Balance & Beyond
Balance and Beyond is the podcast for ambitious women refusing to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive and where you have the power to define success on your own terms.
Balance & Beyond
What Stole Your Joy (and How to Take it Back)
Remember when you used to laugh until you cried? For many of us, those moments have become increasingly rare. Joy doesn't simply slip away—it gets systematically stripped from our lives without our awareness.
This eye-opening exploration reveals the three hidden thieves that have stolen your joy. First, the deeply ingrained belief that joy must be earned after productivity, usefulness, or taking care of everyone else. From childhood messages about finishing homework before play to adult guilt about prioritising pleasure, we've absorbed the toxic idea that joy is frivolous—a reward rather than a necessity. Second, your nervous system has become addicted to stress chemicals, trapping you in a state of hypervigilance where there's simply no room for softness, release, or joy. When you're constantly braced for the next emergency, joy becomes physiologically impossible. Finally, the trap of overachievement masks your joylessness with constant busyness, perfectionism, and the relentless pursuit of external validation.
The painful irony? Joy isn't inefficient—it's rocket fuel for high performance, leadership, and magnetism. In our increasingly AI-driven world, your capacity for genuine human emotion is your greatest asset. Joy isn't what happens after you fix everything; it's what allows you to feel alive while everything else is unfolding.
Ready to reclaim what's rightfully yours? Join the Return to Radiance 21-day challenge starting June 9th. Through simple, powerful practices in just two minutes daily, you'll reconnect with what makes you feel most alive—no fluff, no pressure, no fakeness. Your journey back to joy starts now.
To view the Transcript from this week's episode, visit our Balance & Beyond Podcast webpage: https://www.balanceinstitute.com/podcast/2025/100
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my chip microphone. Okay, a few years ago, someone asked me when was the last time you laughed until you cried, and I couldn't answer, not because I didn't want to, because I genuinely couldn't remember. That was the moment that it hit me. Joy hadn't just slipped away, it had systematically been stripped from my life. In today's episode, we're going to talk about exactly what stole your joy and how to take it back. That's right. Your joy has been stolen and here's the kicker without you even realizing it. So today I'm going to share with you three things that have stolen your joy. There's a very good chance that some of this is going to take you by surprise. First up, often I talk about weeds in your garden and the beliefs that hold us back.
Speaker 1:Well, joy is something that many of us have been taught that you have to earn. You have to earn your joy, you have to be useful, and then you can have fun. This often starts really early in life. I remember coming home from school and saying I want to go out and play. It's like no, you have to do your homework first, you have to clean your room first and unintentionally as parents we can sometimes do this you want them to do the thing and then they can go play and have fun. They have to do the serious thing and then they can be silly. If kids often try to slip in being silly in the middle of doing a task, we beat it out of them. Like no time for silliness, come on, like we got somewhere to be, don't you know? We're on the clock. And this messaging that we get as a child often then carries through. Particularly, if you had parents who were quite serious, who weren't sort of all silliness and giggles, if they were just that was their personality and that was how they parented, then joy becomes an indulgence. It becomes something frivolous that when there is a little bit of space, then okay. When it doesn't matter, when you're on the clock, then you can have this thing out and we know on the clock, then you can have this thing. Overlay that with the messaging that women have also received subtly and sometimes overtly, around being helpful, being responsible. Joy comes after you take care of everyone else.
Speaker 1:If you can relate to feeling guilty for sitting, still, if you get triggered or eye roll at people who are silly or you consider them frivolous or they're throwing their life away in the pursuit of pleasure, let me guess you probably have the belief that when you've got all your ducks in a row, then you'll go and do the fun things, You'll work your butt off for your entire career and you'll go have tons of fun in retirement. Those beliefs are all indicators that this is a belief that runs very, very deep. For you Now, earning it can mean you have to earn it and you have to do something productive first, but earning it can also be around your perceived version of credibility. So there's somebody in my world who completely triggers me. She is someone who dances around in a glitter jumpsuit, has had all this success, and I sit there and say you're a yoga teacher and you have no experience. You haven't earned the right to have that much fun, and it was only after unpacking some of my own work around. Why am I so triggered by her? Why do I sit there and go, ah, you don't deserve this, you haven't worked hard enough for it. How can you be having fun?
Speaker 1:And then all this success comes. That's not how it works. But what if it did? What if joy and fun and frivolity and humor and contentment and happiness? We're not rewards. We're not things that come at the end of something else, at the end of something productive, or at the end of something worthy, or the end of a degree, or whatever you believe has to happen in order for you to have this critical emotion that is rocket fuel for high performance, and it's the reason that we live.
Speaker 1:We, as humans, are given this nervous system and these beautiful emotional states that light us up, that make us feel human, that make us feel alive, that make us feel human, that make us feel alive, and all you have to do is be around a child who is inherently silly, who laughs all the time, unencumbered at nothing, to know that we're born this way. It's beaten out of us, it is suffocated from us, and it's done so subtly and so slowly that very often we don't even realize it until it's completely gone or it's completely stifled, and so it's only you know, this little sort of random thing that happens. But even then we contain it because too much to do. Come on, get in the car. No time for silliness.
