44: How Poor Boundaries Lead To Burnout

Feeling stretched too thin, taking on things that aren’t really yours to carry? Maybe you know your boundaries could be stronger, but you're not sure where to start? In this episode Tertia dives into how lacking boundaries can quietly push you toward burnout, especially for women who are constantly juggling responsibilities.

Tertia breaks down how weak or leaky boundaries can leave you feeling overwhelmed and stretched too thin and why setting boundaries from a place of deep self-trust (instead of guilt or overthinking) can bring a sense of balance and ease. She unpacks the struggles of holding strong boundaries in both work and personal life, the fear of upsetting people, and how we’ve been taught to put everyone else first.  This episode will offer you guidance on how to reconnect with your body's truth and stand strong in your boundaries, finally breaking out of the burnout cycle.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Find out what boundaries really are (hint: they’re not just about keeping people out).
• See how shaky boundaries can quietly drain your energy and lead to burnout.
• Learn the difference between setting boundaries in your head vs. actually feeling them in your body and why that matters.
• Discover why the usual “just say no” approach often backfires, leaving you exhausted and guilty.

Key Takeaways:

• Boundaries are deeply ingrained in your body's truth.
• When your boundaries are weak, work and personal life start blending, leaving you drained.
• Embodied boundaries come from within and naturally shape how you show up.
• The fear of upsetting people can push you to overdo things, leading to exhaustion.

Take Action:

• Pay attention to how your body reacts in different situations as it’ll tell you where you need better boundaries.

📩 Join the conversation:

• DM me your biggest insight! https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/
• Email me via my website https://tertiariegler.com/contact/

➡️Watch Free Training Your Burnout Exit Strategy: The 5 Step Path to More Energy, More Money & More Self-Expression - Without Burning It All Down

