How Tiny Living Allowed Me to Finally Listen to My Body

In this episode of the Less House More Moola podcast, Laura discusses the importance of embracing seasonal changes and wellness, reflecting on how tiny living allows for a deeper connection with oneself and nature. She explores the contradictions of self-care in a productivity-driven society, the impact of work ethic on health, and the class-based perspectives on work and money. Laura emphasizes the need for balance between work and self-care, advocating for a wealthy mindset that values time autonomy and personal well-being. Ultimately, she encourages listeners to consider alternative living as a means to create space for self-care and rest.

Link to Hidden Rules Among Classes

https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/examples-hidden-rules-among-classes

Go to thetinyhouseadviser.com

Transcript

Less House More Moola Podcast (00:40)
Hey everybody, Laura here. Welcome to Less House More Moola podcast. I'm recording here on another windy day in Northern New Mexico as spring is really getting underway and there are a lot of beautiful changes happening in my canyon. The flowers are starting to bloom and the trees are buddying and it's been so beautiful to be here throughout the winter and enjoying.

the seasonal changes

And this has really got me thinking about health and wellness, taking care of oneself, seasonal shifts, how we're able to live our lives closer to the earth. I think I've probably said this a few times, closer to the earth. And closer to the earth certainly means living in more harmony with...

mother nature with the earth, but also it means living closer to ourselves and our own natural inclinations. And to be honest, this is kind of new for me. I haven't often gotten to listen to myself or follow my own instincts or really think about my healing journey. It's been really

transformational to be in the tiny house and able to focus more on myself and my own nature.

So this made me think about how tiny or alternative living allows us to finally listen to our body. It seems like at least in my algorithmic circles of self-improvement or self-actualization or all the deep, all the deep things that I listen to, it seems like that

There's a lot around listening to our body, taking time to rest, the importance of sleep. I don't know if you all have seen it, but there's this crazy get up challenge going on where you try to get up from the ground without using our hands to lift us up. So a lot of focus on these wellness topics, even napping came into even my professional.

life discussions, which is maybe a little bit contradictory to the other points of pressure that we have around us. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the idea of resting, like not being productive all the time and putting our own needs first is contradictory.

to our social expectations and norms. In fact, I might even go so far as to call these ideas around self care a little bit of an absurd expectation, considering all the other things that we're expected to do. It's kind of like that saying, you really cannot have it all, even though we've all been really taught that we can have it all, we really know the truth.

Most people are running around taking care of children or elderly family members or friends. We're managing all the complexities of an increasingly complex and changeable modern life. We're doing this after we're working full time or more than full time. So the idea of putting rest first and listening to our body's needs

and doing anything other than the myriad of requirements of modern life seems to be just another expectation. And really that idea of taking care of ourself is really only for an elite few of people.

For most of my entire life, my grandmother, who I call my BFF, has been fussing at me about not working until I'm sick, about taking time to rest. This is a constant theme I hear from her. Every single time I talk to her, she accuses me of working too much and not resting. And up till now, I haven't really fully digested my own reaction, but

I was thinking about it today. I realized that her words have somehow felt contradictory, especially coming from a woman who had a full career, built all of her own homes and was really visibly entrenched in patriarchal norms. So every time she has emailed me or told me to take time to rest or not work so hard,

Most recently, she said to me to stop and smell the roses. I've been a little dismissive of her suggestion. It sounded like a contradiction to the cultural mandate that I continue to pursue my work ethic in order to get ahead.

Work ethic, in my understanding for my entire life, has been my way to get ahead, my way to get status, my way to achieve things, my way to create my own security. I actually had an interesting aha moment years ago in my early days as a financial advisor when I saw a chart about the hidden rules of social and economic classes in the United States.

I'll definitely link some information about this in the show notes for you. The rules governing our money, our time, the driving forces behind our decisions may be largely class based according to this academic research. For those of us who grew up in a poor family, we understood that money was to be used.

as an example. think paycheck to paycheck life. For those of us who were middle class, money was to be managed. Maybe there was a lot of discussion around money management. And it really is only the wealthy who view money as a resource to be used to build on itself to be invested.

I grew up in a family without any conversation around stocks and bonds as an example. So I definitely did not understand money as a resource to be conserved or invested. I really understood it more to be something that was to be used or managed. So it was quite an aha moment for me when I first understood that there are social class implications to how we view money.

It is also interesting to look at the driving forces for different economic and social classes. The middle class, as an example, has been programmed to focus on work, climbing the ladder, getting an expensive education that we believe is crucial for climbing the economic ladder because the driving force for the middle class is work and achievement.

