“escape the ordinary“ is a weekly-ish newsletter - crafted by real human hands aka me (@Elena Kochler) with intention, heart, and a little dash of imperfection. Especially in times of AI, this newsletter is a creative, human craft - and often a summary of my thoughts. If something resonates, feel free to share it or pass it along to someone you care about. Thank you for reading, reflecting, sharing, subscribing, and simply being here. It truly means something.

Happy Sunday and hi from Brazil 🇧🇷👋🏼

I just hung up the phone with a close friend who is slowly suffocating in his career.

He’s the head of data privacy and internal compliance at a major firm. His job, by definition, is to protect the organization’s integrity. But for months, the commercial director has been running roughshod over him: Bulldozing boundaries, bending rules, and treating compliance like an annoying suggestion. My friend has a knot in his stomach every morning before he opens his laptop.

Tomorrow, he has to sit down with his boss. So, naturally, we spent forty-five minutes plotting like chess grandmasters:

• Strategy A: The Soft Appeal. “I’ve just been feeling really burnt out and unhappy lately…”

• Strategy B: The Socratic Trap. “What do you think this role should ideally look like?” (Feigning curiosity when you already know the answer).

• Strategy C: The Legal Fortress. Citing paragraph 4, subsection B, waving hard data, and boxing them into a logical corner.

We build these elaborate battle plans all the time, don’t we?

Whether we’re preparing to confront a boss, negotiating an exit package, or bracing to tell a partner that something is broken, our instinct is always the same: we try to control the reaction. We filter the raw truth through politeness, corporate jargon, or tactical diplomacy, convincing ourselves we’re being “strategic.”

In reality, we’re terrified. We use strategy as armor because we don’t want to feel the sting of someone else’s discomfort or worse, their rejection.

But human beings aren’t chess pieces. The moment you start strategizing a conversation to manipulate the outcome, you guarantee one thing: dishonesty.

In their book Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans talk about “Gravity Problems.” A gravity problem is an immovable reality. You can curse gravity all day, you can build elaborate schemes to outsmart it, but if you jump off a cliff, you will hit the ground. It isn’t a problem you can solve, it’s just a condition you have to accept.

How another human being reacts to the truth is gravity.

You cannot script their reaction. You cannot manage their ego. You cannot guarantee they won’t get angry, defensive, or dismissive. When we spend days agonizing over “how to say it so they don’t get upset,” we are trying to solve gravity. It keeps us stuck, anxious, and deeply compromised.

A few months ago, I watched another close friend hit this exact wall.

On paper, she is unstoppable: One of the youngest Senior Vice Presidents in her corporate industry, holding multiple board seats, wildly accomplished. In reality? She was feeling diminished, deeply unhappy, and ready to negotiate a fair exit package.

For three days, she analyzed her departure like a military operation. She drafted talking points, calculated leverage, rehearsed hypothetical rebuttals, and agonized over how to ask for the compensation she knew she deserved without “looking greedy” or “burning bridges.”

She was trying to solve gravity.

How her CEO responded to her boundary was out of her control. How the board felt about her leaving was out of her control. The breakthrough came when she stopped auditioning lines to protect their feelings and simply put reality on the table:

“I’ve given everything to this organization, but this chapter is closed. Here is what I’ve contributed, here is the number that honors that work, and here is how we make this clean for both of us.”

No games. No guilt. No over-explaining. When you strip away the tactical armor and speak plain reality, you take away their ammunition to argue.

The only thing inside your control is what you bring to the table: your integrity, your boundary, and the truth.

Earlier this year, I had to take my own medicine.

I hired a business coach to help me prepare documents for several funding applications. It was a serious financial investment for me, and he had come warmly recommended by someone I respect.

During our first two Zoom calls, something was off. He’d pause mid-sentence, his eyes drifting to another screen. I could hear keyboard clicks while I was speaking. Twice, I had to repeat basic questions because he simply wasn’t there.

At first, I doubted myself. Then, I got angry. I was paying good money for half-attention.

Immediately, the little strategist in my head went to work. I talked to my friends: “Maybe I should just tell him my timeline changed. Maybe I’ll say an unexpected expense came up and I have to pause the funding round. I’ll make a polite exit so nobody feels bad.”

Then I caught myself. Why lie to avoid thirty seconds of tension?

I picked up the phone, dialed his number, and didn’t dress it up:

“Hey. I noticed on our calls that your attention seems pulled in three different directions. I don’t feel like I have your presence, and given what I’m paying, that doesn’t work for me.”

A long, heavy silence sat on the line. My chest tightened.

Then, a deep sigh.

“Thank you for just telling me the truth,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “Five clients cancelled on me this week, and they all made up polite excuses about their budgets changing. The truth is, I have three lawsuits pending, my wife is critically ill, and my head is nowhere near this room. I should have told you.”

I took a breath. “We’re human,” I told him. “If your world is burning down, you don’t have to fake it for me. Just tell me. If you’d given me the choice, I would have gladly rescheduled until you had room to breathe.”

We reset the clock. We started fresh. And that engagement turned into one of the most transformative, high-trust professional relationships I’ve ever had.

If I had used a “polite strategy,” we both would have lost.

Speaking raw truth without armor requires three things most of us were never taught:

1. A commitment to your own integrity over someone else’s comfort. If you are loyal to the company, people like you. If you are loyal to yourself, people respect you.

2. The nervous system to hold tension. Honesty creates a pocket of silence. Let it hang there. You don’t need to rush in and fill it with apologies.

3. The courage to drop the script. Stop auditioning lines in your head. Say the real thing.

There is an incredible, almost physical lightness that happens when you stop managing optics and just say what is true. You drop an enormous amount of emotional deadweight. The anxiety you feel before a hard conversation isn’t the truth itself; it’s the exhaustion of trying to manage the unmanageable.

Stop running simulations. Stop playing chess. Give people the dignity of reality, and give yourself the dignity of being real.

Which conversation are you currently strategizing in your head that actually just needs your honesty?

Take a breath. Say what’s true. I’m rooting for you.

Sending you so much sunshine to your heart 💛,
Elena

⚡ Links of the Week

• 📖 What I’m Reading: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. The book where the idea of “Gravity Problems” comes from. If you’re feeling stuck in your career, relationships, or daily routine, this reframes problem-solving entirely. Stop trying to outsmart gravity; solve what’s actually solvable.

• 🌊 Where I’m Recharging: Windtown Beach Hotel (Cumbuco, Brazil). My absolute go-to getaway to kitesurf, get deep work done, and reset. This is my first time here, and definitely not my last. If you’re coming from Europe, it’s ridiculously easy to reach: Fly direct into Fortaleza via Lisbon, Madrid, or Paris, and you’re on the water in under an hour.

• 🎨 What I’m Learning: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creativity Workshop. A completely free course on Acumen Academy by the woman who wrote Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love. If you’ve been wanting to design a creative life that feels joyful rather than pressured, give yourself an hour with this.

• 💻 What I Built: elenakochler.com. I completely vibe-coded my brand-new website! Take a spin through the new home for my work, projects, and thoughts—I’d love to know what you think.

• 🎧 Free Audio Guide (auf Deutsch): Der Job-Unhappiness-Navigator. Warum sitzen wir beruflich so oft in der Sackgasse fest, obwohl wir im Kopf schon zehn Strategien durchgespielt haben? Ich habe einen kurzen Audioguide aufgenommen, der dir hilft, die typischen Muster hinter beruflicher Unzufriedenheit zu durchschauen und echte Klarheit zu finden.

Work With Me

If you or your team are ready to cut the noise and have the conversations that actually move the needle:

• Keynote Speaker: On radical honesty, leadership clarity, and courage.

• Executive Advisor & Mentor: Partnering with leaders, founders, and executives navigating high-stakes transitions.

• 1:1 Coaching: Moving you from endless mental strategizing into grounded action.

👉 Let’s build together: Explore speaking, advisory, and coaching at elenakochler.com or reach out directly to start a conversation.

It felt productive. I could respond to a few people, clear out notifications, knock out some easy tasks, maybe check Slack… and suddenly two hours had passed.

Then I’d try to do my hardest, most intensive work later in the day.

Which, unfortunately, led to me working through any problems after multiple back-to-back meetings or making decisions at 4:30 pm when my brain was fried. (Not exactly setting myself up for success here!)

The problem wasn’t necessarily what I was doing. It was when I was doing it.

For a long time, I tried to force myself into rigid productivity frameworks that completely ignored our natural biology. This is especially true for us as women. So much conventional advice expects us to operate on a relentless, flatline schedule, ignoring the natural biological rhythms and energy fluctuations we experience. When I finally understood how to stay closer to my biology and work with it instead of against it, everything changed.

This shift is largely thanks to my friend Dr. Christian Poensgen. His coaching has made a significant impact on my life, which is why I am so thrilled to share Ultraproductive, a new book he co-authored with Eric Partaker.

Basically, we all have certain hours when our brains are naturally sharper. There are three general chronotypes Eric and Christian describe in the book:

• Larks: You’re naturally an early riser and do your best thinking first thing in the morning.

• Third Birds: Most common. You need a little time to get going, then hit your stride a few hours after waking up — usually around mid-morning.

• Owls: Your energy builds throughout the day, and your best thinking often happens in the late afternoon or evening.

I instantly recognized myself as Third Bird and began to reorganize my day. Now I prioritize around my energy, instead of my to-do list.

If I need to write, strategize, solve a complicated problem or work on something I’ve been avoiding, I try to do it during my peak window.

Email, expenses, scheduling and other admin work gets pushed to the hours when I know my energy drops.

I still have meetings I can’t move and days when my calendar isn’t ideal. But even knowing which hours I should be more protective of has changed the way I schedule my week.

This graphic from the book gives you a quick way to figure out your chronotype:

Ask yourself:

• When would you naturally wake up without an alarm?

• When do you notice yourself doing your sharpest thinking?

• When does your energy usually crash?

Your answers will give you a pretty good clue about whether you’re a Lark, Third Bird or Owl.

Once you know, I’d try one thing: Look at tomorrow’s calendar and see what you’ve scheduled during your peak window.

Is it work that requires your best thinking? Or are you spending that time answering emails, sitting in meetings you could move, and taking care of things you could just as easily do when your energy dips?

Since joining the coaching and reading Ultraproductive, I’ve gotten much more protective of my best hours and have become… no surprise here… more productive :)

If getting more of your important work done is one of your goals this year, I highly recommend grabbing a copy.

I have a feeling you’ll start looking at your calendar a little differently.

Sending you a lot of sunshine to your heart 🧡
Elena

P.S. This is one of the 9 cheat sheets that come free with Ultraproductive. Order the book and all 9 are yours today. The first 10,000 people who order the book also get a free seat in Eric and Christian’s live Accelerator program (regular price $993). Secure yours here.

I’m writing this from under a duvet with a cold and a pot of ginger tea.

And I have to say, I’m oddly grateful. I cannot remember the last time I was properly sick. It’s been ages. My body has carried me through a year of building a business, a lot of travel, four CrossFit sessions a week, a thirtieth birthday at home and in Venice last week. It has done all of that without complaining once. So when it finally said “okay, we’re stopping now,” I decided not to argue.

And the timing is almost suspiciously good, because this week is the autumn equinox. The exact moment when the year tips over. And my body chose that week to make me stop.

I’ve been lying here thinking about transitions ever since.

The day the year tips over

Twice a year, the sun crosses the celestial equator and day and night come out roughly equal, everywhere on the planet at once. In spring it tips us toward the light. In September it tips us toward the dark.

Astrologically, this is the moment the sun moves into Libra, the sign of the scales. Balance. Weighing things up. I’m not going to tell you Mercury is doing something to your inbox, that’s not really my department. But I do love the symbolism.

Almost every culture that lived close to the land had something for this moment. Harvest festivals. Erntedank here in Germany, where villages still carry pumpkins and wheat into church. The Moon Festival in China, around the same full moon. Different names, the same instinct: stop, look at what grew this year, give thanks for it, and get ready for the part of the year that turns inward.

Then look at what most of us actually do in the last week of September.

We come back from summer and go straight into Q4. The “final push.” Year end targets. The busiest ten weeks of the calendar, stacked exactly on top of the part of the year when the light is leaving and every living thing outside is slowing down, pulling its energy back in, letting leaves drop.

We have heated offices and strawberries in January and the same meeting schedule in December as in June. We have engineered the seasons out of our lives almost entirely. Nature still runs its transitions. We just stopped attending them.

And it isn’t only the seasons. We’re getting further away from being animals in general. AI writes the emails. Appetite gets switched off with an injection. Faces on a feed have converged into one face, and half of them aren’t real faces. Everything is trending toward a version of a human who is smooth, consistent, available at all hours, and has no seasons at all.

I don’t think we were built for that. And I think women feel it first.

Why I think women feel it first

Here’s the part I really want to get across, so I’ll say it as plainly as I can.

A woman doesn’t only live through four seasons a year. She lives through four seasons every month.

That’s what the menstrual cycle is. Not a few days of bleeding with a long stretch of nothing in between. A full rotation, roughly four weeks long, with four distinct phases, each with its own weather. And once I learned to see it that way, it made more sense than anything I’d been taught at school.

Inner winter is your period. Hormones are at their lowest point of the month, and so, often, is your energy. It’s the most inward phase. More sensitive, more vulnerable, more open. Traditional Chinese medicine describes it as the time when all energies rest to prepare for the next cycle, which is one of the kindest descriptions of a period I’ve ever read. Winter isn’t failure. It’s where the next thing gets prepared.

Inner spring comes after. Estrogen starts to rise and with it, for many women, energy, curiosity and appetite for the new. It’s the planning phase. The “let’s do this” phase. Ideas come more easily. You want to go out.

Inner summer is ovulation. The peak. The most outward, most social, most visible few days of the month. This is the phase where it feels easy to speak up, to be seen, to show your work.

Inner autumn is the second half of the cycle, the longest phase. Progesterone takes over. You turn inward again. You get more reflective, more detail focused, and often more honest, because the tolerance for things that aren’t working drops sharply. What many women also notice is a real need for safety, for home, for support. For not being around people who drain you.

Then back to winter. And round again.

Now picture living in that body inside a world that expects the same output every single week. Same energy, same sociability, same capacity, twelve months a year, four weeks a month.

That’s the world almost all of us were raised in. And most of us drew the obvious conclusion: something was wrong with us.

How I learned this, which was not gracefully

I found my way into all of this through pain. My periods hurt for years, and when I mentioned it, I was told that this is normal. Which it is, in the sense that a lot of women go through it. It is oddly normalised.

I’m grateful I was curious enough not to accept that answer. You should not have to suffer in order to be a woman. I really believe that. We’ve made “it hurts, that’s just how it is” an acceptable answer for half the population, and I don’t accept it.

(And to be clear, because this matters more than my opinion: if your periods are severe enough to shape your life, push on it with a doctor who takes you seriously, and push again if the first one doesn’t. There are real conditions behind a lot of “that’s normal,” and they’re notorious for taking years to be named.)

Three years ago I found a woman who teaches hormone cycle awareness, and I joined her three-month training. It was one of the most eye-opening things I’ve ever learned, because it taught me my inner seasons. Not only how we move through them every month, but how we move through them across a whole life: from being a teenager, through the fertile years, and eventually out of fertility into perimenopause and menopause.

