EP 190 - Your Fear of Burning Out Again Is the Very Thing Keeping You Stuck (and Broke)

You’re not imagining it, the fear of burning out again is real. But what if that very fear is the thing keeping you in the same loop of exhaustion, overthinking, and financial contraction?

In this episode, Jessica breaks down the silent sabotage cycle that many soul-led women face after burnout. She explains why your nervous system can’t distinguish between protection and pressure, and how hypervigilance masquerading as caution is blocking your growth, income, and clarity.

If you’ve ever caught yourself holding back “just in case,” whispering your desires, or second-guessing your capacity… this episode is for you.

This is a conversation about regulation, not restriction. Overflow, not overdrive.

Inside this episode:

• Why fearing burnout is keeping your body in the same stress cycle
• How trauma loops recreate burnout without “doing too much”
• The real reason your nervous system doesn’t trust business growth
• What rebuilding from regulation (not hustle) actually looks like
• Practices Jessica uses with clients to exit the burnout-rebuild loop

This episode is a permission slip to rebuild your business in a way that your body, your energy, and your future can sustain.

Sacred Moments & Searchable Topics

[00:01:00] The fear that keeps recreating burnout
[00:03:45] Nervous system trauma and burnout memory
[00:08:00] Why your body treats business like a threat
[00:15:10] Rebuilding your business from overflow, not fragility
[00:21:30] Client practices for post-burnout recovery

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Resource with Jessica Reed. This is the podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who are here to build a thriving business and luminous life, fully resourced from the inside out. Here we unlock the magic of inner alignment, emotional mastery, and energetic strategies, so you can lead with clarity, confidence, and ease. This is your space to shed what no longer serves you, embody your highest potential, and expand into the next evolution of your business and soul's work. You are meant for more, and it all starts here.

