When being a hard charger catches up—and how to start digging out
The person sitting across from me is almost always a woman. Not always—but the pattern skews heavily that way, and I think it’s worth naming that up front. She’s typically in her forties, sometimes fifties; she’s been a hard charger her entire life. She’s the one who makes things happen—at work, at home, in every arena she’s stepped into. She’s been flying through things like a spear for decades, and for most of that time, the momentum carried her.
Until it didn’t.
The phrase I hear most often—some version of it in nearly every one of these cases—is: “This has always worked in the past, but for some reason it stopped working this time.” Or: “I’ve always been this way, but these health problems came out of nowhere.”
They didn’t come out of nowhere. They were a slow build-up over years—typically at such a pace that a person would never notice it unless they had the foresight to be tracking trends over a very long period of time. What feels like a sudden collapse is almost always the moment when the accumulated load exceeded the body’s ability to compensate. Everybody has a point at which their physiology doesn’t seem to be able to sustain being a hard charger with no brakes. The body was absorbing the impact for years; it just stopped being able to.
The loop
Here’s what’s actually happening underneath, and once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.
The cycle starts—or more accurately, sustains itself—with undereating. Whether it’s skipping breakfast because mornings are too hectic, running on coffee until 2 PM, or simply not eating enough because life is moving too fast to sit down for a proper meal, the body isn’t getting the signal that it’s safe. When caloric intake stays low—especially protein and fat—cortisol stays elevated. Cortisol is the body’s stress hormone; it mobilizes energy from stored reserves when incoming fuel is insufficient. That’s a survival mechanism, and in short bursts it works exactly as designed.
The problem is that it never turns off.
Cortisol stays elevated because the body perceives chronic scarcity. The stress response stays locked on—not because of a single traumatic event, but because the body is tallying the total load: insufficient food, demanding schedule, emotional weight, financial pressure, relational strain, sleep disruption. The body doesn’t distinguish between sources of stress; it just tallies the total.
With the stress response chronically engaged, digestion gets blunted. Stomach acid production drops. Bile flow slows. Enzyme secretion decreases. Gut motility changes. The digestive system isn’t prioritized in fight-or-flight—the body is directing resources toward survival, not toward breaking down a steak. So even when the person does eat, the nutrients aren’t being absorbed efficiently. The body ends up malnourished even when food is present.
That malnourishment signals more scarcity, which keeps cortisol elevated, which further suppresses digestion, which deepens the malnourishment. The loop tightens.
Layer on the environmental and life stressors—the work demands, the family responsibilities, the emotional weight of being the person everyone leans on—and you’re looking at a compounding effect where physiological stress and psychological stress amplify each other in ways that feel impossible to untangle from the inside.
What it looks like from the outside
The women I see in this pattern—and the men, when it shows up in men—have almost always already started addressing this in the first way they’ve learned, which is through diet. In my space, that means they’ve found keto or carnivore and they’ve made the dietary shift. Sometimes they’re already seeing some improvements; sometimes the dietary change hasn’t moved the needle the way they expected.
The dietary foundation matters—I’m not dismissing it. In many cases it’s the most impactful long-term lever they’ll pull. What I’ve observed, though, is that the biggest first tweak across the private clients and clinic patients I’ve worked with isn’t dietary at all.
It’s finding time every day to take a break.
That probably sounds underwhelming compared to supplement stacks and macronutrient ratios, but I keep coming back to it because I keep seeing it work. So many people in this category are thinking of a thousand things at once, with a ton of things on the back burner, and they’re wondering why it’s hard to get to sleep. They’re wondering why they’re waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. They’re wondering why their digestion is a mess—why most of what they eat is either running through them or causing their stomach to hurt.
The body needs a break at some point to recover and get out of fight-or-flight. A lot of that begins with how a person thinks about things—or more accurately, whether they ever stop thinking about things long enough for the nervous system to recognize that the threat has passed.
The jaw, the shoulders, and the breath
I know this is going to sound like something you’d see framed on a wall in a crunchy mom’s house—and for the record, I love crunchy moms—but this small practice seems to really help people start digging out of the hole:
Unclench your jaw. Drop your shoulders. Stop holding your breath.
