Why Rest Fails: Understanding Polyvagal Burnout & Compassion Fatigue

Feeling exhausted despite rest? 

This episode explores the root causes of chronic burnout and compassion fatigue among women healers over 50, highlighting why rest alone often can’t help your body recover. 

• Dive into how polyvagal theory and somatic healing shed light on nervous system dysregulation, alongside hormonal changes during perimenopause, that trap you in survival mode. 
• Discover why boundary setting and self-compassion are crucial steps to reclaim your vitality and purpose. 
• We also explore chakra healing, especially focusing on the root chakra, to rebuild your foundation of safety and energy. 
• Finally, engage in a guided somatic practice to help regulate your nervous system and move from burnout to embodied recovery. 

This episode offers nervous-system-informed insights and practical tools to support healing and radiance beyond exhaustion. It’s not about pushing harder but learning to feel safe enough to truly rest. If this resonates, take the Burnout Assessment Quiz to better understand your nervous system's survival patterns and healing needs. 

This episode offers nervous-system-informed insights and practical tools to support your healing journey and radiance beyond exhaustion. This is not about pushing harder. It’s about learning how to feel safe enough to rest.

This podcast is for women healers over 50 navigating burnout and compassion fatigue who want nervous-system-informed insight into exhaustion, purpose loss, polyvagal regulation, chakra healing, and embodied recovery so they can move from survival into clarity, stability, and restoration.

Or send Dr. Julie an email with how you're feeling to get a personalized plan to feel alive and thrive.

Burnout isn’t your failure—it’s the cost of caring too long without support.
In Pursuit of Soul Joy: A 12-Week Guide for Overcoming Burnout and Compassion Fatigue is written for women healers ready to stop surviving and start living again.

👉 Get the Book!

Reach out to Dr. Julie - Tell her how you're feeling to get a personalized plan to feel alive and thrive.

