How to Audit Your Life Before It Falls Apart

Episode 19 is a solo episode. No guest this time, just me, sitting in Mexico, finally able to say I love my life without a disclaimer attached to it. This post pulls from that conversation and goes further into the exercises I actually walk clients through: the Body Truth Audit, the Identity Archaeology Dig, and the four-list relationship audit that started as something I did for myself and became something I teach.

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A life audit usually starts the same way. Not with a spreadsheet. With a Sunday night that feels heavier than it should, or a compliment on your LinkedIn profile that lands like an insult, or a body that has been trying to tell you something for longer than you've been willing to listen. If you're searching for how to actually do one, I'd guess you already know something is off. You just haven't had permission to name it yet. This is me giving you that permission, and the exact exercises I used to give it to myself.

The Golden Handcuffs Nobody Warns You About

For years I was a UX designer who looked, on paper, like she was crushing it. Six figures. Respected in the field. A portfolio full of projects other designers wanted to reach out and ask about. I was designing user experiences for a living while my own experience was quietly falling apart, and I want to say that twice because I needed to hear it twice when it was happening to me: I was designing human-centered experiences while completely ignoring what my own human was telling me.

The tell was my body. I gained more than 75 pounds of what I've come to call depression and stress weight, and that number was never really about food. It was the weight of performing a version of myself that wasn't real, of stuffing down a voice that kept trying to speak up in meetings about user journeys while my own journey was leading me straight into burnout. I told myself I should be grateful, because I had a good job and good benefits, and gratitude for something that's slowly killing you gets marketed as virtue when it's actually self-abandonment.

The Body Truth Audit: A Real Way to Audit Your Life

Here is the exercise I still do, and the one I teach coaching clients who are trying to figure out how to audit their own life without turning it into another performance review. It's called the Body Truth Audit, and it starts by pausing wherever you are and scanning your body from your head down. Where are you holding tension right now. Where does something feel heavy, or tight, or just off.

Then bring your work into it. Think about Monday morning, or your most dreaded task, or the person you report to, and notice what happens in your body when you do. That knot isn't just stress. It's information your nervous system has been collecting on your behalf, filing away every time you said yes when your body said no. The headaches aren't only from your screen. The chronic fatigue isn't only from being busy. Your body knows the difference between good stress and bad stress, between being challenged and being drained, and it has been keeping receipts on every choice that went against your grain long before you were ready to open the file.

What I Found When I Actually Got Honest

The deeper work started with a movie. A week before I was supposed to return to corporate America from a two and a half month medical leave, I watched Judas and the Black Messiah, and there's a scene where Fred Hampton looks at a crowd celebrating a small institutional win and asks them, essentially, whether they think that's going to make them free. Something clicked. I wasn't free. My entire life had become work-adjacent, even my hobbies, which I'd turned into recovery tools for a job that was draining me in the first place. I wasn't living. I was recovering from living.

I built an exercise out of that clarity called the Identity Archaeology Dig. Finish the sentence "I am someone who ___" ten different ways, quickly, without editing yourself. Then go back through each one and ask whether it's true because it's authentically you, or because it's what you were rewarded for. I used to write that I was someone who is always reliable and never lets people down, and when I actually sat with it, that line had nothing to do with reliability. It came from a fear of disappointing people and losing their approval, which traces back further than I want to admit into childhood, into a mother who wasn't a words-of-affirmation person and a kid who figured out early that achievement was the fastest route to being seen. I still have the little figurine she gave me when I was ten years old for doing something she was proud of. I packed it and brought it to Mexico. Healing doesn't require you to throw away the evidence that you were loved, even imperfectly.

None of this happened without a couple years of unglamorous therapy, the kind that doesn't make it into most entrepreneurship content because it isn't cute. My therapist once asked what it would feel like to live as if my life actually belonged to me, and I didn't have a fast answer. I had to learn how to ask for help after spending most of my life being the friend everyone came to and never letting anyone come to me. I was in a toxic relationship at one point and hid it from my two best friends because I felt protective of the person hurting me. Learning to say "I'm not okay" was like learning a new language I'd never been taught.

The Four Lists That Will Tell You the Truth About Your Relationships

Once I started doing this work on myself, I couldn't stop applying it outward, and this is the part of the audit most people skip because it's the most uncomfortable. Make four lists. Your true supporters, the people who celebrate who you're becoming and not just what you've achieved, and ask yourself honestly when you last let them see you struggling. The transactional relationships, the ones that would evaporate the second you stopped being useful. The energy vampires, whose cost you've never actually calculated in time, in emotional labor, in the version of yourself you have to perform to keep them comfortable. And your safe people, the ones who get your full and messy self, and an honest accounting of how much of your actual time goes to them versus everyone else on the list.

Some relationships only survive because you keep betraying yourself to maintain them. I had to walk away from one of my closest friendships because of how I was being treated, and it took years to fully grieve. I had to put distance between myself and family members whose treatment of me I'd been excusing for decades. And eventually I had to leave an entire industry, the same UX world that built my resume and my LinkedIn following and my invitations to speak at conferences, because I never experienced an industry more hypocritical about the values it claimed to hold. None of the awards mattered as much as I'd once believed they would. I mattered. That was the whole audit, arriving late but arriving true.

Where to Start Your Own Audit

If you're doing this for the first time, start smaller than you think you need to. Run the Body Truth Audit this week, just noticing, no fixing yet. Write your ten "I am someone who" statements and let them sit for a day before you interrogate them. Make the four lists honestly, even the ones that hurt to write down. You don't need clarity on your five-year plan before you're allowed to start. I didn't have answers to any of those questions when I left corporate either. I only knew I needed my agency back, the ability to build a day around my own energy instead of someone else's meeting schedule, to say no to money that would cost me my spirit, to rest without asking permission first.

There's a whole other layer of this I haven't told you yet, the family expectations that keep so many of us performing long after we know better, and that one deserves its own conversation. For now, start with what your body already knows. It's been trying to tell you.

If a full-body audit of your own life is where you're at right now, I built a free guide for exactly this moment. It walks you through the exercises that help you spot the misalignment, name the golden handcuffs, and start reclaiming your agency. Get the Life Audit guide here.

Originally aired as Episode 19 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.