Mentally Stuck

Welcome to Sync & Thrive, the bi-weekly newsletter helping couples strengthen their relationship through shared health. Every Friday, we share real-life reflections and actionable insights. If you were forwarded this message, sign up here.

👋 Welcome back Ladies and Gents,

“You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning” — Tim Ferriss

Most ruts do not arrive with a warning. They build so slowly you almost don't notice, until something stops you cold enough to finally look. For me, that something was a game of tag.

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Last Saturday night, I was running around the kitchen island playing tag with our friend's kids. One second I was fine. The next, I felt a sharp pain shoot through my right leg.

I could have sworn someone had thrown a hard ball at my calf. It felt that real. I spun around and said, “Hey, who threw a ball at me?” The kid behind me looked around the room, then at his friend, then back at me like I had lost it. He finally pointed at a tiny speck on the floor and offered, “Maybe it was this?”

By the time we got home, I was laughing (replaying the cartoon-like facial expression of a child in utter confusion) and crying (because I tore my calf muscle and it hurt). My family thought that I had lost it. Maybe perimenopause was upon me all of a sudden.

Between the tears, laughter and concern as to how something like a simple game of tag would bring me to this painful moment I was now experiencing, there was more on my mind.

With little reassurance from Gemini and the advice nurse on call, a few hours later, we were in the ER to get some answers.

Turns out there is a name for what happened: tennis leg. A torn calf muscle from a sudden push-off, the kind of injury that convinces you something hit you when nothing did.

Five days later, I am still on crutches, keeping the weight off that calf. But there is something else that keeps coming to mind as I recover:

There was no ball. No impact. Nothing to point to. It was just one of those freak moments, and it forced me to stop.

And when I stopped, I realized I had been stuck in another way too. The newsletter had gone quiet.

Two months ago, I went silent on our newsletter. What started as a weekend getaway spilled into a couple weeks. I told myself that I’m summering and taking time for other things. I’ll get back to it next week.

Next week, however, didn’t come, and before I knew it, two months had passed. That break made me start thinking:

Did any of it matter?

I am a first-time publisher, and while I have done a great many things professionally, putting myself out there, sharing research, tips and tools for building agency in a relationship is new to me. My break from writing gave room for doubt to creep into my thinking.

And while I wrestled with the answer, I stopped writing.

That is uncomfortable to admit when the reason I started writing this newsletter in the first place was to scratch my own itch of curiosity. There are few people who write on this topic. I found what I was researching to be interesting and encouraging. And I was enjoying the process. To hit publish twice weekly was satisfying, and I was happy sharing it with others that wanted to read, until I wasn't.

Here is the thing: I believe in building agency in your relationship, but here was an area where I wasn’t always practicing it.

The hard part is that you can spend a lot of time thinking about something you care about without moving it forward.

I kept turning the same question over in my head. Did any of it matter? The more I ruminated, the harder it became to focus on the work itself.

That became a loop. Doubt stalled the writing, and not writing gave me more room to doubt.

You don’t have to have every answer to take the next step. But you do have to notice when you’re asking yourself the same questions without giving yourself a chance to learn anything new. Otherwise, another week passes, and the thing you care about stays untouched.

So in my own goal of bringing high-agency into this work, I fail.

But I get back up (again).

This time, that means looking honestly at what I can change, including the expectations I had put around this newsletter.

A friend sent me this quote, and I love it:

“Expose yourself to your weaknesses in order to get better.” — Cameron Hanes

I had to remind myself this is a marathon, not a sprint. Getting stuck is not the problem. What you do once you realize you're stuck is.

“You cannot compound if you quit” — Sahil Bloom

Setbacks are good because they can force us to reflect. (Tim, I might put this on a billboard.)

One comment pointed out: “Staying in the game doesn't mean staying the same.” And that’s valuable. What stood out to me was I had not quit, but I had a moment where a lack of clarity forced me into stopping the process of building something new.

That’s where I’ve been for the last two months.

Not swimming in Mallorca, touring National Parks or backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail. I’ve been quietly wrestling with the newsletter. Two months of silence, and I had convinced myself that was the whole story. It was not, and I would not see the difference until I had stopped long enough to look.

I had boxed myself in.

🔬Research
🧱Frameworks
⚕️Health tips
🫂Couples wellness

All good things. I just kept delivering them the same way, every single week, until the format became the box. The more I tried to make it perfect, the harder it became to make it at all.

