238. Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of Burnout (And What Actually Works)

What if the reason you can't break free from chronic stress has nothing to do with your mindset—and everything to do with your nervous system being stuck in survival mode?

Meet the science behind why willpower fails when you need it most—and the 4 body-based regulation techniques that high-achievers use to shift from reactive to intentional living.

In this first part of our burnout mini-series, Dr. Adrienne Youdim reveals why your brain literally cannot think its way out of chronic stress, and introduces the foundational step that transformed Steve Wilt (from our previous episode) from burned-out executive to tournament winner.

What You'll Learn:

• Why your nervous system gets hijacked by modern "threats" like endless emails and decision fatigue
• The neuroscience reason willpower and positive thinking fail during burnout
• 4 immediate regulation practices you can use between meetings, tasks, and high-pressure moments

"All we can change, all we can do is be intentional about the way that we respond." - Dr. Adrienne Youdim 

The Regulation Toolkit:

• Before: Chronic stress, stuck in fight-or-flight, reactive decision-making, constant mental buzzing
• After: Intentional responses, access to creativity and logic, sustained energy, improved performance

The Process: Body-based nervous system regulation through breath, micro-pauses, transitional rituals, and sensory grounding

Remember: Burnout doesn't resolve through thinking—it softens through intentional regulation that tells your body you're safe and have the power to choose your response.

The Complete Burnout Prevention System:

• Regulate (Part 1): Nervous system tools for real-time stress management
• Restore (Part 2): Navigate transitions without reactive behaviors
• Reframe (Part 3): Transform limiting beliefs into empowering choices

Ready to go deeper? Our next Resilient Minds cohorts start September 30th (women) and October 1st (men). 

Learn the complete mind-body system at https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/resilient-minds

3 Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

• Join Resilient Minds: If this sounds familiar, you're exactly who Resilient Minds is designed for. Next cohort starts September 30th - Limited to 12 high-achieving professionals ready to move from success to significance.
  Ready to stop asking "Is this it?" and start living like you know it isn't?
  Application details here: https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/resilient-minds
• Subscribe to Dr. Adrienne's weekly newsletter https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/newsletter.
• Connect on Instagram : Follow @dradrienneyoudim for tips and inspiration on well-being and peak performance.