Speaker 1:I remember I had that moment when one of my daughters is particularly silly and I remember yelling at her saying get in the car. And she's like mom, I'm just being silly. I remember saying to her. We don't have time to be silly. What message is that sending her? Her nervous system, my nervous system? Why the hell are we here? If it's just all about getting somewhere, getting rushing, getting to school, getting to work, getting to wherever, what's the point? We all harp on about the fridge magnet that says enjoy the journey, but if there's no space in that journey for what matters, then what are we doing?
Speaker 1:Let's talk about reason number two that your joy has been stolen. Part of this wiring that happens conditioning from a young age that joy has to be earned and you have to do other things and you have to put other people first. As part of that journey, your nervous system becomes addicted to stress and cortisol. It's really hard to feel joy when your body is stuck in survival mode. When we are living this life of busyness run by the clock back-to-back meetings, calendars you know living life on a knife's edge our nervous system becomes wired for hypervigilance. By this I mean it's always looking for what's the next thing that could destabilize this knife's edge way that I'm running my life. So anything that takes up a little extra space than you think you can give it, nevermind the fact that you're procrastinating, or never mind that it's not available for you to rest because you feel guilty or worry that you've missed something. Your nervous system, then, is stuck in this state.
Speaker 1:And what's really interesting, when you learn more about feelings and nervous systems and how all this works, is your body actually gets addicted to the chemical state of stress. And our body's main goal, our brain's main goal, is to keep you alive, and it wants to do that today. How it went yesterday, because yesterday you survived and you're still here. So what your body and brain will actually do is find things to make you stressed about, even if you're not stressed, because it doesn't know how to sit in calm, it doesn't know how to sit in rest, it doesn't know how to find room for joy, because when there is so much cortisol, you're bracing, you're living in fight or flight. You've got your breath held and what joy is is it's an exhale, and your nervous system's going mm-mm-mm. Can't do that. We can't exhale because if we exhale, we're going to drop a ball.
Speaker 1:Have you seen what we've had to do this week? We've had to make lunches, we've had to respond to a meeting. We're snapping at a child. I remember snapping at my daughter when she asked for a hug. I literally pushed her away. When she was younger I was like no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm making lunch. That is my nervous system going. There is no time for softness right now. It is not safe to be soft, it's not safe to stop, it's not safe to rest, because cortisol is the only way I know my good old sympathetic nervous system is wired. It's completely dominant and my parasympathetic system, which is my rest and digest, can't get a look in edgewise.
Speaker 1:This is when you have to understand that the work here is yes, you've got to rewire your beliefs. You've got to believe that you don't have to earn your joy or your rest, that all of these things are rocket fuel for high performance, and you have to train your nervous system to actually be okay with it, to actually make the space for it, to actually soften for it, and realize that if you don't have joy in your life, if you don't have lightness, then you are going to be not only a very, very strong candidate for burnout, but you're going to start wondering what the hell am I doing? What is this all for? There is no fun in life, there is no joy. This is something that we hear all the time from clients and even women who are thinking of coming into our world is I don't know what I'm doing this for.
Speaker 1:All I ever feel is resentment, frustration, anger, guilt, shame, regret. I never feel any of the good emotions because how our bodies work is emotions come as a box, and when you are numb and when you are stuck in survival mode, we want to ignore that gnawing feeling of resentment that sits there and festers in your relationships. We don't give ourselves permission to feel our anger. So many women tell me that they're like this damn wall and they've got it all shoved inside and they are terrified that if they open one little crack, that the whole thing is going to come gushing out, they're going to fall into a puddle and won't be able to function. That, my friend, is not a way to live, and neither is waiting for the damn wall to burst.
Speaker 1:When you have to lock yourself in your bedroom for five days because you can't stop crying, you can't stop shaking and you can't move, that is called a breakdown and that is called a burnout episode. That is simply your nervous system going. The damn is full, the damn is full, the damn is full. I can't take it anymore and you won't let me release the pressure. And so we have to learn to regulate our nervous system. We have to learn to feel safe in joy, and the way we begin to do that is to find micro moments of joy, to tell our body it's safe to laugh, to tell our body it's safe to soften for a hug or a silly video that someone sent you, or to laugh at a joke or whatever it may be. So you've got to train your nervous system, otherwise there will be no room for joy. So your nervous system has also stolen your joy, and it's sneaky because we don't realize these become our natural state. And lastly, this is a biggie.
Speaker 1:This is one that I personally have probably fallen into in time, and I call this the trap of overachievement. I am someone, probably like you, who likes to achieve. I like hitting goals, I like setting big goals good old, big, hairy, audacious goals. I value efficiency, and when you are wired to achieve, when you are stuck in wanting to constantly achieve, to constantly be better and overlay that with this I've got to earn my rest, the joy gets buried under this pursuit of enoughness. Perfectionist, eat your heart out here Perfect plans, perfect houses, perfect families, even though your quest to meet the ruthlessly high standards that you set for yourself can never actually be met, because that's the whole point, and so you set for yourself can never actually be met, because that's the whole point, and so you constantly feel like a failure in every area of your life.