So if work and achievement has been your mantra for your whole life, it came to you honestly.

Interestingly, when we look at the locus of control or destiny beliefs of different social classes, the middle class believes that we have a choice in how successful we are and how our life plays out. So we don't believe ourselves to be sort of victims of the world, but instead to be able to make key decisions that will change the course of our life.

And we believe that those key life decisions are largely built on working really hard to move ourselves upward.

But working really hard to improve and manage our future requires us to sacrifice ourselves. If we're all exchanging our time for money, then it's only when we reach a certain level of financial freedom that we can view our time as being within our range of choice. Our time when it's a resource to be conserved or invested.

is really something that we experience once we reach some level of financial independence.

It is only a wealthy mindset that allocates time to higher level priorities beyond achievement or responsibility to priorities of wellness, self care and rest. So when we think about our time as being fuel for our life, just like money is fuel for our life and for our future, the two sometimes are quite interchangeable as we

give away our time for money. That idea of having time to take care of ourself and to focus on our health and wellness requires that we take away money from other pursuits like achievement of career, the American dream, retirement perhaps, all of those things that we're working so hard to achieve. We have to trade off from those things in order to free up.

to focus on other things.

So this Hidden Rules Among Classes breaks it down into three columns, poverty, middle class, wealth, It talks about the rules for all kinds of aspects of our life, including money, time, family structure, worldview, and driving forces. It's quite an interesting.

thing to have a look at because you can see maybe how you grew up and how that makes you think about these areas of our life.

I've talked in other episodes of this podcast about sweat equity, AKA work, and how it can be a tool for building value and building some of our financial freedom. Sweat equity can be leveraged to create our financial security. Our household has built financial security.

largely out of double income long work weeks and then improving properties in our off time. we often say to each other, we don't know how to do anything but work, which is quite interesting.

For nearly all of my life until perhaps quite recently, I have understood that my value was in my grit, my work, my work ethic, and doing more than the next person. Certainly educational achievements were a high priority for me I think I've said here before that I've been in school for

for nine of the last 14 years. So lots of belief that that education was how I got ahead.

I'm really challenged when it comes to finding fun in my life, recreating, resting. There is this voice in my head that always is reminding me that there is more that can be done. There's always more to do. There's always something that could be better, something that could be worked on, something that could be improved. Always there is work.

Now that I'm reflecting on this chart, I realized I was very closely following the hidden rules of the middle class, very focused on work, very focused on achievement, very focused on managing, believing that my choices could alter the course of my life. I was pretty much slam dunk right in the middle of that chart.

But then on the flip side, here I am in middle age. It has become very clearly evident that I have nothing if I do not have my health. None of us can enjoy anything in life if we are focused on a major health crisis, if we don't feel well enough to do the things that we want to do or engage with the people we care about.

So in our tiny house, we have for a couple of months now, been engaged in a daily yoga practice that is designed around healing some of our age related issues. When I look around at those of my generation, I'm reminded that it is a very slippery slope once we reach age 50.

and that thinking about taking care of your health may be the only important thing that we have left to do. By this middle age point, we've accomplished a lot and that at this point, we really need to think more about caring for our health in order to be able to enjoy the second part of our life.

But the reality is that maintaining our physical and mental health while working 60 hours a week in order to continue to climb that corporate ladder and keep up with middle-class achievement may be simply impossible. You can't do all the things. There's only so many hours in every day. And with so many of them engaged with career and chores, errands, responsibilities, AI, complexity.

Life is a lot. Taking care of our self, either comes at the sacrifice of sleep or requires us to demote our work ethic. I remember this crazy conversation I had with this really successful and a little frazzled woman professional in my network about how she was getting up at 4 a.m.

to improve her fitness and practice her miracle morning in addition to everything else that she was doing. I was a little stunned.

I've noticed that our current social obsession with having time to take care of our health, time to rest, time to focus on the people most important to us. It is really a strong pressure point that we seem to be having right now is this idea around just all of us having suddenly this free time to focus on the really important things in life. And yet for many of us, it may seem like a pipe dream.

another thing to try to achieve, to strive for.

The reality is, that having time for us to care for ourselves and our own values runs contrary to the social rules and expectations that tell us that we must be hyper productive, striving for more money and achieving the appearance of the American dream. It's kind of like that weird expectation that all people should be able to buy a luxury brand car and have an American dream house.

