Q4 Ads, Burnout, and the Nervous System: What Nobody Tells You About Running Campaigns Under Pressure — with Rita Ainsworth

September 1, 2026

Season 2

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Q4 Ads, Burnout, and the Nervous System: What Nobody Tells You About Running Campaigns Under Pressure — with Rita Ainsworth

Q4 is the most competitive and most demanding time of year for course creators running paid campaigns. Ad costs nearly double, audiences get saturated, dashboards flash numbers that can trigger panic before there’s even enough data to make a decision and beyond all of it, the human running the campaign is burning through energy reserves they may not have.

In this episode, Monica Badiu talks with Rita Ainsworth, performance marketing expert, nervous system coach, and someone who has managed ad budgets in the tens of thousands per day, about what it actually takes to survive Q4 without breaking. Rita shares the hard lessons she learned from two burnouts, the science behind why stress derails decision-making, and the practical tools that help high performers stay regulated when everything is on the line.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why Q4 ad costs can jump from $60 CPM in September to $9,500 CPM during Black Friday — and what that means for course creators with smaller budgets
How to compete against big brands during Q4 without a big brand budget — and why offer positioning and emotional resonance matter more than production value
Why building your audiences before Black Friday — through ads, organic content, and email — is the single most important thing you can do right now
The real reason course creators should start Black Friday prep in September, not October
Why holding your nerve during the first 24–48 hours of a campaign is one of the hardest — and most important — skills in performance marketing
What functional burnout looks like, why so many entrepreneurs are living in it, and how to tell if you’re one of them
The nervous system tool Rita uses with every client that takes under a minute and can pull you out of reactive decision-making instantly
The one supplement Rita recommends every entrepreneur take before Q4 — and why

Key Takeaways

Start building your retargeting audiences now. Most Black Friday sales happen on retargeting — which means the email list you grow and the content you publish between now and November is the infrastructure your Q4 campaigns will run on.
Know your leading indicators. Click-through rate, cost per landing page view, cost per add to cart — if you know these numbers going in, you’ll know whether the campaign is working before the purchases show up in your dashboard.
Offer is everything in Q4. Your audience has a fixed pot of money and a lot of options competing for it. The course creator who wins isn’t the one with the biggest budget — it’s the one who can articulate the transformation most clearly and position it as more important than everything else on the list.
State before strategy. Rita’s core principle: the nervous system state you’re in shapes every decision you make. A regulated nervous system makes better marketing decisions than an exhausted, adrenaline-driven one.
The 4-6 breath. Breathe in for 4 counts, out for 6. Do 10 rounds whenever you feel yourself tensing, looping, or spiralling. It’s the fastest way to shift out of fight-or-flight and back into a state where you can actually think clearly.

About Rita Ainsworth

Rita Ainsworth spent over a decade in performance marketing, managing multi-million dollar ad budgets and leading teams across international time zones. After burning out twice, including one episode that left her unable to work more than two hours a day for month, she walked away at the peak of her career and went deep into the science of stress, energy, and the nervous system. She now coaches founders, operators, and marketers on how nervous system state shapes performance, decisions, and leadership. Her practice is built on one principle: state before strategy.

Website: ritaainsworthcoaching.com
LinkedIn: Rita Ainsworth
Take Rita’s Nervous System Quiz: find out if you’re regulated, stressed, or heading toward burnout, plus practical tips based on your result.

Enjoyed This Episode?

Share it with a course creator or marketer who’s heading into Q4 without a plan for their nervous system — not just their campaigns. And if you have a minute, a review on Apple Podcasts helps more course creators find the show.

Hi. And welcome.
My name is Monica Badiu. I am a marketing consultant turned conversion copywriter and copy coach. I help online course creators and info product businesses sell more through persuasive, non-spammy, no fluff copywriting.

I teach about copywriting, digital marketing, and conversion strategies tested in my businesses and with my clients.

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