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
How To Stop Overthinking And Trust Yourself
We unpack why exhaustion comes from decision overload, not workload, and how seeking endless advice backfires. We show a simple writing practice to calm the threat response, access intuition, and choose with alignment instead of fear.
• decision fatigue driven by mental bandwidth, not tasks
• brain’s need for certainty and safety
• pitfalls of outsourcing choices to experts
• alignment over blueprints for unique paths
• reframing right vs wrong into learning
• naming emotions and thoughts to reduce threat
• pen-and-paper exercise to activate logic
• setting constraints to end analysis paralysis
If you found this episode helpful, I would greatly appreciate it if you shared it with a friend, left us a review, because that is going to help us to help more ambitious, high achieving women like yourself confidently make decisions without the mental gymnastics
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Discover more ways I can support you in breaking the burnout cycle. Visit my website.
The actual reason that you are exhausted isn't a matter of how much is on your plate or how much you have to do. In fact, it's actually a matter of how much mental bandwidth, how much energy you are spending in making decisions on a day-to-day basis, whether it's in your personal life, in your business, or in your nine-to-five job. On today's episode, I am diving into the number one way that you can confidently make decisions and quiet the mental gymnastics that happens in the mind. 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. Today's episode is for you. If you have ever found yourself in that situation where it's like you have to make a decision, whether it's for your personal life or in your business, and you essentially, right, feel like the weight of the world is just on your shoulders. Where the decision just feels like you don't have that clarity to make a decision. And so if you've ever been in this, then you know exactly what I'm talking about, where your mind starts to do all of the mental gymnastics of thinking about all of the what-ifs, where you're weighing the pros and cons, and then you're essentially at a standstill, right? You're like at a standoff between if I make this decision, then this could potentially happen, but if I make this decision, then this could happen. And there's pros and cons to each, and so it's like I just don't know which direction to go, and so we don't make a decision, right? Or we maybe delay on the decision or we procrastinate. Or if you are like me, then chances are you maybe hire a coach, or you ask colleagues, or you ask other people for just insight that maybe you're not seeing something, and that's going to be the nugget that you need, the piece of information that you need to get the clarity so that you can confidently make a decision. And I totally get why you might approach decision making this way. It's this place of like, well, I've never done this, I've never been there. So let me ask people who either are in a position where I eventually want to end up, right? They are successful in my eyes, they are doing the thing that I would like to be doing, and so let me ask them. And it makes perfect sense why we approach decision making this way, because on a neurological level, okay, our brains are first off seeking evidence that this is even possible. Because chances are, if you are going for a goal or there's something that you really want, you want it not because you have it, but because it's something that you've either never experienced or you've never seen other people in your tribe or in your inner circle having that, right? Like, for example, if you wanted a six-figure business, then chances are you don't have one yet, or the people around you are potentially not even entrepreneurs, or they are entrepreneurs who have struggled to make ends meet, or whatever it is that you're seeing. And so the brain will automatically seek out people in the environment of like um who have done it, who are doing it, so that it can have proof to validate the idea, to validate that this is possible for me. The second reason why we actually seek advice from other people is because our brain's number one job is to keep us safe. And so if we go back to the fact that we are entering into a journey that we have never done before, we're doing something we've never done before, and that you've never seen other people do before, then the brain starts to go into a little bit of overwhelm, a little bit of panic of like, I don't know what to do next because I've never been on this path before. And so uncertainty to the brain is essentially a potential perceived threat. It's a potential threat that if I go on this journey, I cannot predict an outcome. And therefore, I could potentially fail. I could potentially, you know, make a mistake that could cost me everything, and then our brains, whether or not we realize it, goes into Armageddon mode where it will tell you this entire story, even if it's not consciously in your awareness, but it will create in the subconscious at least the entire story loop that if you fail, if you make the wrong decision, then guess what? You are going to end up uh, you know, not succeeding, and then you've also risked your financial safety, and then guess what else? You're now no longer going to be financially safe, which could lead to you being homeless and on the streets. And this is like what our brains do in the background, oftentimes without us even knowing. But what we do tend to feel is that internal overwhelm, that internal anxiety that happens around um trying to make a decision, right? And so it makes sense why we then seek out external opinions for the validation of the idea or even just like a way to get the answers before you even have to take action, right? It's like we're trying to plan the road trip before we go on the road trip. But here's why that doesn't work and why it actually is keeping you stuck in further indecision and further analysis paralysis. And the reason why it will not give you what you're seeking is because the reality is if anyone could tell you the right decision for you, then every decision that you would have made would have been correct, right? And you would have never ever made mistakes. And yet we know that that isn't the case. In fact, I'm willing to bet that you can probably think of a decision that you made based on advice from um external sources such as your