Ep. 34 I'm Exhausted from Burnout | The Cycle of Capability for Midlife Women

Have you ever felt exhausted in a way that a good night's sleep or a weekend off just doesn't touch? That's the kind of burnout I'm talking about in this episode — not the kind rest fixes, the kind that shows up even after you've done everything right.

I'm sharing a real two weeks from my own life — my husband off work, both of us somehow getting busier instead of slowing down — and the moment it finally hit me that something had to give. If you've heard my earlier episode responding to Jenna Kutcher's essay on the hustle pattern, this one picks up right where that left off. Knowing the pattern exists didn't stop me from ending up burnt out anyway.

In this episode, I name something I don't think gets said enough about burnout: the more capable you are, the less anyone actually checks on you. From the outside it looks handled, so people stop offering help. Instead they call you superwoman — and that praise quietly substitutes for real support. Underneath that is an even harder layer: guilt about ease. Even when help is available, there's an unspoken rule that you have to earn the right to rest through suffering, not simply by wanting it. I walk through exactly how that shows up, and why it keeps so many women waiting for collapse before they'll actually ask for anything.

I also break down the real physiology behind chronic stress — the actual cascade from your hypothalamus to your pituitary to your adrenal glands, why the body's natural "stand down" signal stops working under constant pressure, and the part most people miss entirely: your nervous system treats isolation itself as a threat, which means real connection isn't just nice to have, it's one of the only things that can actually turn the stress response off.

What you'll learn about burnout in this episode:

• Why capability can isolate you, and how "superwoman" becomes a substitute for real help
• The guilt mechanism that makes rest feel like something you have to earn through suffering
• The actual HPA axis cascade — what your hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands are doing, and why the shut-off switch stops working
• Why isolation itself keeps your body in a stress response, and why being seen matters biologically, not just emotionally
• A simple way to check your actual capacity — and why saying the number out loud matters more than just noticing it

This is exactly the kind of thing we work through inside my monthly membership, the Intuitive Circle — not adding more self-care to an already full plate, but practicing letting yourself be seen needing something, until it stops feeling like proof you've failed. The Circle's on a summer pause right now, but the waitlist is open at lesleyturner.ca/theintuitivecircle for first access when it reopens in September.

If this episode named something you've been feeling but couldn't explain, subscribe, leave a review, and send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear it. You know exactly who I'm talking about.