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

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

Transcript

0:02

If you've ever taken time off, slept more, tried vacations, and you're still exhausted, I need you to hear this. That's not burnout. That rest config, that's your nervous system stuck in survival mode. Empowering brilliant women in healthcare over 50 to transform burnout and compassion fatigue into renewed passion. Reigniting your spark to create a life that energizes you every single day. I'm your host, Dr. Jules. Let's get to it. Stay with me until the very end of this podcast because today we are covering three things that could fundamentally change how you understand exhaustion. First, I'm sharing the research backed reason why rest no longer restores your energy and why this exhaustion feels qualitatively different from anything you've experienced in your thirties or forties. This isn't just being tired, it's something entirely different. And second, I'm going to walk you through the specific nervous pattern. The specific nervous system pattern called functional freeze that gives you performing caregiving and showing up while simultaneously keeping you depleted, disconnected, and numb. And third. We are doing a deep grounding root chakra practice together eight to 10 minutes of somatic work that will help you finally get your body to feel safe enough to move from survival into recovery. And I want to start today with a question that might sting just a little. When was the last time you woke up feeling truly rested? Not I got through the day. Rested not I can function rested, but a deep cellular, my body. Feels held by the world. That kind of rest. If you're anything like me, when I was in the middle of my burnout and compassion fatigue crisis, it didn't happen because here's what I hear from women healers. Over 50 again and again. Again, I took a week off and I'm still exhausted. I slept 10 hours and I woke up feeling like I didn't have a minute's sleep at all. I went on vacation, spent the whole time worrying about what I'd have to face when I got back home, and underneath all of this is a terrifying question about. Well, a lot of us are afraid to ask out loud this terrifying question, what if I'm broken? What if I'm never going to feel normal again? And that's where you are right now. If you're lying in bed at 3:00 AM wondering if. This is just how life is going to feel from now on. I need you to hear this sweet soul. You are not broken. You are not failing at rest. Your body is not betraying you. What's happening is that your nervous system has been stuck in survival mode for so long that it has literally forgotten how to shift into recovery. And today we're gonna talk about why that happens and what it means, and most importantly, why you need to do something about it and what you can do about it. So let's take a nice big, deep breath. Let's get comfortable and let's begin in. So why isn't rest working anymore? The question that changes everything, and I wanna start with a story. Last month I was working with a client, I'll call her Sandra. She's a 56-year-old. Who's been a hospice nurse for 28 years. Incredible at her job. Her patients love her. Her colleagues rely on her, and she came to me because she had taken two weeks off her first real vacation y'all in three years. She went to the beach, she slept in every day, read novels, did yoga in the sand, all the things the self-care articles tell you me, us to do. And when she came back to work, she felt exactly as exhausted as when she'd left, maybe even more exhausted, because now. She had the added weight of, did I do everything right and I still feel terrible? What's wrong with me? Can you relate? Has that ever happened for you? Because here's what no one are. Very few people tell us about chronic exhaustion in healthcare. Helpers, healers, word. This is chronic exhaustion That is an epidemic. Rest is not the same as recovery, and until you understand the difference, you're going to keep doing what Sandra did. Taking time off and getting your hopes up, and then feeling devastated when nothing changes. So there's a science behind this, the Science of Survival states, and let me explain what's actually happening in your beautiful body. When you're exposed to chronic stress, and by chronic I mean years or decades of emotional labor, moral injury, hyper vigilance, being responsible for life and death decisions, witnessing suffering with inadequate resources to help absorbing other people's pain while suppressing your own your nervous system. It shifts into what researchers call a persistent threat state. Now, this is backed by extensive research from people like Steven Po Hayes and his polyvagal theory, Bessel, VanDerKolk's work on trauma and the body, dozens of studies on professional caregivers and compassion fatigue. Here's what happens, your automatic. Our autonomic nervous system, the part that controls things like your heart rate, your digestion, sleep, stress response. It has essentially two modes. It has social engagement and rest. That's our parasympathetic. I'm safe. I can relax and it has survival. That's our sympathetic I need to fight. Flee or freeze. And in a healthy, regulated nervous system, you move fluidly between these two states. Stress happens, you respond. Stress passes, you recover. But y'all, when stress becomes chronic, and think about the work we do. Those of us in the helper and healer roles, when stress becomes chronic and inescapable, and that's exactly what happens in our modern healthcare helper system, your nervous system gets stuck. It stops shifting into recovery mode, even when the external stressor is removed. Isn't that remarkable? Well, it's tragic. Your body forgets how to downshift and why this hits women over 50 harder. For women over 50. This problem gets exponentially worse because of hormonal changes. Research published in journals like Psycho Neuro, neuro Ology. I'm laughing at me. If you've ever been my student, you know, I, I suck at pronouncing things, but anyway, this journal shows that estrogen plays a critical role in stress resilience. It literally