Dr. Riley Smith
Practical Approaches for Releasing What You Absorb There was a period in my practice when I was seeing a lot of people in acute distress. Day after day, I was sitting with pain—physical pain, emotional pain, the pain of people whose bodies had become battlegrounds for stress they couldn’t name. I was good at holding […]
Understanding the Hidden Cost of Holding Space for Others Have you ever come home from work feeling like you’d been through something traumatic—even though technically nothing happened to you? Have you ever absorbed someone else’s crisis and then found you couldn’t shake it for days, carrying a heaviness that didn’t quite belong to you? Have […]
How to Recognize Your Cortisol Pattern and Begin the Journey Back to Yourself The first time I really saw my own cortisol pattern—not just intellectually understood it, but saw it reflected back to me in black and white—was humbling. I had been feeling off for a while. Tired in the mornings despite adequate sleep. Wired […]
How Your Stress Hormones Keep Score Long After Your Mind Moves On Something stressful happens. Maybe a crisis at work, a difficult conversation, a moment that demanded everything you had. You handle it. You stay calm, do what needs to be done, and get through it. By evening, you might not even remember the details. […]
In the first part of this series, I introduced a reframe that changed everything for me: a boundary isn’t a wall you build against others—it’s a fence you build around your own garden. We explored why boundaries matter metabolically, what happens when you operate without them, and the moment I realized that my constant availability […]
There’s a word that most caring people have a complicated relationship with: boundaries. When we hear it, we tend to think about saying no. About walls. About keeping people out, being less available, becoming somehow harder or colder. And for those of us who find meaning in being there for others, that framing feels wrong. […]
In the first part of this series, I explored what’s actually happening in your body when you’re in crisis mode—the fuel you’re burning, the cost that accumulates, and why some people feel increasingly depleted while others seem to bounce back. If you recognized yourself in that picture, this piece is about what comes next: how […]
Here’s something I’ve noticed in my work with helping professionals that I think deserves far more attention than it gets: some people can navigate high-stress situations and bounce back relatively quickly. Others—and if you’re reading this, you might be one of them—feel like every crisis takes a piece of them. Like the recovery time keeps […]
When I finally started protecting my mornings, everything shifted. Not because I was doing more, but because I was doing less. I was allowing myself to receive before I started giving. And that one change—that reversal of the default pattern—transformed not just my mornings, but my entire capacity for the day ahead. In the first […]
Here’s something I’ve observed in my work with helping professionals that I don’t think gets talked about nearly enough: by 9am, most of you have already spent half your daily energy budget. And you haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet. I’m not talking about physical exertion. I’m talking about something far more invisible, […]
Dr. Riley Smith, LAc · DACM · DiplOM
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