Transcript

Your success is being sabotaged by hidden hungers that lead to chronic stress, burnout, and self-sabotaging habits. Trust me, I get it. As a mother, a physician, and a type A personality that has a whole lot of ambition to go, I know firsthand how we neglect ourselves in the pursuit of success and how it can leave us feeling drained and unfulfilled. It has led me personally to a better way. Welcome back to Health Bite, the podcast that helps high achieving professionals like you stop chasing from a place of depletion and start creating from a place of deep nourishment. I'm your host, Dr. Adrienne Youdim. I'm a physician, author and expert in medical weight loss and mind body medicine. And each week we will decode our hidden hungers together as I offer you practical evidence based tools like nutrition, movement, and contemplative practices to help you break the cycle of reactivity so you can live a life of joy, vitality, and good health, mind, body, and soul. And I'm so glad to have you here with me this week. We are in part one of our little mini series, our burnout mini series, where we're going to talk about step one, how we regulate. Two weeks ago, we started this conversation on burnout. And my observation that burnout is a side effect of chronic stress and reactivity. It makes sense, right? If you think about it, when we're in this prolonged energy state, when we're in a prolonged negative energy state that is not sustainable, we burn out. We have to be purposeful about managing that reactivity by regulating and restoring and reframing our mission. Those are the three steps that we're going to talk about over the course of the next three weeks. And I want you to recognize that this doesn't just happen. Trust me, I know. We can't just expect ourselves to be in this state of self-regulation. We actually have to be intentional about doing it and about achieving it. So last week on our podcast, I took you through the story of Steve Wilt. He was the highly successful financial executive who had participated in my resilient minds group, my eight week mind body group, where we teach the tools to help manage this reactivity, to help manage the chronic stress response. And he really leaned in and shared with us that everything in his life improved as a result. His relationship or relationships improved, his leadership in his workplace improved, his mission driven goals, and even his golf game. He also shared that as a result of this work, He moved, in his words, from success to significance, doing work that not only serves him personally, but served him in serving others. It was really a great listen. And if you haven't listened to it already, I recommend that you head over there after this and listen to that episode as well. On that note, I want to keep you in the know. And many of you have emailed and DM'd me about Resilient Minds. We are currently enrolling our next cohort. Our women's cohort starts September 30th. Our men's cohort starts October 1st, 2025. You can learn more about it at dradrianhudeem.com backslash resilient-minds. More of that and more on that at the end of the show. So stay tuned. But I want to start with a personal truth. And actually, before I get there, I literally just recorded this podcast. I just recorded it with so much excitement and passion only to find out after I had gotten through it all that I hadn't checked my audio. I hadn't set it up properly. And while you could see me jumping all around screen, I did not record a single peep. Now, I want to tell you that this is a side gig to my side gig, this podcast. I'm not a career podcaster. This is not the only thing I have going on. As you know, I have an active medical practice. I have an active speaking business. And so I tend to record these episodes like I am today. on a Saturday afternoon in order for it to be edited by my wonderful Cecilia on the other side of the planet. Literally, she is on the other side of the globe where she anxiously awaits my episodes that are always tardy in order to drop Monday morning. And as I sit here with you this Saturday afternoon, I have to get to a bat mitzvah tonight. I have to pack because I am moving my son in to GW. We're heading across country to move him in to start his first year of college. I have a whole lot of deep and tender emotion about that. And I still need to color my hair in addition to packing. So I quite literally am using these these skills myself to not self-deprecate, to not be angry, to ground myself, to bring myself back to my intention and to my mission of serving you all. And know that no matter how grounded and self-aware we are, no matter If we are new to this work or we've been doing it like I have for years and years, we all get pulled into reactivity. It happens that moment when you recognize you did something wrong and that snappiness comes out. You may feel that desire to be snappy to someone around you, someone you love or care about. or your feeling of angst makes you want to go into the pantry and grab some snack or engage in mindless drinking or grab your phone and start doom scrolling. That overwhelming sense of needing to do more or not enough. I swear I was just talking about this particular one with a colleague yesterday, a very successful speaker who at the age of mid-60s still has to actively manage that feeling of not-enoughness. This is all reactivity that we get pulled into. And the burnout that happens does not happen overnight. It results from chronic self-neglect, chronic self-sabotaging habits and coping mechanisms, reactivity with autopilot thoughts and autopilot behaviors, and a reactivity in our bodies as well. Our bodies' reactive response to chronic stress when prolonged and ongoing just leads to burnout. And so I want you to recognize that this is something very physiologic. And again, as we're doing this, the doorbell's ringing and I'm gonna take a moment to tell my kids to manage that. But this is something that is