What changed for me since then is that I slowly stopped overriding my body and started listening to it. There’s an idea in Chinese medicine that I find very beautiful, and I’ll share it as a tradition rather than a fact. It describes a vessel that connects the heart directly to the womb. What moves the heart moves the cycle. Grief, worry, fear, pressure: all of it is said to travel down that line.

I don’t need that to be anatomically literal for it to be true in my life. Because when I finally stopped separating my emotional life from my body, a lot of things got easier. My cycle stopped being a monthly ambush and started being information. Honest, reliable information about how I was actually doing.

That shift, from overriding to listening, has done more for my health than anything else I’ve ever changed. And it’s what led me to the work I do now with the nervous system. My cycle was my first teacher in how much the body knows before the mind catches up. The nervous system was the second.

Back under the duvet

So here I am, sick in the week the year tips over, and I think my body might be making a point.

There’s a transition happening outside. The light is leaving, the leaves are about to go, and every other living thing on this planet is slowing down on cue. The only species trying to speed up for the end of the year is us.

The equinox is a good moment to ask a simple question. Not how productive you’ve been. What season are you actually in? Out there, and in here.

If you’re a woman, you can ask it twice. Which season is it outside, and which one is it inside? They won’t always match. Sometimes you’ll be in inner summer in the middle of November. Sometimes you’ll be in deep inner winter on a gorgeous June day and wonder why the whole world is at a barbecue without you.

Neither one is wrong. Both are just weather.

And if what you find brings up questions, or you’re trying to work out why your system pulls the handbrake in the same week every month, you know where to find me.

For now, I’m going back to my tea, to let my body do what it apparently knew how to do all along.

Sending you all the sunshine to your hearts 💛
Elena

I turned 30 yesterday.

I always get a bit melancholy around my birthday. It arrives about two days before, sits in the corner of the room, and mostly says things like “so, are we doing this then.” It turns into gratitude by the evening.

Here’s what 20 year old Elena would not have believed.

I changed careers completely. I outgrew several versions of myself, some of them quite reluctantly. I crossed an ocean, literally, on a boat, for six months, having quit a well paid job with no plan B. I stopped being scared of building deep relationships. I went after the things my heart actually wanted, which is a cheesy sentence and I’m leaving it in.

I’m not married. I don’t own a house. I do not, at this precise moment, have a fixed apartment.

By the standards 20 year old me had written down somewhere, this is a fairly comprehensive failure. 😂

But I built my life around nature and adventure, around freedom, around friendships and family and the stubborn desire to change something real in this world. And I’m proud of that in a way that surprises me, because it was never the plan.

I’m basically living my old vision board. Not the parts I thought mattered. The parts I drew in because they made me feel something.

There’s plenty I’m still figuring out and plenty I still struggle with. Underneath all of it there’s this deep gratitude for the path I chose, or possibly the path that chose me, for the woman I’m becoming, and for the people I get to drag along with me.

My motto for the next era: Ridiculously Unrealistic

I spent one phase of my life trying to be realistic. It was the most uninspiring and, funnily enough, the most difficult stretch I’ve had. Realistic looked responsible from the outside and felt like slowly running out of air.

So: dream stupidly big. Be a rebel. Go against the current occasionally, because that’s where the roads nobody has mapped tend to be.

And now, for anyone who wants them, the 30 things I’ve actually learned. Are you ready?

30 lessons from 30 years of Elena

1. The person you want to be is mostly decided by what you do every day. Not by what you intend. By the boring repeated thing.

2. It’s okay to feel lost. (often) It means you are brave enough to figure it out. Keep going anyway. There’s always light coming. I promise.

3. Learning to trust my nervous system meant learning to trust what’s actually mine. My body knew things about certain rooms and certain people long before my brain agreed. Learning to trust my body is still my biggest quest. Thank god there’s the breath. Which leads me to:

4. Your breath will lead the way. Literally. It’s the one part of your autonomic nervous system you can also drive on purpose, which makes it the nearest thing we have to a remote control for our nervous system.

5. You can never travel too much. Especially if you grew up in Germany, a country that is objectively very comfortable and has still somehow made pessimism a national sport. We complain about the trains with a devotion other cultures reserve for religion. Travelling is what cured that for me. You can’t really see the thing you’re standing in until you’ve stood somewhere else. I carry a passport that opens doors most people on this planet will never have opened for them, and I did nothing to earn it except be born where I was born. Knowing that has made me a much less impressive complainer and a considerably happier person. It also taught me how absurdly beautiful this world is, and that protecting nature isn’t a favour we’re doing it. We’re inside the system, not visiting. Protect it and you’re protecting yourself.

6. Everything can co-exist at the same time. Emotions included. You can be devastated and excited in the same moment and neither one is lying. You can feel it all. And life becomes freeing when we do.

7. The goal isn’t to feel calm and at peace. It’s to feel everything and be okay with that. Calm as a permanent state isn’t a regulated nervous system. Feeling everything and being okay with it is.

8. Sometimes you have to disappoint other people in order not to disappoint yourself. I’d correct “sometimes” to “many times.” And that’s okay.

9. You have an obligation to make yourself happy in this world, too. Yes, too. Alongside everyone else you’re busy looking after. You matter.

10. Try being unrealistic. See above. I ran the experiment in both directions and I have data. And good stories.

11. Lufthansa business class is worth the money. Sometimes you treat yourself and there’s no deeper lesson attached. Also, it’s good to have friends who work for airlines.

12. Celebrate life. Birthdays, small things, ridiculous things. Invest in the right people. Take celebrations seriously, because they’re one of the few occasions where the entire agenda is that someone exists and people are glad about it.

13. Weight train. The gym isn’t boring, that’s just a convenient excuse. Getting strong changes your confidence and the amount of trust you have in your own body, and those two things leak into everything else. I never thought becoming lean and the fittest I’ve ever been was in it for me. Turns out that was just another story I was telling myself. Isn’t it great to bust our own limitations?

14. Let yourself be a beginner. Go step by step. Most of the frustration I’ve had came from skipping steps I thought I was too advanced for. (Let’s take the gym again. You can never stop learning about squatting. Or the business: I skipped the foundation of getting clear on my positioning and it cost me a lot.) DON’T SKIP THE FOUNDATIONS!

15. Trust that life is for you. Even in hard times. Especially then. I have this strong belief that every rejection is redirection, and it makes life so much more joyful and brings ease.

16. Get in the ocean as much as you can. Float. And if you can, kitesurf. You’ll truly learn how to fly. There’s (almost) nothing that makes me feel more connected to the elements than this sport.

17. Nature is your biggest guide and healer. Stay away too long and you’ll get disconnected and eventually unwell. I’ve tested this thoroughly (aka city life).

18. Your environment shapes how you feel and who you become. Choose it on purpose. Pick the place that brings out the version of you that you like. And leave places (fast) that make you question your worth. Environments matter so much more than we think.

19. You don’t have to do anything to be worthy. You already are. And in the right circles you won’t have to prove it, which is how you can tell they’re the right circles. Who am I again without my title? (Asking for a friend.)

20. Take your nutrition seriously. What you eat and how you eat shows up in your energy every single day. Yes, protein is important. Fibre, too. No, you don’t need that many supplements and powders if you get your basics right. Oh wait, there’s that thing about foundations again.

21. Social media is dangerous for your mental health. Don’t consume it. Use it as a tool for communication and creation, and then close it.

22. Honour the seasons and the weather. Living as though every week should have identical capacity is a fight you’ll lose. Especially as a woman. We’re animals. And believing that the moon moves the earth’s water but somehow doesn’t affect us is an idea only humans could come up with (lol).

23. Ask for help. Go to therapy. You don’t have to do any of it alone. Ask for what you need and it has a strange habit of finding you.

24. Decaf is much kinder to your nerves. A real coffee is a cup of stress. I switched, mostly, and it changed my sleep and digestion more than any supplement I’ve ever tried.

25. Fix your sleep and then guard it like it’s valuable, because it is.

26. The thing you’re most afraid of is usually the thing holding the most freedom. I pushed becoming self-employed ahead of me for a looooooooong time. And safe to say I’m a year into it and it still scares the f*** out of me. I’ve just got better at living with it.

27. If your job makes you miserable and you don’t fit, go and explore. It’s hard. Do it anyway. This isn’t a rehearsal. This is your life. I wish I’d made some moves faster. Life has so much to offer, and if you’re privileged enough to be born in Germany and get the smallest opportunity to actually go for it, DO IT!

28. Be a rebel, speak your heart, always be kind, and lose the good girl script. The good girl script has never once made anyone happy, including the people it’s performed for.

29. Learn to rest. If you’re a multi passionate high performer, or honestly if you’re any other kind of human being. Resting is a skill, and almost nobody teaches it. We teach effort obsessively. We hand out plans, macros, programmes, deadlines and metrics for effort, and then leave people to figure out the other half on their own. The trap is thinking rest is the reward you collect once everything is finished. The list is never finished. Give it a method, a time and a place, the way you’d give any other thing you take seriously. My resting looks like walks in nature, deep talks, yin yoga, reading beautiful books, making music, and cooking with or without a plan. They all have one thing in common: no phone, nothing digital at all, and one single task.

30. Just ask the questions. You don’t need the answers yet. You only have to start asking and stay open enough to be surprised. Life will gift you the answers.

31. Realising I’m over 30 and can do whatever I want, lol. Including putting 31 things on a list of 30. Nobody is coming to stop me. That took three decades to properly land, and it turns out to be the actual gift of this birthday.

Also on the list of things I’m apparently allowed to do: build a business, which has turned out to be the most advanced spiritual practice I’ve come across. More on that in a minute.

One more thing

If I had to compress all of it into one, it would be number 1, because everything else sits downstream of it. The person you become is built out of ordinary days.

Which brings me to an awkward admission about this newsletter.

Escaping the ordinary, except not really

It’s called “escaping the ordinary”. That is a very 20s title and I’m keeping it, partly because I like the energy. But my 30s, so far, look suspiciously like finding joy in the ordinary.

I go to the same CrossFit gym four times a week and I’m excited about seeing the same people there. That’s the whole sentence. Twenty five year old me would have been appalled. She was busy escaping, and she would have wanted to know where the adventure had gone.

I travel more consciously now, which mostly means fewer but loooonger trips, often to the same places. I’m much more careful about who gets my time, and I’ve stopped experiencing that as rudeness.

My 20s had a lot of Marie Antoinette in them. Big, loud, slightly theatrical, quite a lot of cake, a permanent conviction that the interesting thing was the next thing. I don’t regret a single year of it, and it also wasn’t built to last, which the historical record rather supports.

Now I’m calmer on the inside, slowly, in a way I couldn’t have manufactured at 25. No idea what that makes me. There’s still a sailing pirate in here and she isn’t going anywhere. She still loves celebrating vividly, exploring, and running into mud puddles, just with better boots, haha.

Maybe the escape was never from ordinary life. Maybe it was from a life that needed constant escaping.

The most advanced spiritual practice I’ve found is building a business

One more thing about this decade, and it’s the part I did not see coming at all.

I’m not flexing, but I spent a looooot of my 20s in trainings. Hundreds of hours, several certifications, the full shelf. And nothing has put me in contact with my own material the way building a business has.

You can hide behind a certification. Then behind the next one. You can hide behind a silent retreat in Bali, or behind a corporate job with a reliable salary that lets you say you’d do the other thing if only circumstances were different. All of these are extremely comfortable. All of them will show you parts of yourself. I do believe, though, that none of them will show you very much.

Then you put something into the world with your name on it and ask people to pay for it. And every belief you hold about worth, visibility, money and being too much or not enough turns up at once.

My first year self-employed, I said yes to everything. Every job, every collaboration, every half interesting opportunity that appeared in my inbox. Some of that was money. Most of it was that I had no idea who self-employed Elena actually was.

It took me about a year to understand that I could choose. It wasn’t obvious from the inside. Every no felt like a door closing permanently, like I was personally offending the universe’s supply of opportunities. What actually happened is that the work got better, the right people got clearer, and the things I turned down were never mine in the first place. You don’t lose what was never yours.

A business means putting yourself out there, visibly, repeatedly, with your face on it. That’s frightening in a very physical way. Social exposure and physical threat run through a lot of the same circuitry, which is why pressing publish can make your heart rate do something completely disproportionate to the act of tapping a button.

Which is the honest answer to why I can’t stop talking about nervous systems. It isn’t a wellness topic for me. It’s the thing that decides whether you can be seen without falling apart, whether you can hold a price without apologising, whether you can hear a no on Monday and still send the next email on Tuesday. Regulation is infrastructure for doing anything that scares you. Business just happens to be the version of that I’m currently living in.

And somewhere in that year I realised something that surprised me: I didn’t want to do it alone. Which is a strange thing to admit when part of my story is about independence and quitting jobs and crossing oceans by yourself.

One thing I’m truly grateful for is my business partnership and friendship with Nadine (love you!). While we were building our own businesses, we kept running into inner material sitting directly on top of the business problem. There are business coaches and there are mentoring programmes, and almost none of them go anywhere near the inner part. So we built the thing we needed ourselves: working through the real topics of building a business, outside and inside at the same time, as somatic coaches who also know how a business actually works. Because when businesses fail, and especially in self-employment, it’s very rarely a competence problem and very rarely a motivation problem. It’s the inner material that comes up and never gets any room to be resolved.

Nobody in 2026 is ashamed of going to therapy. So why wouldn’t you put your business under the same light? I promise it pays off.

Follow us along here: somapreneur.de

And with that

The question I keep landing on, for myself more than for anybody else:

Am I actually on the stage of my own life, or am I standing at the side, waiting for someone to come along and invite me on?

I ask because I still catch myself waiting. A year into this and I’m still occasionally hovering in the wings, half hoping that somebody official walks over with a clipboard and confirms that I’m allowed to be here.

Nobody is coming with the clipboard. That’s the bad news, and it’s also the entire gift.

So, the honest state of things at 30:

I don’t know if this works out. The business is a year old and it still frightens me most weeks. I don’t fully know who I am without a title to hand people at dinner parties, and I notice the small reach for one every time somebody asks what I do. Learning to trust my own body is still the open question, the one I’m least finished with, and I say that as a woman who now does this for a living. I write about breath partly because it’s the one thing that has never let me down, including on the days I did.

So: here’s to being unfinished.

Here’s to the version of me who reads this in ten years and finds it slightly embarrassing. I hope she does. It’ll mean she kept moving.

And if you’re building something, or trying to work out why your nervous system keeps pulling the handbrake right when it matters, you know where to find me.

Thank you to everybody who sent me a message this week.

Here’s to the next decade. Ridiculously unrealistic, please.

Sending you all the sunshine to your hearts 💛
Elena

I just got back from five days in the south of France, where we celebrated one of my best friends turning 34. Long table, too much rosé, a pool and laughs until 3am in the morning.

I am a big believer in celebrating birthdays. All of them. 34 is not a milestone by any calendar logic, and it was one of the best weekends I’ve had this year.

Somewhere in our twenties (or later in life I guess) a lot of us quietly downgraded birthdays to “dinner, if the week allows.” I think that’s a small tragedy. A birthday is one of the very few occasions in adult life where the entire agenda is that a person exists and other people are happy about it. There is no deliverable. Nobody is being aligned on anything. You just show up for someone because they’re alive, which when you say it out loud is an absurdly good reason to get on a plane.

