Balance & Beyond Podcast

Ever felt strangely exhausted even when your life looks organised on paper?

We dig into the quiet force shaping so many choices: the avoidance of discomfort. Not the dramatic kind, but the subtle, anticipatory flickers—a tight chest in a meeting, a delayed email reply after you set a boundary, the micro-pauses that make you want to smooth everything over. We trace how early praise for being helpful and reliable trained a deep habit of over-responsibility, and how corporate cultures double down on this by rewarding vigilance and punishing mistakes.

From there, we connect the dots between perfectionism, people pleasing, procrastination, and over-preparing. They look different on the surface, yet they share one engine: keep discomfort away. The result is the duck-on-the-pond life—calm above, frantic paddling below. Decisions slow down as we chase 95 percent certainty, energy gets siphoned into managing reactions, and even simple choices feel dense with risk. We unpack the critical mix-up between safety and comfort, and how the nervous system over-corrects by flagging everyday stress as danger.

What changes everything is tolerance. Not fake bravado or recklessness, but the skill of holding uncertainty without shutting down. We talk about building inner safety so your prefrontal cortex stays online when stakes feel high, and we use Barack Obama’s “51 percent certainty” as a practical anchor. With tolerance, boundaries simplify, decisions get cleaner, and energy returns—not because life softens, but because you stop organising around avoidance. You learn to feel a hard moment and move anyway, trusting you can re-decide on the other side.

If this resonates, hit follow, share it with a woman who needs it, and leave a quick review to help the show reach the right ears. Then tell us: what “good enough” decision will you make today?

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. I honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in!

Jo Stone (Host)

This episode is about something most women have never named, even though it's been shaping their days for years. What if a lot of the stress in your life isn't coming from what you're doing, but what you're constantly trying to avoid?

If you consider yourself rational, responsible, helpful, capable, and that inside a lot of the choices you make make complete sense. However, when you zoom out after working with thousands of women, a different pattern becomes visible.

Many decisions are not about what's actually needed or true, despite what you've been led to believe. They are about keeping discomfort away. Hear me out. Discomfort isn't dramatic or obvious. It's not trauma. Discomfort is subtle. It's relational and anticipatory. Discomfort shows up as tightness in the chest or maybe your throat. Discomfort's a spike of self-doubt, a spike of self-doubt.

It's the anticipation of judgment or disappointment, that feeling in your gut of, oh my God, I've been a bit exposed, or I'm not fully in control, that desire to grip, feeling of uncertainty. And when we say discomfort subtle, discomfort looks like a glance someone can make from you across the room, a pause in conversation that feels a little bit uncomfortable.

The fear of being wrong, of disappointing someone, of being misunderstood. Discomfort is that horrible feeling you get in your gut when you are waiting for a reply from an email where you've just pushed back on something.

Or rereading that message six times, trying to work out are they just a little bit annoyed or are they really, really pissed at you? We learned early on as little girls that when things are uncomfortable, when you feel discomfort in your system, you don't feel safe.

When you think back to what you were praised for as a child, it was probably things like being helpful, being reliable, putting your hand up, thinking ahead, avoiding crisis, managing complexity. And if you're anything like me, you were probably called mature, wise beyond your years, reliable.

But the more I learn about how we were raised, we were just given hefty doses of over-responsibility, really, really young. We learnt very early that being safe is don't rock the boat, be helpful, always be a few steps ahead, never make a mistake. And our nervous system learnt very quickly.

Okay, so I'm going to make sure I can prevent those things from happening because I don't feel safe when I get in trouble. So I'm going to do everything I can to avoid ever getting in trouble. I don't feel I don't feel safe if there's conflict around me because then I don't know how I feel. I don't know how they're going to react. I don't know what all this means.

So I feel really, really uncomfortable. The corporate world then reinforces these deeply embedded childhood patterns. We're taught to be organized and we're praised for that. We say yes for everything. Mistakes are punished. Uncertainty is managed with traffic light systems and full charts and color coding.

So over time, this avoidance becomes automatic. It's not conscious, it's not something we do to make ourselves miserable, but it's a reflex to an old embedded pattern. And our lives start organizing around this one quiet goal. Keep everything smooth at all costs. Keep everything steady.