biologic. It's an ancient automatic system that we have that is created to deal with true threat. It is literally a stress response that we know as fight, flight, freeze, and sometimes fawn. This system was designed to protect us from immediate danger. And so our heart rate goes up. Our muscles become tense. Digestion slows down. Our liver releases stored sugar so that we have the energy to move. Our body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that flood our body, making us more likely to react, to move, to get away out of harm's way. And again, in small acute doses, this response can be life-saving. But in modern life, where the, quote, threats never stop, they look like hundreds of unread emails or a constant barrage of text messages, conflicts at work or at home, uncertainty and financial stressors, social comparison on social media, and even just the overstimulation of constant noise and decision-making. Over time, this leads to poor digestion, to hormonal disruption, disruption of your immune system, chronic inflammation, irritability, anxiety, feelings of depletion and exhaustion. It results in reduced engagement and motivation, maybe even negativity, cynicism towards your work and towards people around you. And finally, feelings of reduced efficacy, like we can't do anything right. And all of this eventually leads to burnout. And I want to say this, we all talk about burnout in terms of work, but this can happen at home too. I mean, parents and caretakers, they can also experience burnout. So it's not something that's reserved just for a corporate job. And here's the key. You cannot think your way out of reactivity. You have to do this work with your body. You have to regulate at the level of your body. So what does that actually mean? When I talk about regulation, I mean the ability to shift your response, to shift the response of your nervous system from fight or flight to rest and relax. And this is something that we can build the skills to do, to take ourselves from stress and chaos to ease, from reactivity to intentional response. Because that's what it's all about. We cannot change what's happening around us. All we can change, all we can do is be intentional about the way that we respond. And I want to tell you, this isn't a catchphrase. This isn't a meme. This is a deliberate strategy. Strategies that we engage in deeply in the Resilient Minds course. ones that I practice daily and ones that I want to share with you today. It's also not about pretending that everything is rosy or that we can eliminate stress. Because let's be real, that is not realistic or normal. We will always have stress. But again, it's about learning how to respond in a way in which you train your body or you tell your body that everything is okay. And when you signal that to your body, that you have the capacity to respond to challenges and to the demands of your life, you quite literally are regulating your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that is responsible for logical decision making, for empathy, creativity, meaning making. Look, when we are in that stress response, our brain shifts to the automatic part of our brain. There's a part of our brain, the most ancient part of our brain, called the limbic system. where it is reactive, it is automatic. Less evolved animals operate only from that part of the brain. They only have that part of the brain. We've evolved to have the cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to be logical, to make decisions, right? to bond with each other, to create meaning out of difficulty and tragedy, to respond with love and care and empathy. These are parts of the brain that we want to use. These are aspects of our humanity that makes us more effective and intentional and productive But if we can't access that part of the brain, then we can't be deliberate in that way. So we need to learn to regulate. So let's talk about how we can regulate ourselves in real time. And the most foundational part, what is at the core of self-regulation, is something called self-belly breathing. And if you remember, it's what Steve shared last week too. It's something that he said he now practices regularly. He did it throughout his golf game. I can't remember if this actually made it to the episode, but Steve shared that he has been working on completing or winning a golf tournament for the last 30 years. And he attributes his ability to do this breathing practice between sets as something that actually allowed him to achieve that on this particular occasion. And it's something that I use regularly too. And so at any moment in time, you can pause, you can do the sitting or standing up, bring awareness to your body, relax your shoulders. If you're able, you can close your eyes or you can just zone out, right? Just have a soft gaze so that you're not actually focused on anything on the outside, bringing your awareness to the inside. Start with a slow inhale through the nose and out through the mouth, calmly, slowly. And now here's the important part. Soften your belly. What that means is that when you inhale in through the nose, you don't imagine the breath just coming into the nose or the back of the throat. You don't allow it to just stop in the top of the chest. But you soften the belly so that the air quite literally comes all the way down. And I want you to visualize that breath coming all the way down into the very bottom of the lungs, the part of the lungs that reside in the belly. When you soften your belly on the inhale, You allow the air to come all the way down to the lower part of the lungs where your parasympathetic fibers live, that rest and relax part of your body. And you will notice that your belly rises with the inhale and falls with the exhale. This kind of slow, intentional breathing into the belly with a prolonged exhale, tells your vagus nerve that all is good. It allows you to regulate your heart rate. It brings down your breathing and it brings