I’m turning 30 in a couple of days and I am looking forward to it much more than I expected to. There’s a whole cultural script about 30, especially for women, with a checklist attached and a low background hum of panic. I’m not really feeling it. My twenties were loud, fast and productive, but full in life shifts, transformations and unexpected chapters. I’d like the next ten years to be just as full and considerably less stressful. And I would like to celebrate the fact of simply being alive much more.

Which brings me to what I actually want to write about today. I want to write about rest, which sounds like the least interesting topic on the internet, and is actually the thing I have got most consistently wrong in my adult life.

First, some context on why I’m allowed to talk about this

Ask anyone who trains seriously when they actually get fitter and they’ll tell you the same thing: not during the session. The session is only the demand. The adaptation happens afterwards, while you sleep and eat and do nothing remotely impressive. No coach on earth argues with this.

Now look at how those same people plan a week. The training is in the calendar to the minute. Tuesday intervals, Thursday strength, Sunday long run, all of it tracked. And recovery is a vague intention to get to bed earlier, plus a sauna if one happens to be nearby.

It’s the only half of the plan with no method, no time slot and no location. Your gym has a squat rack, a program, a coach and a door you walk through on a bad day because you said you would. The other half of your performance has a sofa and good intentions.

I’ve been living in that gap for about a decade, from both directions at once.

I was never bad at effort. What I had was a talent for more. Young leader at Deutsche Telekom, then Head of Sales at ada Learning. A TEDx talk. Hundreds of hours of breathwork, yoga and coaching training stacked on top of full time corporate jobs, done mostly at weekends, which is a sentence I used to say with pride and now say with mild concern for my former self. I also train hard and always have, and my recovery protocol for most of that time was “sleep, presumably.”

(There was also the six months in 2018 when I quit a well paid job to go sailing with no plan B. My family handled it beautifully. By which I mean my dad asked whether I had thought about pensions.)

If effort had been the missing ingredient, I would have solved this in 2019.

The thing I was catastrophically bad at was less. And it turns out less is a skill with protocols behind it, the same way a training block is. It just never got a place in anyone’s plan.

That’s the whole reason I started getting so obsessed with Nervous System Work, Breathwork and my Coaching practice.

Where I think the mistake actually sits

Most of us learned that rest is what you get afterwards. After the launch. After the quarter. After the season. It sits at the end of the list like a bonus payment you’re allowed to cash once everything else is settled.

Now look at what that does mathematically. If rest is the reward for finishing, and the list never finishes, then rest becomes something you have structurally guaranteed you will never have.

So it gets postponed into blocks. Two weeks in summer. A long weekend when things get bad. And then we’re all confused about why the holiday wore off so fast, and we conclude that we need a better holiday, ideally somewhere with more sunsets.

Anyway. Here are the excuses I used, all of which I have heard back from other people in the last six months, usually:

“I’ll rest after this project.”

There is always a project. I said this sentence for roughly six years and I could not tell you a single stretch in that time where the list was empty.

If your rest depends on an empty list, you do not have a rest plan, you have a fantasy about a version of your life that isn’t happening.

“I already sleep eight hours.”

So did I. It didn’t help, and this confused me for ages.

Sleep duration and sleep quality are different things. If your nervous system is still in a mobilised state when you lie down, you can spend eight hours in bed and get very little of the deep, restorative part. I was measuring the wrong number and feeling smug about it. 90 min deep sleep is the real flex to aim towards.

“I tried meditation and I’m bad at it.”

Same. I assumed I was doing it wrong.

What was actually happening is that sitting still with a highly activated system is a very steep entry point. It’s a bit like handing someone their first ever barbell at their maximum weight and then concluding they don’t like the gym. The problem was the order, not the tool.

“I train five times a week, that’s my recovery.”

This was my favourite, because it let me solve a problem by doing more of something I already enjoyed.

I love hard training and I still do it. But adding high intensity work to a system that never fully switches off is adding load to something already carrying too much. It felt productive. It was more input. My legs told me this before I was willing to listen.

The bit that actually worked

The shift came when I stopped treating recovery as a mood and started treating it as physiology.

What had to come together: Working with my breath. Actually tracking where I was instead of where I assumed I was. And giving up the pretence that my capacity is identical every day of the month, which, as a woman with a cycle, was possibly the single most useful planning decision I have ever made and also the one I resisted the longest because it felt like an excuse.

The result was that my life got calmer and more colourful at the same time, which I had genuinely assumed were opposites.

So what do you actually do on a normal Tuesday

Here comes the advice that actually worked for me, which is considerably less convenient than the advice I used to give.

For a long time I tried habit stacking. You know the concept: attach the new thing to something you already do. Three breaths before the first email. Sixty seconds in the car before you go in. One minute before the phone at night. Who actually does that?!It did not work for me. Not even a little bit.

The work I needed before happened in coaching and later in therapy, and I’m saying that out loud because it’s the bit that usually gets left out of the tidy version of these stories.

I had to understand what I was getting out of running hot. For me, a lot of it was identity. Being the person who could take more. Being reliable in a way that was quietly self-destructive and extremely well rewarded, by employers and by me. As long as that was running the show, every practice I added was just another item on a list I was already behind on. Of course I dropped it. It was competing with something I valued more.

Once that shifted, the practice stopped being a chore I was failing at, and started being something I wanted.

So here’s what a week looks like for me now, concretely:

A fixed time, not a trigger. Mine is in the morning before anything else happens. Same time, same spot, same chair.

Ten to twenty minutes, daily. Slow nasal breathing at around six breaths per minute, so roughly five seconds in and five seconds out, or four in and six out if you want a stronger downshift. That range is where the effect on heart rate variability is most consistent, and you can feel it inside two or three minutes. The most important thing is to find a technique that fits your unique nervous system! Here a good nervous system coach can help (I know someone hehe).

One deeper breathwork session a month. Longer, more intense (transformational) breathwork is a completely different tool with a different purpose, and it is not a daily practice. I do it once a month, ideally with someone else holding the space. It’s the best emotional regulation tool out there (in my limited opinion).

A rule for missed days, written down in advance. You will miss days. The rule is: resume, don’t restart. Counting streaks turns a recovery practice into another performance metric, which is precisely the disease we’re treating here.

The rest of the list, and why it isn’t a to-do list

Somebody asked me recently what I actually do next to breathwork, and the honest answer is a pile of unglamorous things that accumulated over the last years.

I mostly stopped drinking coffee. Mostly. There are exceptions and they usually happen in airports. I made decaf coffee my go-to option.

I plan sauna, ice baths and yin yoga into my week the way I plan training sessions. Yin in particular does something for my fascia and my head that I did not expect and still can’t fully explain.

I eat considerably more protein than I used to, which is the most boring advice in the world and it worked.

I spend proper time in nature and much less time on my phone.

I work on my trauma. Go to therapy and do my transformational breathwork.

I’m learning the handpan, and it has made me more creative in a way I did not see coming.

And I fly to birthdays. I spend time with people I actually care about, which is the only thing here that never needed a protocol.

Here’s what I understood embarrassingly late: life happens in systems. These aren’t nine separate projects. They’re levers on the same machine, and they pull each other.

Less coffee means I sleep better. Sleeping better means I need less coffee and I train better. Training better means recovery matters more, so the sauna gets booked. Time in nature happens when I’m not on my phone, and I’m less on my phone when my system isn’t hunting for something to do. The protein makes the training work. The breathing makes the sleep work. The therapy is why I stopped sabotaging all of it.

Pick one and it compounds. Pick one, and six months later two or three others have quietly shifted without you running a campaign about it.

So pick one. My honest suggestion: pick the one you feel slightly reluctant about, because that’s usually where the leverage is hiding.

And now the slightly awkward self promotion part

I’m running 10 free 45 minute Recovery Audits.

We look at where your energy is actually leaking across a normal week and build something that fits the job you have, not the one you’d have if your calendar were different.

Two conditions:

1. Twenty minutes of honest feedback afterwards. Honest as in “this was not useful,” if that’s the truth.

2. Permission to quote you, named or anonymous.

Reply to this email or send me a message and I’ll send you the details.

Also, I am building something called La Siesta, which is basically a gym for recovery, and I’ll write about that properly soon.

Have a good week, and breathe out for longer than you breathe in.

Sending you much sunshine to your heart 💛,
Elena

And it’s far less fancy than I would like it to be.

In my first year of full self-employment, I experimented a lot - much of what I wrote about one of my last letters. New content formats. New offer ideas. Saved strategies from people who seemed to have it figured out. I’d start one thing on Monday, get excited about a completely different thing on Wednesday, and by Friday I’d wonder why nothing felt like progress.

And somewhere in that first year, I came to a shocking, quietly humbling realization:

A lot of what held me back was wanting too much, too soon.

Let me explain.

I started producing a lot of content before my positioning was clear. I wanted the audience, the clients, the momentum. All of it, now. But a positioning takes time. It’s a hundred small decisions about who you serve, what problem you solve, and what you’re willing to say no to. And decisions take even longer when you carry perfectionism and a small decision crisis around with you, like I do. Every option I didn’t choose felt like a door slamming shut. So instead of choosing, I kept all doors open. Which is a polite way of saying: I stood in the hallway.

So I posted. And posted. I felt busy. Busy felt safe.

Busy was dangerous and also a nice hiding place. As long as I was producing, I didn’t have to answer the harder questions. Content is a tool inside a working system. Without the system, I was decorating a house that had no foundation yet and wondering why nobody moved in.

Then I looked at the one area of my life where I made fast, real progress: the gym.

When I started weight training, I couldn’t hang from a bar for ten seconds. My grip gave out. My shoulders complained. So I did dead hangs. Then longer dead hangs. Then shoulder mobility work that looked like nothing on camera. Bench press, rows, progressive overload. Adding a little weight, week after week, for two years. There were entire months where nothing visible happened.

And now? I squat my own body weight. I deadlift 1.5 times my body weight. Last month I did my first two pull-ups. In CrossFit workouts now, I feel like a machine (lol).

(Yes, I feel weird flexing about this here. I’m doing it anyway. It also humbles me, because I know exactly what it cost: two years of unfancy things, repeated.)

Nobody hands you a pull-up. You earn it in increments so small they’re almost embarrassing.

Here’s what struck me: I would never walk into a gym on day one and load 1.5 times my body weight onto a bar. I’d hurt myself, feel like a failure, and probably never come back. I also wouldn’t stand in the gym comparing myself to the woman repping out muscle-ups, concluding I’m not made for this. She’s been training for six years. Different timeline, different body, different life.

But in my business, that’s exactly what I did. Both things. I skipped the dead hangs and went straight for the pull-up. Posting like someone with a clear message, before I had one. And I measured my month three against other people’s year six, then wondered why I felt exhausted and behind.

Everything online screams speed. Six figures in 90 days. Scale now. Overnight everything. The algorithm shows you the pull-up, never the two years of hangs underneath it. And when you can’t keep up with a highlight reel, you start believing something is wrong with you. With your discipline. Your motivation. You.

If you’ve been “doing everything right” and it’s still not working, I’d put my money on this: your strategy is the problem. Which is far more fixable, I promise. Discipline was never your issue, you wouldn’t have read this far if it were.

The rebellious move, in a world that sells overnight success, is going step by step. Doing the reps nobody sees. Choosing one direction and letting the other ideas wait their turn. Building the base before the flex. Because let me tell you another secret. If you nurture one idea in your head, the others start growing, too!

For me, the dead hangs of my business looked like this: sitting with my positioning until I could say it in one sentence without flinching. Talking to real people (I know crazy!) instead of producing for an imaginary audience. Making one decision and living with it long enough to get data, because there is no failing, only data. Boring? A little. But boring is where the strength gets built.

So here’s my question for you: What’s the dead hang of your business? The unfancy, unsexy rep that builds the strength you’ll flex later?

Maybe it’s finally deciding between your three offer ideas. Maybe it’s writing your positioning down and letting it be imperfect. Maybe it’s unfollowing the accounts that make you feel behind.

Your first pull-up is coming. Do the hangs.

And by the way: this pattern isn't a business thing. We do it everywhere. Every January, half the world decides to change everything at once: meditate daily, run four times a week, quit sugar, journal, be in bed by ten. By mid-February most of it has collapsed, and we quietly file it under "I have no discipline." But we never had a discipline problem. We loaded 1.5 times our body weight on day one in life form. The friend who runs marathons started with runs so short they felt silly. The couple with the calm evenings started with one phone-free dinner a week. Small, almost embarrassing reps. Everywhere. Just saying.

Sending much love to your heart from Frankfurt Airport (on the way to another adventure I will tell you later about) 💛

Elena

P.S. If you’re standing in the hallway right now: many ideas, no clear next step, tired of your own circles. That’s exactly the work I do with women building their own thing. We won’t add another strategy to your saved folder. We look at where you actually are, what’s keeping you stuck (spoiler: it’s rarely discipline), and define your next rep: the one that builds real strength. Step by step, with your nervous system on board instead of working against you.

If you want that kind of clarity, let’s talk!

What I didn’t know then was that stored stress and trauma doesn’t have to look dramatic to live in the body. It can be subtle. It can be years of being disconnected from your needs, ignoring exhaustion, swallowing emotions, forcing productivity, and living in fight-or-flight so long that it feels like your personality. And this personality is very much rewarded in our modern society - by the next promotion, the status, you name it.

At one point, my body began speaking louder than my mind would allow. Sleep became shallow. My digestion weakened. My immune system faltered. My skin inflamed. My moods became unpredictable. I felt disconnected from my joy, my creativity, and my intuition and yet on the outside, I was “doing everything right.”

I knew something was deeply wrong. Driven by my own curiosity and my need for understanding, I dove into the science of the nervous system, trauma physiology, vagus nerve regulation, and the mind-body connection. And slowly over the years, everything finally started to make sense.

I discovered that anxiety, burnout, hormonal imbalance, chronic inflammation, depression, gut issues, and emotional reactivity were not personal failures, they were messages from a dysregulated nervous system asking for safety.

I stopped trying to fix myself and began learning how to listen. I learned that healing doesn’t come from forcing calm, it comes from teaching your body that it is safe again. It comes from breath, rhythm, gentle movement, nourishment, boundaries, nature, pleasure, rest, and self-compassion. It comes from slowly re-training your system to shift out of survival and back into life.

Today, my work is devoted to recovery, rest and nervous system regulation — as a lived practice. I believe our modern society does not need another productivity and performance hack: We need to learn to understand our nervous systems to truly feel alive and enjoy life!

And now slowly, the synthesis of everything I have learned through science, embodiment, trauma-informed practices, and my own healing journey is coming together.

Little did I know that 7 years ago …

The funny thing is, every time I had heard the word “nervous system” when I started learning about it, I couldn’t really understand what people meant. Because I could not feel it myself. So today I want to dive a bit deeper into that - because if you are like me - you might need different perspectives, different views and some own experience.

Let’s talk nervous system.

So what IS this nervous system everyone keeps talking about?

Your body’s information network

Your nervous system is a communication network. Your brain and spinal cord in the centre, and billions of nerves branching out into every part of your body: your heart, your gut, your skin, your muscles.

Some of it you control, like lifting your arm, walking to the fridge, deciding to stand up. That’s the conscious part. Most of it you don’t, like your heartbeat, digestion, pupil size, body temperature, sweating, arousal and your breathing rate right now, which you weren’t thinking about until you read this sentence. That’s the automatic part, and it runs the show whether you’re paying attention or not.