Now on the surface, avoidance looks quite calm. I'm keeping everything steady. We talk about this like when you're the duck on a pond. No, it's okay. I'm managing everything, I'm keeping all the balls together. But underneath, your feet are paddling like no one's business. It takes so much energy.

You're monitoring tone, timing people's reactions, their actual reaction, their perceived reaction, the reaction after the reaction that they're having right now. You're thinking three steps ahead to write, I've said this, they might say that, then or say this, or we'll do this, and then after that, that might happen, and that might happen. "If that happens, then I'm going to do this."

Adjusting, softening, juggling, preparing, managing. Any of this sound familiar? This is why women are so tired and they can't point to why. And it's not necessarily workload or what they're being asked to do, it's the hyper-vigilance that comes with everything that is the primary cause of their stress. And that vigilance isn't just at a conscious, rational level. Well, it makes sense for my job to work out who's going to reply first.

So, therefore, "Which order do I send out my requests in?" It's at a deep nervous system level. It's wired in. Your body will react faster to a perceived sigh or glance of anger than your conscious mind ever can. This wiring is completely involuntary. This wiring is completely involuntary. You can't stop it happening. It happens before you're even aware of it because it's so deep within. And it stays hidden because, on the surface, these decisions make sense. They're rational, they're responsible, they're caring.

You get me a lawyer who doesn't say, "Jo, of course it makes sense to plan ahead." Of course it makes sense to get as much information as you can. That's how I make the best decision. They feel like good judgment and the right thing to do. And that works for a long time. Until it doesn't.

But then these avoidance patterns we have are so hardwired that it feels impossible to ever consider another way to be. Another reason discomfort is so hard to change is how many behavioral patterns that lie on top of it. If boundaries feel uncomfortable to you, it's probably because someone else might react to them.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable because there's nothing to grip. What can you hold on to? What can you plan? Perfectionism reduces the risk of criticism, of making mistakes, or getting in trouble. People pleasing reduces the risk of disappointment or of conflict or of other people not liking you and being upset with you.

These aren't separate issues, separate behavioral patterns, but underneath it is the same organizing principle. Let me avoid the feeling before it arrives. This is why when you try to fix these patterns on the surface with different strategies, it never lasts because you've not dealt with the underlying issue ruling them all.

The biggest myth we've been told in our lives is that the avoidance of discomfort is going to keep us safe. Now it did once, it kept you in your parents' good books by listening to them and following their instructions. Because when you didn't listen to mom say go clean your teeth, she yelled at you, and that made you feel scared.

You avoided your teacher's wrath by making sure that you wrote neatly and did your homework on time. So by following these rules that we've set for ourselves, we feel like it keeps us safe. But all it is is the avoidance of exposure, risk, fallout. We can control things.

"Well, I can control how I do my homework." "I can control how neat it is." "I can control how organized I am." But over time, this safety that we have created gets confused with comfort. And so now our system goes, "Whoa, okay!" "So I'm comfortable, therefore I'm safe." "All right." "So if I'm ever now uncomfortable, alert, alert, alert, that is not safe." "That is not safe." It sees it as dangerous instead of something that's simply a temporary moment or an emotion that will pass and that we will survive.

So it completely overcorrects and expends huge amounts of energy avoiding any form of discomfort. Because any form of discomfort, someone saying no to you, your brain will go, oh, "I told them I can't do the thing." "Oh my God, they're not gonna like me." "And if they're not gonna like me, they're gonna tell everyone else that I'm a horrible person." "I'm not gonna have any friends, then I'm gonna be kicked out of my town, and then I'm gonna be all alone." "My family's going to leave me." "I'm not gonna have any money, I'm gonna live on the streets, and I'm gonna die."

Dramatic, yes. However, this is the dominoes that our brain has embedded within it. And so, of course, it goes to if I say "No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna die." "So, what are we gonna do in that situation?" "Of course, we're gonna say yes again and again and again."

But this irony is that the avoidance doesn't actually remove the discomfort. It might remove it from the moment that you say no, but it stretches it out and it embeds it into daily life, into thousands of small automatic decisions that you have no idea are carrying so much emotional weight.