helps buffer. The effects of cortisol, your primary stor stress hormone, and when your estrogen levels drop during perimenopause and menopause, yeah, we lose that protective layer, that protective buffer. The same stressor that you could have handled at 35 may not be as easy to handle now. Because then you could metabolize that hormone and recover, and now that same stressor at 56, 65, it's now hit you harder and lasts longer. Your cortisol stays elevated, your inflammation markers go up, your ability to shift into rest. Digest mode decreases so when you take time off, your body might physically be resting. You're lying on a beach, you're sleeping in, but your nervous system is still running the same threat detection program. It was running at work. You are not tired because you're doing too much. You're tired because your system no longer believes it's safe to stop. That's the exhaustion paradox, and this creates a really sad state for us. You're so tired, you can barely function, but you can't actually rest. You lie in bed, you're exhausted, but your mind is racing. You take a day off, but you spend it worrying about what you're not doing or you go on vacation, but you can't stop checking your work. Email. Guilty, guilty, guilty. I've done that lots. Your body, my friend, is screaming for rest, but it won't let itself receive it. Because deep in your primitive brain and the parts that govern survive survival. Rest feels dangerous. Your system has learned that letting your guard down means something bad is gonna happen. Someone will need you. You won't be available, something will go wrong and it'll be your fault. And so it keeps you vigilant, alert, and ready even when there's nothing to be ready for. And this. Is the invisible load. It's the part that most people don't understand about healthcare and helper and healer work, especially for us gals. The exhaustion isn't from the physical tasks. It's not just the long shifts or the heavy client load, or even the physical demands of those of you that are actually doing hands-on patient care. It's the invisible load. It's the emotional labor of managing everyone else's. Feelings while you're suppressing your own feelings, being the one everyone comes to when things are going wrong, carrying the weight of outcomes, you can't always control. Absorbing trauma while being expected to stay professional. How? Being the strong one, the reliable one. The one who never takes breaks. And for women over 50, you've been carrying this invisible load for decades. Your nervous system has been on high alert Yeah, for so long that it doesn't know any other way to be. When your body keeps Score, good old Bessel VanDerKolk's book. The body keeps score. It's a good one. I'm sure most of you have read it. It's probably worth a second read, third, fourth. I know I, give it to my clients to read, as we start working together because it is so important to understand how your body is keeping score. Because even when your conscious mind says, I'm on vacation, I should relax, your body is still keeping score. It's tracking every unprocessed trauma, every minute you swallowed your grief to care for someone else. Every time you overrode your need to go pee or to eat or rest, because a patient, a client needed you, every moral injury where you knew what the right thing to do was, but the system would not let you. Your body has been keeping score and the score is it's not safe to let your guard down, so why we might ask, be told to get more rest is a bit gaslighting. When someone tells you to take time off or you just need to practice better self-care, it's not just unhelpful, it's really not. It's actually a form of gaslighting because it implies that if rest isn't working, you are doing something wrong. You are. Not trying hard enough, right? You're not relaxing correctly, but the truth is your body isn't refusing to rest because you're doing something wrong. Your body is refusing to rest because it doesn't feel safe. And you cannot think your way into feeling safe. You cannot willpower your way into nervous system regulation. You cannot self care your way out of physiological state. That was created by years of systemic trauma. What you need isn't more rest. What you need is safety real. Embodied cellular safety, and I know that might feel a bit overwhelming, like, well, great. Good news, Jules. Rest doesn't work. What am I supposed to do? Well stay with me because understanding the problem is the first step in solving it and the next step. I need you to understand is this specific nervous system pattern that I see in almost every woman healer over 50 that I work with, and it's called Functional Freeze. And once I name it, you're going to see it everywhere. So living in functional freeze. And this is the state that as far as I know, no one to very few people are even bothering to talk about it. Most people know about our fight or flight, right? And that's the sympathetic nervous systems response to threat, adrenaline spike, heart racing, ready to run or fight. And more people are starting to learn about freeze. The fawning. And that is a shutdown response. When the fight or flight isn't possible. It's the deer in the headlights, the collapse, but there's a state in between that's much more insidious. Especially for high functioning women in caregiving roles, and I invite you gorgeous soul to look in the mirror. It's called functional freeze, and it's where you live, what front, what functional freeze looks like. You are not actively panicking. You are not collapsed on the floor, unable to move from the outside. It's pretty tricky. You look just fine. You show up, you perform. You meet all of your responsibilities, but on the inside, you're flat, emotionally numb, going through the motions. You feel heavy, like you're moving through concrete and foggy. That brain fog, that difficulty concentrating. You can't think clearly, and then that disconnection. That again, we're gonna be jumping deep into you feel disconnected from your body, from relationships, from your joy, that sacred purpose that brought you into the caregiving role to begin with. You can function, hence