Latest / The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women / Ep. 34 Burned Out But Still Functioning? The Signs Your Body Is Running on Empty

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Ep. 34 Burned Out But Still Functioning? The Signs Your Body Is Running on Empty · The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is a relationship between our nervous system and our gut and our immune system and the stress that we hold.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: And our body needs certain conditions to heal.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And those conditions do not involve more output, another smartwatch, more discipline, another protocol.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: It involves telling yourself that you are enough just as you are.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to stop pushing through and start feeling like themselves again.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm CJ, Ayurvedic Wellness Guide, helping women reconnect to the natural rhythm their bodies have been craving.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't that long ago that I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix, bloated no matter what I ate, and lying awake at 3 a.m.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: with my mind already running tomorrow's to-do list.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that my body wasn't feeling me.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was completely overwhelmed because you're not broken.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: You've just been living outside your natural rhythm for a long time.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Body Rhythm.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Chelsea, and so glad to have you here.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's been about a year that I flamed out, burnt out, could not get up from bed.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this was over the time of two years when I was caregiving for my dad who was sick.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was working.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was always in and out of hospitals, going, never had a time off.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't eating right.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And finally my body just gave out.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It couldn't be in output mode anymore.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had asked me as this was going on, did I feel burnt out?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I would say I feel stressed, overwhelmed, but I could handle it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of my default position for years growing up, is I can handle it.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I can keep going on my own.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: I can shoulder all of the responsibility and the burden.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And because my mind was telling my body the story, I just kept overriding what my body was telling me because looking back little by little, it was telling me that this was not sustainable until one day I could not get out of bed where going to the bathroom just seemed like too much effort.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: This story might sound familiar to you, or maybe it's familiar in another way, where it seems like too much effort to do your day-to-day activities, where going outside seems to be too much, or getting up from bed and putting your feet on the floor just seems like one more thing that you have to do that you don't have energy to do it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, like me, you were living for months on four or five cups of coffee, and it would hit two o'clock, three o'clock, and you would just reach for the coffee so you could sustain yourself until it was time to go to bed.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: But this is not just my story.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is a story about other women who have been in high output, high functioning mode for so long that your body's resources can no longer keep up with the output that you're demanding of it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Women that I have worked with who've lived in chronic stress mode year after year or survival mode for year after year, those women who are burned out don't usually arrive and say, I'm burnt out, but they arrive with symptoms.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's digestion that has started to be unpredictable, that's acting up, that has no cause.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: It is sleep that has stopped restoring, as always being tired, even when you get the eight hours of sleep.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's insomnia tossing and turning all night long.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the thoughts that can't turn off.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's showing up as a sort of emotional brittleness and rigidity when we're burnt out, stressed out, in survival mode, the nervous system loses its suppleness.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so that shows up as us snapping at people as a lower threshold towards irritability and anger.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's snapping at someone or a situation that just seems to come out of nowhere.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps it is a flatness or a lack of joy where there used to be something.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: So often I have heard women say that they don't even remember things that brought them joy, what they liked to do.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was left so far ago that they're not even in touch with that part of themselves anymore.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath all of these symptoms, underneath the lack of energy and the lack of sleep and the digestive problems, gut health problems that just won't go away, underneath all of it is a woman who continues to show up.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: She's continuing to deliver.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: She's still the person that everyone depends on.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: She is the one who is handling it all.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And from the outside, she looks very capable, right?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: But on the inside, she's running on nothing, running on fumes, and she can feel it, but doesn't quite know what the fix is.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because you've gone to the doctor and you've had all the tests and everything comes back normal or saying you're fine, but you have this internal knowing that something isn't right.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: You have this internal knowing that you want something to change, that you want to feel better in your body again, but you just don't know what's going on and you don't know where to start.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I have seen this working with women, I've lived this in my own journey, living through the caregiving and the emotional exhaustion and the eating to soothe and the losing connection to joy, to losing connection to relationships where I kept functioning while everything inside of me slowly went quiet.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you looked at me from the outside, if you were one of my friends, you saw all the things that I was taking on, all of the responsibilities, me going from place to place to place, right?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And even some friends were like, I don't know how you do it.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And my response was, well, I just continued to go.