Compassion Fatigue Cure: From Burnout to Radiance for Women Healers 50+

The Degree That Broke You: Why Your Training Wired You for Burnout (Women Healers 50+)

• Dr. Julie Merriman • Episode 49

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Are you a high-achieving woman healer over 50 who did everything right—earned the degrees, built the career, and secured the status—yet you feel more exhausted now than when you were a starving student?

You were promised that expertise would bring ease. Instead, your training wired your nervous system for chronic self neglect. For women over 50 and healers, the very education that built your career is often the root cause of your burnout. You learned to normalize stress, ignore your body, and wear overwhelmed as a uniform. But now, as you navigate the "Midlife Collision" of menopause, aging parents, and complex caseloads, those old strategies aren't just failing—they are breaking you.

In this truth-telling episode, Dr. Juls names the uncomfortable reality: Your degree didn't prepare you for this; it prepared you to suffer. You will learn to unlearn the habits of the "Achievement Trap" and shift from grinding to wisdom. Discover:

  • The "Achievement Trap": How graduate programs trained your brain to normalize anxiety and make "overwork" your default setting.
  • The Midlife Collision: Why the "push through" strategies of your 30s are destroying your energy now that you are navigating the physiological shifts of midlife women.
  • 4 Nervous System Tools: Practical interventions, including the Heart-Root Recalibration, to stop the cycle of resentment and reclaiming your inner peace.

Your worth is not in your credentials. Press play to unlearn the hustle and reclaim your mental health.

This podcast supports women healers over 50 navigating burnout, compassion fatigue, and midlife transitions with strategies for nervous system regulation, trauma-informed boundaries, and chakra alignment to heal resentment and self-neglect while cultivating soul joy, radiance, and a purposeful next chapter of freedom and inner peace.

THE DIAGNOSIS: Are you the Martyr who can't say no? Or the Warrior who fights until she collapses? You cannot heal what you cannot name.

👇 Take the 60-Second Quiz to find your Burnout Archetype: [CLICK HERE TO REVEAL YOUR ARCHETYPE]

Join the Rebellion: If this episode woke something up in you, share it with a colleague who needs permission to stop. We rise together.

Reach out to Dr. Julie

Episodes drop every Tuesday at 5am and every Friday at noon.