your functional, but you're not really alive. You are surviving. So functional freeze develops when your nervous system makes a very specific calculation. Escape is not possible. Fight would make things worse. Complete shutdown would mean I can't take care of the people depending on me. So the safest option. It is to conserve energy. Stay small, keep performing. Don't feel too much. And for women, healers, this makes perfect sense. You can't fight the HE healthcare system. You can't fight the education system. It's too big, it's too entrenched. You can't flee. You need a job. You need the income. The benefits, you can't fully collapse. People are depending on you. You gotta keep your job. So your nervous system finds a middle ground functional freeze. You do what needs to be done, but you disconnect from yourself to do it. The exhausted but wired phenomenon, and this is why you feel simultaneous, exhausted, and wired. I have evenings, I'm so damn tired. I know that by the time I get to that bedroom, my eyes are not gonna cooperate. I have to do some shocker work to get things balanced before I get into bed. And I'm trying to give you these skills in every one of these podcasts. But let's talk a hot minute about exhausted, because functional freeze is a massive energy drain. You're running your entire system in low power mode at all times. Everything takes more effort. Then you're wired because you're still in a threat state. You are still on alert. You can't fully let go. Your sweet body is trying to rest, but it's also trying to stay ready, and those two states are incompatible. So you end up in this horrible middle ground where you're too tired to engage with life. But also to activate it to truly rest ha the number, the the numbness is protecting you. So this is one of the most confusing parts of functional freeze. It's the emotional numbness. If you read my book in Pursuit of Soul Joy, I was stuck there for years, four years, and it robs you of life. You used to care so deeply. I mean, that's why we get into helping roles, right? But now you feel nothing or you feel very little. You look at things that used to bring you joy and you feel flat. You're with people you love, and you feel distant. You know, you should. Bring some. A good old Alice in the shoulds feel grateful, excited, moved, but you don't. And that numbness, it's terrifying because it makes you wonder, have I lost myself? Am I becoming cold? Is this who I am now? Listen to me carefully, the numbness. Is not you losing your capacity to feel the numbness? Is your nervous system protecting you from feeling too much when you are in a chronic threat state, feeling deeply is dangerous. Grief, rage, despair. Those are big emotions that require a lot of nervous system resources to process. And if your system is already maxed out, just trying to survive it, can't afford those big emotion emotions, so it numbs you, not because you're broken, but because it's trying to keep you safe. And that has become your reality. Our reality, I'm not blaming all of us who are helpers because of a responsibility trap. And here's the truly insidious part for women healers, we can't afford to collapse. Men, and I love men. My husband is my favorite human on earth, but men, well, and my boys, my family. But anyway, men in functional freeze might be able to withdraw, disengage, check out. Society gives them just a little more permission to do that. But as women, especially a woman over 50, in a caregiving role. Because we're raised in a special time, right? You are expected to keep showing up. You're expected to keep caring, keep performing emotional labor, and keep holding everyone else together. So functional freeze becomes your only option. It's the state that lets you keep going when you've got nothing left to give. You're like a phone running on 1% battery in low power mode. All non-essential functions shut down so you can make it through the day you're living on autopilot, and that's what happens in functional freeze. Life becomes autopilot. You wake up, you go to work, you do the task, you go home, you scroll on your phone, you go to bed, rinse and repeat. You do it again the next day, and somewhere deep inside there's a part of you that's screaming. This isn't living. This is just existing, but you don't have the energy to do anything about it. So you keep going and the exhaustion deepens. And why this matters. Why I'm spending time on this y'all. I need you to understand you haven't failed resilience. Your body has adapted to survive functional freeze. Is an intelligent response to an impossible situation. Your nervous system looked at the demands you're facing, the resources you have access to, and the consequences of not showing up, and it made the most adaptive choice available. But here's what your nervous system doesn't know. Just because functional freeze helped you survive doesn't mean it's helping you thrive. And at some point, survival stops being enough, and at some point you need more than just making it through the day. Girl. You need to feel alive again. That joyous, alive feeling. And that's where we turn to the body, to the energetic system that holds all of this. Because what I'm about to share with you changed everything for me and for hundreds of women I've worked with. And we're going to go to the root chakra and why? It's the key to moving from survival to safety. So y'all the foundation of safety, that is your root chakra. And just as a refresher, what is the root chakra? It's the yogic tradition. In the yogic tradition, the root chakra is the first of seven energy centers in the body. It sits at the base of your spine, at your pelvic floor. And it governs everything related to safety, survival, grounding stability, your right to exist and take up space, your connection to the earth, to your body, to your physical reality. And the root chakra asks one frontal fundamental question, am I safe? And when the answer is no. Or when your nervous system isn't sure, everything else in your system shuts down to conserve resources for survival. So let's explore that depleted root chakra, shall we? For women, healers and helpers