Why I am grateful for burnout
One day I started crying and just couldn’t stop. Even then, I didn’t realise what the problem was, I still blamed myself for not being strong enough, for not being able to push through or for not putting other people’s happiness before my own emotions.
That day was in 2020. Like so many mums during the lockdown in 2020, I later realised what I was going through was burnout.
The pressure of running a successful business, being primary caregiver to my children (one of whom turned 1 in lockdown), trying to keep the house in a state that didn’t impact my mental health and the constant anxiety about what was going on in the world was a recipe for disaster.
I was, and still am a marketing agency owner, I work with small business offering affordable marketing support. I built my business to allow me flexibility to be available for my children when they needed me, a value I still hold strong. My now ex husband deemed his work more important than mine, so when lockdown hit and childcare stopped, everything fell to me.
Not only this but my business was thriving during this period, I hired support, I had a steady flow of enquiries, and a huge proportion of them converting into paid monthly retained clients - enabling me to have two members of my team.
Having these team members was more motivating to me than making money for myself, one of my team members had chronic health condition meaning they couldn’t work in a normal office job and needed flexibility to work around their health. They also happened to be amazing at their job, so it was win-win for everyone and gave me purpose to keep this person in work.
I mentored people, hired interns, and was literally living out my ambition and making great money, flexibly while doing it.
And then burnout hit.
And I couldn’t push through any more. I couldn’t stop crying, I could only look after the children and the dog, even then I felt like I was doing a poor job. Work dried up, almost like the universe signalling to me that I couldn’t continue like this. I had silent panic attacks, health issues, I was gaining weight and eating too much sugar just to give me energy to get through.
Looking back at it now I’ve done the work on myself, I’ve done the healing, I deeply understand my nervous system and I can see exactly what happened and why.
I had been living out of alignment for years.
The idea of alignment gave me a deep understanding of my patterns, so I could see why certain things didn’t feel good to me, why certain people/situations literally drained my energy immediately, while others gave me energy. A simple way of looking at it is that I was living the life everyone told me to live, not the one that was truly me. The more I lived the life that was truly mine, the more the energy came - and that in itself has been a long journey, one that I now get to help others on.
I was choosing clients that didn’t fit my values and work style, because I was chasing a financial dream. I specifically remember an initial meeting with one client and I had a really bad gut feeling when I spoke to them, I couldn’t place it but my body was telling me “no this client isn’t right for you”, but I ignored that, the pay was too good - and I took them on. I hated every part of working with them. Even though I outsourced so much of the work to my team, working with the client absolutely drained me. It wasn’t that they were demanding or wrong for their requests and expectations, it was simply that we didn’t align in values, style or ethos.
I wasn’t listening to the music I love because I was afraid of judgement, I didn’t buy or cook the foods I loved because I was so desperate to please others. I was living in a controlling relationship and I didn’t even realise it.
I lost my personality, I lost my sense of humour, I lost my ambition and I lost my sense of self.
Now I am out of the other side of the controlling relationship, I have more understanding of how we lose ourselves in these dynamics and how this all fits together, but what I still ponder at times is, did the relationship cause my burnout or was my nervous system dysregulated before I entered the relationship?
What I didn’t realise then was that if I knew more about my nervous system, understood the signals it was sending me and made decisions that honored myself, not the life other people chose for me, burnout probably wouldn’t have happened.
When I look back now I see so many signals I was ignoring
That gut feeling with the client - my body sensed it was too much for me to handle before my conscious mind caught up
The people pleasing and fear of judgement- buying food others liked, planning days around other people, working and doing all childcare without pushing back. This was the fawn response, trying to find belonging to feel safe. This is a survival response where being part of a tribe is safer than being alone, so we try to find a sense of belonging. Thousands of years ago, where there was less to differentiate people, finding your sense of belonging was easier, these days with so many different interests, finding belonging is more difficult, so we fawn, we pretend, we people please and we do what we need to do to fit in.
The loss of sense of self, personality, sense of humour etc, all signs of a dysregulated nervous system - my energy was all on survival.
