(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to Ask Allison. Y'all ask the questions about having a fun and thriving practice and I answer them. We have a worksheet for you today so you can bring this answer into your life. You can access that at abundancepracticebuilding.com slash links, where you'll also be able to ask any questions you have for Ask Allison. If you want more support, we've got some free trainings in there too.
If you can't get enough Ask Allison, check out our YouTube channel for our entire Ask Allison library. Welcome back to Ask Allison. Here's today's question. I feel like I can't take a break. It's not about money or high needs clients. It's like there's something in me that can't take a break. Any advice? So much advice. First, I want to thank TherapyNotes for sponsoring Ask Allison.
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So I relate to this too well. I struggled with this a lot in the past. I've worked through miscarriages. I've worked through sickness and varying degrees of anxiety. I've worked during a lot of fear and not enoughness. I've worked through buying and moving into a new home and sick kids and sick family members. I went to work the day after the worst trauma slash day of my life.
Consistency is one of the most accurate measures of whether or not a business prospers, and I earned an A-plus for a really long time, and it sounds like you do too. But I'm going to make a case for earning Bs for both of us, which is something I feel like I've done. When you're great at what you do and you enjoy it, there is this positive feedback loop that maintains the working behaviors, and I let my business become my hobby and my identity and my BFF and my third child.
It was gradual, but my business became so pervasive in my life. I loved it, so it didn't feel the way it felt to hate my toxic agency job and have that take over my life. It felt exciting and important, and I realized that I was thinking about work while playing with my kids more than I was actually listening to them.
And when my friends asked how I was doing, and pretty much all of my conversations at this stage of my life a few years ago were like catch-up conversations because I stopped showing up in my friendships, I answered their questions of like, how are you doing by talking about how great abundance had been going. And then I shared the cute thing my kids did or the fun thing Joel and I had planned, but it always started with abundance.
So for a while, half the conversations I started with my husband were business idea related, and he's always been very supportive, but he really missed having non-work related conversations. So I say all that to say like, I still get this. I feel like I'm on the other side of it and have a balance that I didn't even know was possible at that time in my life.
So no matter where your practice is, whether it's in the very first early stages where you're working your butt off to get your first few clients, or you're packed full and you're trying to carve out time to eat lunch, you can be susceptible. And all along the way, you can be susceptible to work taking over your life. For the most part, this isn't a business ownership thing. This is a you thing. Yeah. Owning a business means you don't clock in, do your work and then leave.
But I want to be really clear that feeling compelled isn't inherent in business ownership. There's something in there that you need to sort out. So while you work on the underlying grief or trauma or worthiness or whatever is underlying that, here are some things that I want you to consider to help put some boundaries around work. Setting a really hard stop time. If you need to leave your laptop at your office or shut the whole thing down and stow it away from you if you work from home, do that.
Make your off days all the way off. If you've been doing like a little work here and a little work there, this is going to feel really uncomfortable at first, but it's important that you hold to that. Take all work apps off your phone when your work day ends. If you have drafts, for instance, let's say you use Instagram, if you delete the Instagram app, it's going to all the drafts that you have. So if you just created a bunch of content, we don't want to delete it.
Just download it to your phone, delete Instagram or get a blocker, like an app blocker. I use the one called Freedom and that helps. Keep your phone in a different room whenever possible, especially if you feel like you can't trust yourself to not get onto work stuff somehow through it. And I would say just in general, that's probably a good rule to not be tethered to your phone all the time.
I realized I was trying to calm the anxiety of all the to-dos by completing those tasks, which sounds logical, but since there's a never ending rotation of stuff to do, which I'm pretty sure we've talked about in here before, I was cramming too much in while also feeling perpetually behind.
It's another feedback loop, one that is a lot less fulfilling and a lot more anxiety packed because we can make up all sorts of work for ourselves and we can convince ourselves that the work we just made up for ourselves is the one that's really going to move the needle and change things for us. But that's not necessarily true. Replace your fake hobby of work with real hobbies. You might have forgotten those exist.
That way you have something to do when you're off work and you're feeling the itch to do work and you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes that distraction will help. Don't expect this to be comfortable. I've mentioned that a few times. You may be very anxious Monday mornings wondering what awaits you after denying the compulsion to check stuff over the weekend. That'll get easier. Take a really hard look at your practice and see what needs to change. Sometimes it's systems.
Sometimes it's a number of things. So if you're seeing like 40 clients a week because insurance reimbursement rates are so low that you have to, or maybe you're struggling with setting and maintaining boundaries with your time, you probably need some help changing that. If you have not done that yet and it is not working for you to maintain that change, our Limitless Practice Program is specifically for full therapists who need to make these big changes in their practice.
You can message me the word limitless and we'll talk through if it's a fit. But I think most importantly, don't just do the things that I listed out. Also work on whatever you're avoiding emotionally.
Say the thing aloud to your therapist that you're not saying, or let them know you need to focus on it more if you're kind of like steering elsewhere or get a therapist if you don't have one, but find some way to work through whatever hole or void or avoidance that work is kind of like calming for you. And having been in your shoes, I can say there is a way out. You can take breaks and eventually they're not going to be as anxiety provoking as they might be right now.
So today's free worksheet is 10 things you can do to regain balance. Message me the word sheets, and I'll send you the link to that in all of our free worksheets. And that way you've got some, some guidance to kind of help you through this. All right. I hope you have a really great day. Take care. If you're ready for a much easier practice, therapy notes is the way to go. Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code abundant for two months free. I hope that helped.
If you have questions for ask Alison, or you want to get your hands on the worksheet for this episode, go to abundancepracticebuilding.com slash links. If you're listening, you probably need some support building your practice. If you're a super newbie, grab our free checklist using the link in the show notes. I'd love for you to follow rate and review, but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.