For 15 years, I worked as a CRNA, a nurse anesthetist, inside high-acuity hospital settings where the stakes were life and death, every single day. It was the kind of stress that lives in your shoulders, your sleep, your interactions with others, and your relationship with yourself. So when I finally left to build my own functional medicine practice, I assumed the hardest part was behind me. I thought entrepreneurship would feel like relief.
It didn’t. Not at first.
When Relief Never Came
What I didn’t expect was how much more my nervous system would have to carry as a business owner: the decision fatigue, the financial uncertainty, the blurred lines between “work” and “everything else,” the fact that there was no longer a shift that ended. I ran my own labs out of curiosity, the same epigenetic testing I use with my clients to measure biological aging. At 45 years old, I expected my results to roughly reflect my age. Instead, my biological age came back at 102.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect: knowing the science didn’t protect me from living the imbalance. I had spent years teaching clients how to recognize what their body was asking for and how to respond to it. But when it came to my own life, I kept overriding those same signals, because there was always one more email, one more client, one more thing that felt more urgent than a walk outside or an actual lunch break. It took me time to understand that this wasn’t a discipline problem. It was a mismatch between the pace I was asking my body to sustain and what it was actually built to handle.
What the Labs Showed Me
Once I stopped treating my body as something to conquer and control, and started treating it as something to listen to, everything shifted. Today, at 48, my biological age tests at 37, a decade younger than my actual age. That reversal didn’t come from working less. It came from working differently, in a way that included recovery as part of the strategy, not a reward for finishing it.
If you’re a business owner reading this and recognizing yourself, here’s what I want you to know: your calendar is not the real problem. Your nervous system is having a normal response to an abnormal pace, and it’s asking for something, not punishing you for something.
Micro-Moments for Nervous System Recovery
You don’t need an hour you don’t have. You need micro-moments, repeated often enough that your body learns it’s actually safe to downshift:
- Box breathing, or even just simple breath awareness, between calls. Four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out, four counts hold. Ninety seconds is enough to signal safety to your nervous system.
- A “sniff, sniff, exhale” with a grounding scent like lavender or peppermint essential oil — a fast, physical reset you can do at your desk.
- Five minutes outside, ideally with real sunlight on your skin, especially in the first hour of your day.
- Gargling, humming, or singing (yes, really). These activate the vagus nerve directly and shift your body out of fight-or-flight and into rest-and-digest.
None of these require you to clear your schedule. They require you to believe, on a felt level, that your wellbeing is not separate from your business strategy. It is your business strategy. You are the asset your company depends on most. Protecting your nervous system isn’t indulgent. It’s operational.
You built a business so you could have more freedom, not less. Some of that freedom starts with a breath.
Elizabeth Greenfield, RN, MS, IFMCP is the founder of Elizabeth Greenfield Functional Wellness, a precision functional medicine practice specializing in hormonal health across the menopausal journey, gut health, and biological age reversal.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.