Silent panic attacks and health issues - I was living in my mind, overthinking everything but not taking care of myself. My body wanted me to pause and listen- but I still didn’t
My body wasn’t just sending physical signals, it was also determining my actions and behaviour and I felt like there was nothing I could do about it, and in all honesty, at this point I didn’t realise that doing anything about it was even an option.
Around 6 months later, I kept seeing an advert for a coaching course, that offered a free taster, this taster session opened my eyes to a completely different way of thinking. Through this course I discovered a love of journaling.
Journaling is one of the things that completely transformed things for me. When I felt isolated and like I couldn’t admit my feelings to anyone on the outside of me, I found solace in my journal. Journaling allowed me to discover myself, to untangle my thoughts and process my emotions.
I started opening my world to my unconscious mind, I went on a deep journey to understand myself and my patterns and I slowly made changes to become the best version of myself with the goal of setting a better example for my children - to be who you are, not who you are told to be.
Through this work I reconnected with my love of nutrition and biohacking, and through that I started exploring the nervous system more deeply - and that’s where everything connected.
I truly believe that the nervous system is the key to living a happier life. We spend our childhoods being conditioned to be who our parents, teachers and peers tell us to be. We follow the career path because we’ve been told its a good idea. We feel that we “should” get married, have children, etc by a certain age, because that is the done thing. We don’t like certain hobbies/music/foods because they aren’t cool and we want to fit in with the crowd, which is a survival mechanism. But what we forget is that if we don’t fit in by being ourselves - they aren’t our tribe.
A few quotes have shaped who I have become over the last few years…
“Your vibe attracts your tribe” - When you are doing what you love, living your best life, you connect with people for that version of yourself. When you live by someone else’s rules, people pleasing and trying to fit in - you meet people that fit that version of you - the version that isn’t really you. So it’s not much of a surprise we have a loneliness epidemic when we look at it in these terms - if you are being someone you are not, and building relationships with other people who are being someone they aren’t - where’s the actual connection? So many people feel lonely despite being surrounded by people - is this why?
“You connect with people at the same wound level as you” - for me hearing this quote, which was from Tara Swart, was such a big realisation. Of course that’s why I repeat the patterns, that’s why I struggle with building deeper connections. I had low confidence and hated being centre of attention. I struggle with who my people were, being friends with other people that had low confidence but displayed it in different ways, I couldn’t find my place. It was only as I started to grow out of this “wound” and found myself again.
“Bring the subconscious conscious” - a term used in the coaching world, but is so relevant for the nervous system. Your nervous system represents your subconscious, it knows before you do, so how do we make better decisions and break bad habits and patterns? By learning to listen to our nervous system and the signals it sends. When we listen to the smaller signals, they don’t have to get bigger - the bigger the symptoms you experience, the longer you have been ignoring it.
“Your soul came here for a purpose” - something Kirsty Gallagher says a lot - when life gets difficult this can honestly feel like such an important idea, remembering we are here to grow through the hard times and learn lessons to enable us to become stronger and happier.
Spirituality is something else that has opened up to me as I have come out of the burnout phase, and while I understand it isn’t for everyone, for me it has been so important to my journey. It has enabled me to live in the present, recognise the growth opportunities I have been given, and trust that better times are on the way for me. And when you start connecting spiritual concepts and the nervous system, that’s when things get quite interesting, the vagus nerve is sometimes referred to as the “soul nerve” and this is the nerve that give us our intuition or gut instinct. I find this area absolutely fascinating- but I will save that for another time!
If you recognise yourself in any of this and feel like you want to make a change, it is possible for you. I went from living in logic and always thinking about the future, to living in flow and only thinking about the present and I feel so at peace from that journey. It might sound odd, but I am grateful for the burnout, without it, I wouldn’t have found myself, the only thing I would change is that I would have listened to the signals my body was sending much earlier than I did, and now I know how to do that, I know I am in a better place.
If you want to learn how to listen to your body signals, book a free discovery call with me.
