Maria Connolly, LPC
Many high-achieving women spend enormous amounts of energy caring for everyone and everything around them while quietly starving themselves of the very things that help them feel grounded, connected, and alive. We learn to survive on emotional depletion. But we can’t do that for long. Our inner life needs regular nourishment. And we get that from micro-practices that ground and sustain us.
We’re often told only half of the story. We know our bodies need nourishment to function well. Surviving on caffeine and sugar, or depriving the body of what it genuinely needs, makes us feel unwell. Energy drops. Mood shifts. Focus disappears. The body keeps the score. However, the other half of the story is that our inner life has similar needs! Just as you nourish your body, it’s important to nourish your inner life.
For a long time, I treated my body like something that needed to keep up with my life. Like many highly-motivated women, I pushed through exhaustion, ignored stress signals, skipped meals when I was busy, and reached for whatever was quick and comforting when my energy crashed. I told myself I was “fine” because I was functioning. Productive. Capable. Getting things done. But I have to admit I wasn’t experiencing optimal health and well-being.
Because beneath that outward competence, my body was trying to get my attention. I just hadn’t learned how to listen yet.
For many high-achieving women, food isn’t just about nourishment. It’s about regulating your mood, energy, and performance. So there are many elements to consider when we’re looking at how food affects your mood.
You may eat between meetings. Or skip meals without noticing. You reach for something quick when your energy dips. At the end of the day, you unwind with something comforting, not because you’re hungry, but because your body is asking for relief.
And often, the conversation around food gets reduced to discipline. What you should eat. What you shouldn’t. What’s “good” and what’s “bad.” But that framework misses something essential. Your relationship with food isn’t just behavioral. It’s somatic. It lives in your nervous system.
If you’re like many of the women I work with, you don’t struggle because you don’t know how to calm your mind. You struggle in the moment when your body takes over.
Your chest tightens. Your jaw clenches. Thoughts accelerate. A conversation shifts, a comment lands wrong, pressure builds, and suddenly you’re no longer responding. You’re reacting.
And in that moment, it doesn’t matter how self-aware, intelligent, or practiced you are.
Your nervous system has already made the call. This is the piece that often gets missed in conversations about “how to calm your mind.” Because the mind isn’t actually where the spiral begins.