parents, a coach, whether it's a business coach, life coach, sports coach, and colleagues even or mentors that you look up to who are further on the journey than you. And then it ended up not being the decision that led to whatever outcome you were looking for that drives human behavior to even make decisions in the first place. Right? And so why did that happen? Well, the reason why it happens is because the decisions that we make in our life has to be aligned. And so what I mean by that is that a decision that might be right for myself or for anyone else for that matter might not be the right decision for you. And it's because I genuinely believe that we all have unique experiences, unique gifts, unique callings that reasons that we were put on this earth to utilize the gifts that we were naturally born with, that these are like God-given talents or universal given talents, whatever you want to call it, power source, universe God gave us to on this earth use in order to serve the greater good. And because of that, and I know it's gonna sound cliche, because of that, it is not possible to essentially take someone else's blueprint of succeeding and then just copy pasting and doing it the same way in your life because you're unique in itself, of like your journey is not going to look the same, it's not going to be the same as anyone else's because you are not the same. Energetically, spiritually, you are not the same as the other person that you're receiving advice from. And so it's not to say that receiving advice is is uh never going to work or help you, but it is to say that that is not what will lead to you being able to confidently make a decision. And I'm guessing that you most likely can think of a time that you received advice and it actually left you less confident than when you initially asked for the advice, right? Where you felt maybe more lost, more confused about what the right direction is and what the right decision is for you. So if asking for advice and uh having external advice was the way to make confident decisions and quiet the mind, then you every time that you did that would have been confident in the decision that you made, and yet we know that that isn't the case. So what is it that will help you to make confident decisions? Well, what will help you, the number one way to help you make confident decisions, isn't a matter of looking externally for the answers. It's a matter of looking within. It's a matter of like learning how to trust yourself, learning how to listen to your intuition, how to lean into what it is that your soul is saying is the right direction. And I think that a lot of times we lose sight of that skill, of that gift that we have to listen to our soul's calling because of what we have been indoctrinated in, right? Just think about it. We go to school and we're taught that there is a right or wrong answer, and that if you get it wrong, then what happens? Well, you fail. And so, year after year, test after test, we have gone through this indoctrination process of believing that this is how we make decisions, is that there is a right and a wrong when in reality there is no right or wrong decision, because every decision that we make will either lead to the lesson that we are meant to learn, or it will lead us in the direction that we are meant to go. And so to confidently make decisions, it isn't a matter of having the right answer, it isn't even a matter of having the right advice, it's a matter of quieting the noise enough in the mind to hear what the soul is telling you is necessary, like what is the right direction for you. And so, how do you do that? Right? How do you quiet the noise? Well, it's about learning, first off, to hear the noise, acknowledge the noise, the thoughts that are coming up incessantly around a decision, the emotions that are coming up around a decision, because that's going to tell you what is it that the brain is trying to talk you out of. What is it that the brain is saying is a threat, and that is what's causing all of the internal turmoil that you're feeling. And so to quiet that, it's first a matter of acknowledging that it's happening and and actually seeing it for what it is, and then it's about learning how to essentially talk the brain off the cliff, so to speak, right? Just like how when a child is scared, what do we do? Well, we start talking them through the process, we start acknowledging the fear, and then we start talking them through of like why it's you know, for lack of a better term, why it's irrational. And so the same thing is true when it comes to the fear that's coming up around decision making, right? Because the only reason we are feeling fearful is like we talked about, because the brain has never had to make this decision before. So it's in unknown territory that it cannot predict an outcome. And that to the brain is a threat. So it's about acknowledging the fear that you're feeling, and then it's about uncovering what the story is, what is the fear, and then it's about quieting it by talking it out of um that story loop of like showing the brain what are the other potential outcomes that could happen if we make this decision. And so this is something that I want you to try is just seriously, the next time that you feel indecision, notice what comes up for you, and without judgment, just noticing it, okay? And what I want you to do is actually to take a pen and write it down on a piece of paper, write down the emotion that you're feeling, where you're feeling it in the body, and then I will also want you to just write down what are the thoughts that keep coming up, what is it that I keep ruminating on that I keep thinking about? And the reason why I have all of my clients write it on a piece of paper is because what that is going to do is slow your brain down enough to be able to quiet the fight, flight, or freeze area of the brain so that you can actually get out of that hyper-vigilant mode, so that you can actually start activating more of the prefrontal cortex of your brain to think logically, to look at other opportunities, other ways that the situation is not an all or nothing. So that's what I want you to try. And if you found this episode helpful, I would greatly appreciate it if you shared it with a friend, left us a review, because that is going to help us to help more ambitious, high achieving women like yourself confidently make decisions without the mental gymnastics. So that's all I got for you today. I will see you on another episode. Bye for now.