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Transcript

Welcome. I'm Tertia, and you are listening to the Beyond Burnout for Driven Woman podcast, where we end the cycle of burnout so you can feel more balanced, clear, and in control of your life. If you are a high achiever, ready to move past overwhelm, overthinking and overdrive, and instead drop down into your body so you can start living full out, you are in the right spot. Let's dive in. I am recording today's episode for you from the loving confines of my car while I'm looking at all of the new blossoms and little green shoots that are starting to emerge on the trees. I've just come from an acupuncture appointment, and instead of going back to my office, I decided to drive out here to one of the public parks near my home. And I'm just enjoying looking at all of these new shoots. And that sort of ties in with today's episode, and that is new beginnings. We're entering into spring here in the northern hemisphere, and there's always the promise of new beginnings when the buds start to push their little tender shoots out. And so for you, this is an opportunity for you to step into some new blooming, to start growing in a new direction, specifically around the boundaries that you hold or you don't hold. So I want to explore today how poor boundaries, how lack of boundaries, how porous boundaries can contribute to burnout. And this is going to be very helpful for you if you have a suspicion that your boundaries could be stronger, but you are not sure how to either go about having stronger boundaries, like, where do you even start? Or perhaps you are not 100% clear on if your boundaries need to be stronger, because as far as you know, it seems okay, but you suspect something might be off. You're going to find today's episode helpful. So I want to kick us off by talking about, what are boundaries? I think for many of us, it's not unusual to think of boundaries as a perimeter fence. It's something that we erect to keep things out and to keep things in. And the most obvious boundary that we all have is the boundary of our skin, right? So it keeps all of the germs and the uglies outside and inside. It keeps us contained, like our muscles and our bones and ourselves and the blood vessels and our organs. All of that is contained within the barrier of our skin and our boundaries that we hold and that we navigate the world with work similarly. But I'm going to invite you not to think of them as a perimeter fence. And I'll explain to you now why I say that. So the main reason that we need boundaries is so that we can keep ourselves contained and that we can keep others as others, and that we don't confuse other people for ourselves. Like, we need to know where we end and where other people start. So this is a key ingredient or a key reason why we have boundaries when this is lacking, when we don't have that clear sense of where we end and someone else begins, it leads to all sorts of complications. The most obvious complications is where we tend to take on the responsibility for other people's feelings. We feel responsible for how other people feel as they move through the world. And not only do we feel responsible for their responses and their reactions, but we also try and make it better for them. And unfortunately, it often happens at the cost of of ourselves. I'm popping in here with a quick announcement about my new upcoming boundaries masterclass. This is going to be especially helpful to any woman who feels like she's standing with only one foot in her own life. If you want to learn how to solidly stand in your truth and solidly stand in your boundaries so that you can stop burning out and start living full out, then this workshop is for you. We're going to explore what are some of the main reasons why you might be struggling with boundaries, And I'm going to take you through a guided embodied exploration to discover the boundaries that you want to hold with regards to any sticky situation in your life. So make sure that you check out the link in the show notes. And now back to the episode. Boundaries are particularly important in terms of relationships. And if you think about it, anyone that we interact with in the world, it doesn't matter if it's an intimate relationship, if it's your partner, if it's your children, or if it is a client or if it is a colleague, there's always some kind of relationship involved, right? And that's where our boundaries come into play. When I did my feminine embodiment coach training, it helped me look at boundaries in a different way, I believe, based on what I've learned and my experiences. Since our boundaries are not something that we should erect from the level of the mind when we do this. This is typically when there's a boundary that's been crossed, and it's when you decide, oh, my goodness, I can't take this anymore, and you strike out or you react, right? That's when you've had enough and you draw that line in the sand and it becomes a very, very rigid boundary. And then what happens is you feel guilty for having overreacted or for coming on too strong or whatever judgment you want to give yourself. And you then veer over to the other side where you overcompensate and you go out of your way to accommodate the other person against which you have reacted in that boundary. And this is something that I know deeply, this swivel between lashing out, overreacting, protecting, and then retreating into feeling guilty and overcompensating. And this is a pendulum that's quite exhausting to be on this rigid, porous. Rigid porous kind of boundary cycle. But we do that. And it happens when we set our boundaries from the level of the mind, right? Our boundaries live in our body because our boundaries are those things that we are available for that we are not available for. And the answer of what it is that we are available for or not, that is our deepest truth. And that truth can only be found in the body. It can't be found anywhere else. Definitely not on the level of the mind and definitely not in the advice or the suggestions from another person, right? Only you know for yourself what is good for you and what you are available for. And to be able to access that, you have to come into your body. You have to meet all of the tender layers that exist between you living as this fullest expression of yourself, and the part of you that feels guilty, the part of you that wants to please, the part of you that feels responsible for others. And we navigate through that. In the work that I do with my clients, I help you navigate through that. So our embodied boundaries are then boundaries that are born from within us. And when we sit in these boundaries, when we let the truth of that infuse ourselves, we set this out into the field around us. So our boundary is not a perimeter that we erect on the outside. It is a force that comes from within and it surrounds us. I do hope that you get a felt sense of the difference between erecting something on the outside and taking something that you are filling yourself with from within and letting that infuse the field and fill the field around you. And the consequence of having these kinds of boundaries that are built from our own truth is that we stand stronger in them, right? We have a solid conviction of them, and it's a lot easier for us to live them out into the world. And this is so important, because the biggest reason why we struggle with upholding healthy boundaries is because of the consequences we fear. The consequences. We fear people will get upset with us. We fear people will stop loving us. We fear that we will damage relationships, and this may or may not be true, but it's the fear that we hold that causes us to not stand strong in honoring our own boundaries. And it doesn't matter if you tell yourself, oh, you know, that's just how it is. I've now had enough. And this fear is not legit. This fear still lives in your body and in your nervous system. So we also need to find a way to meet this fear and to, to love the fear, to partner with the fear so that the fear doesn't rule our lives. And again, this is where embodiment is such a powerful process because it takes us into our bodies so that we can inhabit more of ourselves. So I want to share with you now some examples of what poor boundaries that could lead to burnout may look like. And for me, the first context that comes into play when we speak about boundaries and burnout is I think about work life balance. And this is the typical example of letting your work life spill into your evenings, letting it spill into your weekends, and feeling like you have to always be available. The boundaries between home life and work life can easily become very blurred if you are not careful. I've seen in my own life how easy it is to slip into checking my emails while I'm busy cooking dinner. And the problem with that is it's okay if you do it once, but if it starts becoming a habitual thing, you putting