Here’s the first thing that genuinely surprised me when I learned it:

About 80% of the information travels from your body up to your brain. Only about 20% travels from your brain down to your body.

Read that again.

Your body is not waiting for instructions from your head. Your body is mostly the one doing the talking. Your brain is mostly listening. Which explains a lot about why “just think positive” has never fixed anyone’s anxiety. And after years of doing “mental coaching” with many of my clients - I never really reached the root cause.

The question your body asks every second

Your automatic system has one job: keep you alive. To do that, it constantly asks one question, roughly every second of your life, without asking your permission:

Am I safe right now?

Researchers call this neuroception. Your system scans three things at once: what’s happening inside your body, what’s happening in your environment, and what’s happening in the nervous systems of the people around you.

And it does this before your thinking brain gets involved — up to ten seconds before you’re consciously aware of anything. If we had to wait for the rational brain to decide whether the rustle in the grass was a lion, our species would have ended a long time ago. The answer to the question “Am I safe right now?” determines how you feel, what you’re capable of, and how you show up. Not the other way around.

Green, orange, red

For a long time, we described the automatic nervous system as having two settings: on and off. Stress and calm. Sympathetic and parasympathetic

Newer work, the polyvagal model, describes three. I find the traffic light version easiest to hold onto.

Green: safe and connected. Your ventral brake is on. Heart rate steady. Digestion working. You can make eye contact, hear the warmth in someone’s voice, be creative, be playful, be present. Your immune system is doing its job. This is where healing happens. It’s also, notably, where you’re actually a nice person to be around.

Orange: mobilised. The gas pedal. Adrenaline first, then cortisol. Heart rate and blood pressure climb. Breathing speeds up. Blood floods to your muscles, up to twelve times more than usual, because you might need to run. Digestion shuts down, because in an emergency, lunch can wait. Your mouth goes dry. Your pupils widen for distance vision. This is fight or flight. It’s supposed to last about ten minutes. Enough time to escape a predator.

Ten minutes. Sit with that for a second, then think about your average Tuesday.

Red: shutdown. The handbrake. When fighting and fleeing don’t work, the system goes the other way: collapse. Numbness. Heaviness. Hopelessness. Slow movement, flat voice, no facial expression. Constipation. Dissociation - that feeling of watching your own life through glass which so many people know really well.

Here’s what matters: This is a hierarchy, and your body climbs down it in order. It reaches first for connection. If that fails, it mobilises. If that fails too, it shuts down.

Which means shutdown is not weakness!!!! It’s the last resort of a system that already tried everything else. “Burnout”, by the way, lives exactly here. A body that dropped into red.

And to climb back up, you have to go in reverse — through mobilisation, through movement, before you can reach connection again. That’s why lying still and telling yourself to relax so rarely works when you’re truly flattened. Your body needs to move the stuck energy before it can settle.

The fourth F

Most people know fight, flight and freeze.

There’s a fourth one that almost nobody talks about, and it’s the one I recognised myself in immediately.

Fawn.

The therapist Pete Walker describes it as seeking safety by merging with the wants and needs of other people. Being endlessly agreeable. Never quite able to say what you actually want. Struggling to set a boundary. Barely knowing what your own needs are, let alone speaking them. It doesn’t look like a stress response. It looks like being lovely. And it gets rewarded, constantly, in workplaces and families and friendships. Which is exactly why it’s so hard to spot in yourself.

The smoke alarm

Here’s the part that reframed everything for me.

Your stress response doesn’t need actual danger. It only needs the possibility of danger. Picture a smoke alarm. You cook something a little too passionately, some smoke rises, the alarm screams. There is no fire. There was never going to be a fire. But the alarm did precisely what it was built to do: it responded to the possibility.

Your stress response works the same way. It runs on old experience and old patterning. There could be danger versus there is danger and your body treats these almost identically. Giving a presentation to twelve colleagues? Your system can read that as a threat to your life. Because for most of human history, being rejected by your group meant you didn’t survive the winter.

The cycle nobody finishes

A stress response is meant to be a circle, and it has four parts:

1. Your system detects a stressor.

2. Your body mobilises: adrenaline, heart rate, energy.

3. You discharge that energy. You fight, you run, you shake it off.

4. You return to balance.

Animals do this beautifully. A gazelle escapes, trembles violently for a minute, and then goes back to eating grass as though nothing happened. Cycle closed.

We have the same instincts. But we also have culture, manners, inboxes and meeting rooms. So we get activated at 9am and then sit still and be professional for another 8 hours.

The stressor passes. The energy doesn’t.

It stays in the body: in the muscles, in the system. And it accumulates. One unfinished cycle stacks on the next, and on the next, until the baseline itself has shifted and you’re living in a low hum of activation you no longer notice, because it’s just how you feel now. That’s what chronic stress actually is. Stress is not one bad week after the other. It’s an unfinished pile.

Why modern life is so hard on this system

Physiologically, we’re still cave dwellers. You heard this before. And your nervous system works essentially the same way it did fifty thousand years ago. Your environment does not.

Evolutionary biologists have a name for what happens when a body meets conditions it was never built for: mismatch diseases. Illnesses that show up more often, or more severely, simply because we no longer live the way our bodies adapted to live.

And the stressors stack up in four categories, most of which we never count as stress at all:

• Physical: sitting more than two hours at a stretch, too much screen light, too little daylight, chronic pain, overtraining, noise

• Biochemical: caffeine, alcohol, dehydration, processed food, food intolerances, nutrient gaps, less than six hours of sleep

• Mental: working more than forty hours, too much social media, too many open tabs in your head, working late into the night

• Emotional: relationship strain, conflict, grief, loneliness, financial worry, fear of loss

Look at that list and count how many are true for you on a normal week. Most people are running four or five simultaneously - constantly and then wondering, why they feel tired, anxious and tense.

And this is worth being honest about: you can regulate your nervous system as much as you like, but if the stressors themselves never change, the effect stays temporary. You can do a lot of breathwork, but it isn’t a licence to keep living in a way that’s breaking you.

Your window

Imagine a window. Inside it, you function well. You can think clearly, feel your feelings without drowning in them, handle a difficult conversation, sleep, digest, be present.

Above the window is too much activation: restless, wired, irritable, racing heart, easily startled, anxious, overwhelmed.

Below it is too little: numb, foggy, cold, slowed down, checked out, absent.

Chronic stress and unprocessed trauma make that window narrower. Less has to happen before you’re thrown out of it.

Most people don’t notice they’re dysregulated, because it’s been normalised. See if any of these sound familiar:

• Getting triggered easily and taking a long time to come down

• A head that won’t stop

• Trouble concentrating

• “I can’t meditate, I’ve tried, it’s not for me”

• Sleep that doesn’t restore you

• Big appetite swings, sugar cravings in the afternoon

• Chronic digestive trouble

• Absorbing other people’s moods like a sponge

• Staying far too long in situations you know are bad for you

None of these mean something is wrong with you. They mean your system has been outside its window for a while and is doing its best.

The goal was never calm

This is where most wellness content gets it backwards.

A regulated nervous system is not a permanently peaceful one. Constant calm isn’t regulation, it’s usually avoidance wearing a nicer outfit. A regulated system still gets stressed. It still races before a big talk. It still gets angry when something is genuinely worth being angry about. The difference is what happens afterwards. It goes up, and it comes back down. It moves. It’s flexible.

You want the whole range available to you, the orange to get things done, the red to rest deeply, the green to connect, and the capacity to travel between them without getting stuck. This is what is true nervous system regulation - moving up and down the ladder without getting stuck. And this capacity has a name: resilience or how I like to call it: capacity. Capacity because it is literally that: Creating capacity for everything there is. And being ok with that. And it isn’t built in a weekend. If your system has been stuck in orange and red for a decade, it takes time and repetition. But it does change, because the nervous system is plastic. It learned the old pattern. It can learn a new one.

Why the breath

Remember that everything automatic runs without your input? There’s one exception.

Breathing. It’s the only autonomic function you can consciously take over. Heart rate, digestion, hormones - you can’t touch those directly. But you can change your breath, and your breath changes all of them. That’s why I call it the remote control.

The mechanism is elegant. When you breathe in, your heart rate rises slightly. When you breathe out, it falls. Pressure sensors in your chest register the shift and report it to your brain, which adjusts accordingly. Lengthen your exhale, and you’re sending a physical, unfakeable message: the danger has passed.

Your security system reads that as evidence. And unlike your thoughts, evidence is something it actually accepts. This is also why so many people conclude they’re “bad at meditation.” Sitting still with a dysregulated system is genuinely unpleasant. The instruction to observe your thoughts is hard to follow when your body is convinced there’s a lion nearby.

Breathe first. Then meditate.

Try this now: in through the nose for four counts. Out for eight. Three rounds. Slowly. Give yourself time. It takes a while to arrive to the 8 seconds exhale - and once you get there you will feel the change in the body.

Then notice whether you sigh, swallow, or hear your stomach make a noise. Those are physical signs your brake just engaged.

That’s your nervous system. Saying hello.

Where this goes

Healing, for me, didn’t come from forcing calm. It came from teaching my body - breath by breath, boundary by boundary, rest by rest - that it was safe again.

There’s one more thing worth knowing before I stop.

You don’t do this alone. Your nervous system is in constant, unconscious conversation with the nervous systems around you. A calm person genuinely calms you. An activated one activates you. It’s called co-regulation, and as babies, before we could regulate ourselves at all, it was the only way we survived.

We never really outgrow it.

So it’s worth asking: who do you spend your time with, and how does your body feel around them?

I’ll leave you with this today.

Sending you all the sunshine to your heart 💛
Elena

✨ Work with me: Nervous System Mastery 1:1

Most of us spend our lives hustling in jobs that make us sick and dysregulated. In relationships that stay shallow, because we are never really present. In a body that feels more like a project to be fixed than a home.

The number one skill of 2026 is to learn to master your nervous system.

I have one more spot open to work with me 1:1 in August and September.

We work with science-backed breathwork, nervous system regulation and somatic practice, so you can regulate yourself, make decisions from clarity, and build a life and business from capacity, not burnout.

Includes:

• Weekly 1:1 sessions

• Personal breath & nervous system analysis

• Daily practices & audio library

• WhatsApp support between sessions

• Business & visibility frameworks for solopreneurs

Let’s talk first (no pressure), because I want to make sure it’s truly a fit. Book your call here: https://elenakochler.com/en/discovery-call

And find out more here: https://elenakochler.com/en

If you are thinking about it, maybe it’s time to explore. There is another world out there waiting for you 💛

On a casual Thursday last year, in May 2025, I found out I wasn’t going to be able to keep my job at my company. I had just been promoted and had been trying to find my place in a new role as Head of Sales. I was struggling. The company was struggling, and I felt it. The pressure. The imbalance. I felt it in my body, and it had slowly begun to burn me out. Losing a job, like losing a relationship, feels like someone pulling the rug out from under you. And it hurt. My ego got hurt.

At the same time, I felt huge relief. I felt like I’d gotten a butt-kick in the direction I wanted to go anyway. And now I had the perfect ramp to do so.

I spent the whole summer working like crazy. Building my offering, my website, reaching out to people. I did what I always did: work hard and show endless drive. None of it was truly working.

So in August 2025, I decided to really take a break. And it was much needed. Just to give you some insights: I have been working since I was 17. I moved to Hamburg on my own after finishing school, started my dual studies program, and had to work 40 hours a week while learning to navigate living on my own for the first time, making friends in a new city, and keeping up with my studies. After finishing that, I started as a project manager, traveled a lot between Hamburg, Bonn, and other cities, and kept hustling — until the truck rolled over me and put me to rest. Two years into that job, I took my sailing break, which I’ve written about here before. While I crossed the Atlantic and stared at the water for weeks, I slowly learned to rest and reconnect — and found my passion for self-awareness, self-development, and psychology. Coming back from that trip in 2019, the years that followed were full-on. I moved into further leadership roles while completing trainings on the side in coaching, yoga, breathwork, holistic healing, female hormones, and the nervous system … all while progressing in my career as a project manager and leader. I graduated from a top business school with a Master of Science and slowly tried to build my coaching business on the side.

When I say I needed this break, I really mean I needed it.

So last August, I set myself the goal to only follow “the joy” until the end of the year. For me, that meant: I played a lot of padel and made many new friends, spent a lot of time kiting in Egypt and Fuerteventura. I rented a sailboat with two of my best friends in Croatia for island-hopping, and spent Christmas with my family on the Baltic Sea. I rediscovered the values that help me make better decisions for myself going forward: nature, creativity, and gratitude. I closed out the year in a cozy cabin with just a bed and a fireplace, at -14 degrees, by a lake an hour outside Berlin.

Looking back now, in July 2026: toward the beginning of the year, I felt a lot of pressure inside me. That unease of really building something that matters. Making sure its “successful”. But nothing good ever came from force, did it?

I had to learn to allow myself to experiment — so I did. And building out loud feels so weird. Maybe it’s because we feel judged, or feel like we look mindless, when we change our mind. But, as a smart person once said: I have no obligation to be the person I was five minutes ago. I also don’t want to paint self-employment as all pink and rosy. It’s not — it’s the biggest growth quest there is, and, as someone once told me, true advanced spiritual practice. And I get that now. You need to experiment to find your spot.

Just to keep you in the loop, here are the things I experimented:

• I launched “Studio Frei Sein” last year as my German coaching, breathwork, and nervous-system offering, and started taking clients into my Berlin home and practice — only to realize I want to work more internationally, and need to build a business that lets me do that while traveling. Goodbye, Studio Frei Sein.

• I rebuilt my offering and website 500 times, every time I got feedback. I felt so insecure in the beginning. There are literally 200 ways to frame an offering. I had to learn to trust my positioning and give it time. Think of it more as a playground.

• I also started a newsletter in German on breathwork. I still deeply believe breathwork is a hugely underrecognized tool — especially in Germany, where there’s a big knowledge gap. But I also realized this isn’t my niche. So, bye-bye, “Now We Breathe.”

• For about four weeks, I posted only in German on LinkedIn. After spending time building an international audience, I gave in for two weeks and switched to my current clients’ language, instead of focusing on the clients I want to attract in the future. I confused the algorithm, and I’m still feeling that. Lol. Back to my roots, and back to posting in English.

• I got sucked into a €4,000 course on how to build an automated funnel, only to learn it wasn’t at all what I expected. I bought it out of desperation to find more clients, and it cost me at least two months of my time. Ahhhhh.

• During that time, I also didn’t write my main newsletter — aka this one — and stopped posting altogether. I just felt extremely lost, and hustled in every direction except the right one.

• In March this year, Nadine — a close friend I met during my breathwork training — and I started a female fitness brand in Germany, only to realize it was too early and too much stake: she’s still in her corporate job, and I’m building my coaching business at the same time. Instead, we’re building a community, launching in September, for solopreneurs going through the same struggles we are — hoping to create a space for accountability, focus, inspiration, and the business tools it takes to build a successful solopreneur lifestyle business today.

I also started to focus almost entirely on the topic of recovery, rest, and nervous-system regulation. I also hosted a retreat in beautiful Greece, offering yin for recovery and functional, transformative breathwork — and, well, I’m still here writing this, overlooking the mountains and the sea.

What I forgot to mention is how my surrounding helped me in this process in last 6 month: I spent six weeks sailing from Panama to Colombia this year, almost a month in Tenerife — where I found a new love — spent another six weeks in Fuerteventura, and will move my base to Valencia in August.