Speaker: 0:48

Fear of burning out again in your business is actually going to make you burn out again and keep you broke. Broke. Your fear of burning out again in your business is actually what is going to make you burn out again and keep you broke. And I know that sounds blunt, but after years of working with women who are recovering from burnout, who are re-learning to trust themselves from burnout, who are rebuilding their business models. After burnout and through my own lived experience, through burnout, through nervous system breakdown, this is what I believe is the truth, because that fear that, that constant monitoring, the holding yourself back, the second guessing this is keeping your nervous system in the same stress cycle that got you there in the first place. Now welcome back to Resourced if you are brand new here. Welcome. This is the space where we talk about business through the lens of frequency, through the lens of embodiment, nervous system, regulation, and leveraged strategy. Now my name is Jessica Reed. I am a business mentor and I am a frequency strategist for women who want to build from. Overflow not from overdrive. And today we are talking about something that I have seen so often with women who have experienced burnout, and that is the very real fear. Of it happening again, and this was even conversation I've had with someone just last week. It is conversations I've had countless times in my private containers recently in my mastermind as well. This fear that you are going to burn out again, it is keeping you, it feels protective, right? But what it's actually doing is it's keeping you in a survival mode. It's going to limit your decisions, it's gonna block the flow of money, the flow of clients, and the clarity that you are calling in for your business. So by the end of today's episode, you are hopefully going to understand why your nervous system can't tell the difference between I am protecting myself and I'm still actually under threat. And you're going to hear about how the fear, adrenaline fear cycle is quietly actually recreating that burnout for you and what actually needs to happen for you to rebuild your business from trust, from regulation and from overflow instead of fear. I'm going to share with you things that processes that I take my clients through. So that you too can recover from that. Okay. Because the first thing is, well, the first thing really is acknowledging that burnout that you experienced was so real. It was not in your head. It was a full body, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual experience that has likely led you to it's fried, your nervous system. It's fried your nerves. Okay. You have likely become unwell, exhausted, potentially have illnesses from burning out, mental fatigue, and, and whether you have ended up in that space of, of nervous system breakdown that I ended up in where every part of my body was completely depleted. Again, I, if you wanna go back and hear that story, I shared with you how PTSD and other things had sent me into that space and what I've dealt with this year in a previous podcast. But what we see is that if you have been through burnout, essentially it is something that a lot of women fear experiencing again, and I just really wanna honor that and say I completely understand. Understand why you fear it, understand why you don't wanna go back there. I understand why the memory of that level of stress keeps you on such high alert because your brain and your whole body and your whole being has gone, ah, this was too much. It was too big. I don't like feeling like this. Threat danger. Now, if your business was the thing that tipped you over the edge, I'm not, I'm gonna avoid saying the word caused the burnout. And just so we are clear as well, you don't have to have had a poorly built business or poorly, you know, a bad job to have to be in burnout from it. Okay? You can love what you do and still burnout. I just don't, I, I don't believe that it is the actual root cause of the burnout because there are so many factors involved. And most of them in all of the work that I have done with women have come down to what is underlying the behaviors, the actions, the tasks that they're engaging in, the way that they showed up in their business. All of those things are coming down to subconscious behaviors, driving. So anyway, that's why I'm not saying the business that caused the burnout. But what I do know is that whatever your experience of burnout was, whether you got to a point where you were physically unwell and you couldn't get up, or you couldn't leave the house, or you ended up with panic attacks or really emotionally unstable, you know, in those really challenging experiences or whether, you know, you got really physically depleted, whether you just really struggled mentally, however. It is that you experienced your burnout. Your brain is gonna be on this heightened state now to say, Hey, that was awful. I don't wanna experience that again. And so then I hear I'm rebuilding my business, but I'm so scared. That I'm gonna burn out again. And what you are doing then is you are making these decisions in your business. What you do, what action you take, how visible you are, how many clients you take on, you are treating yourself, like your body is so fragile. And maybe at that point in time it may be fragile because there is this very real physical healing that hap that needs to happen from burnout. And I'll talk about that a bit later. But treating your body like it is so fragile that anything could potentially tip us back there, and that then impacts us making these growth driven decisions. Now I can literally hear your thoughts right now screaming at me. Yeah, but Jess, it was so scary. It was so real. It felt so awful. I don't want to go back there. No, you don't. And that fear is valid. Absolutely. But also it is a fear of something. Just like any trauma that we have, it is our body and our mind replaying that event over and over again. Strengthening those pathways with the same emotional response over and over again. It is not happening right now. So by you saying, I don't want to build my business. I'm scared I'm going to build it and end up in burnout again by you building from that. Energy rather than the energy and the identity of who am I that builds from overflow by you building from this. You are keeping yourself on the pathway to burnout again, because that level of