The Packhorse Project
Lighten the load. Find your pace.
Coaching for people who carry more than they should have to, and are ready to do something different about it.
Lighten the load. Find your pace.
Coaching for people who carry more than they should have to, and are ready to do something different about it.
You know the feeling. The weight isn't dramatic. It's cumulative. Responsibility layered on responsibility, until the thing that finally tips you isn't a crisis. It's a Tuesday.
You're still performing. Still delivering. But somewhere along the way, the load stopped being sustainable and started being something you just endure.
Most approaches to resilience tell you to push through or slow down. Neither works when the load itself is the problem.
Packhorse works with three things that actually determine how you feel and how long you can sustain it.
What you're actually carrying. Not just the workload, but the cognitive, emotional and relational weight that accumulates beneath the surface.
The speed at which you're moving through it all. Not just busy-ness, but whether your rhythm matches what your system can actually sustain right now.
What you have left to give, and what is depleting it without announcing itself. Capacity isn't fixed. It shifts with recovery, environment, and how well your load is distributed.
Most wellbeing work measures how people say they are doing. This work measures what their nervous systems are doing. The two do not always agree, and the gap is the useful part.
Capable people who are coping report that they are coping. That is not dishonesty. It is what a questionnaire is built to capture: how you appraise your own state, filtered through what you expect of yourself. At the point where the appraisal is itself under strain, it is the least reliable instrument in the room.
The variation between consecutive heartbeats reflects the traffic between the branch of the nervous system that mobilises you and the branch that lets you recover. Thayer and Lane's neurovisceral integration model (2000) connected that variation to the same circuits governing attention and emotional regulation. Measurement standards have been settled since the Task Force report of 1996.
A single reading tells you about that morning. Recording continuously across several days and nights takes in working hours, evenings and sleep, so what emerges is the distance between what you are spending and what you are getting back. That distance is the thing that accumulates, and the thing nobody feels arriving.
What it is not: a diagnosis. Heart rate variability is not a test for burnout, and no honest reading of it claims to be. It is a way of seeing your own pattern with something other than your own judgment, at exactly the point where your own judgment is the thing carrying the load.
Sustained pressure is not a character flaw. It is an architecture problem, and data is what makes that arguable rather than merely reassuring.
Three ways in, depending on where you are and what you're carrying.
Start here
A close look at what you're actually carrying, which hands you a written profile of where the real pressure sits. Session one maps your load across every dimension. Session two delivers your load profile, and we decide what, if anything, comes next. Add optional HRV monitoring to see what your nervous system is doing beneath the narrative. No ongoing commitment. Sometimes the clarity is the intervention.
One to one
One-to-one coaching for when you already know what you want to work on. A new role, a difficult dynamic, a decision you keep circling. Four focused sessions over two months, shaped around a goal you define, working through load, pace and capacity. Not open-ended, not therapy. A thinking partner who has been inside high-stakes environments and understands what the pressure costs.
Teams & groups
Group sessions for loads that are carried together. For teams, leadership groups or cohorts running hot at once with no shared language to name it. We surface what the group is carrying, where the pace has become unsustainable, and where capacity is leaking. A shared language for load, so "I'm fine" stops being the only acceptable answer.
Two things I work with alongside the coaching. No affirmations, no journaling prompts, and nothing that asks you to think your way out of a physiological problem.
An optional part of The Diagnostic. You wear a small monitor for several days and nights, a working week included, and what comes back is your own data: stress load, recovery, sleep quality, and the points in the day where the two pull apart. Most people find the first reading uncomfortable and useful in about equal measure.
I trained in sound therapy, and I recommend it rather than sell it. Specific sound input can move you out of sympathetic overdrive without asking anything of your attention, which is the whole point for people who are too wired to meditate. Where it fits, I will point you towards it. Where it does not, I will say so.
The Packhorse Load Assessment is a short, private reflection tool. It won't fix anything, but it will show you where the weight is sitting right now.
Take the load assessmentTake something away today
A calm, practical workbook for organising your digital calendar so it supports your life, not runs it. It moves you from mental overload to visible structure, and settles the invisible to-do list running in the background.
$25 · instant download, yours to keep.
I'm Abbey. Just a few years ago, I walked away from a career in law and banking that I had spent 20 years building; I was a high performer who was languishing, and nobody could see it. There were no guardrails stopping me from doing more, so I did. I kept running away from the issues at hand, literally, by taking on very hard things, like a self-supported 250km race across the desert.
My body made a decision I wasn't willing to make myself. I burnt out in a way I didn't have language for at the time, and spent the better part of 18 months putting myself back together. I haven't run since. It turned out I didn't need to keep running away.
I rebuilt slowly, with a lot of help. I had already trained as a coach, and then I studied the science of allostatic load, HRV, and what chronic stress actually does to a nervous system that was never built for the way most of us live today.
Packhorse is what came out the other side. I work with high performers who are still delivering but realising they may be running on empty, to show that high performance doesn't have to cost you yourself. I built what I wish someone had offered me: an approach that takes the load seriously, measures what's actually happening in the body, and gives you practical tools, not platitudes.