If you're the one everyone leans on… this conversation with brain health coach Barbara Gustavson is worth your time.

Barbara's path to becoming a brain health coach started with a piece of paper handed to her at a Cracker Barrel on Thanksgiving Day — a document that revealed a family history of covered-up crimes, mental illness, and Huntington's Disease. That moment didn't end anything. It started something.

What followed was fifteen years of navigating caregiving alongside a career just beginning to take shape, children, a marriage, and a growing awareness that her own brain was carrying more than she'd admitted. In this conversation, Barbara walks through the difference between resetting and regrouping — why you can sleep eight hours and still wake up depleted, and what it takes to actually address the root causes. We also talk about the limbo season: that stretch of time after something shifts where the old rules don't work and the new ones haven't formed. Barbara doesn't frame it as a problem to solve. She frames it as a pause that asks you to listen differently.

The conversation also covers the window of tolerance, what it costs to work outside it, and how learning the language your brain actually speaks — signals, not shoulds — changed how Barbara made decisions, set limits, and stayed present through the hardest stretch of her life.

Her book is Regroup: How to Reset Your Mind to Unlock Hidden Energy, Enjoy Productive Peace, and Feel Like Yourself Again.

Resources mentioned the following during the episode:

• Regroup (Audiobook) — Barbara Gustavson: https://amzn.to/48AWdCw

• Welcome to Your Crisis: https://amzn.to/3QJpyVc

• Think Again — Adam Grant: https://amzn.to/3P2SxTg

• Calm — mindfulness app: https://www.calm.com

• Five Minutes' Peace — Jill Murphy (children's book): https://amzn.to/4w536G8

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For Business Inquiries: [email protected]

• 00:04 — Show opens; KiKi introduces today's guest

• 01:53 — The Thanksgiving moment that changed everything

• 06:18 — Caregiving guilt: the feelings we don't name out loud

• 09:17 — What limbo season actually is and why it isn't a mistake

• 11:24 — From quicksand to surrender: reframing the stuck feeling

• 14:40 — Survival mode is biology, not a character flaw

• 18:32 — Regroup isn't reset: the difference and why it matters

• 23:30 — Listen to the whisper before it becomes the two by four

• 25:59 — The window of tolerance and the cost of ignoring it

• 31:12 — The principle Barbara still wrestles with: negativity bias

• 34:30 — Staying present in the current season, not the last one

• 36:32 — What to do when you're in the middle of your own limbo

About the Things Go Sideways Podcast

When life or leadership goes sideways, the story's just getting interesting.

Things Go Sideways with KiKi L'Italien features honest conversations with leaders, creators, and changemakers navigating disruption, uncertainty, and identity shifts. Each episode explores trust, resilience, and what it means to stay human when certainty breaks down.

New episodes share real stories about rebuilding agency and meaning without rushing to quick-fixes, spiritual bypassing, or pretending clarity comes easy.