hypervigilance and fear and replaying your emotional experience over and over again is going to keep you in a chronic state of stress and now chronic stress. Is what led you to have your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional experience of burnout to begin with. Okay, so we call that the fear, adrenaline fear loop. Okay? You have the fear, you enhance it, you relive it in the moment. It'cause you're having that emotional response and then we focus on it. Or maybe you focus on sensations in your body or thoughts that you're having and it's no different to someone like me experiencing panic disorder. You're either observing the thoughts and making meaning of those, or you are observing the internal sensations and making meaning of those. Oh, I remember when I felt this way. I don't wanna do that again. Oh, fear sparks the adrenaline keeps the fear alive, and you're stuck in this loop of high alert. Even if you are technically resting, even if you're technically doing nothing, your brain thinks it's protecting you, but your nervous system is not feeling safe enough to relax. It's not feeling safe enough to go into overflow, to access your, your highest faculties of creative thinking. Okay. So that constant vigilance, that constant narrative of I don't want to burn out again, is actually more likely to contradict what you actually want and keep you in contraction. So the cost of this is really this distrust that you then have because you stop trusting your body and start believing that again, you're fragile, that something could tip you too far over that you can't handle this. You stop trusting your intuition. You stop trusting your business when that trust is gone. That creativity that access to your intuition, the parts of you that believe in yourself, that magnetism, that buck, yes frequency, that all goes with it, and so in my experience, burnout is never actually just about the workload. And I touched on this before and this is something that maybe some of you are going, yeah, okay, but maybe this is also a really big aha. The women who have come to me for burnout have come in blaming the business and the workload. And it absolutely is that tipping point contributor. But for me, it's the emotional patterns underneath. It's the unhealed trauma that has been suppressed. It's the emotional experiences, it's the challenges that we'll deal with later. It's the things that we feel like we're not coping with, that we're not asking for help with. It's the proving, it's the people pleasing. It's the perfectionism. It's finding your worth through productivity. It's having all of your dopamine and all of your good feelings come from the business that you love and, and not actually getting any kind of respite from that. It's never just about the business. And just like I talk about all the time, you've heard me talk about Clear align leverage, and if you haven't, I talk about it all the time. It's my Energetics of success framework and it underpins everything because it's never just about the workload. There will be strategic things that have been implemented in your business, maybe even a whole business model that needs to change. But if, if you have, I don't know if you have beliefs around always having to be say on as a business owner. And I say that because yesterday I was talking to a small business owner and he literally said to me, I have a small business. I, you know, I work around the clock. It's just what you do when you have a small business. I'm like, Paul in my head, like, this wasn't the place for that conversation. I'm like, oh, I have a small business. I don't work around the clock. I don't believe it's just what you do. I'm not saying I don't work hard, and some days I will absolutely have longer hours, but it's aligned with my energy. I've built this business part-time. I make over six figures in this business. Part-time, it's. It's, again, my beliefs are different, but I had to really work on that. And so for me it's about what is the underlying thing that caused the burnout. I will, you know, one client who came to me years ago who was in a state of deep state of burnout, her brain was brain fog, everything. Like we, we could hardly hold a conversation. And yes, it was the business. It was the workload, but the workload was the way that it was because the grief that she didn't wanna feel or not didn't want to feel but put to the side and threw herself into the business a few years later was catching up with her. Even if you love your business, the beliefs, the things that you don't wanna feel, the emotional experiences that you're having, the amount of women who blame their businesses for their burnout, but are having massive relationship problems at home in their environment. You know, these things are going to keep you hustling past your nervous system's capacity. Remember that your business and you are not separate in this, this journey to burnout. You don't switch off your identity. You don't switch off your beliefs when you show up for your business. Burning out doesn't mean that you can't handle it. It doesn't mean you're not cut out to be a business owner. It doesn't mean that you fuck the whole thing up. It means that you are operating from an identity that is ready to be rewired or needs to be re patterned. An identity that maybe allows for different systems that delegates more, that that allows herself to have a separation between her work identity and who she is. An identity that feels and deals with certain emotional challenges. So getting through this and rebuilding on the other side, because I know that's the big, like, yeah, Jess is all well and good, but how do I actually do that? You say, I need to stop saying I don't wanna burn out again. So what do I do instead? Now this is gonna sound really simple. You're gonna laugh at me. Some of you may even just like shut this episode down completely and stop listening. I want you to be willing to feel the burnout again. You can say that again. I want you to be willing to feel the burnout again no, I'm not crazy when I say that. And this is the same advice I was given with acrophobia, which by the way, is the fear of panic disorder. The fear of panic, the fear of leaving your home, the fear of all of the sensations that come from all of the stress experience that I've had. Okay, the fear of that yucky feeling inside. Same advice that I tell people with panic attacks. We have to be willing to