Breaking The Burnout Cycle
Are you a female entrepreneur who is currently spinning your wheels, doing all the right things, yet continuing to find yourself hitting an invisible wall that is keeping you from the success, fulfillment, freedom, & happiness you want?
You’ve read the books. Taken the courses. Implemented the strategies. You know the “how to”...but somehow they either don’t work for you when you apply them OR you can’t get yourself to stay consistent with them to get them to work for you.
And because of that there is a part of you that wonders deep down
“Why is this working for everyone else but me?”
“Maybe I’m doing something wrong? What am I missing?”
“Am I not doing enough?”
…or worse - “Is something wrong with me?”
And because you’ve only learned one way to achieve success, you now find yourself believing that the only way to achieve your goals is to work even harder. To push and push and push, like nothing else matters, not your health, not your family, not your life.
Here’s the truth: You’re not broken. You’re just burnt out from doing success the way you were taught — the hustle-harder, push-through, ignore-your-needs kind of way.
Breaking the Burnout Cycle is the podcast that finally speaks to you. Hosted by Dr. Reana Mulcahy, subconscious reprogramming coach and former hustle-addict turned aligned success mentor, this show is your permission slip to stop over-functioning, start honoring your truth, and finally create the next level of success from a place of alignment, not exhaustion.
Dr. Reana over the past 4 years has been high achievers, like yourself, break free from the burnout cycle by teaching brain-based tools, rooted in neuroscience and neuropsychology, to help you identify, understand, and break free from subconscious habits that are keeping you from the success, fulfillment, and freedom you crave.
Each week, we dive into subconscious mindset work, nervous system healing, and the invisible beliefs that keep high achievers stuck in survival mode — even when they look “successful” on the outside. You'll hear solo episodes, client breakthroughs, and expert conversations designed to help you rewire your beliefs, reclaim your energy, and rise into the results, relationships, and reality you know you’re meant for.
It’s time to stop chasing success that costs you your peace. It’s time to break the burnout cycle — for good.
Subscribe now and let’s rewrite the rules of success, together.
Breaking The Burnout Cycle
Why “Just Say No” Fails To Help You Set Boundaries
"Just say no" is the worst advice you could ever receive to help you set boundaries.
Stop treating boundaries like a willpower contest and start understanding what your brain is trying to protect. We pull apart the well-meaning but shallow advice to “just say no” and explain why high-achieving women so often snap back to people-pleasing the moment they feel pushback or disappointment in the room. The real driver isn’t a lack of strength—it’s a nervous system trained to read limits as threats to reputation, income, and belonging.
We walk through the neuroscience in plain language: how the amygdala overrides your prefrontal cortex, why fight-flight-freeze shows up as overexplaining, reflexive yeses, or avoidance, and how subconscious beliefs link boundaries with danger. From there, we offer a practical path to rewire those links. You’ll learn to surface the precise fear your brain predicts, gather real counter-evidence, regulate your body in the moment, and use concise boundary language that respects both the relationship and your capacity. Expect simple tools like the physiological sigh, value-linked scripts that shorten guilt spirals, and low-stakes reps that teach your system that no is safe.
Across four years of working with leaders and entrepreneurs, we’ve seen what changes when limits become second nature: calmer calendars, higher quality work, cleaner collaboration, and more energy for the people you’re doing this for in the first place. If you’ve ever wished you could set a boundary without the mental gymnastics and fallout, this conversation gives you the roadmap—rooted in brain science and proven in real-world careers. Listen now, try one tool this week, and tell us what shifts. If this helped, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review so more high achievers can break the burnout cycle.
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Discover more ways I can support you in breaking the burnout cycle. Visit my website.