Most people carrying chronic stress don’t realize how much physical tension they’re holding until someone points it out. The clenched jaw. The shoulders pulled up toward the ears. The shallow, restricted breathing pattern that keeps the nervous system in a low-grade state of alertness all day long. These aren’t just symptoms of stress; they’re perpetuators of it. The body reads its own physical state and interprets tension as confirmation that the threat is still present.
Releasing that tension—even for a few minutes, multiple times throughout the day—starts to create small windows where the nervous system can shift out of sympathetic dominance and into a parasympathetic state. Rest-and-digest, as it’s sometimes called. The name is literal; the digestive system functions better when the body isn’t in fight-or-flight.
This is a gateway. It’s not the whole solution; it’s the first crack in the wall. From here, people tend to snowball into other practices that help them continue digging out—breathwork, time in nature, gratitude practices, journaling—whatever resonates with them personally. The jaw-shoulders-breath check is just the entry point because it requires zero equipment, zero time commitment, and zero expertise. You can do it right now while reading this.
The oil change analogy
Being in chronic fight-or-flight makes me think of never getting an oil change and continuing to run that engine after the oil is either dirty or completely out. The engine will keep running for a while—maybe a long while if it’s a good engine. The damage is happening the entire time; you just don’t see it until something seizes.
The human body is more resilient than any engine, which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it can absorb an extraordinary amount of punishment before it breaks down. The curse is that the resilience masks the damage long enough for it to become deeply entrenched. By the time symptoms show up in a way that can’t be ignored, the stress loop has been running for years.
The oil change equivalent isn’t a pill or a supplement. It’s rest. It’s nourishment. It’s reducing inputs long enough for the system to recognize that it’s not under attack.
Nourishment as a safety signal
Eating—specifically eating protein and fat in the morning—sends a signal to the body that the famine is over. It sounds simplistic, but the hormonal cascade that follows a protein-rich morning meal is significant: cortisol begins to follow its natural curve (high in the morning, declining through the day) rather than staying flat and elevated. Blood sugar stabilizes. The body starts to shift out of resource-conservation mode.
For people who’ve been skipping breakfast or running on coffee for years, this can feel counterintuitive—even uncomfortable. They’re not hungry in the morning, they say. Their stomach is queasy. They can’t face food before 10 AM.
That’s the stress loop talking. Morning appetite suppression is a hallmark of chronically elevated cortisol. The cortisol is doing the job of mobilizing stored energy, which suppresses the hunger signals that would normally prompt a meal. Breaking through that suppression by eating anyway—even something small—starts to retrain the system.
When digestion is too blunted from chronic stress to handle normal meals, MCT oil can serve as a bridge. MCT oil is absorbed directly through the portal vein to the liver, requiring significantly less digestive capacity than long-chain fats—far less bile, minimal enzymatic processing, and no gallbladder contraction in the traditional sense. It provides energy and signals caloric adequacy to the body while the digestive system gradually recovers enough to handle whole food fats. Start small—a teaspoon in coffee or broth—and increase as tolerance allows, using it as a bridge while gradually tapering up dietary fat to encourage the stomach and gallbladder to start working again.
The downstream cascade
If the stress loop runs long enough without intervention, the effects extend well beyond digestion and energy.
Impaired digestion leads to impaired detoxification—the liver can’t do its job effectively when the raw materials it needs aren’t being absorbed. Hormone clearance slows, which can contribute to estrogen dominance, progesterone insufficiency, and the hormonal imbalances that amplify what women are already experiencing during perimenopause and menopause. Thyroid function gets caught in the crossfire; the body downregulates metabolic rate as a protective measure when it perceives sustained scarcity, which can show up as low T3 on labs even when the thyroid gland itself is functioning normally.
Sleep architecture deteriorates—not just because of cortisol dysregulation, but because gut health directly influences the availability of tryptophan, the amino acid the brain uses to produce serotonin and ultimately melatonin. The gut produces roughly 90% of the body’s total serotonin, but that peripheral serotonin doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier; the brain has to make its own from available tryptophan. When gut health is compromised by chronic stress—through dysbiosis, inflammation, or impaired absorption—the gut microbiota can divert tryptophan away from the brain’s serotonin-melatonin pathway, and vagus nerve signaling between the gut and brain is disrupted. The result is the same: sleep suffers. The mechanism is just more indirect than most people realize.
Immune function weakens. Nutrient deficiencies accumulate. The physiological stress compounds the mental and emotional stress, and vice versa—the body can’t distinguish between them; it just tallies the total load. The snowball grows.