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't think about it because it was just too much.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And besides that, right, I thought to myself, there's no way I could stop.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so my body, though, started telling me I didn't have the capacity to continue on the path that I was on.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so knowing holistic healing, knowing Ayurveda, knowing yoga, all of these things I knew about and I just slowly they went away because all the other responsibilities seemed more important.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: But when I returned back to Ayurveda, when I returned back to yoga, what brought me back wasn't a stricter routine, it was a rhythm that worked.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was getting myself on a schedule, it was allowing for more nourishment and to be nurtured and to create a space that allowed me to actually rest for about six months.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: After that time where I couldn't get out of bed, my only yoga routine was laying on the floor with a blanket underneath my knees and laying there for about 15 minutes.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And slowly, as I gave my body the feeling of safety and support that it was needing, I was able to get back into my body.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's as simple as that.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: In Ayurveda, there is the concept of ojas.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ojas is this deep reservoir of vitality and immunity, and it's a living essence, it's love and joy flowing through the body.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of our most foundational resources, the thing that makes resilience possible, the thing that makes us able to bounce back possible.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when Ojas is strong, we experience steadiness, we experience clarity, we experience emotional groundedness and joy and love and vitality, right?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever noticed someone who just seems to have something flowing out of them, uh a vitality to them?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is Ojas.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's the ability to give and to live without feeling completely emptied and depleted.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: But Ojaz can become depleted through diet and lifestyle, through chronic stress, emotional suppression when we don't move through our emotional experiences.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: It moves through daily routines that are not regular.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: It depletes through uh insufficient rest and restoration and space and connection.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually what burnout is.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: It is the depletion of Ojast.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's the depletion of vitality, the depletion of emotional steadiness and clarity and joy.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And usually it takes a while to get there.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: It takes months or years for Ojast to become depleted.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: But what I love about Ayurveda is that we can replenish Ojast through diet and lifestyle.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's certain ojost-giving foods like dates and avocados and fresh greens and melons, right, that restore that vitality in the body.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: When ojost is depleted, we have digestive disruption, gut health issues.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have the lost joy, the emotional unsteadiness.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's disturbed sleep, the loss of feeling rooted.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And most wellness programs treat these as separate symptoms.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But what I love about Ayurveda is that Ayurveda sees them as one picture, as a body whose deepest reserves have been sent.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: In Ayurveda, burnout is a pitta vata imbalance.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's an imbalance in the heat element and in the air and ether element.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And Vata is the energy of movement, of air, of constant change and creativity.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: It gives us glow, right?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's also the element that governs the nervous system.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: So think of all of the thoughts and all of the signals that the nervous system sends or stimulation, hello, screens anyone.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Irregular schedules, right?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: If we don't go to bed on time, we don't wake up on time, we never know when we're eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Too much sensory input, right?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Scrolling through social media, doom scrolling, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all of the things.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then that creates an anxiety, a scattered thinking, an inability for the nervous system to really land and feel rooted and rested.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it inhibits the ability for us to create space for ourselves for reconnection with ourselves, with others, the divine.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And pitta is the energy of fire and drive and accomplishment.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: In balance, it gives us focus and direction and ambition.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: But out of balance, it creates this energy of chronically pushing through, of high output without enough recovery, of an internal belief that productivity is worth.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this chronic pushing through, this high output without recovery, it creates inflammation in the body.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Inflammation that might show up as uh joint pain, as IBS, as skin irritation and skin rashes.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: It can show up as emotional intensity, anger, irritability, a short fuse.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: It can show up as an exhaustion, but you still can't stop.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sound familiar?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And most high-functioning women in burnout are running both of these patterns simultaneously, driven by pitta, destabilized by vata energy, and running out of ojas underneath of it all.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Until one day you get to the point where you can't give anymore or you feel just so disconnected from yourself.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know what to do.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: In Ayurveda, there's also this concept of Agni, of digestive fire.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And our Agni, our digestive fire, yes, it metabolizes food, but it also metabolizes our life experience, our emotions, our stress, our grief, our joy.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And when we have been running in high output mode for so long, when we have been suppressing the emotions, just pushing them down into the void because there was never enough space to process them.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: When we've been taking in more than we have been able to metabolize our digestive fire, our Agni becomes weak.