you back to center. This starts to happen within seconds. If you don't believe me and you have an Apple Watch or an Oura Ring, check your heart rate monitor. It happens within seconds. And you don't need to do it for a prolonged period of time. You can do it for 30 seconds, even. Repeat it a couple times a day, even once a day, will make a difference. Try anchoring this to an existing habit, maybe before you open your inbox or right before meals. Bring this practice to one of your already habitual behaviors and create a routine. The next skill that I want to share is what I call the one minute reset. Because reactivity thrives when you're on the go. When you insert mini pauses into your day between tasks or into your day to day, for example, take a moment between meetings and step away from your present place. Step outside. Acknowledge the feeling of the air on your skin or the sun on your face. Close your eyes for 30 seconds. Stretch your arms overhead. Give yourself a minute to reset. Ask yourself, what's needed right now? It's not just the pause itself, but it's the message that you are sending to yourself, which is, I am not a machine. I deserve time and space, and I get to choose how I respond. You can even do this as a transitional ritual. We rush from task to task, from work to home, from screen to bed. And when we don't allow ourselves time to settle in transition, it trains your body to stay in that heightened state, to remain activated. What if you created a ritual between tasks, allowing yourself just a little pause, just a little respite? Maybe you decide to play a song between, I don't know, your calls at work or between checking your emails and actually going into the working part of your day. Maybe you decide to light a candle when you wake up in the morning or set an intention before dinner or journal before bedtime. Think about how all of that buzzing from task to task activates your nervous system And notice how a ritual can help you slow down a bit. Slow down your mind, slow down your body, and give yourself that respite that you know that you need. Another practice is grounding through the senses. Use your environment to help you get out of your head and into your body. Because oftentimes it's that thinking That thinking is the very thing that is keeping you activated. That constant buzzing in our heads that stimulates us in the absence of anything that's going around outside, right? Sometimes it's just the ruminating on what may have happened before or our worries and concerns about the future. It's not reality, but it is what is happening in our minds that is keeping us activated. So use your senses to bring yourself back to the present moment. Run your hands over some cold water or pour yourself a hot cup of tea. Feel that sensation of the warmth going down your body. Or again, light a candle or essential oils. Use smell to bring you to the present moment. Listen to some calming sounds. You can YouTube the sound of the ocean or rain sounds. Or perhaps you place your bare feet on the cold kitchen floor or go outside and feel the sense of grass under your feet. These simple practices, these simple grounding exercises of anchoring to your senses, will bring your awareness back into your body away from those ruminating loops of thought in your head. And finally, I want to remind you of something. You don't need to master all of these. You don't need to do everything all the time. You just need to be open-minded and to begin. Ask yourself again, what is one way you can create a moment of calm today? Where can you breathe more intentionally? Where can you pause even for just one minute, even for just 30 seconds? Because burnout does not resolve through thinking. It does not resolve through willpower. It softens. through intentional regulation, through gentle, repeated reminders that you give to yourself and to your system in these ways, telling it that you are okay and you have the power to choose again. These practices are not rocket science. This is not something that you need a prescription for. It's not something that you have to pay money for. But that doesn't mean that they're not effective and that they are not important. So don't minimize it and don't trivialize it. These gentle intentional reminders are tangible ways that you can self-regulate. and regulating, that is the first step. That is the foundation to managing our reactivity and combating the burnout that is our fate if we don't do so. In our next episode, we're going to talk about what comes after the pause, how to restore with nutrients, good food, pause through nature, rest, relaxation, movement, and leaning into contemplative practices and connection. If you want to start contemplating these nutrients right now, you can head over to my website and download the Fuel Blueprint at dradrianYoudim.com and If you're ready to take this work deeper, I'd love for you to join us in our next cohort of Resilient Minds. Once again, Resilient Minds is my eight-week program designed for high-achieving professionals who are ready to do this work deeply, ready to learn, ready to engage, ready to lean into community, and to adopt the skills that help us shift from reactivity and burnout into calm, intentional living. In just two months, you'll learn the practical science-based skills, the mind-body strategies that help you regulate your stress, break free from self-sabotaging behaviors and patterns, and learn how to fuel your mind and body and purpose in a way that will profoundly change how you live, how you lean into your relationships, and how you lead in your workplace and in your community. Our next women's cohort begins September 30th. Our men's cohort begins October 1st, 2025. You can learn more and apply at dradrianYoudim.com backslash resilient-minds. Until then, I'm Dr. Adrienne Youdim, and this is your Health Bite. I wish you good health, mind, body, and soul, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week. Bye now.