Wellness In Every Season

Reading for Wellness

• Autumn Carter • Season 1 • Episode 174

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What if slowing down isn’t falling behind—but finally coming home to yourself?


In this reflective and deeply human episode of Wellness in Every Season, Autumn shares how recent health challenges forced an unexpected pause—and why that pause became a powerful turning point. What starts as a conversation about books and reading gently unfolds into a much bigger exploration of burnout, identity, healing, and rediscovering joy after a lifetime of hustle.


Autumn opens up about her own workaholic conditioning, growing up in chronic stress, and how that shaped her drive as a business owner, parent, and helper. From there, she dives into why her “light-me-up” clients are often high-achieving leaders who are running on empty—and why she understands them so deeply. This episode isn’t about self-help checklists. It’s about recovery, nervous system safety, and giving yourself permission to soften.


You’ll also hear why fiction—especially stories of transformation and resilience—can be surprisingly healing, even if you struggle with meditation or stillness. Autumn explains how reading (or audiobooks and podcasts) can become a gateway to rest, creativity, and childlike wonder, while modeling healthy boundaries for your kids at the same time.


If you’ve been burned out, overstimulated, or stuck in survival mode, this episode offers a grounded invitation to slow down, pick up a book, and remember who you were before the world asked you to perform.


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Hi. I am so excited to be nerdy and passionate, all the things right now. 

So as I talked about in a previous episode and have been mentioning here and there as I'm interviewing people, I have had a lot going on with my health and it's given me a really good pause. Is it weird to have. Something just make you grateful for the pause in life.

So for me, well let me start out. We're gonna end up talking about books and why reading is good for you. So if you're not a reader, audio books, podcasts are even good for you.

Welcome to Wellness. In every season, we talk all things wellness, to help you align yourself, align with your goals, find balance in your life, and just recalibrate yourself if you are listening for the first time. Welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here, and let's get started in the rest of the podcast.

So, hey, you're here. And we're gonna be talking about more of the nonfiction and not self-help, we're gonna be going there, but I have really been grateful for the opportunity to really pause and spend more time visualizing who my ideal client is and why I wanna help them, and why this would be more passionate for me and lighten me up doesn't mean that I'm saying no to people who aren't like my golden.

Light me up client by any means, but it's been so fun. 

So I'll tell you who my ideal client is. They are the person who, and you'll start to be like, yeah, this is everybody, but I'll dial it in. They are people who don't do basically anything wellness wise. They aren't taking care of any. Real aspect of themselves because they are hustling hard.

They are a business owner. They are like C-E-O, C-F-O, HR assistant to any of those people, and they don't get enough sleep. They don't do enough for social outlet. They are not taking care of their physical health. Nutrition is terrible. They are just going, going, going, workaholic, that type of person.

And the reason why I wanna work with them is because I'm recovering from that. 

So going all the way back to my beginning days. My father started his business when I was in kindergarten and he just kept hustling harder and harder and harder. He was almost always at work when he wasn't at work.

He was abusive to me. So it was messy, right? And it was very much ingrained in me that you need to work hard and not only hard, but harder and be smarter about it. And his thing that he would say is it's a no brainer. So it's that whole like, you really need to think hard and.

I ended up working for him. I had no choice. I tried to quit several times, tried to work other places, and he just wanted me to work there with him so I could be under his thumb. It really sucked. Anyway, so I learned how to work. I learned how to work hard. I worked my way through school, um, worked my way through my husband's education and that.

What I grew up in, right, is all of that stress and I was conceived into a stressful environment, is the best way to say it. My parents were very young. My mom was five months pregnant when they got married, and they only got married because of me. They divorced quickly after domestic violence are my earliest memories.

Like a lot of stress, right? Because I have less energy. I've been reading more for Kindle Unlimited, I did the three month subscription because I'm hoping that's how long it will take. We'll see, but on the days when I have a clear head, I just wanna get it all done, do all the things, and it's making me realize, no, slow down.

Let's work on prioritizing. Let's work on, like I told you my word of the year, surrendering when I'm not feeling well, letting that flexibility be there. 

And what I realized is I had one job that was a temporary job because I was getting ready to move and this job allowed me to go and audit medical records and I got to travel to do it.

And it made me realize I don't wanna sit in the office. I want to go out, I want to be around people. I want to be out and enjoy the weather. So it was really good for me to realize that. And then I didn't really do anything with that until I became a stay at home mom. Realize, right? I like this. I like being able to like, go during the day to places and do things and enjoy the weather.

I very much am somebody, my desk is right next to a window. I like nature a lot. It brings me a lot of peace. That's probably why my background on my computer screen is a forest. Forests light me up. My husband likes water. I like forests, so we have a forest and a lake in our neighborhood.

It's great. 

Anyway, let me get to books because I've had lower energy, I've been reading a lot more and I've actually been having a lot of fun with it and nerding out. And I've been getting back into my, I don't even know when this started, what age, but I really enjoy dragons. You can probably see it in my background up here.

So I've been reading books about dragons. It's been so fun. But more than that, I've been reading books that have people who are overcoming trauma in them and who are redefining themselves. 

And it's been healing me. I don't know if how many of you can resonate with that, where you have read something that is not self-help and you resonate enough with the character that it heals you.

