Ep. 33 Why Burnout Happens to High-Achieving Women

What if the thing you're most afraid of—slowing down—is actually the thing that allows you to keep going?

You answer emails while making dinner. You work after everyone else goes to bed. You carry the emotional weight of your family while trying to build something meaningful in the small pockets of time that are left.

You tell yourself you'll rest later.  But later never comes.

So many high-capacity women believe they have to choose between caring for themselves and fulfilling their purpose.  The story of one of the most accomplished American authors tells a very different one.

Burnout doesn't happen overnight. It builds quietly through years of constant responsibility, interrupted attention, emotional labor, and putting yourself last. Your body adapts—until one day it can't anymore.

🎧 Press play to discover why so many high-achieving women mistake chronic stress for "normal," how your body signals it's been living in survival mode, and why slowing down before burnout isn't giving up—it's creating the resilience to keep going.

Resources

✨ Feeling like your body has been carrying too much for too long? Take my free Hidden Stress Pattern Quiz to discover how chronic stress may be affecting your energy, digestion, sleep, and daily rhythms—and receive personalized next steps to help you begin working with your body instead of pushing through it.

Chelsea Johnson Ayurveda / The Body Rhythm

Transcript

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But maybe some of this sounds familiar anyway because you are answering emails while you make dinner. You're working after everyone else goes to sleep. You're trying to build something, anything meaningful in the pockets of time that are left over. You're carrying the emotional load for everyone around you. Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to stop pushing through and start feeling like themselves again. I'm CJ, Ayurvedic Wellness Guide, helping women reconnect to the natural rhythm their bodies have been craving. But it wasn't that long ago that I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fit, exploded no matter what I ate, and lying awake at 3 a.m. with my mind already running tomorrow's to-do list. I thought I just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined. I didn't realize that my body wasn't feeling me. It was completely overwhelmed because you're not broken. You've just been living outside your natural rhythm for a long time. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Body Rhythm. I am Chelsea from Chelsea Johnson Ayurveda.com and so good to have you here today. And today I'm really excited to bring you this story. I was recently reading an article about Harriet Beecher Stowe. And you may have heard the name, it might sound familiar, perhaps not, but she is the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most known and influential novels in American literature. But what surprised me about finding out about her was her life before the book was published. Because I think her story might feel a bit familiar to you, even though she lived over 150 years ago. She had money problems, and those money problems never really went away. She was supporting her husband. She was an emotional caretaker for the family. She was caretaking for sick kids and cooking the dinner, and she was managing her household. And on top of all of that, she was writing constantly. And she was writing not in a quiet room, a quiet office with the door closed and just uninterrupted hours of writing time. No, she was writing in the middle of the chaos because the family needed income. And she was writing essays and stories and magazine pieces. She was writing religious reflections, serialized fiction pieces. And this was all before Uncle Tom's cabin. This is what her days consisted of. And she wrote in fragments, a bit here, a bit there, at the kitchen table, and between everything else that was going on. She wrote with her kids in the room, with the husband around. The whole entire household was moving around her. And she actually wrote about this, what it was like to try to think and write and create while constantly being interrupted by the demands of her house. But by the time she was 35, her body basically gave out. At the time, the language for this was nervous exhaustion, prostration, collapse, ill health. But when you read back through the accounts, read through the letters and the family accounts, what emerges isn't that she was just tired. It's that she was deeply depleted. She became unable to function the way that she had before. She felt weak. She was overwhelmed both physically and mentally. She was largely bedridden for a while, and it wasn't just a rough couple of weeks. She spent months recovering. So she essentially went to what was called the water cure. It was a hydropathic retreat in Vermont. And a lot of women who went to these water cures got better. And not because the water themselves was a miracle worker, it was because often for the first time in years, the women were removed from the relentless responsibility of their lives. And Harriet's letters from this time have this undertone of relief to them. Relief of stepping outside of constant demand, constant output, relief at not having to hold everything together every single moment of the day. And I think a lot of women, modern women, feel that exact same way. But here is what really intrigued me about her story. Because so often we can think of collapse as being the end, of being depleted in such a harsh way as being the end of everything. But in Harriet's case, that was not it. Several years later, at the age of 41, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, which became one of the most influential books ever written in the US. And so the pause, the interruption didn't destroy her purpose. It interrupted a way of living that wasn't sustainable, no matter how important her work was. So let's dig into what was actually going on in Harriet's body and what a lot of women today might be experiencing in their bodies. Maybe you're not raising seven kids while writing and trying to write a book and magazine articles in the margins of your day, but maybe some of this sounds familiar anyway because you are answering emails while you make dinner. You're working after everyone else goes to sleep. You're trying to build something, anything meaningful, in the pockets of time that are left over. You're carrying the emotional load for everyone around you, and your attention is