Burnout Broke More Than Your Career — It Broke How You Communicate

Most burnout conversations stop at the job. The schedule. The workload. But what happens when the hustle and grind mentality follows you home — into your relationships, your conversations, your nervous system? This week on The Weekly Recharge, Renae starts with a weird science fact — humans don't actually feel wetness, we never have — and uses it to unpack something most high-achieving women never see coming: burnout doesn't just exhaust you, it disconnects you from the very language you need to be understood.

If you've repeated yourself until you wanted to scream, spoken louder hoping it would finally land, or felt like you were throwing yourself against a brick wall while the other person shut down — this one is for you.

Renae also introduces something she's been quietly building for the woman who is done being the most productive person in the room and still feeling completely unheard: Energetic Intelligence: Relational Rewire — and announces a free workshop coming soon.

In this episode:

• The neuroscience of wetness and what it reveals about human adaptation
• How burnout rewires the way you communicate without you realizing it
• Why verbal communication keeps failing high achievers in relationships
• The frequency you're already emitting — and how to use it on purpose
• A first look at Energetic Intelligence: Relational Rewire
• How to get early access to the free workshop

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Transcript

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Hello, and welcome back to the audio version of the weekly recharge newsletter. I am your trusty host, burnout and identity coach, and brain spotting practitioner, Renee. And if you stumbled over here from the Hustle Rebels podcast, welcome. If you like what you hear, I will leave the link to subscribe to the weekly recharge so that you can be a part of the OG fam as well. Otherwise, hop on board and off we go. You're not bad at communicating. You're just transmitting on the wrong frequency. Here are some of the things that we're going to cover this week: the weird science of wetness and why you've never actually felt it. Why adaptation is your nervous system's superpower, what to do when words stop working in relationships, the other languages that your body already speaks, and a free workshop that might change how you communicate forever. So I've been a little obsessed with something this week, and I can't stop thinking about it. So naturally, you guys are all coming with me. Here's something that I learned this week. Humans don't have hydroreceptors, which means technically we have never actually felt wetness. Not once. Not even once. I know, mind blown. And you're probably thinking, um, Renee, I absolutely know what wetness feels like, but stay with me. What we actually feel is a combination of the change in temperature and texture. Our brain takes those two signals, runs them through its very impressive internal algorithm, and hands us back the experience of wet. We didn't choose that. We didn't decide it. Our bodies just adapted. They built a workaround so seamless that we've just never once questioned it. And here's your proof. Have you ever reached for a t-shirt that was hanging outside at dusk and thought to yourself, is this wet or is this cold? That pause, that confusion, that's the crack in the story. That's your body momentarily running out of enough data to fake it convincingly. So we don't know what wetness actually feels like. Our brain just knows the difference, and that has just always been enough. So my hairdresser and I have something in common. We are both basically blind without our glasses. And we accept that fate. I nearly ate the floor walking back to the shampoo bowl the other day because I had taken my glasses off for the cut. And we were laughing about it when she said something that brought me back to the wetness obsession. She was trying to describe to someone with perfect vision what it actually feels like to take your glasses off when your vision is actually terrible. It's not just that you can't see, but that everything becomes such a blur that you can't even distinguish color from the void. And she had said, I I couldn't tell you what color your eyes were, she said, not because I can't see color, but because there's nothing distinct enough left to attach it to. And then she said, I don't even know how to explain it to someone who hasn't felt it. And honestly, that's what hit me. Because how often are we doing that? Trying to translate an experience across a gap that the other person simply just doesn't have the receptor for yet. Think about the last time a conversation with someone you love went sideways. You said what you meant and you meant what you had said, but somehow it still just didn't land. What if the problem isn't that they weren't listening? What if they just don't have the receptor for the way that you're transmitting? Here's what I keep coming back to. If our bodies figured out wetness without a single receptor for it, if we built an entire workaround using temperature and texture and just made it work, then we are capable of far more adaptation than we give ourselves credit for. So when verbal communication hits the same wall for the tenth time, maybe the question isn't why won't they just understand me? Maybe it's how can I adapt? What other language is available to me? What am I transmitting that I haven't named yet? Because here's what I do know. We are all emitting a frequency. Nikola Tesla figured that out in the late 1800s. And we're emitting it constantly without realizing it. It's not something that you read or hear or even see. It's something that you feel, a universal language that exists underneath all of the words that we keep reaching for. And most of us have never been taught how to understand it, let alone speak it on purpose. Some of you caught a glimpse of this last week when I mentioned the sheepdog framework. The idea that the energy in a room, in a relationship, in a dynamic, can be shifted, like a sheepdog moves afield, not by force, but by presence. And I've been sitting with that framework for this last week, shaping it, finding its edges, and it finally has a name now. Energetic intelligence, the relational rewire. And I'm going to be hosting a free workshop to introduce the upcoming beta cohort to you properly, to teach you energetic intelligence as a language, what it is, how to start recognizing it, and how to use it to stop repeating yourself and speaking louder and arguing in circles and feeling like you're throwing yourself against a brick wall while the other person just shuts down. Because that pattern is not a you problem. It's a frequency problem. And it's fixable. If you want to be one of the first to know when the workshop drops, grab a spot on my calendar and let's talk. I love to connect before I open the doors. I put a link in the calendar in the description so that you can book a chat with me. This week's nervous system regulation practice is going to be notice before you speak, the frequency check-in. Before your next difficult conversation, I want you to pause and ask, what am I actually feeling right now? Not thinking, feeling. And then I want you to notice what's in your body. Is there tightness, warmth, distance, pull? Whatever is there without editing it. And then ask yourself, is this something that I can put words to, or is it something I'm going to have to transmit in a different way? Let that question sit. You don't have to solve it. Just get curious about that gap between what you feel and what you know how to say. We are adaptive creatures. We always have been. And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is just stop insisting on the one language that isn't working and start paying attention to the ones that already are. And then this week on the Hustle Rebels podcast, in case you missed this week's episode, I got pretty personal. And this one is a solo episode about the beliefs driving your burnout that you never actually chose, and why changing your habits, your schedule, even your job title won't touch them. I even share a story that I've never told publicly and break down why behavior change keeps failing without identity work underneath it. If something in your life keeps feeling stuck no matter what you do, I recommend that you start here. And then up next on Hustle Rebels, I'm going to be sitting down with Kai Brown, a young entrepreneur who grew up with parents that never passed their limiting beliefs onto him about culture, money, or expectations. He has built his own life and work around helping others dismantle their own limiting beliefs. He's grounded, he's sharp, and to be honest, this conversation definitely shifted something within me. And I think it'll definitely do the same thing for you. So check out those links in the description in the show notes so you can be able to go back and watch some previous episodes. And if you're new here or feeling nostalgic, you want to read some previous newsletters, you can check them out with those links as well. And like I said, I'll leave the link for you to be able to subscribe for future weekly recharge newsletters as well. As always, I appreciate you guys. I'm always here if you have any questions or if you just want to chat. So share the weekly recharge with a friend so they can be regulated just like you. See you guys next week.