MY Story: From Burnout, to Slow Burn

What if the life you built was perfect on paper and punishing in your body? Naomi opens up about scaling a successful chiropractic clinic while quietly slipping into chronic fight-or-flight—shallow sleep, IBS, skin flare-ups, and a short fuse that signalled a system stuck in survival. The turning point arrived at an intense retreat in Spain, where breathwork, sweat lodges, firewalking, and deep connection made enough space to feel the honest answer: the blueprint she followed fit someone else’s nervous system, not her own.

From there, everything changed. We talk through the decision to sell the business, move back to Scotland, and rebuild a rhythm that respects physiology—periods of creative work balanced with slow time in nature, family, and community. Along the way, Naomi shares how somatic practices, nervous system education, and compassionate boundaries became the foundation of a new kind of success. Instead of chasing scale, the focus shifted to regulation: better sleep, steadier moods, improved digestion, and the natural return of energy and purpose.

You’ll learn why health truly radiates from the inside out, how to spot early signals of sympathetic overdrive, and what it looks like to design a life that keeps you in a healing state more often. We explore practical tools for nervous system regulation, the myth of being “fixed,” and why patience and consistency are the unsexy truth of lasting change. Whether you’re navigating burnout, rethinking work, or seeking deeper fulfilment, this story offers a clear path: protect your baseline, then build from there.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body. Your story might be the nudge someone else needs to trust their own.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Mission

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer. Welcome to episode four, which I am calling My Story.

Redefining Success In Healthcare

Naomi Mills 0:48

It's my intention today to give you some context into why I created You Are the Answer and why I'm so passionate about helping empower you through helping you understand your basic physiology of your central nervous system and the things that happen in our lives to compromise it and the things that you can do to counterbalance that stress so that you can thrive and live a really happy and connected life. Most of you, if you have a job, means that there is a way of doing your job that is considered to be successful. And for me, as a chiropractor, graduating as I did just over 14 years ago, I came into clinical practice with quite a clear idea of what my job was and what it was going to look like.

Naomi Mills 1:50

And if you've listened to episode two and heard the story about my mum's cancer diagnosis, you will already know that very early on in my career, I was awoken to the fact that I couldn't just look at somebody's external symptoms and how well they looked as a true measure of how healthy they actually were. But what I wasn't necessarily looking at was myself and my own nervous system. So while that huge transition happened for me in year one and I began looking at all my clients in a completely different way and being able to help them in a much deeper sense, I didn't actually shine that spotlight on myself, shall we say.

Naomi Mills 2:36

So most of us, I believe, in our careers do have a blueprint of what a successful person in that job looks like. And for me, it was helping as many people as I could, hopefully, having my own practice one day, maybe having staff, perhaps even having more than one practice. And it was about building something sizable that could be seen and that I could really tell that lots and lots of people were getting helped. And so that's what I did in most of my 20s. I built a chiropractic practice to be very large. I had several rooms, several different kinds of therapists working with me, other chiropractors. We had a team of 10 in the end. And what I was completely missing without realizing it was a sense of purpose and fulfillment and groundedness.

Signs Of Fight Or Flight

The Retreat And Epiphany

Choosing Nature And Starting Over

Naomi Mills 3:40

That was because I was so busy doing and I was busy following this blueprint that I never stopped to question whether that blueprint was right for me and my nervous system. It was just what a successful chiropractor did. Looking back now, I can see that I was operating in this fight-to-flight state that I often talk about. I didn't sleep very deeply or consistently. I had IBS symptoms, dodgy digestion, my skin could flare up. I could certainly flare up mentally and emotionally at people that I was close to. And I was just always on the go. And I wasn't particularly good at just being and not really achieving or doing anything. And that went on for a good 10 years. And it wasn't until I accepted an invitation to go on a retreat, actually in Spain with a group of other women, which in some ways was my ideal of hell. But there must have been something within me that thought, yeah, you should go and give that a go, even though it feels really, really uncomfortable and very, very far out of your comfort zone or anything you've done before. I'd heard good things from other people and friends that had been on these retreats. So I thought, I'm just going to go. And it was during that retreat where I had what I can only describe as an epiphany. I think it really was the first time in a decade, and since losing my mum and just being in the survival state of grow my business, grow my family, survive, that I stopped and I did some body-centered work, some somatic work. There was breath work and sweat lodges and firewalking and meditation and connection with other people and all of this, very intense, mind you, over just three days. But all of it allowed a real invitation to myself to actually reflect on the life that I had built and was living and was enjoying, whether that really was giving me a sense of peacefulness and fulfillment. And the answer was that it wasn't. And when I realized that, and I say it was an epiphany because for me, and this does not happen very often to many people, although it does happen, by doing this reflective work, I suddenly saw what I have created might be great for somebody else, but not for me.