You could feel like that layer of healing, and I feel like healing and becoming is like an onion. Like you cry a lot. But there's a ton of layers with it. And as we can heal those layers, we become closer to who we really are, the core of who we are, the core of who we were before we were even born into this world.

And it's so hard being a parent and realizing that I'm doing that to my children even when I'm trying not to. We have been forced to conform and we have to conform as children to our families and to what's expected and then to society and the schools and everything else.

And then we spend our whole adult lifetime undoing a lot of those things. And the thing is, there's pros and cons to it, right? We need to conform in school. To make it easier on the teachers who have large classrooms or if we're homeschooled, conform to our parents' way of teaching. And how different is that where it's a lot of the same style of teaching?

If you're in a co-op, there's other parents that rotate through, but it's probably not as much as every school year with a different teacher. And then once you get to middle school, lots of different teachers in high school. Lots more. I didn't grow up homeschooled, but I know friends who homeschool. So anyway, it's been really fun and like I said, very healing to go through these characters and cringe when it's like, I would not do that.

I do not resonate with that at all. And with some characters it's like, yes. You are like me, like if you're in real life, we could be friends, that type of thing. It's just, I really recommend it and for anyone who's like, okay, you're just told her. Let's go back to what is your favorite non-fiction book and why.

That'd be such a fun chain. We could follow each other on good reads. What is your favorite book? What is your favorite genre of book? I've had people ask me this and for me is I'll go with one for a while and then I'll tire out and then I'll go with another one. And I think that's what's so fun about life, is we don't have to be stuck in one box and we are in such a society that likes to have labels on where really we're like a Venn diagram.

We overlap in a lot of different areas, if you haven't picked up a book for a while, here's your call to action. Pick up a book. It's a really great time of year to do it. There's less sunlight outside. We overextended ourselves over the last several months. We are frazzled, burned out.

This is a great opportunity to force yourself to sit down and try and relax and to just. Not zone out like you do with the movies or shows. So you still have some parts of your brain working because you are imagining the world that the author is building. And how funny is it that you go and you find a picture of the character and there are nothing like what you victory, even though the author wrote it out.

That's for me, I can never quite picture the person. I have to like go and look for rendering and yeah, it's hardly ever what I pictured for them with some books. I don't even, nope. It's gonna be my way. Thanks. There can be so much to it. And if you are someone like me who struggles more with meditation, this can kind of be your gateway to it because it's forcing you to relax, especially.

If you kind of form your own little nest and make sure that your body is caged and comfortable, so like around pillows and like you're not in a position where your back is tweaked in a weird angle, you just make sure that you feel aligned and comfortable and safe and you get to read your book. And the nice thing is your children seeing you do this can be really beneficial.

'cause it reminds them of like, oh yeah, I could read too. Yeah, and the more you're doing this, the more that they can go, oh, you're not as available. I'm gonna go figure it out for myself. It's been really great. Trust me on this. You can have breaks with this, and this is really great for those of you who run late because you wanna get that one last thing done, or you don't wanna show up too early and you're not sure like where that happy medium is.

If you have a book, you can show up early at whatever place, and then you have your book to read and you can kind of make that a habit, so then you get those little extra minutes reading your book. But really there's a lot of scientific data to back this up. For me, it's my own life that I'm gonna use instead.

I know how much better I feel when I have given myself that permission and it's that child part of me if you're thinking parts work, because I grew up loving to read. I was somebody who struggled with reading and writing and needed to, um, I was with the ESL English as a second language students learning how to read and write.

I had half the spelling list that the other kids had, and by the time I graduated that program, I was way higher reading level than everybody else in class and had my notes stuck in novels. And I think I graduated from, hooked on phonics. It's awesome. Hooked on phonics actually did work for me.

But I think I graduated from it in like fourth grade. Third grade anyway. 

And my daughter has also had to be in speech. Only one of my kids has not. The other three have. And seeing them start to understand reading and seeing it open up for them. My oldest, like I said, he never, had to do speech.

He always has his nose stuck in a book and it's so fun. He's gotten in trouble in class for it. And I laugh and I tell him I was the same way. But also remember, listen to your teacher instead of me just going straight into scolding him about it. It was really fun for him to realize, oh, my mom's the same way.

It's okay, and I can figure out ways to know when it's appropriate to read and when it's not. So it was fun to share with him from personal experience. This works, this doesn't, here's the appropriate time, and there's. There's so much joy that you can have in finding things like this that allow you to heal, that allow you the space to unplug and that allow you the space to have a little bit more of the childlike wonder.

It's amazing to me how much, honestly we do it to ourselves where we. Take away our own childhood wonder, and then we get to the point where we have a hard time connecting with children, or we are more envious of children when it's that reminder that we can bring it back into our own lives. We can bring in that our own clit and let it spread everywhere.

Clits awful, by the way, but you know what I mean, where we can. We can find these openings in our lives to bring back in that joy, that passion, that smile, that ease, and that is the way of living an anti-stress lifestyle. 

So next we're gonna talk about why and how often you should be in a sauna because New Year's.

And how many people have joined a gym does your gym have as sauna? We're gonna talk about the next

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found the answers that you needed, and you had some amazing aha moments. Please share this episode with others because it helps us align ourselves and then better align the world so that we can seek the healing that we really are looking for as part of the legal language.

I am a certified life coach with a Bachelor's in Applied Health. That is what I am leaning on for this. This is general advice. Take it as such. See you in the next episode.