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Transcript

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It's a Tuesday afternoon. I already recorded a podcast episode for The Emotional Truth this morning. I did an interview for another podcast right afterwards. I don't have any clients today. My husband is at work. My son's at his sports day camp. Uh there is a networking call happening right now that I could hop on, and some part of me is genuinely tempted to. But instead, I'm sitting here on my back deck on purpose so that this summer doesn't just blur past me and I look up in September going, Wait, what just happened? Because earlier this summer, it did blur past me. My husband was off work. He actually took holidays and was home. And instead of the two of us slowing down together, we somehow both got busier. We packed in more clients for me, camping, a tractor pole, basically like balls to the wall the entire stretch. And it wasn't until I had a conversation with a friend and slowed down where I was sitting still for the first time in two weeks that it hit me. Something has to give here. You're listening to the emotional truth, somatic healing and nervous system regulation for the midlife woman who's done everything right and still feels stuck. I'm Leslie Turner, somatic practitioner and intuitive coach. I work in the body, and I have a pretty uncanny ability to see what's actually running underneath. The stuff that therapy touched but never quite moved. Because understanding why you do something and actually stopping it are two completely different things, and that's exactly where we work. We cover people-pleasing, mom burnout, perimenopause, relationships, money, and what it actually costs the woman who's always been the responsible one. Short episodes, real stories, specific enough to stop you in your tracks. Let's get into it. This is a type of burnout. It's not always the collapse in bed kind. Sometimes it's just deep fatigue, no motivation, snapping at people you love, giving your absolute best to everyone, and then coming home with nothing left over. Now, one thing first I have to rule out is the physical stuff. If you are exhausted, please get your blood work done. Do a thyroid panel, get your iron checked, do hormones. I used to run this work for patients for years as a naturopath. And then once that's clear, this episode is what's for after. Now I've talked before in episode 30, the one I did where I was responding to Jenna Kutcher's essay about the hustle pattern underneath all of this, your worth tied to output, the fear of being seen as someone who can't handle her own life that keeps you going and going and going. If you haven't listened to that one, please do go listen to it first. This picks up right where it left off. Because knowing that that pattern exists didn't actually stop those two weeks I just described from happening to me. I know this stuff. I teach this stuff, and I still ended up there. What I noticed looking back at those two weeks is that every day ended fast. I would get to dinner and think, holy crap, where did that day go? And underneath the speed was a very distinct feeling that getting things done gave me a real hit. Might have been dopamine. It was a sense of purpose that was felt in my body, and it felt good. That's not joy. And I think those two get confused constantly. Now I'm not talking about your big P purpose conversation, not the what am I here on earth to do with my life? That's not what I mean. I mean something smaller, more everyday. The hit that you get from checking something off your list, from handling what needs to be handled. It's the I did the thing, I'm capable, look at everything I accomplished today. Joy is something else. It's actually being present with the people you love, doing nothing that necessarily needs to get done and still feeling fine and good about it. We love that. My family loves that, but we didn't get enough of it. The joy kept getting swallowed by, yeah, but this still has to get done. It's not purpose that resets to zero every day. It's the to-do list. And because that list is back at zero every single morning, you have to go chase that purpose hit all over again just to feel okay by dinner time. But then joy doesn't ask anything of you afterwards. Purpose does. If productivity is the only channel you've built for feeling good, keep this in mind. Then rest, when you actually sit down to rest, doesn't really feel restful. It just feels empty because nothing's filling the space where the productivity hit usually goes. So let's talk a little bit more about burnout. One of the reasons we're kind of a burnt-out society in general is that we don't actually live in villages anymore. Villages used to come with things built in, like the babysitter down the street, someone dropping off a meal when you're drowning, a shoulder to cry on that didn't need to be scheduled in advance. We don't have that structure anymore. And hiring help is a bit of a privilege, plain and simple. What people usually get told instead is to get more organized, batch your meals, time block your week, shift your mindset, as if the problem is how you're managing your calendar, and it's not. An entire category of support used to exist by default. It was free, it was immediate, it was built into where you live. And now either it costs real big money, or it just isn't there for you at all. No amount of time blocking manufactures a babysitter down the street or a friend who just shows up with dinner because she can tell that something's wrong. That's a missing structure, not a mindset problem. So let's talk about what's actually going on in your body when this kind of level of stress and burnout becomes your normal. Your body runs on something called the HPA access. I used to talk about this a lot as a nut bath. So HPA stands for hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands, and they're constantly talking to each other. Your hypothalamus senses demand, and it signals to the pituitary to then signal to your adrenals to release cortisol. You've probably heard of cortisol. I've talked about it on the podcast. And in short term, this cortisol is genuinely useful. It sharpens your focus, it gives you energy, gets you up in the morning, gets you through a deadline or an emergency. The system is built to spike and then return to baseline. When you are under non-stop demand, there's no real recovery window anywhere in there, just like my two weeks of craziness. The spike never gets to come down. Cortisol just stays elevated day after day. Chronically elevated cortisol stops feeling like stress after a while. It starts feeling like tired but wired. You're unable to rest even once you get the chance because it feels so unfamiliar. You're quick to snap. There's no patience left for anyone. That's a body running a stress hormone with nowhere to land. If this is your life and there's no real break unless