always a little bit somewhere else. And let me tell you something that I hope helps is that your nervous system was never designed for constant attention everywhere. Your nervous system was never designed for never fully resting, for never fully recovering, for never fully being present. Your nervous system wasn't designed to just keep going and going for ongoing vigilance, for ongoing interruption. But because we are amazing human beings, our bodies just adapt to how we live. And so the adaption to constant doing, the adaptation to constant interruption has a cost because over time you stop noticing things. You stop noticing the tension in your shoulders, the tension in the jaw, the clinched jaw, the shallow breathing, the digestive symptoms that just become normal, the bloating that just feels like the price you have to pay to eat a meal, or the heartburn that is always there, the exhaustion that just seems to be underlying everything you do, right? Never quite feeling fully rested. Maybe it's the irritable irritability that comes up and targeted at your most loved ones. Maybe it's a kind of emotional flatness that's just there beneath the surface. Because functioning day to day becomes the body's priority, and everything else gets pushed down below the surface into the void, right? We push it down and push it down and push it down into the void, but eventually it surfaces back up. You push it down and push it down and push it down, but eventually it surfaces back up. And for a lot of women, modern, high-functioning, high-capacity women, there's almost an identity built around continuing and doing no matter what, of being dependable, of holding everything together, of managing the emotional load, of being the emotionally available and organized one for everyone else. And then we don't take that time and care and attentiveness to ourselves. And so this was Harriet too, doing everything for everyone but herself. And she was carrying an unsustainable rhythm for too long until her body forced her to notice and to take action. And that action was a pause, it was a rest. Depletion, collapse, burnout doesn't happen because we are too weak and we can't handle all of the things, right? It happens because we've been too strong for too long in recovery mode. It's not sustainable in a healthy, healing way, and that's a very different thing. It takes a toll physiologically to live that way, to live in survival mode. Because survival mode changes how we digest, it changes how we sleep, it changes our hormonal balance, it changes our emotional resilience, it changes inflammation in the body, it changes our breathing patterns, even how your body produces energy and gives out energy. All of it changes when we're stuck in survival mode because the body was never meant to stay activated indefinitely for so long. Harriet's body wasn't designed to do that, and your body isn't designed to do that. And that's the first piece is recognition that your body wasn't designed to hold everything together all the time. It was designed to pause, to rest, and then go again. And here's something that I think is really important about Harriet's story, right? Because I think so many of us can get stuck in the thought of I can't let myself not do these things. Everything hinges on me doing this, taking care of that, um, managing this, right? But Harriet took a pause, right? Her body forced her to take a pause. And we all remember her masterpiece. We all remember her achievement of Uncle Tom's cabin. Nobody really knows that she had nervous exhaustion. Nobody really knows that she became depleted and had to go take a water cure. History doesn't remember that her body carried the cost before her achievement ever happened. And I think a lot of us, a lot of modern women, are kind of living that exact same dynamic now, right? We're praised for being dependable, praised for handling everything, for staying productive no matter what, for being emotionally available to everyone else. And underneath all of that competence, there is a nervous system that has never fully exited survival mode, sympathetic activation. And I've talked about this before in an episode called Emotional Alchemy, which is that our culture values hardness overfeeling. It values that tough woman. We celebrate the woman who keeps going, who pushes through, who kicks ass, who stays productive no matter what, who performs strength by disconnecting from her own emotional experience. And I think a lot of hustle culture has taught us to treat emotions as obstacles. Emotions are inconvenient, they're something to suppress or deal with later or push them down into the void, right? But emotions don't disappear just because we override them, just because we suppress them down, the body still holds on to them, the nervous system still carries them. And when we live in constant go mode in chronic activation for years and years and years, we stop giving ourselves any space to actually process what we're feeling. And eventually that unprocessed emotion shows up as tension and fatigue, strain, digestive issues, numbness, anxiety, exhaustion, depletion. And the body is carrying what the mind never had the space to feel. Right? What if we all went to the doctor and we showed up, you know, complaining of the chronic neck pain, which I've done in my case, and the doctor said, you know what? The body's been carrying what the mind never had the space to feel. Go take a few days off. Wouldn't it look different if that was the way that it was? When I look at so many women's stories, I don't just see physical exhaustion, I see all of the story that led up to it, all of the emotional labor that led up to it, all of the constant responsibility, the fragmentation of attention, the suppression of everything that's happening just to get through the day, the self-overriding again and again and again. Women who keep functioning because they have to or they don't know how to stop. And then finally the body interrupts that pattern, right? And I think there's this belief right now in our society that slowing down makes us less powerful, it makes makes us less fierce. But Harriet's life suggests something else. That emotional depth, that giving ourselves space, that creating space for connection to ourselves and to others and to nature, to allow ourselves to feel embodied and reflective can actually deepen the quality of what we create, of what we put out into the world. Because after Harriet's time of depletion, right, she was able to create something that held a different emotional