I needed to change the way I was playing. And then I started noticing something. The signs were already there.

None of them announced themselves. A text. A conversation. A list that found us. A few subscribers showing up. The first signal forced me to stop. The others became visible because I had finally stopped long enough to notice them.

1. My body stopped me.

The calf injury was the most literal signal of all. I had been moving through life without thinking much about stopping, and suddenly I had no choice.

2. Someone noticed.

Matt, a close friend of ours, sent a few texts. (Sorry Matt, I hope you don’t mind.)

It reminded me that even when I wasn't showing up publicly, people were still paying attention privately.

3. Aaron was already thinking about the next move.

Aaron shared a post from Gary Vaynerchuk about what he calls the interest media era, the idea that showing up with something useful matters more than creating content for attention. It sparked another conversation between us about how we show up and create value.

It was a nudge I needed, not to go back to what I had been doing, but to rethink how we were showing up.

4. A list that found us, at the top of it.

On Wednesday, I got a notification email from LinkedIn. Someone had tagged me in a comment. That comment led to a post from Sponsor Scout, ranking the top 28 Relationships and Dating newsletters.

Sync & Thrive was number one!!! 🎉

We did not chase this. The work was already speaking for itself. This was an answer to the question I had been asking for weeks. Did any of it matter?

5. The work kept moving.

This one took me a minute to understand. While I said nothing for weeks, the newsletter grew. And not one person left.

No new email from me
No push to subscribe
No campaign

Other newsletters were still recommending us. People were still finding us through Instagram, direct search, and channels we had not touched in weeks. The flywheel I had built was still turning.

What mattered was this: I had been doubting myself while the evidence kept building around me. I just wasn't looking.

Maybe this is what I had been getting wrong about being stuck. I thought getting unstuck meant getting back to where I was before. I don't think it does. I think sometimes you get unstuck by changing something.

Sometimes that means getting narrower. More discipline. More focus. More structure. And sometimes the opposite is true. You need to open things back up. That is the adjustment I am making here.

I had narrowed this newsletter down to what I thought it was supposed to be. Now I want to make room for what Aaron and I love: a recipe we cook on repeat, a meme that made us laugh, a book Aaron reads to me at night, a conversation we had in the car, something we are learning, something we are struggling with, something we are figuring out together. It is still couples wellness. It is still high-agency. There will just be more of us in it. 

Because that is what got me unstuck in the first place. And maybe that is the larger lesson. You do not always need a new life. Sometimes you need a new way of living the life you already built.

That is also what I want Sync & Thrive to become. Somewhere bigger than a tip you read once and forget. A place couples build a whole life inside of, together.

🩺 The health decisions
💵 The money decisions
🫂 The way you handle a hard season without it becoming a wedge between you

Couples are the foundation everything else gets built on. And most of us never learned what it takes to keep growing together once the life you built stops looking like the life you imagined.

Matthew McConaughey has a word for the things that tell you to keep going: greenlights. Sometimes a greenlight looks like a win. Sometimes it looks like a text from a friend, a conversation with your spouse, a list that found you, a number that moved without you pushing it. You do not always notice them while you are moving. Sometimes you have to stop long enough to see them.

That is what happened to me. I thought I needed to get moving again. Instead, I needed to stop, look around, and notice that I was not starting from zero. I had already built something. I just needed to change what came next.

So before you close this email, here is the question I want to leave you with: what are your greenlights right now? What has been telling you to keep going, even while you have felt stuck?

And if you cannot see them yet, that is okay too. Sometimes the first step out of a rut is admitting you are in one.

If you and your partner want a starting point for working on your health together, take the Sync Quiz™ separately, then compare your results. What stands out? What is one thing you want to work on together?

Make it a date night. Pour a drink. Pull up your results. And talk about what you find.

→ Take the Quiz ←

With care,

💛 Jaylene & Aaron, Sync & Thrive Team

P.S. If you're new here, welcome. 👋 We're glad you found us. Everything we write is designed to help you and your partner build your health together, on your terms. The best place to start is with the Sync Quiz™.

P.P.S. If there’s a dynamic in your relationship you’d like us to explore, send us a note at [email protected]. Many of our best topics start with reader conversations.

🖊️ Most of what we write about lives inside four everyday areas of life together: how we move, eat, connect, and reset.