To allow myself to experiment has probably been my biggest “success factor” looking back. But it often felt sh** along the way. The clarity I have now came from trying a lot of different things. I only truly learn when I am in action - so I had to try. Try and see what resonates with me and the market.

So: To say that the last 6 month of my self-employment experimentation have been a wild ride would be the biggest understatement. I felt lost (still do). What I also know is that figuring it out takes more time than we often think. And instead of beating myself up over that, I’m proud that I’m actually taking the time to have done it and will keep doing so - maybe in a less higher frequency.

Now sitting here I feel that I have found my spot, regained my spark, and learned where my offers resonate most with the market.

I am happy I chose this path, this type of “hard” for now. My self-employment has asked me to face the uncomfortable more than anything else ever has, and it’s still asking me to do that every day. I don’t know what will change and happen moving forward. I know, deep in my core, that I have a unique gift for helping people relax, regain their strength, and regulate into the life they want. And I’m planning to work more offline in Valencia (here comes La Siesta). I also know I want to keep supporting women on the path of self-employment. It’s a fun one. And it’s more fun knowing you don’t have to do it all on your own. I also know I don’t only want to do one thing. Multiples inspire me - keep me sane and creative.

I also know: wherever life leads me, life is for me. And my nervous system has learned to take it all in — the good, the bad, the ugly. All of it.

I’m saying bye for now, and jumping back into the crystal-blue, sparkling sea here in Greece.

Sending you much sunshine to your hearts 🧡,
Elena

✨ Work with me: Nervous System Mastery 1:1

Most of us spend our lives hustling in jobs that make us sick and dysregulated. In relationships that stay shallow, because we are never really present. In a body that feels more like a project to be fixed than a home.

The number one skill of 2026 is to learn to master your nervous system.

I am opening spots to work with me 1:1 in August and September.

We work with breathwork, nervous system regulation and somatic practice, so you can regulate yourself, make decisions from clarity, and build a business from capacity, not burnout.

Includes:

• Weekly 1:1 sessions

• Personal breath & nervous system analysis

• Daily practices & audio library

• WhatsApp support between sessions

• Business & visibility frameworks for solopreneurs

Let’s talk first, because I want to make sure it’s truly a fit. Book your call here: https://elenakochler.com/en/discovery-call

And find out more here: https://elenakochler.com/en

Modern ambition, redefined: calm, nervous system smart and fully alive

You function. You deliver. You’re good at what you do. Maybe even very good. Your calendar is full, your results are solid, the feedback is positive. From the outside, everything looks on track.

And yet: somewhere, quietly, underneath all of it, something isn’t right.

It took me a long time to understand what that something was. And even longer to admit it existed. Because how do you explain to someone that you’re exhausted by things that are going well? How do you explain that success can feel like eating chips: satisfying in the moment, familiar, even good - but that one day you realize you’ve been eating them every single day and you can’t quite remember why you never feel full?

It happens slowly. That’s what makes it so insidious. There’s no dramatic collapse. No moment where you wake up and think: this is wrong. It’s more of a quiet drift. A slow diminishing in places nobody measures. Less joy. Less aliveness. Less of that feeling that what you’re doing actually belongs to you.

The nervous system doesn’t lie

I was 22 when I became one of the youngest executives at Deutsche Telekom. I was good at it. Genuinely good. I could read rooms, hold teams together, deliver under pressure, manage conflict, exceed expectations. All of that was true.

And at the same time though, I couldn’t have said it then, my body was registering something that my mind would take years to understand.

An exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix. A quiet internal hollowness that I covered efficiently with performance. That’s the distinction we often overlook and is the key of the work I do today. Between what you can do – and what is good for you. Between where you function – and where you actually live. Between the system you were optimised for – and the system you were actually built for.

I recently read an essay about one of the sharpest observations I’d come across in a long time: the modern world is built on the assumption that a good human is a consistently productive one.

Most systems we grow up inside – school, university, corporations, even many online business models – are designed to reward a particular kind of energy. Consistency. Speed. Visibility. Output. Whoever performs well in this system gets validation. Whoever gets validation keeps going. Whoever keeps going eventually loses track of whether what they’re doing still actually feels like theirs.

You get good at something. You get feedback that you’re good at it. You do more of it. And somewhere down the line – months later, sometimes years – you realize you’ve been eating chips every day and you no longer remember when that became your diet. It isn’t good for you. But it tastes fine. And everyone around you seems to be eating the same thing.

And adding to that: Social media has done something strange to us. It has taught us that existence requires proof. That work only counts once it’s documented. That we are only relevant when we are visible. And so we post, we perform, we optimise – and somewhere in that process we lose the thread to what we actually wanted to say.

What the nervous system is actually carrying

The exhaustion from being good at the wrong things leaves traces. It lives in the shoulder that never quite relaxes. In the sleep that doesn’t restore. In the breath that stays shallow even when nothing is happening. In the background hum of restlessness that you’ve known for so long you’ve mistaken it for personality.

The nervous system learns. That is its greatest strength and its Achilles heel. It learns what normal is. What safe is. And if normal has meant alarm for long enough, if safe has meant tension for long enough, then alarm becomes the baseline. Then stillness is what feels threatening – not the stress.

I have sat with women who said: I don’t even know what relaxation feels like anymore. And they didn’t mean it as a complaint. It was an honest assessment. Their bodies had simply forgotten what safety felt like – because they had been so good, for so long, at functioning that they had forgotten how to feel.

The question underneath everything

We spend enormous energy trying to become better versions of ourselves inside systems that were never designed for who we actually are. We optimise our output, our consistency, our visibility, our productivity. We read the books, follow the frameworks, track the metrics. We get good at things. Sometimes very good.

And we rarely stop to ask: does this feel like mine?

In a physical sense. In the body. Does the work I’m doing feel like it belongs to me – or does it feel like something I’ve learned to perform so convincingly that I’ve stopped noticing the difference?

The nervous system knows the answer before the mind does. It always does.

I’ve stopped believing that exhaustion is a sign of too much work. Usually it’s a sign of too much wrong work. Or work that no longer feels like yours. Or visibility that performs instead of communicates. Or a body that has been so good at keeping up for so long that it has forgotten how to say what it actually needs.

The nervous system knows this before the mind does. Always.

At 22 already, my body was telling me what I couldn’t yet say: this isn’t for you. You can do it. But it’s costing you more than you can see.

It took years to understand that. And more years still to actually begin listening.

What I know now is this: being good at something doesn’t protect you from it being wrong for you. Success is not a guarantee of alignment. And the question was never whether you can function – the question is whether what you’re doing feels like you.

Your body already knows the answer. It always has.

When you start building a life that feels true to you, a lot becomes possible.

When you start building a life that actually fits you, the quality of everything changes. Not just the work. The decisions become clearer because they’re no longer filtered through fear of losing something you weren’t sure you wanted anyway. The relationships deepen because you’re no longer performing a version of yourself for external approval

Your nervous system, it turns out, knows the difference. Between surviving and living. Between functioning and belonging to yourself. And once it gets even a small taste of what alignment actually feels like – once the body experiences even briefly what it’s like to operate from a place of genuine fit rather than chronic adaptation – it becomes very difficult to go back.

That doesn’t mean everything becomes easy. It means something more useful: the difficulty starts to make sense. The effort feels like it belongs to you. The exhaustion, when it comes, is the exhaustion of building something real – not the exhaustion of maintaining a performance.

That distinction has changed everything. And it started, as most things do, with a moment of stopping long enough to listen to what was already there. 🌿

Sending you all the sunshine to your heart 💛,
Elena

✨ Work with me: Nervous System Mastery 1:1

Most of us spend our lives hustling in jobs that make us sick and dysregulated. In relationships that stay shallow, because we are never really present. In a body that feels more like a project to be fixed than a home.

I’ve redesigned my 1:1 mentorship for 2026: Nervous System Mastery

We work with breathwork, nervous system regulation and somatic practice, so you can regulate yourself, make decisions from clarity, and build a business from capacity, not burnout.

Includes:

• Weekly 1:1 sessions

• Personal breath & nervous system analysis

• Daily practices & audio library

• WhatsApp support between sessions

• Business & visibility frameworks for solopreneurs

Start on request. Application required — because I want to make sure it’s truly a fit.

Apply here: https://elenakochler.com/en/discovery-call

Modern ambition, redefined: calm, nervous system smart and fully alive

That moment, that quiet, almost unremarkable decision, is what I think of when I talk about the life I’ve been building.

There’s a word I’ve been sitting with lately. Freedompreneur.

It doesn’t mean working less. It doesn’t mean being lazy, or unambitious, or checked out. It means something much simpler and much harder: building work that revolves around your life, not the other way around.

For most of my twenties I didn’t know another way. I was fast-tracked into leadership, managed big teams, delivered results. I was good at it. And I genuinely loved parts of it. But there was always this invisible ceiling. Not on my career, but on my days. The sense that my time belonged to something else. That I had to earn the right to linger.

Leaving that world didn’t happen overnight. And I want to be honest: it wasn’t a dramatic escape. It was a slow, deliberate decision to design something different. A business built around breathwork, coaching, and everything I know about how humans actually work. Something that is deeply mine.

Here’s what I’ve noticed since: I don’t have work-life balance anymore. And I mean that as a good thing.

Balance implies two separate things on opposite ends of a scale, work on one side, life on the other, constantly trading weight. But my work doesn’t feel separate from my life anymore. It feels like a part of it. One I actually like.

When I’m in a breathwork session with a client, I’m not watching the clock. When I’m writing, I’m not waiting for it to be over. When I take eighteen days in Tenerife instead of four, my work comes with me as something I actually want to open my laptop for.

A Freedompreneur isn’t someone who found a hack. It’s someone who stopped asking “how big can I make this?” and started asking “how does this fit into the life I actually want?”

The equation is deceptively simple: high value, low unnecessary friction, intentional simplicity. Charge well for work that matters. Build systems that don’t require your constant presence. Keep your life simple enough that freedom stays affordable.

Money still matters. Of course it does. But it becomes a tool, not the destination.

Success starts to look different. It looks like a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be. It looks like extending a trip because the light is beautiful and your nervous system is finally quiet. It looks like work that doesn’t deplete you because it’s actually yours.

I’m not suggesting everyone should quit their job and move to Tenerife for eighteen days. But I am suggesting that the question is worth asking:

What would you do with your time if you had more control over it?

Not when you retire. Not when the kids are grown. Not when you’ve finally made enough. Now. With the life you actually have.

That’s the thing about freedom, it tends to be available sooner than we think. We just have to stop waiting for permission to take it.

Sending you much sunshine to your heart 💛
Elena

But here I am. And before I get into everything, a small but important reminder about what this newsletter actually is:

escape the ordinary is my occasional sharing space. It’s not a strategy (even though I once tried to make it more strategic). It’s not a content pillar. It’s not optimised for anything. It’s the behind-the-scenes of my life, the unfiltered version, the one that doesn’t make it onto LinkedIn or into a carousel post. The place where I write when I have something to say, not because the algorithm told me to. If you’re here, you know this. And I hope that’s exactly why you stayed.

Okay. Now: the update.

One month back. Here’s what that looks like.

I came back from sailing into full German founder reality … and the contrast has been, let’s say, character-building. One week you’re watching sunsets from the deck of a boat somewhere off the coast. The next you’re on hold with a Behörde listening to elevator music for 40 minutes, waiting to ask a question that nobody can answer anyway.

Gründen and in my case “self-employment” is next level. I mean that in both directions: The terrifying one and the quietly thrilling one. The kind where you don’t always sleep great, but you wake up weirdly excited anyway. The kind where you say yes to things before you feel ready, because waiting to feel ready is just a more comfortable form of standing still.

Speaking of saying yes to things before feeling ready: I’ve been showing up at Berlin founder and networking events. Properly. Walking into rooms full of people I don’t know, armed with nothing but an elevator pitch and the audacity to be there. The founder bubble is real, it’s a little intense, and I kind of love it. More on that in future issues, I’m sure. Also, the bureaucracy. I could write a whole issue about the bureaucracy. Maybe I will.

The decision that felt right and ridiculous at the same time.

While I was finding my feet back in Berlin, I made a call that I’d been sitting with for a while:

I switched to German. Fully. (except for this newsletter here lol)

My (new - drumroll please!) Substack, my Instagram, my content on LinkedIn … is now exclusively auf Deutsch. And yes, I’m aware of the irony of announcing this in an English newsletter. That’s intentional. escape the ordinary stays English, because this is my personal space and I write here the way I think - which, after years abroad, is still very much in English when it comes to rambling and reflecting.

But for my work? German it is. Here’s the honest reason: 95% of my clients are German. Breathwork is deeply personal. Stress doesn’t translate well, it needs to land in your mother tongue, in the language your nervous system actually speaks. So the decision made sense. It also felt a little silly. I’m getting over that too.

Do I sometimes wonder if I’ll switch back? Sure. That’s life. Decisions don’t have to be forever to be right for now.

Which brings me to the thing I’ve actually been excited about:

now we breathe ist da. 🌬️

My German-language Substack newsletter launched a week ago — and the first two issues are already out. If you’ve got German-speaking friends, colleagues, or that one person in your life who’s been running on empty for way too long …send it their way.

The latest piece is called:

Perfektionismus hat ein Atemmuster. (Und warum Yoga allein dich nicht rettet.)

It’s for the kind of person who meditates, does yoga, journals religiously — and still can’t switch off. Who has all the tools and somehow still feels like they’re bracing for impact most of the time. It’s about how perfectionism doesn’t just live in your head. It lives in your breath. In the shallow, held, slightly-too-fast breathing pattern that your nervous system has been running on for years without you noticing.

And there’s a brand new 2026 neuroscience study in there — peer-reviewed, published in Advanced Science — that finally shows the exact neural circuit in your brain that connects your breathing to your anxiety centre. Five minutes of slow breathing. Measurable changes in the amygdala. Not a placebo. Neurobiology.

Read it at nowwebreathe on Substack.

That’s the update. I’m here, I’m figuring it out, I’m breathing through it - sometimes literally.

Thanks for being in this little corner of the internet with me. It means more than the occasional newsletter might suggest.

Until next time, sending you much sunshine to your heart! 💛
Elena

I’ll be honest: When going on this trip, I expected the honeymoon of sailing. I pictured sun-drenched decks, smooth turquoise water, and that effortless “laptop at sea” life. And the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama showed that side. But also, the Caribbean gave me a masterclass in endurance. Again.

And that’s okay. I’m actually more than fine with it.

The hardest lesson started three hours out of Panama last week. We were heading for the Cayman Islands (800 mile journey) when our front sail didn’t just snag - it tore about a meter. We had to haul down 74sqm of heavy canvas and divert to a tiny island off the coast of Colombia. It was a three-person job, to stitch it back together.

The next day, we tried again. Then the motor started to bubble weirdly. A strange, wet sound, and then …silence. We were caught in the water with zero wind, drifting for hours while we tore into the engine. We fixed it, we moved on, but the ocean wasn’t done with us.

By dawn, the wind hit 25+ knots. We were tumbled in rising waves with two reefs in the main sail and half a front sail. After 24 hours of that - soaked, exhausted, and watching the forecast get even meaner - we made the call to turn around. We didn’t want to be trapped in those conditions for the next four days.

