a very understandable, learned thinking pattern, especially for women who have spent years in diet culture being told that the only way to do this is to do it perfectly, or it's not worth doing it all. When your only options are all or nothing, any amount of friction tips you towards nothing, a hard day, a moment of wanting something different, a week where capacity is lower than usual. Any of those things become the reason it's over when really they're just the texture of a normal life that's trying to include health alongside everything else. The problem isn't that she quit. The problem is that she never had a third option available to her. She didn't know that she could slow down instead of stop. She didn't know that she could have the thing that she wanted at dinner and still be someone who takes care of herself. She didn't know that B minus effort on a hard week is still an effort, still forward movement, still evidence that she can be counted on to keep going even when she isn't perfect. Because nobody told her that the goal was never perfection. The goal was to keep going. And there are a lot of ways to keep going that don't look like the original plan. So what are you going to do instead? You slow down, you don't quit, you pivot, you don't push harder and white knuckle your way through it. You just slow down, you adjust, you find the version of this that you can actually do right now in the conditions that you're actually in. And then you do that version. So on my run this weekend, slowing down looked like literally slowing down. I dropped my pace enough that the effort became manageable and my heart rate was able to slow just a little bit so that I was able to manage it physically in that moment. I wasn't running the run that I had planned or that I wanted to. I was running the run that I had. And it turns out the run I had was enough to get me further than I would have gone if I had stopped at the first sign of hard. For the woman who's eating a certain way and hits a moment where she needs some relief, slowing down might look like having the thing that she wants at dinner and then getting back to her plan tomorrow. It might look like a less structured week while she's traveling, where she's making reasonable choices instead of perfect ones. It might look like acknowledging that this week is really gonna be crazy. And so a B minus week is gonna be okay. And a B minus week is a week where she still shows up. And none of that is failure. All of it is moving forward. But here's what has to happen first. And this is the actual skill that I want you to take from this episode. Before you can slow down, you have to stop and ask yourself the right question. Not the question that your brain defaulted to, which was, can I do all of this? Can I keep going at this level? The question you actually need to answer, which is, do I really need to stop? Can I keep going just at a different level? What do I need to give myself right now to be able to continue? These questions feel like they're soft questions, and they're not. They're the difference between building something and starting over for the hundredth time. Because when you ask them honestly, when you actually pause and check in with what's true right now instead of what your brain projected about later, you almost always find out that the answer to that first question is no. You don't really need to stop. You just need to adjust. And adjustment is available to you at almost any point in almost any plan if you're willing to accept that the adjusted version still counts. And this is where perfectionism becomes genuinely expensive. Not as a personality quirk, not as something charming about being a high achiever, but as a thing that costs you your real results. Because if the only version of this that counts is the version where you followed everything to a T, then every moment of friction is a threat to the entire structure. Every hard day is a reason it might be over. Every choice that wasn't on the plan is evidence that you cannot do this. And that is an exhausting way to live. And it's not actually how any sustainable way of taking care of yourself works. What works is a running conversation with yourself, not a verdict delivered once at the beginning of a plan and then defended forever, but an ongoing check-in. How am I doing right now? What do I actually need in this moment? Can I keep going? And if yes, in what form? I kept checking in on that run. Every few minutes, every long stretch, every moment, the voice came back and said to stop. I checked in with myself. I asked. And the answer was yes, keep going just slower. And that's what I did. I asked the right question at the right time, and I let the actual answer, the real one from my body in the present moment, guide what happened next. You have access to that same conversation. You've always had access to it. Most women just haven't been taught that it's allowed, that checking in and adjusting isn't the same as giving up, and that the version of you who slows down and keeps going is doing something far more valuable than the version of you who sprints until she quits. So here's why this matters beyond any single run or any single hard day. Every single time you ask yourself those questions and keep going, even slowly, even imperfectly, even in the adjusted version of the plan, you are building evidence. Evidence that you can be counted on. Evidence that when things get hard, you don't automatically disappear. Evidence that you are someone who finds a way to continue. And every single time you quit before you've actually hit a wall, before you've actually run out of road, you build a different kind of evidence. Not because you're weak or because you don't want it, but because your brain now has one more data point that says, when it gets hard, we stop. That evidence compounds in both directions. This is what I mean when I talk about self-trust. It's not a feeling that you wait to have. It's not confidence that arrives one day when you've finally done enough things right. It's something that you build slowly in these exact moments, in very seemingly unexciting rewards. The moments where