Speaker 1:This overachievement that we, the bar that we set ourselves ends up being a huge amount of overfunctioning. Is it any wonder, then, we've got overfunctioning, striving for overachievement in a nervous system that is trapped in hypervigilance? Well, of course, there is no room for anything, because your internal and entire focus is about proving yourself, proving yourself worthy, proving yourself valuable, proving to others that you're helpful. It's about being perfect in the things that you believe are important to you, which usually is everything, and it's about protecting, then, your nervous system from failure, from letting people down, from guilt, from saying no and worrying about everybody else's feelings. All of this is a hyper focus on everything outside of you.
Speaker 1:So joy isn't on the agenda. There ain't any room for that, because it's now a distraction. It's inefficient. I've got things to do. I've got things to achieve. I've got really, really big things to achieve, so how on earth could me being frivolous and having some fun. There's no room for that.
Speaker 1:We mask the joylessness with busyness. We spend our lives doing achieving, ticking things off lists, being ruled by dopamine hits, but we never actually feel anything. Because if we're not busy doing stuff, then we have to sit and realize that on the inside we're numb and underneath the numb we often feel empty, and we don't like that feeling. We don't like that feeling that we don't have enough joy in our life. We don't want to admit that to ourselves, and so we find something else to do. The laundry never ends, the inbox never ends, the life admin never ends, and so you can tell yourself this beautifully logical story. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that at all.
Speaker 1:And this comes down to what I opened with. When a friend asked me when I was deep in my burnout stage, when was the last time you laughed until you cried? And another way she said it when was the last time you laughed until your pelvic floor gave away? I was like, well, that made me laugh. And if you can't answer that, that if you don't know when, the last time that you came home from being somewhere or watching something and your cheeks hurt from all the smiling, from all the muscles that you've had and you've got these beautiful smile lines. They might be wrinkles, but they're smile lines, they're joy lines under your eyes because your cheeks have moved up so much. There's a difference between a full body expression of joy, where your eyes light up and the muscles under your eyes actually move, versus those fake smiles like the model smiles where, yeah, the mouth goes up but it's not really felt, it's just a fake. Yeah hi, yeah, hi. Nice to see you too. Meanwhile you're going idiot. Don't like you stealing all my ideas.
Speaker 1:Joy isn't efficient. Believe it or not. Joy is the thing that gives your ambition depth. It's what is rocket fuel for your magnetism. It's rocket fuel for your leadership. It makes others want to follow you.
Speaker 1:I haven't talked about Debbie Downer. I've worked for a few Debbie Downers and they're not fun to be around. They're not nice to be around. Yes, you'll go and ask them something. They can give you a very efficient apply. But when they never ask you about what you do on the weekend and they are purely all business, there is not one ounce of crack of that hardened armour that they have of themselves.
Speaker 1:You start wondering you're a bit of a machine here. I don't know who you are, and especially if we start thinking about where the world is going in the next few years the incredibly rapid rise of AI joy is fundamentally what makes us human. You are never going to be faster than a machine. You're never going to be faster than a robot and we are going to start seeing all the get shit done women out there terrified of how AI is going to start to replace them. What it can't replace is human emotion you making somebody else feel joy.
Speaker 1:Joy is infectious in a good way. You can rise people up. You make them feel good about being with you, about asking you for insight or input. People invite you places because you raise the vibration of a room. They prove this with science that often the most influential people I'm not saying they're there kind of singing happy, happy, joy, joy and kumbaya, and that's our way of fluffing joy and saying it's frivolous and we're all going to sit around and sing kumbaya. And that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about that internal light inside of you where you love your life, where you're loving this moment, where you feel that warmth inside your heart of yes. This is why I'm here. This is what it is all for.
Speaker 1:So today I want you to walk away with some new beliefs that joy isn't what happens after you fix everything, after you do everything. Joy is what happens and what allows you to live and to feel alive while everything else is still unfolding. If this episode speaks to you, if you have just realized oh my goodness, I have suffocated my joy, it has been stolen and, most importantly, I am ready to take it back. If you are done with it being suffocated under the weight of to-do lists and responsibility and deadlines, then come and join me in Return to Radiance. This is a 21-day challenge in bite-sized chunks, aimed to help women exactly like you reclaim joy.
Speaker 1:This isn't about false positivity, fake smiles, some random affirmations that I'm going to make you say. This is about simple, powerful practices in two minutes a day that are going to help you reconnect to what makes you feel most alive no fluff, no pressure, no fakeness, no waffle. This is just presence that you don't have to earn, that your nervous system can start to receive, because it's going to be in micro doses, and where you don't have to be hypervigilant, because everybody here is like you. You can remember what it's like to feel again. So come and join us. This will be 21 days. That is not going to be frivolous. This is going to be rocket fuel for your performance, for your aliveness and for the rest of your life. Come join us. You can visit balanceinstitutecom forward, slash, return or we will put the link in the show notes. We start june 9th, so get in there. There's already joy happening. Look forward to seeing you there.
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