Special guest episodes drop the 4th Thursday of every month at 7am.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Souljoy, the podcast for accomplished women in healthcare and helping professions who are ready to reclaim their energy, their purpose, and their joy. I'm your host, Dr. Julie Merriman, counselor educator, author, burnout researcher, and fellow high achiever navigating midlife. Here, we blend hard science, honest stories, and evidence-based strategies to help advanced degree women over 40 move from exhaustion to empowerment. Because your education prepared you to help others, but it didn't prepare you to sacrifice yourself. Let's get started. Welcome back to Soul Joy, burnout truths for brilliant women. Man, it's kind of a tongue twister. Okay, we're we're pivoting, we're still pivoting. Uh last week I told y'all about how what the pivot looks like. I'm really focusing on women over 40, 50, 60, 70, and how our life looks as a healthcare provider and the burnout that we face. So that's I'm really zoning in on us, us brilliant women who are overeducated and trying to figure out what the hey is going on with this burnout. So these first few podcasts on this pivot, I'm going to talk about some kind of controversial topics per se. But I'm I'm excited to do this with you, and I just invite you to approach this with beginners' eyes, uh, beginner's mind, and just be curious about the topics I'm bringing up. So today we're tackling a question that makes a lot of high achievers squirm. What if the very degree you worked so very hard to earn? And I mean so very hard. I'm thinking about the sacrifices I made myself. I know y'all, we could probably write a book, ladies, if we send me some ideas. I'd love to put them on the podcast. But what if the very degree you worked so hard to earn is actually making your burnout worse? That's right. Making your burnout worse. See, you were told, I was told, we were told, education would protect us. And in a way, it did. I mean, from where I started in a really bad marriage at a really young age, education was my way out. And I was not going to stop till I was to the top. But through that, we went, we learned that it would protect us, that the letters that came after our names meant stability, meant respect, meant a fulfilling career. But the research, and y'all, my own story, grab my book in pursuit of soul joy. I I am down and dirty in that, and I give you lots of ideas to help you. But the research and my own story say otherwise. So today I want to break this myth wide open. Okay, about 15 years ago, and I've told y'all this before, so bear with me. But about 15 years ago, my life looked like a success story. Not bragging. I'm and I'm just being honest, and that's uh I just want y'all to have something to relate to and to validate some of your own experiences. So I'm gonna share mine. So about 15 years ago, really, life looked like a success story. I was a tenured professor, department director, private practice owner, national speaker, uh, did conference notes, uh, you know, conference keynotes, uh, breakout sessions as well, had full classrooms, had my publications. And, you know, to the to those of us in this world of overachievers, my CV sparkled. I mean, it could always be improved, right? I'm not saying I was all that in a bag of chips. I had just worked my ass off and it showed on my CV. Y'all, I was running out of fumes. If I'm if I'm dead honest, and um I believe in being honest, I was running on fumes. I woke up exhausted, I lived on caffeine, I was bitchy, I did not believe in, well, didn't believe in not having fun, I just couldn't fathom having fun. I answered emails at midnight, y'all. At midnight, instead of resting and taking care of myself and being with my family. One afternoon, and I remember this vividly, and I might kind of tear up because I remember this. One afternoon, I stepped off a conference stage to a standing ovation. I say that with humbleness, I say that with humility, but y'all have felt nothing. I didn't feel pride, I didn't feel joy, I just felt emptiness. All the credentials in the world, my PhD, my licenses, my degrees, didn't chill me. If anything, they amplified the pressure. That moment forced me to ask if I have everything I thought I wanted, why do I feel so burned out? So damn empty. Once I started digging into the data, now this was later, when in that moment, you read my book, it took me a hot minute to get my shit together. And really, that's questionable today, but I'm trying, right? We're we're a work in progress. Um, but once I started digging into the data, the pattern, y'all, it was undeniable. Listen to this. This is a 20 an APA 2022 research um stat. Mental health clinicians, 42 to 61 percent of master's to doctoral level providers, which would be us, most of us, report high burnout. 42 to 61 percent. Another 2022 stat, but Mayo Clinic Proceedings uh reported this in 2023. Physicians, 63 percent of U.S. physicians met burnout criteria in 2022, the highest rate ever recorded. Big deep breath, sit down, hear that again. 