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And when Agni is weak, we stop being able to process what we're taking in.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: We stop being able to process our life experience.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then the symptoms of burnout begin to appear because we're not processing what we're doing in the day-to-day.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then the burnout spreads to our emotional body, our relational body, our spiritual body, because the body is interconnected and we can no longer metabolize what we've been asked to carry.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so often to recover from burnout, we need to intentionally create the space to say that we are enough, that we're enough to rest, that we deserve to rest, that we can receive nourishment, that we can be nurtured by others.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we allow ourselves to be nurtured and nourished and rested, then our system, our body that's been overloaded, and a digestive system that just has lost its ability to metabolize finally gets the space to process.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because what Ayurveda has understood long before my modern science has confirmed it is that there is a relationship between our nervous system and our gut and our immune system and the stress that we hold.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And our body needs certain conditions to heal.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And those conditions do not involve more output, another smartwatch, more discipline, another protocol.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: It requires a felt sense of safety and support and daily rhythm and warmth and nourishment and stillness.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: It involves telling yourself that you are enough just as you are, and you deserve space and rest and a chance to pause.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because modern burnout culture tells us that recovery is something that we have to achieve.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have seen several things about it, quick fixes here and there.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Modern burnout culture that I've seen tells us that recovery is one more thing that we have to achieve, right?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we have all of the apps telling us what our health data is.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: But Ayurveda is asking us to come back into the body.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: We've become so disembodied with our experience, so external to us.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Ayurveda asks us to come back into the body to become re-embodied.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then through that, we receive recovery.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: We receive the healing.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the women that I work with are so used to putting all the energy out.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not used to being in a position to receive because they've never been given permission to receive recovery and rest and healing.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because they've always been in the role for so long as the one who gives, the steady one, the capable, the accomplished one, the one who holds everything together.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: That receiving feels foreign.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It might even feel selfish.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been there too.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is so, so hard for me to receive, but it's something I have to work on day in and day out, telling myself I'm enough as I am.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's where the healing comes.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we rebuild ojas is through receiving, receiving of nourishing foods, the receiving of love, the receiving of the small connections back to joy.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the small connections back to joy can be memories of when we've just felt joyful, maybe a trip, a vacation, maybe it's out in nature at the beach or in the mountains.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it's as simple as standing in the grass out in the sun and feeling the soft earth beneath your feet and the warmth of the sun just on your skin.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it's flowing down enough to eat a meal with intention, without distraction, to inhale actually the aroma of the food.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Does it actually smell good to you?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Does it actually taste good to you?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Is it allowing yourself to sleep before you answer the next 10 emails?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because the emails will be there in the morning.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is the medicine.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is the healing.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Every symptom, your digestion, your sleep, your emotional rigidity, your short fuse.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's your body trying to tell you that it has been spending more time in output mode than it has been in replenishment and reception mode for a very long time.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And your body is asking for something different.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's asking for a different rhythm, a different routine.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been the steady one, the capable one, the one who keeps going, recovery from burnout doesn't require you to blow up your life.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I wouldn't recommend blowing up your life.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But, and it doesn't require an extreme program.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't require you to become a different person.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: It does require perhaps a different mindset, the mindset that you're enough that you can receive.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Requires an understanding that your body is communicating with you through the symptoms and then addressing the root cause of everything in your life.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's and then it requires an understanding of what is happening underneath of your symptoms and addressing the root cause with space and rhythm and nourishment with the kind of support and felt sense of safety that your body has been asking for, and the only language that it knows.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I invite you to ask yourself what would it feel like to treat your body like something worth nourishing, like something worth nurturing.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to understand what your stress pattern is signaling, what your nervous system might be running underneath everything, all of your symptoms, I invite you to take the hidden stress pattern quiz linked in the show notes.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a gentle place to start just to begin to notice what the body is communicating and what it might be asking for, for you to begin to feel better in your body again.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because you didn't always feel this way.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: You got here over time, over months, over years, perhaps over decades.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Body Rhythm.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Be well and nourished, and I will see you next week.