38: How to End Burnout and Overwhelm - What You Need To Know as a High Achiever

Welcome to the re-launch of my podcast, Beyond Burnout for Driven Women! On this podcast we dive into all.the.things. to help you take back control of your life. 

If you’ve ever thought, Why can’t I just stop overdoing it? this episode will give you a different perspective on burnout and why you keep on slipping back into it.  Tune in as we dive into the core beliefs that keep ambitious women in cycles of burnout, why mindset work isn’t enough to break free and how reconnecting with your body wisdom is the answer.

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Transcript

Tapping into body wisdom is the key to breaking free from overwhelm, to stop falling into burnout patterns, and to finally release self-doubt and get your spark back. Welcome to a brand new episode on the brand new direction of my podcast, beyond burnout for high achieving women, where you will learn all the best tips, tools, and strategies to help you feel calm, connected, and balanced as you navigate work, life and relationships. When we are high achieving women, we have an ambitious streak. We have a driven streak. And because we're also driven, it's often difficult for us to shut off. We are often so uncomfortable in that space of not being active, not moving forward. It's very difficult for us to slow down and to rest. And as I went through this experience myself through my own burnout, I became curious as to why is this the case?

Logically, we know we need to slow down logically, we know we need to rest, and yet it's as if there is some unseen driven force running in the background that's stopping us. And if we look at the definition of burnout, we see that it is the result of exposed stress over a long period of time. So physical stress, emotional stress, or mental stress, we just go through the motions every day of struggling with the overwhelm. We experience self-doubt. We don't feel like ourselves. We feel stressed out. We feel like we standing only with one foot in our own lives. And when you are numb to your body, this is what leaves you feeling disconnected, disconnected from yourself, disconnected from your life, and disconnected from the people in your life, your relationships. And so what we often tend to do is we try harder, we push harder, and these are all symptoms of living from your mind.

So what do I mean by living from the level of your mind? We have decisions to make. We've got bills to pay, we've got people to take care of. So there's a lot of action and doing in that. And in the process, we tend to always be forward moving. So our attention is always focused outwards as we move forward in the world. Not only that, our awareness, our mind, our energy, our focus is also often locked onto things in the future that we are worried about or things in the past that we feel bad about. It manifests in our life as walking around feeling quite tight, feeling quite tense and constricted. You might have the habit of having your shoulders hooked up to your ears all the time, or you might constantly be holding your breath or bracing yourself. And so if we are always going to be living in the state of contraction, the state of tightness where our minds are driving the show, what ends up happening is it drops us of our passion.

It robs us of our clarity, and it robs us of our sense of purpose. And what I have discovered, and this is the work that I will be sharing with you here on the podcast, and it's also the work that I do in my coaching, is I've identified that what many ambitious driven women have in common is a very strong inner critic that's pushing from behind and shouting at you and judging you whenever you are doing not enough. And this leads to things like perfectionism where no matter how much you do or what angle you use to attack the problem, it always feels like you are failing somehow or that you are not doing enough. We also have patterns like people pleasing. We put the needs of others ahead of our own needs. And a lot of that also has to do with conditioning, societal conditioning, where we get taught from a young age that in order to be good and lovable and acceptable, we need to give to others first.

We need to take care of others and support them in their needs and not be selfish. And so a lot of us have taken on this habit of people pleasing and in the process we don't even know what we want anymore because we have sacrificed our life force energy into overgiving. We also typically struggle with boundaries where even though logically we know we can hold boundaries, there is something inside us that makes us afraid to draw that line in the sand, to have that boundary. And so in my own explorations as to why I was so driven by these patterns of perfectionism and people pleasing and why I was struggling with boundaries, as I navigated my way out of my own burnout journey, I landed on three key beliefs that I believe so many of us hold. And those beliefs are, I'm not worthy, I'm not lovable, and I am not enough.

Now, I spoke about how I went from numb to being fully alive in episode one of this podcast. So go back and listen to that episode. And in there I referenced my burnout as the dark knight of my soul. As I was sitting in the middle of it, I was faced with the decision of what am I going to do to get myself out of this mess? I don't want to live in this way where I am, driven by my overdrive, where I'm driven by my perfectionism and where I have lost touch with myself in the process. And so my journey took me to changing my diet, which is always the first step in burnout, recovery in many of the things that I've learned and that I did research on. So kind of change your lifestyle, cut a whole lot of things out of my diet, like gluten and milk.

And I started bringing more fresh vegetables and fruits into my diet. And that helped me a lot. It's not necessarily going to help everyone, but for me that was a good thing to do. And I also started doing yoga regularly. I have a daily yoga practise that I still do to this day, and this has allowed me to begin to connect with myself again, to begin to feel my body. I also did mindset work. I've been in the personal development field for many years, so I have a whole host of tools in my toolbox. And even though I could see that I started making small movements towards recovery, it didn't really change that underlying pattern of overdrive. Discovering feminine embodiment has given me back my life. I have access to an inner world of joy and pleasure, which I had lost as a result of burning out that I had lost as a result of these drivers that were driving me internally.

And so it's my mission to bring you the tools and the strategies as well that I used to get my life back, to take control of my life and to step in that fullest expression of myself where I'm living full out. I want the same for you. I want you to start living full out. So on beyond burnout, we will explore all of these tools and strategies to take you from feeling overwhelmed, to take you from feeling like you've lost touch with yourself, and put you in a place where you can begin to live as that best version of yourself. By helping you come home to yourself, by reconnecting to yourself and reconnecting to your body, becoming sensitive to this internal world that's available to you, that will help you navigate the way that you move through your life. When we live only on the level of the mind, effectively what happens is you cut off from the rest of your body and it's through your body that you experience pleasure.

It's through your body that you can access your intuition, and it's through your body that you have a sense of aliveness and vitality for you to start living from the inside out. Instead of being lived by the outside in, you can begin to release all of these contractions, the tightness, the stresses, these mind hooks and these mind loops, and these beliefs of not enough, not lovable and not worthy. And only once you've released this not from the mind, but you've released them from where they have anchored into your body, then you can begin to redesign your life. You can get clear on what it is that you want for yourself. You connect with your own life force again, and you connect with your passion, and you connect with your drive in a healthy and balanced way. And so you can begin to design your life in a way that is fulfilling, in a way that leaves you calm and where you feel connected.

And that is my deepest wish and desire for you, that you can get to experience that as well. So if you are ready to stop living a life that is dictated by shirts, and instead live a life where you feel fully empowered and in control, living from the inside out, make sure to follow me on the podcast. It's going to be mostly me on these episodes, and I'll bring on the occasional guest and right now to get started while I'm finding my own rhythm. You can expect episodes to be uploaded every two weeks. I can't wait to create some magic with you.