"Should I buy mangoes today?" Should be a "Do I need mangoes?" "Do I want mangoes?" decision? But when you are carrying this discomfort, it's "Oh, if I don't buy mangoes, then this person's gonna be upset with me, and then this is gonna happen, and then this is gonna happen, and then oh my god, I better buy mangoes because -"

And so an innocuous thing is heavy, it's dense, and there's so much cycling going on in your brain because you're worried about the reaction of someone if you come home and you haven't bought mangoes. So these strategies that we have are effective for a time.

But once again, they stop working. Our perfectionism, which we learn as a kid, becomes insurance against getting it wrong. If I make everything great, everything perfect, then I won't get in trouble. Our procrastination is protection from irreversible decisions, even though there are very, very few irreversible decisions in life, but our intolerance of discomfort makes everything feel like a life or death decision.

Our over-responsibility kicks in and then becomes a way to manage other people's emotions. We over-prepare to avoid being caught out or like we don't know enough.

None of these behavioral strategies that women have mastered, speaking here, yours truly included, none of these are conscious choices. They are fast, intelligent adaptations that have been driven by our nervous system.

We don't have a choice, but they quietly take over our decision making and how we're living everyday life. One of the biggest reasons this is coming to the surface right now is the level of uncertainty we're living in. Uncertainty is ordinarily paralyzing for humans. But when you have this deep underlying pattern of avoidance of discomfort, it's completely destabilizing.

Most women don't like to move unless they have some level of confidence or clarity or certainty. "It's this." "Let me make sure I make the right decision because the discomfort of consequences of making a wrong one feel very challenging."

And having 90% certainty or 95% certainty or 98% certainty, which is what a lawyer said to me, is how she'll make decisions, feels responsible. Mitigate risk, control what you know, avoid making a mistake, do the right thing by the company or your client. But this comes at a cost. More time, more energy. Plan A, B, C, D, more reassurance required. Decisions get delayed. There's a cost to that.

Not making a decision is a decision. Or they're diluted because by the time you make it, more information has come to light. So of course then you're gonna feel like you have to continuously remake it. It can feel sensible, but it's just another mask that we wear.

And we wonder why, even though we're crazy busy and frantic, we don't feel like we're getting the same momentum that we're used to because we're literally carrying this massive weight and all of this stuff with us in everything that we do.

What we're seeing now is with the level of uncertainty, learning to tolerate discomfort in your mind and your nervous system is a skill women of influence must master. This isn't about you need more fake it to you, make it confidence, or you need a bit more fearlessness, or have some reckless courage.

It's tolerance. It's tolerance of being unsure, tolerance of being misunderstood, tolerance of saying no to someone and let them sit with their disappointment without you having to fix it. Know that whatever the world throws at them, they'll be okay and you'll be okay.

These women are learning to change their source of safety from outside themselves to others, to schedules, to calendars, to perfect things, to within. A brilliant example of building this tolerance for ambiguity, for discomfort comes from Barack Obama, who is on record in saying he only had 51% certainty that Osama bin Laden was in the complex when they ordered the raid to capture him.

But he said, "That's all I needed." He knew that he'd be able to tolerate the consequences of whatever happened on the other side of that. Too many women are waiting for more information, waiting to think it over, want to work through plans A, B, C, and D. Huge amounts of wasted effort and energy just to avoid the discomfort of made the wrong decision.

Okay. If I have enough internal safety and my nervous system can handle that, I've still got access to my prefrontal cortex now to go, okay, I made the wrong decision. Not, "Oh my God, the world is ending." "I'm not safe." "I'm gonna die." "I've made the wrong decision." "What do I know now?" "What's the new decision I need to make?" "What are the consequences of that?" "What do I need to say or do?" "Okay, I can now put that into place, and the world is not going to end."

When discomfort stops being something to prevent, boundaries get simpler, decisions become cleaner, energy returns without changing anything else in your life. Not because life is easier and you suddenly become Pollyanna with rainbows and unicorns, but because life is no longer organized around this avoidance.

You're not managing, you're not preparing. You've learned to find calm within. And safety is something that you have permanent access to, not something you have to control. This isn't an invitation to push into discomfort or to say you have to harden up and tolerate more than you should.

This is an invitation that's probably making you uncomfortable to notice what's currently running your system. Discomfort will be present either way. The difference is whether it's something you notice and work through or something that's quietly making decisions for you.