What I Learned About Energy From Packing Peanut Butter Sandwiches to Monaco

For most of my adult life, work trips followed the same pattern. Group dinner at 7, but nobody actually saw food until closer to 8. So at the 5pm break, I'd sprint up to my hotel room where I had peanut butter sandwiches waiting. I'd eat one fast, alone, because there was no way I'd survive until a late European dinner without getting sick. And even when I did make it downstairs, there wasn't much on the menu I could actually eat. Bread, mostly. Thank God for the bread.

This was my life while traveling the world for Starwood. Istanbul. Monaco. Sandwiches packed in my suitcase for all of it.

The part that gets me now isn't that I found a way to manage it. It's that I managed it so well I stopped seeing it as a problem at all.

Why We Stop Listening To Our Own Bodies

I was a picky eater as a kid. Cream cheese sandwiches on white bread, crusts cut off, on repeat for a decade. Not exactly a nutritional foundation. By college I was trying to eat better and still felt sick constantly. Eventually I got an IBS diagnosis, and what came next was years of running my life around a body that felt like it was working against me.

No fried food. No dairy (devastating, given the cream cheese sandwich history). Meals at specific times. Lemon ginger tea after eating at work. My own snacks stashed in my desk drawer because I couldn't risk what everyone else was having. Every trip, every dinner, every outing planned around what my stomach could tolerate that day.

Here's what I understand now that I didn't then: you don't decide to stop listening to your body's signals. You just get so good at working around them that you forget they were ever signals in the first place. You accommodate. You adjust. You build an entire system to manage the limitation, and somewhere in that process, the limitation starts to feel like identity instead of a problem to solve. Meanwhile, your body keeps sending the message. Just quieter each time, because you've made it clear you're not responding.

How It Shows Up At Home

This pattern doesn't stay confined to digestion. It runs through nearly every part of life as a working mom.

You're exhausted, so you have another coffee. You're wired and anxious at 11pm, so you scroll until you pass out. You feel a low simmer of resentment about how your week is structured, so you push through and tell yourself you'll deal with it eventually. You end every day running on empty and decide that's just the cost of doing everything you're doing.

Same mechanism. You normalize it, you accommodate it, and eventually you get so skilled at functioning depleted that you forget what it felt like to not be.

My co-host Teresa has her own version of this. She grew up on Fruity Pebbles, Slim-Fast bars, and full nineties diet culture. She felt bad for years without fully clocking it, because that was just the baseline. It took stumbling onto a book (The China Study) for something to click and for her to realize the baseline she'd accepted wasn't actually the baseline she had to live at.

Both of us needed to reach a point where we stopped accommodating and started actually listening. That's a harder shift than it sounds, because by the time you're that practiced at managing something, the managing itself starts to feel like maturity.

What Changes When You Actually Listen

A few years ago, something shifted for me. I had spent my entire adult life managing IBS. I built routines around it. I traveled with sandwiches because of it. My whole relationship with food was constructed around accommodating it.

And then, slowly, it stopped. A few months went by without a flare. Then a year. At some point I realized something I had carried for my entire adult life had quietly resolved itself, and I'd nearly missed it because I was still bracing for it out of habit.

That cracked something open for me. If I'd spent years accepting a physical reality that turned out to be temporary, what else was I still accepting that didn't have to be permanent?

That's the real question. Not what am I currently managing, but what have I stopped questioning simply because I've gotten so good at managing it?

Your body is still talking. It has been the whole time. The tiredness that sleep doesn't fix. The shoulder tension that shows up every Sunday night without fail. The way certain work drains you twice as much as it should, while other work somehow leaves you with more in the tank than you started with.

Teresa figured this out around her calendar. Context switching wipes her out in a way back-to-back meetings don't, so she stacks meetings together, protects blocks for deep work, and shapes her days around how her energy actually behaves instead of how her calendar defaults. She ends most days with something left over, instead of hitting 5pm completely spent.

I found my own version with coaching. Sessions cost me something specific, so I cap how many I run back to back, build in recovery time after them, and protect that time even though it doesn't look productive on paper. My capacity for the rest of the day is noticeably better. My work is better. I show up differently for my daughter in the evening because of it.

Working with your energy instead of against it is the difference between riding an e-bike up a hill and grinding up that same hill on a bike with no gears. Both get you there. Only one leaves you with something left when you arrive.

The One Question That Changes Everything

I use an idea in my burnout workshops that I first heard from Naveed Ahmed, founder of Flourish. The gist of it: life gives you small signals first, a feather-light tap. If you miss those, it escalates to something heavier, a brick. And if you keep missing it, eventually it becomes impossible to ignore, the equivalent of getting hit by a bus.

Most of us are waiting for the bus.

We brush off the feather because we're busy. We push through the brick because we don't have bandwidth to deal with it right now. Then we act shocked when the bus shows up as a health scare, a relationship that finally cracks, or a burnout so total it takes months to climb out of.

The work is learning to catch the feather. That starts with a decision: the signals your body sends are worth your attention. Not something to manage around. Not something to push through quietly. Something to actually listen to.

Learning To Hear The Feather

I spent years treating my body's signals as an inconvenience to route around instead of information worth acting on. The peanut butter sandwiches got me through Monaco, but they were also proof of how far I'd go to avoid listening to what my body was actually telling me.

You don't need a diagnosis or a health scare to start paying attention. You just need to stop assuming that what you've normalized is what you're stuck with.

What is your body telling you right now that you've decided is just how things are?

Want the full conversation? Listen to Episode 103 of Rewritten: Real Talk for Working Moms Who Want It All on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Ready to stop managing and start listening? I work with women one-on-one on exactly this. Book a free consultation at reworkit.co/schedule-a-consultation.

Jess Wass is the Founder of Reworkit, a leadership development and coaching company, and co-host of Rewritten: Real Talk for Working Moms Who Want It All. She helps women ditch the script they were handed and build a life that's actually theirs.