depth, a different emotional force, a different look into humanity, a different depth than what she was creating previously. When we allow ourselves the space to feel, when we allow the experience, whatever it is, to move through us instead of staying in us and making us rigid and drying us out. It can bring a different emotional experience, not only to our work, to our creativity, and to our relationships. In Ayurveda, there is a concept called Agni, our digestive fire. And our Agni, our digestive fire isn't just about the metabolism of food, but it's also the digestion of our life experience. The ability to take in an experience, metabolize it, transform it, keep what we need, and let go of anything that we don't need. Right? It doesn't stay in the body. It doesn't stay in the nervous system. And I think before her collapse, Harriet's digestive fire had just become so weak, so depleted, that she was giving too much, she was fragmented too much, she was carrying too much, and she didn't have enough time for restoration. And when our agni is weak, when our digestive fire is weak, everything becomes harder to process. Our food, our emotion, our stress, our grief changes, responsibilities, right? Our whole entire system loses resilience. And when Harriet was allowed to rest, when we allow ourselves the time to rest, right, that helps bring our digestive fire back online. It helps our nervous system come back into balance instead of staying in chronic activation mode. It can begin to transition more and more into rest and digest. And when that happens, all the other things begin to feel a little bit easier, begin to sort themselves out. And getting out of chronic activation mode doesn't mean that we never feel stress again, right? We never feel sad again or grief again. But it just gives an elasticity to our emotional response, to our nervous system response that we can move in and out of activation easier with less time spent in chronic activation before we move back into balance. It makes us less brittle. It makes us more elastic. You begin to move with life instead of constantly bracing against it. There's this other idea in uh yoga and Ayurveda called prana, this life force. Prana is the breath that gives us life. It's our vital essence, our vital energy. And when we live in chronic stress and chronic output in chronic suppression mode, right? Our prana, our life force gets restricted. The body tightens, our breathing changes, it becomes more shallow, our attention narrows, our awareness narrows, we become rigid and brittle. And if we're rigid, we can't be resilient. And when we become rigid, usually it's a sign that our nervous system is stuck in survival mode. Because prana, our life force, it needs movement. What is the breath? The breath is movement. Prana needs space. It needs attention. It needs relationship. This is why resting matters so much, why being out in nature matters, why creating times of silence matters, why stepping away from constant stimulation matters, because what we repeatedly give our attention to shapes the quality of our inner life. Or as Dr. Frolley said, that which we give our attention to, we become more like. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to become more like what I see on Netflix or what I see on YouTube. I want to become more like what I give my attention to in nature, more like the waves at the beach, more like the fresh air in the mountains, more like the gentle swell on the lake when I'm on my paddleboard. And right now, a lot of us, maybe you are living in constant fragmentation. Your attention, your life is divided between screens and alerts and noise and productivity and stimulation and urgency and never fully turning off, never fully resetting. But our mind, our body needs restoration too. Just like a computer that slows down and glitches, right? Our phones that don't uh act as fast as they used to with the latest update, right? Our nervous system also needs times of rest and reset, moments of stillness, moments that are outside the constant demands. And when we are in relationship with others, with other pronoun beings, nature and trees and sunlight and water and animals and people and movement, that reconnects us to rhythm, reconnects us to our daily rhythm, reconnects us to a rhythm that restores our life force, our prana. And thinking back to Harriet Beecher Stowe's uh period of collapse and recovery, you know, it's important to note that when she came back from the water cure, her life didn't become something new, right? It didn't become peaceful. She still had the seven children. She still had the husband and the responsibilities and the financial pressure and the demands of the household. All of it was still there. Sometimes we think that healing is escaping, right? It's eliminating 100% the stress. It's reaching some permanent state where nothing difficult ever happens again. But that's not what healing is. Healing is not the absence of life experience. It's increasing our capacity to meet our life experience without being destroyed by it. Am I going to be destroyed by the thing that's happening to me? Or am I going to be more resilient, have more elasticity to move and meet that experience and then come back into balance? And you might be looking for that elasticity too. You're not looking for perfection or an escape, but you're looking for the capacity to stay connected to yourself while living a very full, human, joyous life. And so if your body has been whispering to you lately through fatigue or digestive symptoms, heaviness, anxiety, exhaustion, that rest doesn't quite fix, slowing down before collapse is not weakness. It is wisdom. It's ancient wisdom. And Harriet Beecher Stowe's story reminds us that women have been carrying impossible loads and rhythms for centuries. It's not anything new in our modern age, but your body doesn't have to fully break down before you're allowed to listen to what it's been telling you. The goal here is to stop requiring full collapse before you allow yourself to rest and ask for what you need. And maybe today that starts with one question. What has your body been trying to tell you long before it starts to shout and forces you to take action? What is it telling you now in the quiet whisper? Let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe. I'd love to have you back for conversations on nervous system, daily rhythms, healing, and how to feel better in our bodies. Thank you for being with me today, and I will see you next week on the body rhythm. Be well and nourished.