Free ยท Live on Zoom ยท 60 minutes

The Fun
Prescription

60 minutes on why sleep and time off have never fixed the tiredness, what your nervous system is actually craving instead, and your first prescription written before you close the laptop. One thing. One day. Next week.

{{WORKSHOP_DATE}} 11am AEST Live on Zoom, with Q&A
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Free. Replay for 48 hours. You'll leave with one thing to do this week, not a list for later.

Everyone thinks you're doing brilliantly. You're worn out in a way sleep doesn't fix, shorter with your kids than you want to be, and between Google and your GP, nobody has given you a straight answer why.

Between us

You've built a good life.

You've tried to work it out yourself. Your iron. Your hormones. Your age. The kids. This is just a “season”... which has now been running about six years.

You might have even had the bloods done. They came back fine.

Every one of those explanations arrives with the same instruction attached. It's normal. Wait it out, or take something for it.

So you've waited. And nothing has shifted, because none of those things were ever the problem.

Here's the one thing nobody has ever put next to it.

A free hour opens up on a Sunday morning. Nobody needs anything from you. And you spend it scrolling, or wiping down a kitchen bench that was already clean. You had the whole hour, and you couldn't think of one thing you actually wanted to do with it.

You make fifty decisions before nine in the morning. Ask you what you want for dinner and there's nothing there.

Everyone reads that as a side effect of being tired. It's closer to an explanation than anything you've been handed all year, and it has been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

You're just not really living it. The answer to what you want is still in there. Nothing has asked anything of it for a long time, so it's gone quiet, and quiet reads like gone.

If you came here expecting breathing exercises

Everything you've tried has been about doing less.

I will show you why you need the opposite.

You've probably done the box breathing. The cold shower. The vagus nerve exercise off Instagram, the magnesium, the app with the chimes at the end. Some of it works, and I use a fair bit of it with women in my programs.

Here's what none of it does. Down-regulating takes you from wound-up to neutral. It quiets the alarm. It doesn't put anything back in. Which is how you can do every one of those things properly, for months, and still open a free Sunday hour and feel nothing you want to do with it.

Nothing in that toolkit takes you past neutral. There's only one thing that does, and you've had it before, and it's been sitting at the bottom of a list that never empties.

The patience you've run out of by Thursday. The capacity for one more thing. The wanting to. All of that gets built somewhere, and for a long time now nothing has been going in.

Fun is fuel. It's the input, not the reward. Which is why an hour of it lands differently to a holiday you can't take, and why nobody has connected the dots for you before.

Where you've landed

Most mums find themselves in one of three modes.

Each one looks like coping from the outside. Each one is craving something specific, and it's almost never the thing she's been trying. That's the part we do in the middle of the hour.

See which one you recognise. Most mums know within about ten seconds, and then spend the rest of the hour finding out what it means.

The Invisible Mum

You know the group chats, the birthdays, who's not speaking to who this term, and which one needs picking up at eleven. You're the reason this family sees anybody. You booked the day, you packed the bag, you remembered the present.

Your own catch-up got moved three times and then quietly stopped being mentioned. The last one you actually made it to, you were checking your phone.

What this mode is craving is not more time on your own. Every mum in it assumes it is.

The Restless Mum

You can't settle. The house has finally gone quiet and you're up doing something, and none of it is the thing. You've tried the walk, the podcast, the early night, and the itch is still there at nine.

You start things. There's a kit in the cupboard from the last one. You're not slack about it, you just can't find the version of it that fits an actual Tuesday, so it goes back in the cupboard.

What this mode is craving has never once appeared on a list of ways to relax.

The Always-On Mum

There's no hour in your week where nobody needs anything from you. You've stopped noticing, because noticing doesn't help.

The last time you had the house to yourself you did admin. Four hours, and you spent them on the things nobody else was ever going to do. You told yourself you'd feel better afterwards, and you were tired in the same way you always are.

What this mode is craving is the one thing your week has no slot for, and it's smaller than you'd think.

So, what is your nervous system craving?

You've been offering it rest. The early night, the bath, the weekend away that cost real money. It has never once been asking for rest.

That's why none of it held past Thursday. You've been answering a question nobody ever asked you properly, for about six years, in good faith.

Find out what yours is craving

Your mode is named in the first ten minutes. The middle of the hour is what it's craving, and why that particular thing.

Hayley outdoors at sunset

The 60 minutes

Where the hour takes you

I run it the way I'd run an assessment in clinic. Find what's going on, explain why, and send you home with one thing to do about it.

  1. Why none of it has worked

    The sleep, the supplements, the boundaries, the weekend away. You did them properly. We start with the one clue everybody steps straight over, which is what happens when a free hour finally turns up.

  2. Which mode you're in

    Three modes, named in the room, with everyone else working out theirs at the same time. You'll know yours inside ten minutes and you'll recognise half the women you know in the other two.

  3. What you're actually craving

    The middle of the hour, and the part women message me about afterwards. Every mode craves something specific, and most of us have spent years offering ours the opposite in good faith.

  4. Why you can't name what you want

    The Occupational Therapy part. What years of being needed does to wanting itself, and why "make some time for yourself" has never once worked on it.

