At 45 I Googled:“Why do I feel like I’m losing my mind?”

I had done everything I was supposed to do. I trained. I ate well. I ran marathons and raced triathlons. I was the woman other people asked for advice.

And then, quietly, it all stopped working. The same food. The same training. A completely different body. Sleep went first, then my patience, then my words — mid-sentence, in front of people, gone.

I was told it was my age. That my bloods were normal. That everyone goes through it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I tried harder. More discipline, less food, earlier alarms.

It didn’t work, because effort was never the missing ingredient. I was under-fuelled, over-worked, over-stressed and under-recovered — and pushing harder was pouring petrol on it.

The turning point wasn’t a plan. It was a pause. A gap between what was happening to me and how I responded to it — long enough to get curious instead of critical.

Underneath the behaviour were patterns: the achieving, the caretaking, the perfecting, the surviving. Patterns built years earlier for a body that no longer existed. Once I could name them, I could interrupt them.

That work became the P.A.U.S.E. Method™, and Power to Pause™ is where I now teach it — so that no other woman has to spend three years Googling in the dark to find out she was never broken in the first place.