63 percent of you beautiful physicians, you brilliant women out there, 63 percent met burnout criteria of 2022. Of course, a lot was going on in 2022, but that stat still stands. Nurses with doctorates or master's degrees, roughly 47% show significant burnout symptoms. AACN 2022. I know my husband and I have spent a lot of time in the hospital in the last few years, and I just I just am in awe of the way those nurses, I mean, they it's not ending their whole shift, they're on their feet, and people are not being kind to them. It just broke my heart and physicians as well. I felt bad for them as they were cycling through. Um, I live as a mental health care professional, so I I mean I can really relate to that, but I saw how hard physicians and nurses were working as well. See, education was supposed to be the safeguard, right? Instead, the very path to those degrees trains us for burnout. Okay, so I'm not saying that to um ruffle feathers. I'm saying that to get your attention because I want to help you. I have a passion to help stop this burnout um epidemic. Yeah, I'm going there. Burnout epidemic. Okay, so here's why. Achievement, arrow to perfectionism, arrow to chronic stress. Fit any of us? I mean, it's not the average duck that says, hey, I'm gonna get a master's degree. Screw that, I'm gonna go get a doctorate or an MD or you know, whatever next uh level up that is. Not just everyone does that. Achievement drive, perfectionism leads to chronic stress. Achievement drive leads to perfectionism, perfectionism leads to chronic stress. Graduate training rewards overwork, right? Oh, and as a professor, I mean, I'm currently a professor, and I'm and of course I'm at the I'm old, I'm in my 60s, I'm a much different professor today than I was in my 40s. You know, I'm always telling my students, dude, a B is gonna get you where you need to go. Now that C, they can't stand the problem with C, but a B will get them where they need to go. Uh if the paper's a couple of days late, it the world is not gonna end. I've got some folks getting married right now, and I just sent an email, I think yesterday, that her mental health and her wedding was far more important than that paper. But I'm telling you, I didn't have professors like that. I was I had professors who told me my ass was gonna be, you know, flunked out if I didn't do this, that, or the other. I don't want to do that to my students. But graduate training rewards overwork, right? Those late nights. I can remember putting the bed, the kids to bed, and then I stay up all night doing homework. Endless revisions, publisher perish. Your nervous system learns that constant activation equals success. I can remember after I finished my doc program, there was a hot minute, um, you know, maybe six months before I went right into the academy. And I just didn't know what the hell I was going to do with myself because I had some extra time. You know, but what am I gonna do? I have time. Oh, yes, y'all, graduate training rewards overwork. And this wires our nervous system to learn that constant activation is what it takes to be successful. Next, we have cognitive load and responsibility. Advanced degrees invite complex cases, right? Where we're at the top of the rung. We're the most educated. We, those really complex things land in our lap. We land in leadership roles. And this, all of this brings constant ethical decision making. Our brain is on 24-7. It's, I mean, I can I can remember um I put myself through my undergrad program as a hairdresser, just right out of um high school. I went to hair school and and I owned a hair salon and I was a hairdresser, um, knowing that I wasn't going to stop there, knowing I wanted to go on to be a counselor, but I worked my way through college, uh, undergrad as a hairdresser. And I can remember there have been days when I've been like, especially when my brain is just dead and there's this demand and it's it's not fun. There's all these decisions and it feels like life or death. And I've thought at times, man, I wish I had my scissors and I would just go back into a salon and just play with hair. Um, although uh sending some love to hairdressers, that's not just easy peasy because you're dealing with people and how they like their haircuts. So um maybe floral arrangement. You know, I'm just thinking sometimes I just want to go be creative and not have to make another effing decision. Just be creative. Any of y'all relate to that? Just let me go play. Our brain is on 24-7. Okay. Next, let's put on our the lens of gender and midlife pressures. Now I'm a little past midlife. Um, I'm in my 60s, I'm on the other side of all that perimenopause. I cannot say menopause for some perimenopause and menopause and such. Um, but I remember it well. Women 40 plus face, and I hang with me as I say this, perimenopause. Whoo, I said it. We have aging parents. I just made my mother a couple of appointments today, arranged to take her. Oh, she wants to do this um tea at the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth. They have this tea. And uh, of course, we grew up uh right there in Fort Worth around the Kemble Art. Anyway, it's gonna be so fun. Anyway, I've got an aging mom. She's a widow, so there's a lot of times, yeah, a lot of my schedule. I make sure she's has her medicine, goes to her doctor appointments, has something fun to do. Um, teen children. I have teen grandchildren and 40-something uh children, but it really, you know, after 40, the relationship with our children really looks different. And we need to honor that and um make space for that as we change. Our kids are changing. Teen children, ooh, that's a handful. Um 20-something children, that's a handful, 40-something children, that's just it's just so different. Uh we also face career plateaus, our hormone shifts. These shifts, these shifts, these hormonal shifts magnify stress responses. Yet our