you physically get sick, the trickle down of that isn't just tired. It's a body that stops functioning properly. So pain patterns that won't resolve, disease pictures that show up out of nowhere, depletion so extreme that the body finally forces the stop nobody was willing to choose. I used to recommend stress support supplements to patients for exactly this, but it doesn't work long time if the schedule, the workload, the pace driving the cortisol up hasn't changed. You can't supplement your way out of a life with no room in it. The body needs an actual break in the demand, not just better fuel to keep it running on the same demand. In my experience, with myself and with the women I work with, burnout actually shows up in three really distinct pieces. The first you probably know well, it's exhaustion, which we could go into further depth in it, but you you can feel this. You know when you can't do much else. The second is kind of a flatness, especially towards the people you love the most. So that snapping at your kid, at your husband, over something that wouldn't have registered a month ago. It's feeling irritated by someone else's needs instead of tender towards them. It's giving your absolute best to your clients and then having nothing, not just no energy, but no actual patience or warmth left over once you're home. And then the third thing is a reduced sense of accomplishment. So you start to doubt your own accompetence, even while you're doing more than ever. If all you know about burnout is I'm exhausted, but you're actually experiencing the resentment towards your family or anything else, it's easy to think that something is deeply wrong with you as a mother, as a partner, as a person, and it's not. It's just what burnout actually does to a person long term. On top of the biology, there's a mechanism most of us never got taught. Most of us were never shown what done actually feels like in the body. Not my list is finished, the list is never really finished. But an actual felt sense of that's enough for today. Without that internal signal, there's no natural place to stop. You don't override the urge to keep going. There's just no cue telling you that stopping is an option. Now I caught this happening in real time while I was putting this very episode together. I had about two hours today before I need to pick up my son from day camp. And my first thought was, oh, I should go clean my car. It's it's gross. I get that. Nobody asked me to, though. Well, did my husband? No, he didn't. Nothing about this is urgent. Just, oh, I should. I should fill this two hours with something productive. So I stopped and I asked myself, who actually decided that? Was this something I inherited from my upbringing that every moment has to be productive? Something society handed to me about what a woman does with two open hours? Or is it just me at this point running an inherited standard I never actually agreed to, kind of on autopilot? In my monthly membership, the intuitive circle, we don't add more self-care to an already full plate. That's never actually the fix. What we do instead is rebuild an actual felt sense of enough in your body so rest stops feeling like falling behind. The circle is on a summer pause right now, but the wait list is open at Lesleturner.ca slash the intuitive circle if you want first access when we reopen in September. There's something practical to actually do with all of this. Have a very honest conversation with yourself and with whoever you live with about where your capacity actually is on any given day, not where you wish it was, where it actually is. This is an honesty exercise. You can even put a number on it, one to ten. I'm thinking about this today because yesterday was a little rough for me physically. I am dealing with a little bit of, and I mean a little bit, I mean a lot, of costochondritis, which is inflammation of the cartilage around the ribs. And I had a flare-up. It hit my neck and my shoulder and my chest overnight. On top of that, my kiddo had a nightmare, and I was up with him in the middle of the night, lying on his bed with a pillow that wasn't supporting my neck. It was my turn to do his lunch. And I told my husband, I'm sorry, I don't, I have to go lie down. I can't make lunches. This is all I've got. And he was like, okay. The real number, maybe a two or three, honestly. And a two or three has to be allowed to just be a two or three, not something you push through or fake to a seven. Those two weeks earlier this summer were exactly this, except neither of us was naming it out loud. We were both running on empty, griping at each other instead of saying, neither of us has the capacity for this pace right now. Something has to come off the list. And sometimes that list is full of fun things too, and even that needs to get cut every once in a while. I've noticed personally that this also matters more in perimenopause because your actual capacity for stress can drop noticeably from what it used to be. And most of us don't update our expectations to match that. We hold ourselves to the version of us from five years ago, the expectations we had then, and then feel guilty when today's you can't keep up with her. Today's you might not need to. Today's you might just need to be honest about your number. So here's what I want to ask you to do this week: rate your capacity, give it that number, talk to your partner about it, and catch the one should the same way I just caught mine. Should I be doing something? Or is that a pattern in my body? Maybe ask whose voice is that that's telling me I should. Client calls, interview this episode, I still have to make dinner tonight. That one's non-negotiable. But the two hours between now and pickup are just gonna be two hours. Not a car clean out, not a load of laundry, just sitting on the same deck, doing nothing anyone would call productive. That's not failure, that's an actual practice. Thank you for being here. If you're here and listening, you are already doing this work. See you next week. If this episode landed somewhere, don't just let it sit there. That feeling you have right now, that's not a coincidence. That's your nervous system telling you something is ready to move. The Intuitive Circle is my membership where we stop talking about it and actually do something about it. Twice a month, live with me, body-based, real-time, and specific to what's actually running for you. Doors open back up in September, and the wait list is open now at Lesleturner.ca backslash theintuitive circle. Go put your name on the list. And if this was the episode that made you pull over and think, wait, is she talking about me? Please subscribe, leave a review, and send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear it. You know exactly who I'm talking about. Find me on Instagram at the Leslie Turner. Until next time, the fact that you're here and listening means you're already doing this work.