your nervous system. Well, this was my experience is I put my nervous system into overdrive because I might have seen an email that upsets me, that needs my immediate attention. But I can't do that because I'm now busy with dinner. So I have to choose, am I going to continue with dinner, am I going to check the email? And most, most likely, if I decide to put dinner to the side so that I can quickly check my email, this is also going to be the moment that my kids want my immediate attention and they need my help with something. So I've put myself into a situation where my nervous system is activated. And usually when that happened to me, and I'm sure that you might recognize this, I wasn't well resourced to be able to deal with it. So what happens is you lash out at the kids, get yourself into a spin, you feel stressed out, and worst case scenario, you might even explode. Okay. And this is a small example of an internal boundary that we hold because there are really two kinds of boundaries. The first kind of boundary is the things that you are available for or not as far as it concerns other people. And the other kind of boundary is the things that you are available for or not as it concerns you. So like the agreements that you have with yourself. And those need to be in place first. If you don't have the agreements, those internal boundaries in terms of how you align your life to your values and to what's important to you, if you don't have a solid knowing of that, it is not possible to sustainably have healthy, solid boundaries in your relationships with other people. And this is when you start feeling responsible for your clients results. You feel like it's up to you to make sure that they achieve success 100%. This is when you start absorbing other people's emotions as your own and you try whatever it is that you can do to make them feel better, because then it makes you feel better in the end. And as most of the things that I talk about here, I'm not sharing this with you to show you to, to point out where you are going wrong or to make you feel bad, or to shame you. I'm doing this to create awareness. For us to be able to make any kind of change in our lives, we need to be aware first. And when the awareness is there, it can start to give us that fuel that we need to make a change. One of the other things that 100% contribute to burnout when it comes to poor boundaries, is this internal sense of not wanting to disappoint others. So really then going that extra mile, going out of your way to make sure that other people get what they need and that other people are happy and satisfied. And I think this is definitely for us as women, this is such a conditioned, socialized reaction that we have where we have been taught since, since we were very, very little, that in order to maintain relations, we need to make sure that the needs of others are taken care of. And our nervous systems have been built to make sure that we stay safe. That's why we have a fawn response. Our nervous system will always make sure that we survive first and foremost. So it's going to default to the behavior that is going to ensure our safety. And what that looks like in everyday terms is that we do default to putting other people's needs ahead of our own at the cost of our own well being. And when you do this enough times, can you see how difficult becomes for you to even know what you need, what you want? And this is where embodiment is like the, the ultimate again, because embodiment takes you out of these conditioned responses, it helps you to unravel and liberate yourself from these socialized traps that we are all in by virtue of living in this world. And it creates the safety in your nervous system. Because if you feel safe enough to be yourself, then you also feel safe enough to live your boundaries out into the world and to let your boundaries inform your decisions. And not boundaries that come from response like, you've crossed my boundary and now I'm drawing this line in the sand. And don't you dare. Not that kind of boundary, but this boundary of this is what's important to me. Fully inhabiting that, letting that take up space in your field. And this is how we teach people how to treat us. I know one of the examples they often give of what a poor boundary looks like is not speaking up when someone crosses a line or not speaking up when someone does something that you disagree with. And I just want to throw in a little bit of a caution here because it's easy to say, you know what, just speak up for yourself. You know what? Just learn how to say no, you know what? Just stand your ground. But the thing is, if you could do that, you would, right? There's a reason why you struggle to do that. And the reason comes back to safety. Sometimes it is safer for us not to speak up. And we also need to honor that about ourselves. And once again, if we are connected to our whole deepest truth, if we inhabit ourselves fully, we are able to even navigate those situations where it might not be safe for us in that moment to speak up. Because it's not so much, and I want you to hear this, it's not so much about what other people are doing. It's about how you are responding in that because we can't control other people, Boundaries are never about controlling other people. I won't let you speak to me like that. I won't let you say that. I won't let you do that. Because that's trying to control others. That doesn't work, right? Our boundaries are about, how do I respond, who am I being? How do I show up, how do I engage with my own life force and with my world in this situation? And you can only have the clarity of that once you are fully inhabiting yourself, Once you have unraveled all of the tension that's stuck in your nervous system, and once you've created safety inside yourself to be who you truly are. If you struggle with boundaries, then I want you to know that this is completely normal. Because boundaries can be so challenging Especially because of the internal conflict that we experience when it comes to boundaries. That internal conflict, when you want to do something or not, and you have a desire to still maintain the relationship or keep the peace or not rock the boat, right? That's why it's so crucial for us to come into our bodies and to meet those layers so that we can navigate them and find out what is our truth in this actually, and then you can begin to live that truth out into the world. This is the work that I do in my one on one sessions with clients. If you need any support in your boundaries, I can help you. And I will leave a link in the show notes for you to hop on a discovery call with me where we can chat about your boundary situation. I will offer you some suggestions and you can see if you want to work with me or not. So there's no obligation. It's a chat and you will definitely leave with some insight and actionable steps that you can apply in your own life. The final example that I want to share with you, which for me is the biggest red flag when it comes to poor boundaries and how that leads to burnout, is that inevitably the first thing to go is our self care. And again, self care doesn't stand in isolation. It's easy to say, oh, you know, just take the afternoon off, oh, just book yourself a spa day, oh, just go for a manicure. But those are, number one, superficial solutions to self care. And number two, there's a reason why self care is always the first thing to go. If you feel like you don't have enough space or time to get to the things that need doing. I think we're all familiar with the expression you can't pour from an empty cup. And I think this is even more apt when we start talking about embodied boundaries. Your cup needs to be full from the inside. You need to fill your boundaries from the inside. And when we don't have those kinds of boundaries, when our boundaries are simply living on the level of the mind, it's easy to chop off those things that we've been conditioned to deem as not so important. Because we value our productivity, we value other people's comfort, and we value ticking off our to do list above the things that really and truly allow us to thrive. To me, living in an embodied way also means that we have embodied boundaries. And I can guarantee you, if you embody your boundaries, if you live in alignment with your deep truth, it is going to be very difficult for you to burn out. Because the reason that we burn out in the first place is because we are disconnected from our own truth. I hope that what I shared with you today gave you some food for thought. I'd love to hear how this episode landed with you. Send me a DM or send me an email. I'll put the links for both of those contact points in the show notes. And as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Please remember to rate and review the podcast if you are listening either on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts, and I will speak to you in the next episode.