To say these were the most uncomfortable days of my life would be an understatement. Even on the most tech-savvy vessels, things break. The wind, the salt, and the water put everything under a stroll.

Why the “Failure” Was the Point

It’s funny how extreme situations bring back a sense of aliveness. I haven’t slept. I was on watch all night and put the anchor down here in Colombia at 5:00 AM. My body is tired, but my mind is structured.

Life on a boat is so simple, yet so focused on the essentials: The Vessel, The Food, and Nature. When you strip away the “noise” of the modern hustle, you’re left with the base. You realize that endurance isn’t just about grit; it’s about the flexibility to change the plan when the waves get too high. I expected a honeymoon, but I got a lesson in what it actually means to be present.

It reminds me of how I felt last year when I lost a job I wanted to hold onto a bit longer, or when sickness forced me to stop. Life sometimes has other plans for us. We try to white-knuckle the steering wheel, but as the Stoics say, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” The best thing we can do - the only thing we can do - is to lean into it. Whether it’s a stagnant career or a broken motor in the middle of the Caribbean, fighting the reality of the situation only exhausts you. Endurance is the art of surrendering to the new plan without losing your spirit. It’s about finding that “sense of aliveness” even when you’re drifting.

I’m flying back to Germany next week, and I’m super excited. I’m carrying all these “fractures” - ideas and structures that formed in my mind while I was fighting the wind. I’m ready to put them into practice.

The sail tore, the motor failed, and we never made it to the Caymans. But standing here on the deck in Colombia, I realize I didn’t lose a trip. I found my edge again.

And that is worth every salty, sleepless hour.

Sending you so much sunshine to your heart 💛,

Elena

A little note from me to you

If you’re reading this from a desk and feeling that “I should be doing more” itch - maybe this is your sign to let something tear. See what happens when the motor stops. You might find you’re more capable of fixing it than you thought.

✨ Ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

NEW: #1 -Transform Together: The Power of Breathing in a circle

12 weeks of guided breathwork with a community that has your back starting in April. Solo practice is hard. Transformation is lonely. But when you breathe with 19 other committed souls, held by expert guidance - everything changes. This is breathwork the way it was meant to be done.
→ Get more infos here: https://elenakochler.com/en/group-program
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership through breathwork. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

🎧 Soundtrack: And while we are talking about aliveness, endurance - this song and the lyrics: 😍

I chose the storm, I chose the way
The clearings near no matter what they keep on saying to me
I trust the lake, I trust the fire
I trust the world keeps better if we keep on anyway

I know it’s always gonna change in ways
I see it making sense of time
I feel it shift me, haven’t been the same
I’m not afraid anymore, of this life

Taken mind
Taken mine

I place the Earth beneath my feet
And look at stars and think of all of what they do for me
I notice it cause it noticed me
This river sings a song of all the life that it can reach

I know it’s always gonna change in ways
I see it making sense of time
I feel it shift me, haven’t been the same
I’m not afraid anymore, of this life

Taken mind
Taken mine
Taken flight
Take what I find

Taken mind
Taken mine

Maybe I’m waking up to the lightning
Maybe I’m waking up to the lightning of the storm
But I won’t shelter in hiding
I’m not afraid of the fight that we know is coming

Taken mind
Taken mine
(Gonna take it, gonna take the lightning)
Taken flight

📸 Snapshots and Screenshots from Life at Sea

I had time to sort out my phone pictures and here are 2 good finds (anyone else here taking screenshots of every good quote?! 😃)

&

& this:

If you made it until here: Thank you. Thank you for being here. It truly means something. 💛

Until next week!

Let’s walk down memory lane.

Summer 2018. Croatia. I was 22. I was sitting on a sailboat, looking at the horizon, and I realized something terrifying: I was done.

At the time, I thought the unhappiness creeping into my bones was just about my job. I thought if I changed my title, the weight would lift.

I was wrong.

Looking back today, I see the architecture of that unhappiness much more clearly. It wasn’t a career issue. It was a systemic collapse: I was in a relationship that didn’t just demand my time - it leaked my energy. I was trying to run a marathon on a battery that wouldn’t hold a charge. My high expectations weren’t “standards.” They were a shield. I used perfectionism to protect myself from ever feeling “not enough,” which kept my nervous system on high-alert 24/7. And I was looking for “home” in cities and offices, never realizing my body didn’t feel safe in its own skin.

I thought I was unhappy because of where I worked. In reality, I was unhappy because of how I was living.

8,000 Miles to Find a Baseline

In one week, I liquidated my life. I quit my apartment. I resigned from my job. I started waitressing to fund the dream.

Four months later, on December 10th, I was standing on the deck of a custom 62-foot catamaran in Cape Town. (For the nerds: a technical masterpiece, the most sophisticated cruising machine I’ve ever seen).

We sailed out past Table Mountain toward Namibia. Across the Atlantic. Brazil. The Bahamas.

Nature. Technology. Mindset. Those months broke my internal clock.

After the trip, I remember flying from Miami to Berlin in 2019. The woman next to me was fuming. She was complaining about a 2-hour flight delay. I sat there and thought: Wow. Only two hours?

When you sail, your dimension of time shifts. A 7-hour flight is a 2-week crossing. You don’t “arrive” because you scheduled it. You arrive when the weather, the tech, and the ocean allow it.

The Illusion of the Jet Engine

Back then, I felt guilty for “changing my mind” about the corporate ladder. I felt like a failure for needing a break.

Now, in 2026, I’m back in the same position. And it’s fascinating how the ocean brings you exactly where you need to go by pushing you to absolute physical exhaustion.

Yesterday, we finished a 10-hour sail. Arrival at night. A lagoon full of corals. High-frequency waves. The motor died several times. It was brutal, technical, hard work. But here is the “Smart” realization I keep having to relearn:

Our human system doesn’t operate on “Lufthansa time.”

We try to force our growth, our business pivots, and our healing into “2-hour delays.” We get angry when we aren’t “there” yet. True transformation moves at the speed of a sailing ship. It’s slow. It’s dependent on conditions you can’t control. It requires you to stay regulated while the motor is failing and the corals are closing in.

I’m back on the water to remember the “Long Way” logic. In the corporate world, we call it “laziness.” On the ocean, we call it “waiting for a weather window.”

If you feel like a failure because you aren’t moving at the speed of a jet engine: Stop. You aren’t delayed. You’re just sailing. And the view from the deck is much better than from seat 14B.

A Tool for the “Lufthansa Mindset”

When you feel the panic of a “delay” (a slow launch, a late client, or a career pivot that’s taking too long) your vision narrows. Your brain goes into “tunnel vision,” looking for threats.

To shift back into Sailing Time, use this reset:

1. Soft Eyes: Don’t look at your screen. Look past it.

2. The Horizon Shift: Look at the furthest point possible (or soften your gaze to see the periphery of the room).

3. The 4-8 Rhythm: Inhale for 4 seconds, then exhale for a slow, steady 8 seconds.

Expanding your visual field physically signals the nervous system to move out of “Fight or Flight” (Jet Engine) and into “Observation” (The Navigator).

It takes 60 seconds. It won’t make the “delay” go away. But it will give you the clarity to navigate the corals when you finally arrive.

I’m breathing with you. Until next week.

Sending you much sunshine to your heart 💛,
Elena

P.S. I would love to hear from you! If there is something that resonated or you would like me to deep dive into a certain topic - let me know. Just hit reply. :)

P.P.S. Make sure to check out my weeks reading list (below). I found some true gems for you.

✨ Ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

#1 -Transform Together: The Power of Breathing in a circle

Early Bird Update: My first group program, Transform Together:
The Power of Breathing in Circle, is now open. If you're ready to trade the "Identity Corset" for Somatic Mastery - I would love to have you!
→ Get more infos here

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership through breathwork. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

🔗 This weeks Reading List: Decoding the Future

1. The Future 100: 2026 Trends (VML) This is the roadmap shows the next 12 months evolution out of the perspective of art and culture. I like. It’s not just about technology; it’s about how our humanity is evolving to keep up with it. 👉 Explore the Trends

2. Live a Disciplined Life Spontaneously (Naval Archive) Most people think discipline is a cage. In 2026, we know it’s the key to the “Ruleless” life. Naval breaks down how to build a system so solid that you can afford to be completely spontaneous. Discipline is the motor; spontaneity is the wind. 👉 Read the Article

3. Fascia: The Body’s Bridge (Seth Kaufmann) This is for the nerds who want to understand the “Identity Corset” on a cellular level. Your fascia is where your history meets your biology. If you want to understand why a career pivot feels like physical pain, read this. It’s the bridge between trauma and high performance. 👉 Dive into the Science

4. The Multi-Passionate Advantage (Dan Koe) “Niche down” is the advice of 2018. In 2026, we realize that having multiple interests isn’t a distraction - it’s a competitive advantage. If you feel “scattered,” this is your permission to be everything you are. You don’t need a niche; you need a system that supports your complexity. 👉 Find Your Focus

Before we dive in today, I have a super exciting announcement to make:

For the past 7 years, I’ve facilitated over 300 group sessions - circles, retreats, classes, corporate workshops, intimate gatherings.

Every time, I witnessed the same magic: something opens when we breathe together that simply cannot happen alone. The collective field. The shared vulnerability. The permission that comes from seeing others release what they’ve been carrying too.

I’ve wanted to build a proper container for this for years. Not a one-off workshop. Not a retreat you leave and forget. A 12-week journey with the same souls, week after week, going deep together.

And now it’s happening.

Introducing: Transform Together — The Founding Cohort

This is my first-ever 12-week Group Breathwork Program. A circle of 20 committed people who will meet weekly, breathe together, and hold space for each other’s transformation.

Here’s what I know after half a decade of this work:

• Solo practice is hard to maintain

• Transformation can feel lonely

• But when you’re witnessed by others who get it - everything shifts faster

As a founding member, you’ll get:

• 12 live 90-minute group sessions

• Lifetime access to all recordings

• Private community for daily support

• My full attention (only 20 spots)

• Early bird pricing: €897 (regular €997)

This cohort starts April 2026. And honestly? I’m being selective. I want people who are ready to show up, for themselves and for the group.

If that’s you, join the waitlist. You’ll be first to know when enrollment opens.

Join the Waitlist → https://elenakochler.com/en/group-program

On to today’s topic:

Last November, I bought a notebook and a copy of The Artist’s Way. I committed to the “Morning Pages”: three pages of longhand writing every single morning. No filtering, no “good” writing. It is a raw, unfiltered data dump of the mental noise in my head.

And boy, was it a slog. To be honest? For a long time, it was just… repetitive shit.

I was stuck in a loop. Every morning, I’d wake up and write the same frustrations, the same anger, and the same circular patterns. But then, the breakthrough happened. I found boredom.

I got so profoundly annoyed by my own drama that my brain finally revolted. I was tired of reading my own repetitive complaints about my past relationship and my career doubts. My mind finally hit a wall and said: “Enough. I am literally bored of being this person. Let’s move on.”

The Windshield Wipers of the Mind

Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, is very clear about this: The pages are meant to be dark, depressed, and annoying. She calls them “spiritual windshield wipers.” The point isn’t to create art; it’s to clear the grime so you can see the road. She insists that you should never edit or even re-read them in the beginning. It’s a pure dump. By putting the “negative” energy on the page, you stop it from swirling in your body.

Cameron explains that we all have an “internal censor”. It’s that voice telling us we aren’t good enough or that our dreams are “unrealistic”. Writing the pages helps you acknowledge the Censor, put its words on paper, and then walk right past it. The pages help move you out of your “Logic Brain” (the one stuck in whatevery situation yu think you cannot get out of: Job, Relationship, Happening) and into your “Artist Brain” (the one that sees the possibilities of 2026).

The Missing Link

Those pages acted as a mirror I couldn’t look away from. They forced me out of self-pity and pushed me into action, simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of writing the same entry again tomorrow.

Through that “mental purge,” I didn’t just find clarity. I cleared the internal clutter that was keeping me in the “Identity Corset” of my past corporate life, finally creating the space to step fully into the breathwork era of my self-employment.

If you are feeling “stuck” in your posture or your career, maybe it’s because your windshield is too dirty to see the next turn.

The Mental “Exhale”

Most people think Morning Pages are about “creativity.” I see them as nervous system hygiene. Morning Pages are to the mind what the Exhale is to the body. In my coaching, I see so many clients holding their breath. Literally and metaphorically. They are holding onto old identities, old relationships, and old “corsets” because they are afraid of what happens if they let go. But you can’t inhale something new until you have fully, uncomfortably emptied the lungs.

The Science of the “Scribble”

Why does writing the “same shit” every day eventually lead to a breakthrough?

1. Down-regulating the Amygdala: By putting the “threats” (the anger, the depression) on paper, you signal to your brain that they are handled. You don’t have to “carry” them in your body anymore.

2. Breaking the Loop: Just like a rigid breathing pattern creates a rigid mind, repetitive writing eventually forces a “pivot.” You get so tired of the old story that you’re forced to write a new one.

3. The Missing Link: When your “Identity Corset” is loosened through writing, your intuition finally has room to speak. That’s how I found the missing link in my breathwork education - I stopped overthinking it and started feeling it.

Try this: Buy the notebook. Write the pages. Get so annoyed with your own limitations that you have no choice but to break them.

I’m sitting here on the sailboat in Panama, and my morning pages look a lot different than they did in November. There’s more space. More air. More “ruleless” airport energy.

I’m breathing with you. Now, go grab a pen.

Sending you much sunshine to your heart,

Elena

✨ Ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

NEW: #1 -Transform Together: The Power of Breathing in a circle

12 weeks of guided breathwork with a community that has your back starting in April. Solo practice is hard. Transformation is lonely. But when you breathe with 19 other committed souls, held by expert guidance - everything changes. This is breathwork the way it was meant to be done.
→ Get more infos here: https://elenakochler.com/en/group-program
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership through breathwork. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

🛠 The Breathwork Toolkit: Morning Edition

• The “Clear the Slate” Breath: Before you start your pages, try 2 minutes of “Extended Exhales” (4s inhale, 6s exhale). It stabilizes the carbon dioxide in your blood, giving you the mental clarity to write the truth.

• The Resource: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — The foundation for the Morning Pages practice.

🎧 The Panama Soundtrack

I’ve been snorkeling, writing morning pages, and listening to the new Lucas Fogale album on repeat.

📸 Snapshot from Panama

Current status: Checking my biological baseline in Panama. In my early twenties, I thought being “driven” meant staying at the desk until I burned out. In 2026, I know that true performance requires the ability to switch off. I’m currently exploring the “missing link” between silence and focus. (And looking for sea turtles).

I’m currently sitting in the Frankfurt Airport, watching a man eat Currywurst and drink a Hefeweizen at 5:00 AM.

Airports are fascinating “ruleless” zones. They are transit spaces where the normal social corsets we wear (the ones that tell us when to eat, how to sit, and what is “appropriate”) simply dissolve. In an airport, you can have dessert for breakfast and nap on the floor, and nobody blinks. It’s chaotic, culturally diverse, and strangely freeing.

As I wait for my flight to Panama to live on a sailboat for a while, I’ve been thinking about how much I want to bring that “airport energy” into my life and my work. I want to break the corsets.

The Identity Crisis: Beyond the “Sicherheit”

Last year, I stepped into full-time self-employment. If I’m being honest? It’s been a wild, sometimes bruising ride.