the voice says stop and you pause, check in, and find out that it's actually not true. You set the goal you set for a reason. You didn't make it up arbitrarily. You imagined something on the other side of accomplishing that goal, a version of your days that feel different, more energy, more ease, more pride in how you're taking care of yourself. Something you want enough that you made a plan to get there. And getting there requires moving through discomfort. And not the dramatic, unsustainable kind of discomfort, the ordinary, mundane kind of everyday life, the kind that shows up on a slow run or on a tired morning, the kind that shows up at dinner where the thing that you want isn't on the plan. The kind that shows up on a packed Wednesday when you're pre-tired before anything has even happened. That discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It's just the texture of the road between where you are and where you want to be. And here's what I found out this weekend. And what I watch women find out when they stop quitting in advance. You can hold more than you think you can. And not because you're tougher than you realized, but because the thing that you were afraid of was never as big as the projection that your brain handed to you. The only way to find out what you can actually hold is to ask right now, in this moment, not in advance, not can I do all of this, but can I do this right now? The answer, most of the time, is yes. So I want to say something about the times that you didn't keep going. Because if you're listening to this and you're thinking about all the moments that you quit, all the plans that you abandoned, all the times that you told yourself that you couldn't do it and then didn't, I want you to hear this. When you look back at those moments, you're usually doing it from a very comfortable distance. You're not in the discomfort of wanting to stop anymore. You're sitting somewhere calm, feeling fine, and from a place that is very easy to think, you know, I should have kept going. I could have kept going. But why didn't I just keep going? What you're not doing in that moment of self-criticism is remembering what it actually felt like to be in it, the emotional weight of being in that situation, the mental load that you were carrying, the physical exhaustion that was real, even if it wasn't the whole story. The conditions you were actually in, not the conditions that you wish you had been in. You quit in a context, and that context mattered. That doesn't mean it's fine to keep quitting. It means that beating yourself up from a place of comfort, looking back at a hard moment without accounting for how hard it actually. actually was is not an honest accounting. And it's not useful either. All it does is add more evidence to the pile that says you can't be trusted when what actually happened was that you were in a difficult condition without the right tools. And now you have a tool the question, the check-in, the pause before the verdict. And that is completely different. So here's what I want you to take from this episode. It's not a better plan. It's not perfect conditions or a week where everything lines up and the calendar is clear and you slept well and you feel motivated. Those weeks exist, sure, and they are fantastic and great. And you don't need any of this on those weeks. This is for the other weeks, the hard weeks the tired Wednesday, the packed calendar, the dinner where the menu is completely unnavigable. The run where your brain says to stop before your body really has a reason to. What matters in those moments is the conversation that you have with yourself. Not the verdict that your brain hands you before you've even checked in, but the actual conversation. Do I really need to stop? Can I keep going at a different level? What do I need to give myself right now to continue? That conversation practiced over time in the small moments and the hard ones is what builds a woman who follows through. And not because she's tougher or more motivated or finally found the right plan. Because she stopped quitting in advance and started asking better questions instead. And so that is the skill and it's available to you right now in whatever hard moment that you are currently in or heading towards. If you're someone who knows what to do but can't seem to get yourself to do it when it counts, I want to point you towards something that I have built. I have a quiz at elisabethsherman.com slash quiz. It takes about three minutes and what it does is identify your specific pattern, the real reason that your follow through keeps breaking down and what to look at first. Because knowing that you need to ask better questions is one thing. Understanding exactly what's been getting in your way whether that's capacity or beliefs or conditions or something else entirely, that's what tells you where to actually start you get your results straight to your inbox. It's free and it's specific to you, not a generic list of tips that applies to everyone and therefore really applies to no one. If you've been nodding along to this episode, if this has resonated, if the pre-quitting thing sounds familiar, if you recognize yourself in the woman who's already exhausted before the day starts or who flips to done the moment the plan gets hard, the quiz is the next step. Again, go to elisabethsherman.com slash quiz. I'll also put it in the show notes. Thank you for spending a little bit of your time with me today. If this episode landed for you, share it with a woman in your life who could use it. And I will see you next time. Have an amazing week and I will talk to you then. Bye-bye. Hey before you go if you are someone who says I know exactly what I should be doing, I just don't do it. Hey, if that's you, I made something for you. It's a free three-minute quiz that gets underneath that exact problem. Not to give you more information but to show you the specific reasons your follow through keeps breaking down because it's not the same for everyone. And once you can see your pattern clearly everything else seems to change. Head to elisabethherman.comslash quiz. It's free, it's fast and it's honest.