fear it. Why? Because it comes back to that fear, adrenaline fear cycle. If we are not, if we are in that state of resistance, if we are not willing to feel it, then we are hypervigilant about it. But for example, with a panic attack, if where they're going, okay, I am willing to feel this. Then there is this whole other, there's this whole relaxation that happens through the body. We surrender. We float through it. Okay. Tell yourself that you are willing to feel it. You are willing to experience it, because that takes away the hypervigilance. Then we have. These pathways that I want you to explore. The first, again, it comes down to clear, align, leverage. Everything for me comes down to clear, align, leverage, clear. You have a very, very real, physical, nervous system condition to deal with. Okay? Your nerves are likely fried. That takes recovery. That takes time. That's gonna take emotional residue, that's gonna take you intentionally finding safety in your body. Again, safety, trusting your body. Again, trusting yourself again, trusting your business. Again, that's gonna come with the aligned piece. The clear is you working through the emotional experiences, any traumatic experiences that have come with this burnout, and there are techniques. Tapping hypnotherapy, EMDR. So many different techniques that can help you do that on a physical level and on a cognitive level. Okay, so we need to clear the residue. We need to clear the emotional charges, but also the beliefs and the identity stories that actually created the burnout cycle to begin with. Okay, so that is then who is the identity? That led me through that burnout. What was I thinking? What did I believe? What needs to clear in order to not have that result again? For example, my work is everything. I have to work day and night to be successful. Small business owners work day and night and are accessible day and night and, and don't tell customers that they have to call back on Monday even though it's 8:00 PM on a Sunday evening. Whatever it is. And I know that sounds extreme, but this is the conversation I was having with this person yesterday. It's like, to be honest, I think the first thing I would be doing is actually just putting in some boundaries. What time are you gonna look at your emails? Can you put your, your notifications on silent over the weekend? Can you leave a voicemail that says this business operates from Monday to Friday? And, and do not speak to the people on Sunday. Just don't. If you rang a doctor's surgery and they were closed, they're closed. Why? Why do you have to be different? It's because of the beliefs and because of the emotional stories and the identities that we have attached to how we operate. Okay. Or that we're operating from. So in order to build a business that is willing. It's like, no, I know how bad that sounds. And we're willing, we are willing to have that experience because we're not fearing it. And just remember, that's the key thing. That means we're not fearing it. That means we're not keeping ourselves in the fear, adrenaline fear cycle, and therefore we can actually move forward in our business. From the identity of someone who creates from overflow, not from stress, not from a fear of not burning out, but from overflow, because the identity who creates from overflow is going to make very different financial decisions, take very different risks, take very different visibility. Leaps serve people in a different way to the person who is constricted and terrified of burning out again. So I am willing to fill this. And then I'm doing the clearing work, clearing the emotional residue of what is living in my body. I'm supporting my body to heal holistically. That is nutrition, that is relationships that is exercising. That is what you are consuming. That is something you can work through with an alternative practitioner, with a psychologist, with a naturopath, there are so many people who can help you. In my mastermind space, we have a call every single month that is purely dedicated to you. The clear, okay, the residue, the, who am I showing up as, what identity am I leading right now as, let's catch that. Let's catch that identity. Let's catch that belief. Let's heal it. Let's clear it. Let's be aware of it because you know, you've heard me say before, we hustle to the health of our nervous system and our business won't outgrow our identity. Okay, so again, it comes down to who is building the business, the scarcity, the fear-based identity, the one who's so scared of burning out that she's not making aligned decisions and still stuck in a stress state. So she's not in touch with what actually feels good, what she wants to say yes to. We're just stuck in our head overthinking, proving all of those survival identities. Or is it the identity of the woman building from overflow? Okay, so clear is so important and knowing that there are all of those elements of the physical, mental, and emotional healing that need to take place in that and the nourishing. And then there is a line now there. Pick up. So that's clear. A line is rebuilding with self-trust. Now that self-trust comes from doing that clearing work, rebuilding with self-trust. Is how we build without fearing the burnout again. Now, here is what is key as a part of that clearing work, as a part of identifying the beliefs. What I will help people do, and this is so deeply aligned with the work that I do, and what I'm meant to do is have conversations and not in a, oh, I forget the word, but not in like a toxic, positivity way of like, what was the lesson from this? But I, I am here. I have the channel of struggle and the channel of crisis in my human design. I am literally here to help people transmute challenges into purpose, pain into purpose. Okay. So you have had this experience. We have these challenges. We operate from these identities because we are being given the opportunity to recognize it. Change it or we can keep going exactly the same. So to rebuild with self-trust, we wanna trust that we are gonna look at that experience and we are gonna know, okay, I operated from this identity, but now I see what I would be doing, thinking who I would be being, how I would be acting, what actions I would be taking if I was building from the overflow identity. So we rebuild with different actions, and that's how we're gonna start building this self-trust one small step at a time, okay? But we're going to trust that we