When digestion is this blunted, targeted digestive support supplements—ox bile for fat digestion, betaine HCl for protein breakdown, TUDCA for bile flow—can serve as a bridge while the stress response settles and the digestive system comes back online. I’ve written about the full digestive support stack and how to prioritize it separately; the short version is that you don’t need to do all of them, and starting with even one or two of the highest-impact options can meaningfully improve nutrient absorption during the recovery period.
This sounds overwhelming when it’s laid out like this, and I want to be honest about that—it is a lot. The stress loop is expansive and it worsens the longer someone stays in it. What I also want to be clear about is that there are entry points for breaking out of it at every stage. Not all of them need to be addressed simultaneously. The body responds to even one meaningful change, and that change creates space for the next one.
The 5-mile-per-hour principle
Sometimes digging out of the stress pit starts with one tangible change. Taking a little bit of time without your phone to sit outside and reduce inputs. Going for a walk with no destination and no podcast. As some people say, we solve problems, work through emotions, and organize our thoughts at 5 miles per hour.
I’ve watched people underestimate the power of this over and over—and then come back and tell me it was the first thing that made a real difference. Not the supplement stack. Not the macro adjustment. Walking, without stimulation, for twenty or thirty minutes.
The phone part matters. The modern human brain is processing more inputs per hour than any generation before it, and most of those inputs are things the nervous system interprets as demands requiring a response—notifications, headlines, social comparison, information that needs filing. Removing that input stream, even briefly, gives the brain something it almost never gets: silence.
Alternating practices like these with dietary and lifestyle implementations over time is how I’ve seen the most sustainable progress. One change at a time, compounding. Not a complete life overhaul on Monday morning—that approach tends to become just another source of stress.
Holding space
I’ll also say this, because I think it matters more than most people realize: as a coach, just holding space for somebody who hasn’t been listened to goes a long way.
One level deeper is holding space for somebody who’s never had that done for them. Many of the people in this pattern—the hard chargers, the ones who make everything happen for everyone around them—have spent years being the person others lean on without having anyone to lean on themselves. The idea that someone would sit with them, listen without an agenda, and take the time to understand what they’re carrying is genuinely novel for some of them.
One more level deeper still: being somebody who holds that space and understands keto or carnivore for a person who has no one around them to talk to about this type of stuff. Metabolic health, in general, is still niche enough that many people pursuing these dietary approaches are doing it in relative isolation—their family doesn’t get it, their friends think it’s extreme, and their doctor has concerns. Having even one person in their corner who speaks the language and validates their experience changes the equation.
This isn’t a supplement or a protocol. It’s the relational foundation that everything else gets built on, and I think it’s the most underrated component of the whole process.
Where to start
If you see yourself in any of this, here’s what I’d offer as a starting point—not a comprehensive plan, because that requires knowing your specific situation, but a direction:
Eat in the morning. Protein and fat. Even if you’re not hungry; start small and build. This is a signal to your body that the famine is over.
Check in with your jaw, shoulders, and breath multiple times a day. Set a reminder on your phone if you need to—the irony of using the phone to remind you to put the phone down is not lost on me.
Find one daily window—fifteen minutes, twenty, whatever you can carve out—where inputs are reduced. No phone, no tasks, no problem-solving. Walk, sit, breathe. Let the nervous system register that there’s nothing to flee from right now.
From there, the dietary and lifestyle refinements can be layered in as the stress response begins to settle. Macronutrient ratios within your keto or carnivore framework. Targeted digestive support if absorption is compromised. Sleep optimization. Supplementation where specific deficiencies exist.
The order matters less than the starting. The body is remarkably responsive once it gets the message—through action, not just intention—that the emergency is over.
I hope this connects some dots for someone who’s been stuck in this cycle without understanding why nothing seems to be working. The answer isn’t always more discipline or a stricter protocol; sometimes it’s permission to stop, eat, and breathe.
Rance Edwards is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) with over 2,000 clinical hours of experience, specializing in chronic disease management and lifestyle medicine.
If you’ve been the hard charger who hit the wall—and you’re ready to start unwinding the stress loop with someone who gets both the dietary framework and the bigger picture—I’d love to connect. Book a free discovery call—no pressure, just an honest conversation about where you are and what the next step might look like.