  5. Fun is fuel

    You've been in this state before. Probably not this year. Most women assume it's a mood. It's a physical state, and it's the only thing that reliably puts energy back in.

  6. What you'll write down before you leave

    One thing. One slot in your week. The reason it works. You fill your prescription in live and download it, so there's nothing left to decide when the day comes around.

Iron, hormones, your age, this season of life. You've probably assumed all four. In sixty minutes you get the fifth. What your nervous system has been asking for the whole time, and the day next week it's happening.

Register free

Plus live Q&A. Bring the question nobody's given you a straight answer to.

“My Tuesday is already full.”

Of course it is. That's the thing being solved, and it's the reason the hour is hard to hand over.

So here's the case for it. Sixty minutes, and you leave with one activity written on one real day of the following week. Something you'll actually take, sized for a week that has no room in it, because that's the only kind of week I've ever worked with.

If Tuesday won't move, register anyway. The replay goes out that afternoon and stays up for 48 hours.

Who it's for

Come if

  • Everyone thinks you're doing brilliantly, and you're not exactly arguing with them.
  • You've googled it at 11pm and landed on your iron, your thyroid and your age.
  • You booked the massage. You were writing a mental list halfway through it.
  • Someone asks what you feel like doing and you say "I don't mind", and you mean it literally.
  • You want to know what's actually happening in your body, rather than being told to be kinder to yourself.

Give it a miss if

  • You want a list you can screenshot and feel productive about.
  • You want the answer a chatbot gives. Tidy, reasonable, impossible to do on an actual Tuesday.
  • You want someone to tell you to put yourself first and then leave it there.
  • You're in crisis. This is education, not treatment, and you deserve the real thing.
  • You're not planning to change anything this week. Come to the next one, no hard feelings.

Who's running it

Hayley Ryan
Hayley RyanOccupational TherapistSingle mum of 3 teenagers

A few years ago I ended up in a doctor's office, and he picked up his prescription pad and wrote me a holiday. An actual script, for a break. I couldn't take it. No time, no money, wrong season of life entirely. So I did the only thing left... small injections of fun back into an ordinary week, and cutting out as much as I could of what was draining me. It worked in a way the holiday never would have, because it was still there the following Tuesday.

I'm a single mum raising teenagers and running a business, so nothing on this page is theoretical to me.

I'm also an Occupational Therapist. It's the profession that studies what people do all day and what it costs them. Energy, attention, capacity, and what happens to a person when the things that used to restore her quietly fall out of the week.

What I see is a capable woman whose nervous system has been running her life for years without anyone noticing. It decides what she can carry, whether she cancels on her friend again, and how much of her is left at nine o'clock on the night the teenager finally wants to talk. None of that shows up as a problem. It shows up as a woman doing well.

This masterclass is the assessment I'd run if you sat down in my clinic looking well from the outside, holding it all together, and quietly unable to tell me the last time you did something purely because you loved it.

Before you register

The things you're wondering.

I'm not burnt out. I'm managing fine.

Then you're exactly who this is built for. The women who come to this aren't collapsed. They're capable, they're delivering, and they're going through the motions of a life they can't quite feel. If nothing is on fire and something is still missing, that's the pattern we're naming.

What if I don't know which mode I'm in?

Almost nobody does before they arrive, and you don't need to. We name all three in the first ten minutes and you'll know yours well before we get to what it's craving. Come with a cup of tea and a calendar you can see.

Is there a replay?

Yes. It goes out the same afternoon and stays up for 48 hours, so work running over or a pickup you can't move won't cost you the session. Come live if you can though, because a fair bit of what this does happens in the room... finding your mode while everyone else finds theirs, and writing your prescription while I'm there to help you get it right.

Is this the only time you're running it?

No. I run it most weeks, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to rush you. But "I'll catch the next one" is the same sentence that's kept the hour off your calendar for about six years. The woman who books it while she's thinking about it is the one who turns up.

It's free. What's the catch?

There isn't one, and there's no held-back version. You leave with your prescription filled in whether you ever buy anything from me or not. At the end I'll take a few minutes to tell you about the five-week program this leads into, because by then it's the honest answer to the question you'll be asking. Stay for that part or don't.

My kids are older. Does this still apply?

Yes, and often more so. Small children take your hands. Teenagers take your head... the moods you're reading through a closed door, the conversation that finally comes at ten at night, the lift home at eleven. Different job, same drain, and far less obvious to anyone watching.

Last thing

Why now, and not next year.

I'll get back to me when things settle down. When the business is steadier. When they're teenagers and they don't need me so much.

Calm doesn't arrive. It changes shape.

Teenagers need more of you, not less. The window you've been waiting for has never had a date on it.

And you aren't being kept in storage while you wait.

Wanting is a capacity, and capacities decline when they go unused. That's why the dinner question is hard now and wasn't at thirty.

They're learning it too.

Whatever they end up believing about what mothering costs a woman, they're learning it from watching you rather than from anything you tell them.

Which is why it has to be now, not when things calm down.

Free Live on Zoom 60 minutes live Plus Q&A {{WORKSHOP_DATE}}, 11am AEST

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The Fun Prescription  ยท  Hayley Ryan, Occupational Therapist This masterclass is education, not individual clinical advice.