For years, my identity was neatly packaged. “I’m the Head of Sales at (Deutsche Telekom, later ada).” It was a title people understood. Now, when I tell people I coach and teach breathwork, a small, nagging voice inside me whispers: Is this a real job?

In Germany, we live in a society of doubt. We are built on the bedrock of Sicherheit (security). I’ve heard it all lately - the “well-meaning” advice that I need a massive network to survive, or that I’ll eventually “realize” that being employed is easier.

There is a cultural implication that self-employment is “lesser than.” But I’ve come to see that it’s actually much harder. It requires a whole new skill set and a level of grit that a corporate office rarely demands.

The “Sport” of Breathing: Moving Beyond the Bubble

This struggle for a “real” identity is exactly why I’m changing how I show up in the breathwork space.

For a long time, I’ve felt a tension regarding how breathwork is sold online. It’s usually found floating in a “spiritual bubble,” or reduced to a 60-second “hack” to fix anxiety.

But calling “breathwork” one thing is like calling “sport” one thing. You wouldn’t compare a marathon to a game of chess or a heavy weightlifting session, yet they all fall under the umbrella of physical activity. Breathwork is the same. It is a vast landscape of different practices with different outcomes.

While it’s been tucked away in yoga studios, it is widely underused by the people who need it most: the corporates, the high-performers, and the everyday professionals looking to optimize their sleep, their health, and their mental clarity.

Going All In

I am officially taking my place here. No more playing small or hiding behind vague titles. I am going all in on breathwork.

I want to move past the “disconnected practices” and the one-off experiences that never quite land. Breathwork is a skill, and skills are meant to be learned, practiced, and integrated.

To bring this to life, I’m doing a few things differently:

• Educational Series: I am currently recording a series of deep-dive educational videos on my Instagram. We’re going to explore the what, when, why, and how behind the breath.

• The Newsletter Shift: This Substack will become the home for this deeper education. We’ll slow down and experience the practices together in real time.

• The Solo-preneur Journey: I’ll continue to share the raw “behind the scenes” of my life as a founder - the doubts, the airport beers, and the sailboat realizations included.

We’re going to learn how to breathe like it matters. Because it truly does.

A note from the terminal: Have you ever felt that “identity lag” - where your heart has moved on to something new, but your brain is still trying to justify it to your father’s friends? I’d love to hear your thoughts by simply hitting reply or in the comments if you are using the Substack app.

By the time this hits your inbox, I’ll have already arrived. I’ve sneaked in a few photos below of the San Blas Islands from the last days - an insane, remote paradise off the Caribbean coast of Panama. It’s nature-rich, incredibly friendly, and exactly the kind of ruleless environment I needed.

Here is also a song I cannot stop listening to:

Close your eyes, slow down your breath and listen.

Sending you so much sunshine to your heart 💛

Elena

✨ Ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

#1 - 1:1 Nervous System and Breath Coaching 🇬🇧🇩🇪

High performer? Time to breathe like one. Are you curious on how Breathwork could shift your health, sleep and performance? Breath coaching is the smartest approach to win over your nervous system and get out of the burn out spiral!
→ More Infos here
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership through breathwork. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

🛠 The Breathwork Toolkit (former Links of the week ;))

Resources to help you build the skill.

• Deep Dive: Your Breath as a Fingerprint This National Geographic piece is a fascinating look at how our breathing patterns are as unique as our fingerprints—and what they reveal about our health and mood. 👉 Read the article here (Note: Use this link for the free, summarized version via smry.ai)

• The Foundation: Breath by James Nestor If you want to understand the “Why” behind the “How,” this is the book. It’s a journey through the “lost art” of breathing and explores why we, as a species, have forgotten how to do the one thing that keeps us alive. 👉 Find it on Amazon

💡 Solo-preneur Tip of the Week

Break the “Identity Corset”: Next time someone asks you what you do, try answering without using a title. Tell them what you build, what you solve, or what you care about. It’s uncomfortable at first, but that’s where the growth happens.

📸 Snapshots from the San Blas Islands Remote Office of the week

It’s a strange irony of the modern world: I’m on a remote island in the middle of the Caribbean, yet I have faster, more stable WiFi here than I ever did in the middle of Berlin. I know the man behind the product is controversial, but Starlink is a genuine game-changer.

Coming Soon

Stay tuned: My new educational video series on the ‘Sports of Breathwork’ launches on Instagram next week. Make sure you’re following me there so you don’t miss the first deep dive. 👉 Follow me here

Happy 2026 to you! 🫶🏼

I didn’t plan to learn my most important lesson of the year in a cabin with no toilet.

But that’s where it happened.

I spent the last days of 2025 and the first fragile days of 2026 alone in a tiny wooden hut by a frozen lake. There was a fire, a sauna somewhere in the woods, and almost nothing else. No heating beyond the fireplace I had to feed all day so the room wouldn’t turn into a freezer. No bathroom in my cabin, only a biodegradable one outside and a shared toilet in the main house, twelve people scattered across little huts like quiet satellites in the forest. My cabin had a bed, a stove, and wide windows looking onto the lake.

That was it.

And somehow, it was more than enough.

The man who created this place used to be a film director in Los Angeles, then Berlin. When Covid came, he found himself spending more and more time on this wild, protected land an hour east of the city. Damp soil, moss, endless lakes, barely any wifi, no meetings, no pitch decks. Somewhere between carrying firewood and walking through the dark to go pee, he realized how little is actually needed to live well. So he built his own cabin without heating, without a toilet, forcing himself into contact with the outside world every single day.

At first I thought it was crazy. After four days, I thought it was revolutionary.

Every trip to the kitchen was a walk through icy air. Every bathroom break meant stepping into the night. I spent more time outside in those few days than I do in an average winter month in Berlin. Inside, I lay on the bed listening to the crackling fire, reading, thinking, breathing, feeling an unfamiliar lightness in my chest.

Food. Warmth. Community. And yes, a proper toilet helps. These are the basics. Not optimized kitchens. Not the newest gadgets. Not another app that promises to finally fix us.

And this is where the bigger realization hit me. We optimized our life for “comfort” but feel as rushed as little chickens running over hot stones in this modern world. So it’s not accidental that time somehow keeps disappearing from our lives. Fades away. Whatever we don’t deliberately protect is quietly erased in a culture that runs on speed. Work is carefully scheduled; rest is treated like something that needs permission.

Free time is not the leftover. It is the condition that allows everything else to work. So building a life where free time is deliberately discomfortable (like having to go outside every time you need to pee) is revolutionary.

Every time we get in contact with what truly matters, we invite a form of slowness. And only in slowness does awareness return. When the pace drops, questions arise that have no chance in the noise:

How am I really doing right now?
What do I actually need?
Where have I crossed my own limits?

These are not indulgent thoughts. They are the foundation of self-contact. And maybe that is exactly why we avoid them so fiercely.

Slowing down doesn’t require a cabin in the woods. It starts much more quietly: In tiny interruptions of our autopilot. In letting work truly end instead of jumping straight into the next distraction. In not filling every empty minute with scrolling. To slow down is to tell your nervous system that something is over; not just that the location has changed.

With slowness comes a gentler relationship to our own boundaries. Fatigue stops being something to conquer. Tiredness is no longer a personal failure. We stop treating ourselves like endless self-optimization projects and begin meeting ourselves as human beings with needs. Kindness, I’ve learned, is not the opposite of ambition, it is honesty about what we can genuinely carry.

Our culture asks too much of work. It wants it to define who we are, what we’re worth, and what our lives mean - more than it could ever hold. What we need are counter-spaces where we are not producing, not performing, not explaining ourselves. Time in which identity is not manufactured, but slowly uncovered. Maybe balance is not the perfect distribution of hours, but the courage to let life matter beyond productivity.

Last year taught me a lot about discomfort. Leaving my well-paid job felt like murdering the 22-year-old girl who once saw her salvation in a six-figure salary. It is always easier to stay seated, hoping someone will come and rescue you.

But no one comes. So you get up. You walk into the cold. You light the fire. You remember what matters. You begin again.

Which is why I can finally say this: I am back.

When I turned my life upside down, I lost many things and writing was one of them. Lately I’ve been finding my way back, three messy morning pages at a time. With all the AI tools out there, true writing hasn’t been easy to hold onto. But I want this space to remain human: imperfect, emotional, alive. If I can’t write from the heart, I’d rather not share at all.

I am deeply thankful that this little cabin in the woods stripped everything unnecessary away and reminded me who I am when nothing else is left.

May this be your permission for 2026:
Protect your slowness.
Choose the discomfort that makes you feel alive.
Hold on to the basics.
Let go of the rest.

Happy New Year,
with so much love, 💛

Elena

✨ Ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

#1 - 1:1 Nervous System and Breath Coaching 🇬🇧🇩🇪

High performer? Time to breathe like one. Are you curious on how Breathwork could shift your energy, focus, or leadership style? Breath coaching is the smartest approach to win over your nervous system and get out of the burn out spiral!
→ More Infos here
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success - without burning out.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

Links of the week
(this is a collection of weekly finds, fun things and recommendations with ♥)

• My year reflection (mainly in photos) of 2025 on Instagram

• One of the best books I read in 2025: The wedding people (affiliate link)

• A true sanctuary on the island of Rügen (baltic sea of Germany). Been blessed to spend Christmas here four times in a row now (unpaid ad)

• My favorite planner to go into 2026 (unpaid ad)

• My favorite new skin care routine - I can’t recommend this brand enough. I have some 20€ vouchers. Let me know, if you want one! (affiliate link)

We’ve all heard the corporate mantra:

“Bring your whole self to work.”
It sounds progressive, human, liberating.

But here’s the truth:
You should not bring your whole self to the workplace.

Not because you should hide who you are. Not because you must play a role. But because your nervous system, your identity, and your dignity need boundaries.

Let me explain.

Your workplace is not your therapist

Modern companies love emotional transparency, but in many ways don’t always know how to hold it. Sharing your deepest wounds, insecurities, trauma or heartbreak in a space that was never designed to hold them safely WILL backfire. I believe, workplaces are not built for unfiltered emotional exposure. They’re built for performance, dynamics, and incentives.

Your whole self includes:

• your grief

• your triggers

• your fears

• your relational wounds

• your shadow

• your survival patterns

Those deserve containers of safety, not performance reviews and Slack threads.

Boundaries are not masks, they are emotional hygiene

You can be authentic without being unfiltered. You can be open without being exposed. You can be vulnerable without being unsafe.

Being selective about what parts of yourself you show at work doesn’t make you fake, it makes you regulated.

True self-leadership is knowing:

Where am I safe to share?
Where am I visible truly as who I am?

When companies preach “bring your whole self,” what they sometimes really mean is:

“Bring your passion. Your motivation. Your creativity. Bring the parts of you that make us better. But leave the messy parts at home.”

That’s not wholeness. That’s emotional extraction.

A better invitation

Don’t bring your whole self to work.

Bring your resourced self.
Your boundaried self.
Your self-respecting self.
Your regulated self.

Not the version of you that is perfect - but the version that is safe inside yourself.

Because emotional maturity is not oversharing. It is choosing what belongs where.

So what belongs at work then?

✅ your values
✅ your integrity
✅ your strengths
✅ your perspective
✅ your presence
✅ your humanity

What belongs in safer spaces?

❤️ the wounds you are healing
❤️ the trauma your body still carries
❤️ the rawness of heartbreak, grief, fear, shame

Those deserve therapy, deep friendships, regulated connection, and places where your nervous system can settle - not present you as (sorry to say): “unprofessional.”

Here’s the real mantra:

Don’t bring your whole self to work.
Bring the self that honors your boundaries.

Because when you protect your inner world, you protect your power.

And that is how you stay alive - inside and outside the office.

Sending you much sunshine to your heart 💛,
Elena

P.S. If you are looking for safe places to connect with something deeper inside you, you are very welcome to grab one of the spots in my Coaching Program “Blessed by Breath”. After 6 weeks it will leave you grounded, settled and clear on your path forward. Working smart today, means being aligned with your nervous system. Grab one of the last spots!

✨ Upcoming Event: The MEtreat in Frankfurt - with Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt & me in german 🇩🇪

On December 6–7, I’ll be part of the MEtreat in Frankfurt, hosted by Zukunftsgeist a two-day experience designed to reconnect you with your Future-Ready Mindstate and the parts of yourself that already know how to grow, adapt, and lead with clarity.

The MEtreat was created by Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt, who spent over a decade at Google as the company’s first Chief Innovation Evangelist. He’s now teaching at Stanford and the Institute for Purpose & Flourishing in New York and is known worldwide for helping people turn uncertainty into curiosity and creativity.
Frederik’s mission is simple and powerful: to show that the future isn’t something we wait for: it’s something we create, starting within ourselves.

Over these 48 hours in Frankfurt, you’ll experience his unique approach to activating your Zukunftsgeist - your “future spirit” - through optimism, creativity, and courageous thinking.

And with me, you’ll explore the inner part of that transformation: breathwork, body awareness, and nervous system regulation. Because clarity and courage don’t just come from the mind, they begin in the body.

Together, we’ll move between inspiration and embodiment, between ideas and experience, so you can leave these two days not only with new insights but with real, grounded energy for what comes next.

No livestream. No theory. Just you, your breath, and a small circle of 20 people ready to meet their future selves.

🌿 MEtreat Frankfurt
📅 December 6–7, 2024
📍 Live in Frankfurt, max. 20 participants
🎟 zukunftsgeist.de/metreat-in-frankfurt

If you feel that 2025 should start differently - calmer, clearer, more you -
this might be the reset you’ve been waiting for.

✨ 2 more ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

#1 - 1:1 Nervous System and Breath Coaching 🇬🇧🇩🇪

High performer? Time to breathe like one. Are you curious on how Breathwork could shift your energy, focus, or leadership style? Breath coaching is the smartest approach to win over your nervous system and get out of the burn out spiral!
→ More Infos here
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success - without burning out.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

Over the past five years, the word “Leadership” has gone through a lot of change in meaning for me. In the beginning, I thought leadership was relevant for anyone in a management position learning to build the right skills to work with people.

At some point in my corporate career, it felt like a pig dragged through the halls and everyone was talking about it, but no one was truly acting on it. Because when it came down to “working for real” and “bringing in the numbers,” harder measures had to be taken.

When I now think back on my 11 years in work life and the people who truly embodied leadership for me, they were the ones who supported my path and saw me as a whole person, not only the role I was playing in my job or the amount of productivity I could create.

I’ve journaled and reflected a lot about leadership in the past years and want to take the time today to portray a few dimensions that have changed how I think about it, feel it, and embody it for myself.

In this newsletter - and also in the next couple of weeks on LinkedIn (follow me there if you like) - I will keep dwelling (is that even a word?!) on it, and I hope it gives you some thoughts on how it can enrich your life.

Let’s get started.

Doing hard things in a human way

What changed my thinking on leadership the most was reading this:
“Leadership is doing hard things in a human way.”

To understand that definition more deeply for myself, I first had to find out what “hard things” and “human way” meant for me.

Doing hard things

Practicing radical honesty:
It’s often so hard to accept where you are right now when you’d rather be somewhere else: that sportier version of yourself, the more successful one, the more connected one, the healthier one, the one with more money to buy something you really fancy, or simply the one with more time.

Oftentimes, we act from a future version of ourselves and make decisions that are step 3 or 4 - instead of step 1 or 2.

