The Day I Couldn't Out-Train My Mind
- Seema Chopra
- May 5
- 4 min read
I sat down to record this episode and my mind went completely blank. Nothing. I'd been thinking about it for days, I had things to say, and then the moment I pressed record — nothing.
I sat with that for a few minutes before I started speaking. And then I realised: that blank feeling is the whole episode. Because you know it. The moment you sit down to do the thing you've been meaning to do, and your brain tells you something must be wrong with you.
It doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system hasn't arrived yet.
What my wrist taught me about my brain
A few years ago I started wearing a Whoop — a wearable that measures heart rate variability, essentially how recovered your nervous system is day to day. I started noticing something that genuinely confused me.
There were days I hadn't trained at all. No gym, no structured exercise, just restorative movement. I'd wake up and my Whoop would tell me I was unrecovered. Body under stress. And I remember thinking: what? I haven't done anything.
That's when it landed.
I had been thinking hard and fast all day. My brain had been running at full capacity — attending to my children, my clients, my work, my own internal processing. My body had been quietly carrying every single bit of it, and I had no idea. Cognitive load, emotional load, and physical load are not separate. They draw from the same well.
When did you last have a day where you did physically nothing and still felt exhausted by the end of it? That exhaustion is real. It's not in your head. It's in your body, and it comes from your head.
What my diagnosis changed
When I received my ADHD diagnosis four or five years ago, something shifted in my body that I'd never expected. My HRV changed. My heart rate settled. My breathing changed. Things I'd been white-knuckling for decades started to soften.
Not because my life got easier. Because I finally understood what my nervous system had been doing my whole life.
It had been running in a threat response that was never meant to be permanent. But it was permanent — during the day, during the night, when everyone around me thought I was relaxed. Underneath, it was always on. And I had been training on top of that. Coaching on top of that. Parenting on top of that. Building a business on top of that.
I wasn't lazy. I wasn't undisciplined. I had a huge drive for life and enormous self-determination. I was exhausted in a way that sleep wasn't touching, because the exhaustion was coming from deep inside the system — from a nervous system that had never had permission to fully stop.
If you're someone who has always found a way, who has always pushed through — I want you to hear this. That capacity to push through is not the same as being okay. Your body doesn't always know the difference between managed and resolved. And over time, that distinction matters enormously.
What I see in the studio
I see this in the women I work with every single week. They're capable, high-performing, and they've been managing their nervous systems through sheer output for years. It shows in their bodies.
They walk in thinking they're ready to train. I can see they're not. Not yet. The shoulders are up near the ears. The breath is shallow. The eyes are still moving, still processing whatever happened in the car, in the meeting, in the house before they walked through the door.
So we don't start with weights. We lie down. We breathe. We move gently until something shifts.
And it always shifts. It tends to live in the hips, the lower back, the pelvis, the shoulders. When it releases, everything changes. The jaw softens. The eyes settle. The breath goes deep. And then they can actually move — properly, with alignment, with access to strength that was always there but couldn't be reached through a system that was still braced.
If I put a barbell in their hands before that shift happened, the risk of injury is real. Stress holds the body in patterns that are not designed for load. Arrival isn't optional. It's the prerequisite.
The blank isn't empty
Which brings me back to where I started. That blank feeling when you sit down to create, to perform, to produce.
The ADHD brain doesn't perform on demand. It doesn't store information in neat linear files. It fires when it fires and goes quiet when it's quiet. I have hundreds of voice notes on my phone — moments where something landed and I caught it fast. And then I sit down to record and I feel like I'm starting from zero.
But here's what I've learned. The blank isn't empty. Everything you've lived, everything you've built, is still in there — in your body, in your system. It comes back when the conditions are right. And the conditions are: arrival. A few minutes of not demanding anything from yourself before you ask yourself to produce something.
I didn't do that before I pressed record this time. I felt it immediately. Next time, I will.
If you're sitting with that blank feeling — in your training, in your work, in your body — it's not a character flaw. It's a nervous system that needs to arrive before it can perform. Give it that. Even five minutes. See what comes.
If you want to work with someone who understands this from the inside, here's my clarity call link. It's £50, and it comes off your first month if we work together. Come and talk to me.
Coming Up | When Pain Speaks
On Thursday 21 May, I'm hosting When Pain Speaks — a clinical and somatic symposium at Beckenham Place Mansion, London (and online via Zoom).
Joined by a Pain Specialist Physiotherapist and a Yoga Therapist-Psychotherapist, we'll be exploring what pain is really trying to communicate — and what becomes possible when we finally listen.
7:00–8:30pm | In person or online | Recording included | Tickets £65
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