programs, as we were going through grad school, did they ever mention that? Hey, girlfriend, when you're hitting your 40s and beyond, some shit's gonna change. Things are gonna be a little different. Plan for that. No, no. Uh, you're gonna be a little depressed when empty nest hits. You're gonna be in an identity crisis when someone starts calling you grandma or boomy. I'm boomy, which I love and I'm proud of. But that was, you know, it's like, whoo, how did grandmahood hit me? We're not prepared for that as we prepare for our careers. Burnout is not a personal weakness. In fact, I would invite you, is because you do such a darn good job at what you do, you wind up in burnout. It's a physiological outcome of chronic stress and professional conditioning. So let's name the myths and replace them with truth. Myth one: education equals immunity. Reality, higher education increases workload, stakes, and public expectation. Right? And I'm just gonna throw this in as a little nugget. If you're the first one in your family to be a higher educated woman, it's very hard for anyone else in your family to offer the support and validity and relation, you know, relate to that, which offers a whole other um type of almost isolation feeling, which that's a whole other podcast. But education equals immunity. That's not the reality. Myth two, I should know how to handle stress. Reality. Graduate school, our programs teach theory. They do not necessarily, especially those of us that are 40, 50, 60, been in the field a hot minute, they did not teach nervous system regulation. We're trying to do that better now. As a counselor educator, we're trying to do a better job of that now. We can certainly go to um professional development and such, but as you were planning your career, that was not something you could put in your notebook and go, okay, I know to look out for this. Myth three: success will make life easier. That was one I was hanging my hat on. Yeah, the reality is every promotion or publication or something in our job that requires more responsibility raises the bar and shrinks your margin for rest. Yeah, these myths keep brilliant women such as yourselves blaming yourself instead of the systems that we were trained in. And I don't know, blame is where we even need to go. I'm just inviting curiosity, awareness, and you to hold space and think, can I kind of shift my thinking around this and and create some new neural pathways where I'm nicer to myself? Okay, so what actually helps? If another degree or a weekend spa trip isn't the answer, although I highly recommend a spa trip, not gonna not gonna turn one of those down, but that's not gonna fix this. What is the answer? And I'm just gonna talk a hot minute about Souljoy, and then I've got four things you can do today to help you with this. But through my own recovery, as I've talked about a lot and years of research, I developed the Souljoy method, and there's four pillars in this method. I'm just gonna talk about um three that I've designed. I mean, Souljoy is designed for advanced degree helpers. And first, that's nervous system regulation. Daily micro practices, paced breathing, grounding vagus nerve activation, teaching your body to feel safe. That's something we're gonna do on a regular basis in Souljoy. Second is boundary mastery, saying no with love. Um, that can be really harder than it sounds. In theory, it's like, well, how the amount I'm gonna say no, but it can be a little push, a little um activating when the time comes up. But I invite you to just restructure schedules, delegate task, and in the culture of heroic overwork, we're not getting medals for that. I invite you to walk away from that. And third, meaning recalibration, reconnecting to joy beyond titles, beyond accomplishments, redefining success in midlife and beyond on your own effing terms. It's time, you know, the I see a lot of funny um TikTok. Well, I'm not on TikTok, but it's you um Instagram reels and such on us older women just not giving a F, you know, just don't have it anymore. And I can happily say a lot of mine have retired. I don't have near as many giving a care as I used to. So my gift to you, my brilliant sisters, are these next four practices that you can try today. But before I go there, I just want to review uh these uh pieces from the souljoy method that I just shared: nervous system regulation, daily micro practices, boundary mastery, saying no with love, and meaning recalibration, redefining success in midlife and beyond on your own terms. Okay, so here are four practices you can do today. The first one, I invite you to set a timer for 60 seconds. If you don't have access to that, just wing it. But inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of two, exhale for a count of six. And the invitation here is to repeat this breathing cycle for one minute, maybe between clients, maybe before you start work, maybe at the end of the day. Just repeat that because the simple pattern signals your vagus nerve to shift from fight or flight into calm. Now it's not glamorous, but it is science and it does work. Then these next um strategies incorporate chakra work and energy healing. And if you've read my book, you know I'm a yoga instructor. I integrate yoga into my therapy practice with my clients. I believe we are energy beings and we need to take care of our energy. Just um just watch yourself the next time you are activated by a client or a patient or a spouse or a child, just see how your