Let me give you an example:
When I started my coaching practice five years ago, I had zero clients, yet I paid 10,000 euros for a new website (that portrayed something I didn’t even know people liked), faked testimonials (sad story), and worked on everything in my “business” except getting new clients.

The radical honesty would have been:
“I have zero clients. How can I get people interested in my work? What do they need? Let’s start conversations, offer something for free to get feedback, and be radically honest about where I am.”

Instead, I lied - pretended I already had a lot of clients - and kept feeling like I needed to “catch up” to the version I had built. That was a hard lesson.

Two years ago, when I did have clients and my business was growing, I still felt the dread of that dishonest start. So I gave myself a restart - an honest one - and promised to never lie about anything again.

And something magical happened.
When I stopped pretending that I had everything figured out and started to be honest about how things were actually going, I grew with calmness instead of “catch-up” mode. I redesigned my website and was completely honest about what I can and cannot do.

Having hard conversations:
Letting someone go - in a job or in life - when something is off or not working.

Having hard conversations still feels hard to me, because potentially hurting someone is difficult to bear, especially when you’re a person who wants to be liked.

In my first leadership role, I had an employee who came to my office every week to tell me everything that was going wrong, what didn’t work, and all the problems we had.
Every time I sat there, listened, and gave empathy: “That must be hard,” “How understandable,” “Thanks for sharing.”

Week after week, nothing changed.
Eventually, I started to get annoyed.

Then I tried to introduce a “solution mindset,” asking questions like:
“Interesting: what do you think could help in that situation?” or
“Do you have an idea of what you could do about that?”

I thought I was being smart, but that didn’t help either.

Her answers always boiled down to: “When there are so many problems, it’s helpless…” For someone in victim mode and largely disappointed by work life, nothing truly helps.

My frustration rose and rose until, in one meeting, I was completely honest:

“Look, you come to my office every single week, complaining about how bad everything is.
This is not a prison.
To me, it seems like you truly don’t like your work - and that’s fine.
I understand it’s hard.
But I also don’t see any chains tied to your legs. You’re free.
You can go, and I’ll help you find a different job. I want you to be happy.”

She looked at me with an open mouth and said she’d think about it.

The following week, her attitude had completely shifted.
She said she didn’t want a new job, had already set up a plan to get her projects back on track - and had started implementing it.

There are many situations like that where having the hard, honest conversation created the shift. Since then, this has been my “hidden secret”: sharing what’s on my mind and how I feel. It truly creates wonders.

When we think we need to act a certain way, we’re not true to ourselves - and not true to the situation. That’s where real change happens.

Making decisions and acting on them:
Making a decision is better than making none.

I’ve seen so many times that indecision is everywhere: we work in the in-between, the analysis, the risk-aversion phase, rather than acting on a decision and seeing where it takes us.

We talk about “failure culture” and, at the same time, “zero tolerance.”
That combination creates paralysis: the need to have every argument right and everything perfect before ever deciding.

Don’t get me wrong: putting thought into a decision is the right thing to do.
But there will always be unknowns, things you only realize once you start walking.
The key is simply to start walking.

I see this in myself and in others at work all the time: this in-between phase.

My golden rule:

If you don’t know how to decide, make the decision - and see how it feels.

It works like magic.
And yes, it’s hard. Because you might fail.
But only if you expect everything to go right in the first place.

Life becomes much easier when we see it as a running experiment.

There’s so much more to say about hard things.
And I guess what feels hard is different for everyone.
Hard things are often harder because they live in our heads - tied to an image of how things should be. When reality doesn’t match that image, it feels hard or unreachable.

If we open ourselves to different outcomes and start to see things as they truly are - instead of how they should be - some things become less hard. Others, especially the ones we can’t control, simply need time to feel less hard.

“Human Way”

What is human, anyway?

For me, being human means messy, imperfect, emotional, inconsistent, full of contradictions - and still showing up.

For a long time, I thought being professional meant leaving the “human part” at home.
The tiredness. The bad day. The fear of not being enough.

But the more I tried to separate the two, the less connected I felt to others, to my work, to myself.

When I started coaching and dove deeper into bodywork and the nervous system, I began to understand something simple but profound:
You can’t lead from a disconnected body. You can only manage.

Being human in leadership means staying in touch with your own system: your breath, your emotions, your limits. It means noticing when you’re in fight or flight before you start fighting your team or fleeing into busywork. t means choosing presence over perfection, curiosity over control.

It’s also allowing yourself to fail, repair, apologize and still see yourself as worthy of leading.When I think of the people who truly led me, they weren’t perfect. They were honest. They were present. They were kind when it was easy to be harsh. And that’s what made them unforgettable.

If you made it this far, thank you for breathing through my reflections. I’d love to hear what leadership means for you right now. What’s one hard thing you’re learning to do in a more human way? Simply reply to this email.

With calm & curiosity,
sending sunshine to your heart 💛
Elena

✨ Upcoming Event: The MEtreat in Frankfurt - with Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt & me in german 🇩🇪

I’m thrilled to share something special with you today.
On December 6–7, I’ll be part of the MEtreat in Frankfurt, hosted by Zukunftsgeist a two-day experience designed to reconnect you with your Future-Ready Mindstate and the parts of yourself that already know how to grow, adapt, and lead with clarity.

The MEtreat was created by Dr. Frederik G. Pferdt, who spent over a decade at Google as the company’s first Chief Innovation Evangelist. He’s now teaching at Stanford and the Institute for Purpose & Flourishing in New York and is known worldwide for helping people turn uncertainty into curiosity and creativity.
Frederik’s mission is simple and powerful: to show that the future isn’t something we wait for: it’s something we create, starting within ourselves.

Over these 48 hours in Frankfurt, you’ll experience his unique approach to activating your Zukunftsgeist - your “future spirit” - through optimism, creativity, and courageous thinking.

And with me, you’ll explore the inner part of that transformation: breathwork, body awareness, and nervous system regulation. Because clarity and courage don’t just come from the mind, they begin in the body.

Together, we’ll move between inspiration and embodiment, between ideas and experience, so you can leave these two days not only with new insights but with real, grounded energy for what comes next.

No livestream. No theory. Just you, your breath, and a small circle of 20 people ready to meet their future selves.

🌿 MEtreat Frankfurt
📅 December 6–7, 2024
📍 Live in Frankfurt, max. 20 participants
🎟 zukunftsgeist.de/metreat-in-frankfurt

If you feel that 2025 should start differently - calmer, clearer, more you -
this might be the reset you’ve been waiting for.

✨ 2 more ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

#1 - 1:1 Nervous System and Breath Coaching 🇬🇧🇩🇪

High performer? Time to breathe like one. Are you curious on how Breathwork could shift your energy, focus, or leadership style? Breath coaching is the smartest approach to win over your nervous system and get out of the burn out spiral!
→ More Infos here
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#2 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success - without burning out.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out by simply replying to this email! 💛

Everytime I start writing here, it feels like I’m announcing another shift. Maybe this newsletter is simply my living proof that life is never static - and neither am I.

So here’s the latest:

1. I left ada, ada left me.
Yep. Big step. After years of learning and growing there, it’s time to go all in on myself. Full self-employment. Equal parts exciting and terrifying.

2. I launched Studio frei◦sein.
For a while, I ran everything “Coaching and Breathwork” under my name. But I knew it was time to give my German offerings their own home. Studio frei◦sein is now the space where I host all things nervous system, breathwork, and coaching. So I finally gave my German offerings their own home: And yes, Studio◦frei sein even has its own newsletter (auf Deutsch, of course). I will also share more of the process of creating this business here and how things evolved in the next weeks - stay tuned!

3. This newsletter stays.
escape the Ordinary is still here - and will stay my space for lifestyle updates, reflections, and tips on living differently. Think of it as your little reminder that “ordinary” is optional.

Managing two audiences (English + German) is… let’s say, a fun challenge. My brain basically lives in bilingual mode now. But splitting the spaces feels right. One home for my work in German, one for the global reflections I share here.

💌 What this means for you:

• Expect personal updates and practical tips here about mindfulness, smart and conscious working and a more healthy lifestyle, in English.

• If you want the deeper dive into nervous system & breathwork (and you read German), come join me over at studiofreisein.de/freebie (there is a surprise waiting for you!)

Thank you for being here. Thank you for letting me keep evolving in public. And thank you for proving with me that change is less scary when you don’t do it alone.

With love and sending a lot of sunshine to your heart 💛, (and way too many browser tabs open),

Elena

Links of the week

Some good reads - they are worth it! 👋🏼

• The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

• How I accidentally built a portfolio career

• 100 Ride-or-Die Leadership Resources

Let’s play a game.

Finish this sentence:

“I’ll finally feel healthy when…”

When I lose the weight.
When I cut sugar completely.
When I wake up at 5AM to journal, dry brush, cold plunge, do breathwork, and crush a kale smoothie before sunrise.

Sound familiar?

Yeah. Same.

But also… no.

Because maybe the real question isn’t “Am I healthy?”
Maybe it’s: Who told me what health is supposed to look like in the first place?

When Health Becomes a Hustle

We live in a culture obsessed with wellness as status.

Juice cleanses. Fitness trackers. Green powders. Glow-ups. Ice baths. The 5AM club. Aesthetic self-discipline disguised as virtue.

I catch myself being drawn to all of this!

Health, once a means to support life, has become a performance piece — polished, Instagrammable, and exhausting.

We’re told that if we just optimize harder — eat cleaner, move smarter, think better, reconnect with our masculinity/ femininity — we’ll finally unlock that elusive state of being: health.

But here’s the unsettling truth:

Many of us are doing everything “right” — and still not feeling well.

If you’ve ever:

• Bought the supplements

• Built the morning routine

• Followed the protocol

• Still felt anxious, depleted, or “not quite there”

You’re not broken.
You’re just human.
And you’ve been handed a definition of health that was never built to hold your full humanity.

Health as a Moral Report Card

In Reclaiming Body Trust, authors Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant explain how modern systems don’t teach us to thrive — they teach us to survive them.

We’re conditioned to:

• Push through fatigue

• Override our bodies

• Feel guilty for resting

• Equate control with success

And when we can’t keep up, we internalize the failure.

The body becomes a problem to fix.
Health becomes a measure of worth.
And perfection becomes the price of admission.

It’s not just toxic. It’s unsustainable.

The False Binary: Sick or Well

Mainstream health culture loves a tidy binary:
You’re either sick or well. Broken or fixed. Weak or disciplined.

This leaves no room for nuance, fluctuation, or the simple fact that bodies change.
Minds change. Lives change.

Real health is not static.
It’s not a destination you “arrive” at and stay forever.

It’s a dynamic relationship — shaped by age, identity, trauma, access, privilege, care, and culture.

Who Gets to Be Seen as “Healthy”?

We have to ask:
Who does our definition of health center?
And who does it leave behind?

Because the dominant image of “health” — thin, white, neurotypical, able-bodied, affluent — is not just narrow. It’s exclusionary.

Too often, health advice comes wrapped in the language of self-care but serves the logic of capitalism:

If you don’t feel good, fix it. If you can’t fix it, hide it. If you can’t hide it, work harder.

And let’s be honest: much of what we’re sold as “healing” is just another way to control the body and monetize our shame.

“Much of what we do in the name of health causes more stress than it relieves.”

What If Health Wasn’t a Solo Project?

What if health wasn’t about discipline and devotion —
but about connection?

What if healing didn’t mean perfection —
but presence?

Writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha offers a radical reframing:

“Collective care means building systems where people feel fine getting sick, needing time, crying, moving slower...
Where we care for each other and don’t leave anyone behind.”

What would it look like to shift from self-optimization to shared humanity?

Escape the Ordinary Idea of Health

The ordinary narrative goes something like this:

Work harder. Restrict more. Control your body. Master your mind.
Look the part. Hustle for wholeness.
Maybe then — maybe — you’ll finally be worthy.

But what if the issue isn’t you —
It’s the story you were told about what it means to be well?

Real health isn’t something you perform for the world.
It’s something you reclaim — in your own time, in your own way, on your own terms.

Not despite your mess.
But because of your humanity.

That’s not failure.
That’s freedom.

So... How Do You Redefine Health for Yourself?

If you're ready to step out of the performative version of wellness and into a more grounded, real relationship with health — start here:

1. Define “Feeling Well” in Your Own Words

Don’t outsource your definition of health.
Ask yourself:

• What does feeling good actually mean for me?

• What helps me feel mentally clear, physically steady, emotionally connected?

• When do I feel most like myself?

Your answers are the compass.
Let them guide you — not someone else’s protocol.

2. Audit Your Inputs

We are constantly being fed ideas about health — most of them designed to make us feel not enough.

• Unfollow the “aspirational wellness” accounts that trigger shame or comparison.

• Curate a digital and real-life space that supports rest, nuance, and curiosity.

• Ask: Is this advice helping me feel empowered — or just pressured?

3. Shift from Control to Connection

Instead of asking:

“How can I control my body today?”

Try:

“How can I connect with my body today?”

This might look like:

• Moving because it feels energizing, not punishing

• Eating in a way that supports both satisfaction and nourishment

• Noticing your body’s signals before overriding them with schedules or plans

Connection builds trust. Trust builds freedom.

4. Build Micro-Rituals of Care

Forget the elaborate 90-minute morning routines.

Start with:

• 3 minutes of silence before opening your phone

• A short walk without headphones

• A daily check-in with a question like, What do I need more of today?

Consistency > intensity.
Rituals don’t have to be big. They just have to be yours.

5. Normalize Support & Collective Care

Health doesn’t have to be solo.

• Talk about your needs with people who get it

• Ask for help before you're at your edge

• Offer others grace for being human — and receive it when it’s your turn

Start imagining care as a shared practice, not just a personal project.

6. Let Yourself Be a Work in Progress

You don’t need to “arrive.”
You don’t need to optimize every moment.
You just need to live — fully, imperfectly, and with your own definition of what thriving looks like.

Let health be flexible. Let healing be human.

Sending you all the sunshine to your heart 💛
Elena

✨ 3 ways to work with me ✨

If you’ve been enjoying my reflections and want to go deeper, here are ways we can work together:

#1 - Transformational Breath on July 17th 2025 (GERMAN)

Join a 2 hour guided online breathwork session using Transformational Breathwork — a conscious, connected breathing technique that activates deep emotional, physical, and energetic release. For anyone feeling stuck, low on energy, or at the edge of a new chapter — no experience needed. It’s a perfect “emotional gym” to reset your nervous system, clear emotional tension, and reconnect with clarity, confidence, and inner calm.
→ Sign up here!

#2 - 1:1 (Breath) Coaching

High performer? Time to breathe like one. Are you curious on how Breathwork could shift your energy, focus, or leadership style? Breath coaching is the smartest approach to win over your nervous system and get out of the burn out spiral!
→ Book a free 30-min discovery call to explore how I can support your goals.

#3 - Workshops & Keynotes for Companies

I work with companies and teams to foster well-being, resilience, and mindful leadership. My workshops and keynotes combine science-backed strategies with practical tools for creating sustainable success - without burning out.
→ Get in touch to discuss how we can bring mindfulness and balance to your organization.

No matter where you’re at in your journey, I’d love to support you in finding your own rhythm of balance and growth. If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out! 💛

Links of the week

• 📞 Most of us just look onto our phone screens, while we wait. Here are other ideas.

• This piece of art 🖼️

• This get’s me thinking: