Start the day in your Body, Not in a Panic: your Morning Stress Impacts your Entire Day.
You know that moment—the one where your eyes open and the list begins.
Before your feet touch the ground, you’re already calculating the hours, juggling priorities, and feeling the familiar rise of tightness in your chest and twist in your gut.
For so many women, mornings aren’t gentle. They’re go-time. It’s ‘take the world head on’, before it attempts to tackle you to the ground. Multiple schedules, school drop offs, errands, to-do lists that split into 3 different categories before your first coffee is done, traffic - and that’s just the first few hours.
With a day started in haste, how does this translate into the next 8 hours? Usually, more haste. Constant rush and push. Your morning has set the tone for the rest of your day - and when you begin in a state of reactivity and overwhelm — you carry that energy into every interaction, decision, and task. Haste and push, rush and strain - until your head hits the pillow later that night. And even then, the mind is still stuck in the inertia of the day which sets the tone for a night of shallow un-restful sleep before it begins all over again, the next morning.
Does this sound familiar?!
Here’s where breathwork becomes your secret weapon
Slow, intentional breathing first thing in the morning helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system—your body’s ‘rest and digest’ mode. It signals safety to the brain, calms your cortisol response, and brings you out of the fight-or-flight state many of us unconsciously wake up in.
Win the Morning - Win the Day. A note from Sarah:
There are many days where I’ve started the morning with anxiety, rush and disembodiment, purely out of habit and ingrained neural patterns. This usually cascaded onto moment after moment of continued reactivity, irritability, tiredness, low focus, unproductivity, foggy mind, and disconnect. And if I didn’t take the time to self-regulate early on, it grew and grew until it required a strong dose of ‘self regulation’ later on. I know this busy morning very well. But I also know the opposite - the slow, gentle, present, clear mornings that are embodied and grounded.
Each morning that I wake up and begin my day instantly with a practice that grounds me, clears my mind, opens up my body and establishes a sense of connected self - provides a baseline that radiates out into the rest of my day. A baseline that my body is quick to return to when jolted off-center. A baseline that my mind knows how to find, when the thoughts get stuck in loops. A baseline that my breath unconsciously syncs back to, time and again. This allows my days to run with a sense of resiliency to the hiccups, gentleness at the forefront, and noticing more frequently the gratefulness in the small things.
So what if your mornings looked a little slower, a little gentler, and a little more you? You can decide to start your day right, simply by changing the way you do things first. You’ve heard the saying ‘win Monday morning, win the week’? The same goes for every single day - win the morning, win the day. And this ‘win’ could be as simple as taking 5 minutes as you wake up to simply presence, ground and get in your body - before you even get out of bed.
Try this tomorrow morning:
As soon as you open your eyes (or even better, before you even open your eyes) take 3 long slow breaths. Make the exhales count.
Stretch, wriggle in your sheets, move a little to awaken and loosen the body.
Focus on soft, gentle, natural breaths. A breath that sets the tone for easeful breathing for the whole rest of the day.
Give yourself a vagus nerve massage, toning your nervous system and priming it for balance.
Clear your energy, clear your mind. Set an intention for the day, how do you want to feel?!
Shift gently into the next part of your morning/day.
If you want this in a guided 5 minute version perfect for you, busy woman - head to the Busy Woman Breathwork Pack to grab yours for today or tomorrows next morning wake-me-up and set-me-up.
Embodied Morning
The Embodied Morning breathwork audio is a 5-minute grounding and connecting practice inside the Busy Woman Breathwork Pack designed to help you start your day in your body—not just your mind. It’s a nervous system attunement and a gentle reminder that before you do, you’ve got to be.
This practice isn’t about achieving zen or squeezing in a “routine.” It’s about presence. Clarity. A few minutes of anchoring breath and gentle awareness that shifts you out of auto-pilot and into grounded leadership—of yourself, and your day.
Whether you play it while you sip your coffee, stretch in bed, or before stepping into your family/workflow, it’s a small shift with real ripple effects.
Because the most powerful way to move through a full day is to begin it fully in your body.
