When You Forget Your Own Tools: A Coach’s Guide to Self-Compassion During Times of Transition

What happens when stress, change, uncertainty overrides your usual practices and how to find your way back.

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I recently returned from an intense week away with my teenage daughter, visiting universities during a heatwave, in the same week as a significant family milestone. Despite knowing all my usual tools -meditation, breathwork, movement, time alone (and many others) – I found myself reaching for old coping patterns instead: sugar, overwork, short-temperedness with the people I love most.

It’s a pattern I see often in my coaching work, and one I think is worth unpacking, because it’s rarely about willpower. It’s about what happens to our nervous systems during periods of transition, stress, uncertainty and how easily even our most trusted practices can slip when life asks too much of us at once.

Why We Abandon Our Practices Under Stress

Most of us don’t lose our coping tools because we forget they exist. We lose access to them because our capacity is already stretched thin elsewhere, often by things we haven’t fully acknowledged.

Big life transitions don´t always announce themselves cleanly. They can show up disguised as logistics, deadlines and the next thing on the list. Underneath, there’s often a current of emotion – grief, excitement, anticipation, loss, fear, worry – that gets quietly buried under the busyness of getting through the day. When that current isn’t given space, it doesn’t disappear. It accumulates and it shows up as dysregulation: poor sleep, reactivity, a pull toward old comforts.

This is especially true for highly sensitive people (HSPs) or empaths, whose nervous systems take in more sensory and emotional information than most and who need more recovery time and intentional space to process what they’re feeling. But the pattern shows up for almost everyone navigating change or uncertainty.

The truth is: knowing your tools and having capacity to use them are two different things.

Stress doesn’t erase your wisdom. It just makes it harder to access.

The Warning Signs to Watch For

Before you can return to your practices, it helps to notice when you’ve drifted from them. Common signs include:

A reliance on old comforts – food, sugar, alcohol, shopping, screens, distraction – that you know aren’t really serving you, but reach for anyway because your system is overwhelmed.

Irritability or reactivity with the people closest to you, especially in moments that wouldn’t normally provoke that response or it is a disproportional response.

Going through the motions of your usual practices or tools without the intention behind them – doing them to tick a box rather than to actually arrive in your body.

Physical symptoms accumulating quietly: disrupted sleep, tension, old injuries/pains resurfacing, fatigue that doesn’t lift with rest.

None of these are failures. They’re signals.

The goal isn’t to never experience them – it’s to recognise them sooner and to meet them with curiosity rather than judgment.

Seven Practices That Help You Return to Yourself

When you notice you’ve drifted, here’s what tends to help bring people back, in my experience both personally and with clients.

1. Protect your sleep and environment. Sleep is foundational, not optional. A nervous system reset often begins simply with rest, familiar surroundings or at least a familiar routine if away and a slower pace than the days before.

2. Reconnect with routine and structure. The specifics matter less than the consistency. Whatever scaffolding normally supports your wellbeing – a morning/evening ritual, regular meals, time outdoors, in nature – return to it as soon as you’re able.

3. Use somatic practices to discharge stress. Breathwork, walking, stretching, or any form of movement helps the body process what the mind may not yet have caught up to.

4. Talk it through with someone you trust. Naming what happened, out loud, to a partner, close friend, therapist or coach often does more to metabolise an experience than processing it alone.

5. Journalling or creating voice notes can help externalise some of the thoughts and feelings and get a different sense of perspective and out of your head as much.

6. Are you putting your needs bottom of the list? Looking at what is on your plate and how much of it needs to be done today, could it be done another day, delegated or not at all? Are you people-pleasing, over functioning or defaulting to old habits e.g. pleasing without realising it and that is adding to your load.

7. Choose self-compassion over self-correction. This is the one that matters most and the one most often forgotten about. The instinct before/during/after a stressful period is to analyse what went wrong and fix it, often with shame, judgment, guilt or blame. The more useful first step is simply to meet yourself where you are in the moment, without requiring anything to change yet. Even simply placing a hand on your heart can show yourself you are with yourself without having to do or change anything. A phone reminder for compassion throughout the day can also help too. And a personal favourite is the RAIN practice from Tara Brach.

Self-Reflection Questions for Your Own Transitions

If you’re navigating uncertainty or a significant change right now, these questions might be worth sitting with:

Are you navigating uncertainty or change right now? Even when a transition is positive or expected, it can still ask a lot of your nervous system. Naming it as a transition, rather than just “a busy time,” can shift how you relate to your own reactions. It can also help to regularly remind yourself of your need for more support, tools, practices and particularly compassion on a regular basis as you navigate this time.

What kinds of behaviours, habits or actions have you leant towards in the past during challenging times? Having this awareness can not only help us put things in place to not reach for unsupportive habits, but also give us an early warning sign when we do that we need to respond to ourselves differently.

What has most supported you in similar times in the past? Often we already know what helps. The work is remembering to reach for it before we’re depleted, not after.

Where can you bring more compassion to yourself? Notice where your inner dialogue turns critical and experiment with softening it, even slightly.

What other tools or practices might you like to experiment with right now? Not every season calls for the same support. What worked for you a year ago may not be what you need today.

A Note on Forgiveness

If you notice yourself slipping back into old patterns during a period of stress or transition, that isn’t evidence that the work hasn’t taken hold. It’s often evidence that you’re human, and that change – even welcome change – can feel like a big ask.

The aim isn’t to never forget your tools. It’s to notice sooner, forgive yourself faster and return to yourself with a little more ease each time.

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I wrote more personally about the specific trip that prompted this reflection – the graduation the night before we left, the flare-up with my daughter, and the deep exhale of finally coming home – in my Substack newsletter. [Read it here]

I would love to hear what came up for you whilst reading this post and if you have any comments, questions, tools you would like to share please do below.

As always, take good care of you,

Em

I am the Crossroads Coach – I support midlife women living abroad who are navigating change and uncertainty – reconnect to themselves and their self-trust to create their next exciting chapter. Do get in touch by email – hello@emmathornelees.com or social media (Instagram or Facebook) if you´d like to have a chat.