Nervous System First, Always

Naomi Mills 6:23

Deep down inside I knew that what I wanted to do was to move back to my native Scotland, be in nature. I wanted periods of time to create and be busy with my clients, and then time to just be in nature and slowing down. I wanted more freedom. I craved more connection with nature and people and my family. And essentially what my body was calling out for were things that my current lifestyle were not consistently providing and couldn't. I couldn't keep working at the level I was working and also have those things. And so I took the decision along with my husband that we sold the business. We moved up to Scotland and we began again. And that was five years ago. And so I can honestly say now, 15 years into my chiropractic journey, five years into my firewalking journey, all of the skills and the work that I've done both on myself and with other people. Now we've taken hundreds and hundreds of people through retreats in our home near Edinburgh. It has just brought home to me the absolute value of each individual person understanding what it is they need for their nervous system to be healthy. Of course, this journey is never done. And the focus of my life now, beyond the things I've been talking about, my first focus is to protect my own nervous system health, to be continually aware of all the signs and signals that my nervous system is going into that fight and flight response. And we talk about that in the first couple of podcasts, and we're definitely going to go more deeply into it. And to realize that this journey is never done, it's never finished.

Health Keys And Inner-Led Well-Being

Naomi Mills 9:36

It can sound a bit cliched when people say healing is a journey, not a destination. But certainly, in terms of our physiology, that is very true. You cannot fix a human being, and that is going to be one of the key topics of our upcoming episodes to get us away from this idea of first of all needing to be fixed because we're not broken, and second of all, this static idea that well, I've got it sorted, and I've got my lifestyle, and I've got my values, and I've got my tools, and so I'm sorted. And life really isn't like that, and you already know it's not that. Well, life is always bringing the physical, chemical, and emotional stresses, and so the focus of the you are the answer mission is to help you become aware of that so that you will go on and develop your own toolkits to keep your nervous system regulated.

Naomi Mills 10:45

Because we know that when you are living and functioning inside of your body in this healing state, a grounded state where your body repairs itself and it sleeps and it digests its food and it balances your hormones and it's working at its very best, even if you do have another health problem or disease going on, by the way. But when you are maximizing your own resilience, that is when you have the most energy to enjoy your life, to serve other people in your community, to move forward with your purpose. And it comes from this place of abundance and love and moving towards something rather than when we are operating in physiological fear, fight and flight, which comes with it a whole emotional state of fear and avoidance, which of course will create an entirely different life experience for you, most likely not one that you are consciously and joyously choosing. So I want to leave you with a final thought before I end this episode. And it's a health key from my book, You Are the Answer, Why It's Time to Trust Your Body. And you can go online to the website www.uartheanswer.co.uk and order your copy of the book. It's written a lot like these episodes, very short, chatty, easy to digest, big picture stuff. And every small section has a health key at the end.

Next Topic Teaser And Closing

Naomi Mills 12:21

And these are just little nuggets that I want you to sit with, that I want to share to allow your subconscious to kind of chew on a little bit to help shift your perspective, even just one degree away from the current model of health and life that you might be holding. And the health key I want to share with you today comes from my section on what it means to be healthy, because ultimately that's what you are the answer is about.

Naomi Mills 12:51

I'm trying to redefine for you what health and well-being looks like. And it says your physical, mental, and social well-being are not controlled by any outside organization or force. Health comes from inside of you and radiates out, not the outside in. So please join me for the next episode on one of my greatest bugbears of all time for all of us in life, our impatience with the healing process, but also life in general. Let's talk about the unsexy truth of healing and getting comfortable with taking time and consistency to really do this work. Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparked something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have been.