are doing things differently. We're going to come back into relationship with our body, going to come back into relationship co-creating with our business in co-regulation, with your energy in co-regulation, with your cycles. With your energetic cycles, with your menstrual cycles, with your human design, with your astrology coming into that alignment, and maybe that means rebuilding your business model. Okay. The pattern often goes, survival identity leads to burnout. Burnout leads to a rebuild, a pivot and a rebirth. And then we build from this aligned, leveraged space that leads to overflow and then a fuck yes, frequency. That's the pattern in my world that comes through. So we co-create and we co-regulate. With alignment, and as I said, maybe that means a whole new business model for you. One that is deeply aligned with how you are meant to lead. One that honors the health of your nervous system, your season of life, the vision that you have, because your business should be a vehicle that takes you to what you wanna live and feel and experience in life, not just what you deem as success in your business. In my opinion, in my world, a lot of us hold that belief. It's okay if you don't. So in the align phase, we're rebuilding, we're tweaking, maybe we're fully rebuilding depending on, on what has happened for you and what you need. And then we leverage. Now leverage is once your foundation is regulated, we're building smart systems, we're building support, we're building structure that actually honors your energy. That doesn't drain it. Now, leverage may also, this isn't linear. Leverage may come in at the beginning. Maybe in order for you to spend that time healing, that necessary physical rebuild and connecting back to your spiritual self and letting your health rebuild and giving your nerves that time to stop being so frazzled whilst you are doing that, maybe you need systems, automations, support and structure so that leverage piece comes in. As a part of that, but then we also look at that leverage of how do I continue to hold this business so that I'm building in trust knowing that I'm doing things differently. Okay. The burnout, you, you don't need to fear it happening again, in the same way, I don't need to fear a nervous breakdown happening again. I don't, I fear phobia. I don't, I fear panic attacks. What we need to do is trust that we are making different decisions and that we are learning, and that we have the tools and the capacity to deal with what comes up. And we have the awareness of what that experience was so that we can take action. And I know for me, support is massive. If you are listening, support is likely massive for you too. The Mastermind we, the whole mastermind is built around clear, align, leverage. That's what we do in the Mastermind. We help you become the woman who holds the leveraged business built in alignment. Okay. Talk to me. Book an alignment call. It's a 20 minute conversation. If you would like to know if that space is to support you, if you are rebuilding, if you are pivoting, if you are rebuilding from burnout. If you are wanting to build without burning out. I know Monica, she said to me the other day. I joined the Mastermind because I burnt out at my work and I never wanted to experience that again. So I am joining this container. I joined this container. She's been with us. She's in her second year, but she said, I joined this container because I am building from overflow. I'm not gonna build from burnout. And so it wasn't necessarily from that fear, and maybe it started from that, but she has flipped that switch. But building from overflow. Okay, now you can't create overflow from fear. I also have very deeply supported two personal private spaces as well, that may be a better fit for you if it's not the Mastermind, particularly if you don't want strategic support as well, and you want support energetically, emotionally, mentally recovering from the burnout going into that subconscious piece only, not the strategy. Then I have a, a voice container that would be perfect for you. Again, an alignment call 20 minutes to see if I can help. But let's, yeah. Think about overflow. You can't create overflow from fear. You just can't. You can't create overflow from fear. Fear is scarcity. Fear will bring you scarcity. Overflow brings safety. It comes from safety. Sorry. So overflow will happen when you believe, when your nervous system believes that you're safe. When it believes that you can hold more money, hold more clients, hold more joy, when it believes that your business is not a threat to your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual being, then you will hold more. So the goal, even though I'm saying don't fear burnout, the goal is not to avoid it. The goal is to be willing. To heal, to trust, to build from trust, and gradually, safely expand your capacity. So that overflow then becomes to feel like a baseline and it feels sustainable. So if you can remember that your nervous system is the strategy, okay, then that overflow can become your new baseline. And if this resonated today, I wanna hear from you. Want you in my dms book an alignment call. If you are really seriously considering what either the mastermind or a private space would look like to work with me in 2026, let's have that conversation. You don't know if you don't ask, but come into my dms. Tell me, have you experienced burnout before? What was that like for you? How have you recovered from burnout? What supports did you have? Is your business model currently supporting you to not burn out again? Are you building every day from that fear of burning out? Or are you building from the identity of overflow because you've done that work to process your burnout experience? Come tell me where you're at. I would love to hear it over on Instagram. Send me an email however you like to communicate. You probably get a voice message back from me. But until next week, I thank you so much for being here, and I will be back in your ears on resourced next week. Bye for now.

30:03

Thank you for tuning into resource with Jessica Reed. If today's episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with another soul led entrepreneur who is also ready to rise. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected because when you are deeply resourced, you become unstoppable. Until next time, my friend, stay resourced. Stay radiant and trust in the magic that is you.