If you've ever received the advice just say no as a way to help you set boundaries, I am about to share with you on today's episode why just say no is the worst boundary advice for any high achieving woman out there. That's all coming up on today's episode, so stay tuned. Hi, I'm Dr. Rihanna Mulkeghi, and after burning out not just once, but twice, I've uncovered that burnout becomes a never-ending loop unless you uncover the subconscious beliefs at the root of it all. Each week, I'm bringing you brain-based tools and strategies that will help you to identify and rewire subconscious blocks, keeping you from the success, happiness, and freedom that you really want. This is Breaking the Burnout Cycle Podcast. If you classify yourself as a people pleaser, then keep listening because today's episode is for you. Because chances are that if you classify yourself as a people pleaser, then you most likely put everyone else's needs before your own, right? Where you constantly say yes, even though you don't have capacity, even though you don't want to say yes. Um, and because of that, it is most likely leading to potential resentment, potential exhaustion that you're feeling, where it's just like, oh my gosh, I I just don't know how to say no. I wish that I could say no. And if I were to guess, if I were to put money on a bet, I'm willing to bet that the advice that you most likely hear all the time around this topic of people pleasing and about setting better boundaries is that you just need to say no, right? Just say no. Just say no. And it's like, okay, I get that the just say no advice is coming from a like a well-intentioned place. But let's be real. If it were that simple, then there would literally be no people pleasers, and yet we know that that's not the case. And in fact, the analogy that I give of people giving that simplistic advice of, you know, just say no, is it's analogous to essentially trying to tell someone or convince someone to not be afraid of heights by just saying, just don't be afraid. Right? And like if that worked, then that advice would simply make their fear of heights just disappear right then and there. And yet we know that that's not the case. And just like in that analogy, the same is true from why just saying no often doesn't work, right? Why, even if you follow that advice, even if you say no, why so many high-achieving women like yourself end up just resorting back to the old way of doing things, right? The people-pleasing way of doing things, the minute that they get pushback or the minute that they start to feel the energy of the person change, like, oh my gosh, they're disappointed with me, they're upset with me, all of those things. And that is because while the advice is well-intentioned, it completely ignores the deeper psychological programming that is actually driving the behavior of the people pleasing. And that is your subconscious mind. And it's happening because literally your subconscious mind has learned unintentionally and often subconsciously, as you were growing up in the world, that boundaries equal being mean or not being a team player, or all of these negative consequences with it. And so what often happens is that without even knowing it, your subconscious mind is essentially equating that to if I set a boundary, then I'm potentially cre like I'm potentially signing my own career death sentence, so to speak, um, because I'm gonna ruin my reputation. And no matter how much you tell your brain, hey, you know what, just say no. You're relying on willpower, which on a logical sense, it makes sense of why setting boundaries is a good thing. But here's what happens when we get into these fight, flight, or freeze responses, where the brain essentially is seeing the action that you're taking or the decision that you're making as a potential threat to your safety and well-being, aka your reputation, aka your career, aka the money that you get, uh, and if we keep going down that rabbit hole, right? It's essentially creating this Armageddon story in your mind that if I say no, then I'm gonna ruin my reputation, and that's then going to lead to the death sentence of my career, and that's going to lead to uh people won't want to work with me, and then I won't make money, and then I'm gonna be on the streets and be homeless, and that is literally what is happening without you even knowing it. It's happening below your awareness, which is what subconscious means. And the reason why logic alone of like telling yourself, oh, I just need to say no, doesn't work is because it cannot override that subconscious pattern, no matter how hard you try. Because what neuroscience has actually shown us is that what happens psychologically is that your prefrontal cortex, which is the logical side of the mind, shuts off and the amygdala and the fight, flight, and freeze response um areas of the brain take over. And so you are literally fighting against your own brain's protective mechanism, and that is going to be an uphill battle no matter how hard you try. And so, what if instead of fighting against your brain's protective mechanism, you could actually rewire the underlying belief that's triggering that fight, flight, and freeze response in the first place? Because that's exactly what happens when you are starting to become aware of the subconscious. When you start to address the root cause, the subconscious programming that equates boundaries equal potential danger, then setting and maintaining and upholding the boundaries become second nature because it's not this constant battle where your mind is essentially trying to get you out of there as a way to try to protect you and keep you safe. And you know, I've been doing this for four years now with high achieving women after high achieving women who, regardless of whether they're an entrepreneur or a healthcare leader and they're nine to five, right? Like, we all know that regardless of whether you run your own business or you are a leader in your industry, like setting boundaries is essential to protecting your time and energy so that you can show up the way you want to show up to serve people. But not only that, so that you can have capacity for the people that you're doing this all for in the first place. And during the four years that I have always done this, I have seen woman after woman transform from constantly feeling stuck in these people-pleasing patterns to being able to confidently set boundaries without guilt. And I can tell you right now, it has not been a matter of telling them to just say no. It was a lot of work of first uncovering what is it that they're afraid will happen if I set this boundary, if I actually say no in the first place. And then it was learning the brain-based tools and getting that repetition of rewiring that programming so that setting the boundary became second nature. And so if you are ready to finally be able to set boundaries confidently, without the guilt, without the mental gymnastics, after the fact, after you've set the boundary, then I've actually created a free boundary setting guide for high-achieving women like yourself. And the link will be in the show notes down below. It is completely free. It is walking you through the exact step-by-step exercises that I have done with all of my one-on-one clients over the past four years to help them go from people pleasing patterns to confidently setting boundaries. And so if this is you, then grab that PDF down in the link below in the show notes. And other than that, I will see you guys on another episode. Until then, have a great rest of your week and bye for now.