It's also an unrealistic expectation in our current economic environment that all of us should be able to achieve the status and own our own time. Most of us will never own our own time. We will never have what I call time autonomy and that is the choice of how we spend our time.

Some folks reach time autonomy when they reach retirement. That is that they have enough saved to quit working and can choose what to do with their time. We see this in the baby boomer generation. Many of them have pensions, multiple sources of income. They're all retiring right now and spending their money and their time however they like. But by the time that we reach retirement, our health may not be able to allow us to live the life

that we would have wanted to have lived Therefore time autonomy while you're still healthy enough to enjoy it is a very rare achievement. So back to my grandmother's advice, resting when I am tired is actually a very rare achievement. And I'm still not there in terms of

having work to be done and things to get up for. And I wouldn't want to be without work completely. I enjoy working. It is a huge part of my identity as it is with many of us. I think that's why so many of us say we will never retire because we like the point of productivity, mastery, achievement, having an impact.

So there is a balance to be achieved between having great work to do and being able to take care of ourselves. So occasionally these days, but much more than in the past, there comes a day when the work can wait or I've done everything I need to do and I can make rest a priority. I even have naps scheduled on my calendar during the summer months, though the schedule is not always followed.

For me, there is a clear marker of having progressed toward a wealthy mindset about time. That wealthy mindset being viewing time as a resource to be invested and to be conserved instead of being spent on making more money.

This is really incremental movement towards a different mindset. Probably this incremental journey is the most that I can ever hope for given how I was raised. It may take my entire lifetime to understand that my value is something other than my productivity, that my value is something sacred and beautiful about existing.

and really isn't about how much work I churn out every day.

In the meantime, we in this household are living in what I consider a Coast F.I.R.E. lifestyle. If you don't know what Coast FIRE is, have a little Google. It's coasting financial independence, retire early. It's the idea that you have enough that your long-term security is set up and that you are in the meantime, working enough to cover your daily expenses.

This creates that nice balance. There is work to be done. There is work to be achieved. There is impact to be made. But at the same time, it's much more about taking care of basic necessities and really not having to strive for the next bigger house or save two and a half million for retirement.

This sort of balance that we have is definitely not something that we had when we were still in our American dream house and while I was still on the corporate ladder. Every day, I am so deeply grateful to not be required to show up at eight o'clock every morning if there is not work to be done, that I get to choose what I work on today. Different days, you have different things that...

inspire you or motivate you. And so getting to have some choice about that is just the greatest freedom. I get to stop working when I'm no longer being productive. That happens about two o'clock every day. I crash out. I no longer am very productive and I get a choice about what I do for that time in the middle of the afternoon. I get to be present and disconnect when the work is caught up.

I get to schedule time to be away that is not based on a PTO schedule from my employer. I don't have to be worried about my job security largely because my roof is already taken care of. And so my job security is more or less an addition to the security already created.

So the roof over my head is going to be there regardless of how successful I am at work.

If we go back just two years ago, as I was getting ready to launch my own firm and we were getting closer to selling our house and moving into our tiny house full time, my life was much more ragged. There was not any wiggle room about what time you got out of bed in the morning. There was not any wiggle room about when you finally got to go to bed after getting all the chores done. There was just this endless to do list in all aspects.

And there was just so much more that always needed to be done. It was a different mindset altogether. And it is only now that we are in the tiny house mortgage free that I am able to listen to what my body has to say hear my instincts and my spiritual inclinations, think about ways to take care of myself.

Continue a morning practice no matter what time we get up. Ground myself on the earth daily. Say no to things that don't call to me. Take time to hike and soak and dance. I finally feel that I have some ownership over my own time.

So if you feel like that you are being sacrificed to the rules of your economic class, really focused on achievement, really focused on managing money, really focused on how you keep up with or continue to increase your status. If you feel that way and you're hearing a lot about self-care,

and think, gosh, that's just another thing I need to do and that I cannot possibly squeeze into my schedule. Maybe it's time to consider how stepping away from the achievement expectations and those programmed driving forces of your social class by going tiny or creating an alternative lifestyle could allow you more time and space.

for yourself. It isn't a one and done. It's definitely a journey, but this is a really good leverage point is reducing cost of living in order to buy yourself some time.

I hope that was helpful. Thank you so much for listening to me as I'm talking about this idea around how tiny or alternative living can help create space in our life for that self care, that rest, and how that's all wound up in a wealthy mindset around time.

I am continuing to create these podcasts to be helpful to you. So let me know if there's something that you'd like to hear about or something you particularly appreciated. Of course, you can always find me at thetinyhouseadviser.com.