body feels. It activates it that that um that's yeah, you can't see me, but that that tightness or whatever shoots through you, that's that's energy. And so, as energy beings, we need to know how to take care of ourselves. So this next um strategy is called energy boundary setting. So beyond saying no with words, we need energetic boundaries. When you're an empath or highly sensitive helper, you are literally absorbing others' emotion, emotions and emotional energy. I talk to this about my student or with my students all the time. They can feel it. Y'all, when you're doing this, it drains your solar plexus chakra, your power center. And that is below your uh well, where your ribcage, where your ribcage is, that's your solar plexus area, the lower part in your upper belly. So I invite you to practice this before client sessions, before patience, before a difficult conversation, visualize a golden shield of light around your body, about arm's length length away. And I want you to set the intention. I hold space with compassion, but I do not carry what is not mine. After interactions, physically brush your hands up and down your arms and legs as if to remove invisible energy dust. This will help to release absorbed energy. I'm not being woo-woo. This is ancient wisdom. Go and research it. Okay, next, the heart chakra recalibration. So many of us burned out helpers, you beautiful, brilliant women, have an overactive heart chakra. Giving, giving, giving, while your root chakra, that safety and self-preservation, now the heart chakra is is in your chest. I mean, that's common sense, I guess. Your root chakra are is from your sitz bones all the way down to your tippy toes. Um, and in the root chakra, that's where your safety and self-preservation is living. Um, and while you're giving, giving, giving, with that overactive heart chakra, your root chakra becomes depleted. And this creates the classic, I'll save everyone but myself pattern. Ooh, does that sound familiar? I'll save everyone but myself pattern. And here's the practice I would invite you to try. Place one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, breathe into your belly first, root chakra, the lower half. Then let that breath rise to your heart. Silently affirm I'm safe, I'm grounded, my cup fills first. Do this for two minutes daily, you know, just do it once, just start trying it. Work your way up to two minutes. You're literally rewiring the energy flow from depletion to sustainable nourishment with this simple act. Okay, and the last one is is throat chakra liberation. And as I work with my clients, of course, I'm always looking at chakras as I'm working with them. They may not know that I'm doing that, but it tells me what energy is going on. And it's amazing to me how nine times out of ten, I'm gonna say 999.9999 times, it's exactly the issue they're talking about. If I in my head, I'm thinking, oh, that's throat chakra stuff. And they start talking about authentic self. Um, it's it's just a trick I use that I really enjoy. But back to throat chakra liberation. Burnout often includes voicelessness, swallowing your truth, staying silent about toxic work cultures, suppressing your needs, your throat chakra becomes congested, which manifests as literal throat tightness, jaw clenching, thyroid issues. Those of us over 40, try this today. Stand with your feet, hip width apart, take a deep breath, and release it with a sound, a sigh, a hum, even a scream into a pillow. Let it be messy and authentic. Then speak one truth out loud that you've been holding back. I'm exhausted, I need help. This isn't sustainable. Speaking it out loud, even to an empty room, begins clearing that energetic block. Again, these are not woo-woo add-ons. These this is ancient wisdom that neuroscience is finally catching up to. That's sustainable transformation. Okay, so y'all have four um regulatory activities you can try right now. The the breathing, the four-count breathing, the energetic boundary setting, heart chakra recalibration, and throat chakra liberation. All right. Your degree proves your brilliance. But brilliance without boundaries leads straight to burnout. You are not weak, you are operating inside systems that reward, overdrive, and punish rest. The good news, you can retrain your mind, retrain your body, and your schedule, and no second degree, no more setting your foot inside a college classroom is required. Your education prepared you to help others. Now it's time to help yourself. Remember, bubble baths can't fix PhD level burnout, but science, boundaries, and a little soul can. I want you to tune in next week where we are talking about self-care is gaslighting for smart women. Huh. Sounds a little controversial, doesn't it? That's what I'm going for. That's what I'm going for. I mean, not controversial, I just want to get your attention and get y'all thinking. So, thank you. Thanks for listening to Soul Joy. Remember, you're not broken, you're overwhelmed, and your best chapter is still coming. If today's conversation resonated with you, share the episode with a colleague, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review so more brilliant women can find us. Ready for personalized support? Book your free 20-minute Soul Joy consultation or take the advanced degree Helper Burnout Assessment. These links are in the show notes. So until next time, I'm Dr. Julie Merriman, reminding you to take care of yourself with the same expertise you give to everyone else.