over 50 living in functional freeze. The root chakra is almost always depleted. Here's what a depleted root chakra feels like. Chronic fatigue. That reset doesn't fix. This was me. This could be you. This can be fixed, but rest isn't gonna do it. There's sleep disruption. Either you can't fall asleep, you can't stay asleep, or sleep isn't restorative, feeling ungrounded, spacey like you're floating outside your body. Anxiety that masquerades as responsibilities, difficulty, truly relaxing even when you have permission to a constant sense of urgency, even when nothing urgent is happening. And feeling unsafe in your own body. Does any of that sound familiar? Let's look at why your root chakra gets depleted when you are in chronic survival mode. This is naturally going to happen, and I want you to think about it. If your body believes. It's constantly under th under a threat. It can't invest energy in long-term thriving. It has to prioritize immediate survival, so resources that would normally go to cellular repair, immune function, digestion, creative energy, sexual vitality, deep rest. All of that gets redirected to survival functions, and over time, over years, over decades, your root chakra, girl, it's hollowed out. You are running on empty, but you can't stop running. It's quite the paradox. Huh? So let's specifically dive into the root chakra in women over 50. So y'all, for US gals over 50. Over 60, over 70, over 80. The root chakra takes an additional hit Because of how our culture treats aging women, our culture tells us we're less valuable, we're less visible, we're less desirable. We are taking up too much space, and we should step aside for younger people. On a subtle, energetic level, that messaging attacks your root chakra because the root chakra is about your right to be here, to take up space and to matter. When the world tells you that you don't matter. Huh as much anymore that your wisdom, your experience, your presence is less valuable. Your root chakra contracts and contraction feels like, well, maybe I should need less. Maybe I should be quieter. Maybe I'm asking too much. Maybe I'm asking for too much. That's root chakra depletion speaking. So your healthy root chakra. Let's talk about what that's gonna feel like, because I want you to imagine for a moment, even if you haven't felt this in years. What a healthy, vibrant root chakra feels like. You wake up feeling rested, held by the earth, stable. You move through your day with a sense of groundedness, your present in your body. When challenges arise, you feel your feet on the floor, you know you can handle it. You trust that you have the right to rest when you need it. To eat when you're hungry, and to say no without guilt. You feel safe in your own skin. And that's what we're moving toward the truth. Your root chakra knows, girl, I need you to understand this. Your body isn't asking for more rest. Your body is asking for safety, and safety isn't just a concept. It's not just knowing intellectually that you're safe. Safety is a felt sense. In the body. It's your nervous system, downshifting from threat to trust, and the pathway to that safety runs through your root chakra. And here's why. Bottom up matters'cause your root cha or is that bottom comes up. You cannot think your way into feeling safe. You cannot tell your body it's okay to relax now and have it listen, because the root chakra and the nervous system it's connected to doesn't speak the language of logic. It speaks the language of sensation, breath, and presence. That's why traditional self-care advice doesn't work. You know, just relax. Think positive, be grateful. And don't get me wrong, all things that we wanna, that are good to have in our nervous system, but we have to have more until we get regulated. That could, that's not gonna help, because y'all, that's top down, that's brain to body. Trauma, exhaustion, nervous system dysregulation, that's all stored bottom up. That's that's body to brain. See the difference? Brain to body. Body to brain. So the healing has to happen Bottom up too. You have to teach your body, not your brain. That it's safe, and that's exactly what we are about to do. So here's where we get practical. I'm going to guide you through a somatic practice specifically designed to activate and nourish your root chak. This is not a quick fix. This is a practice, but if you do it with me right now and then return to it regularly. It's gonna change things. Now I know you might be busy and you have to listen through it this time, but bookmark this podcast, come back and do this for yourself. You've got to get that root chakra balanced and alive so you can feel balanced and alive. So here's the somatic practice. It's called teaching the body. It's safe. So setting up for this practice first when you're able to, if you're driving, don't do it. If you're on the treadmill, don't do it. But when you're able to find a place where you can sit or stand without being disturbed for the next 10 minutes, you are driving, you can do a modified version of this, but ideally, I want you to be still turn off notifications, close the door if you can, and let yourself have this time. The practice works best if you can place both your feet on the ground and ideally barefoot, but shoes are okay if that's where you have to do it. And if you're sitting, sit toward the front of your chair so your feet can rest flat on the floor, hip width apart. And if you're standing, stand with your feet. Hip width apart, knee soft, not locked. So I'm gonna give you a minute to settle in. Okay. Step one, grounding through your feet. I'd like you to take two minutes to do this. We will not take that long on the podcast, but just when you set this up for yourself, close your eyes, soften your gaze to the floor in front of you, either or. Bring all of your awareness to your feet. Feel the weight of your body traveling down through your legs, into your feet, into the floor. If you're barefoot, feel the texture of the ground. Cool, warm, soft, hard. If you're in shoes, feel where your feet Make contact with the inside of your shoes. And now I want you to press your feet gently into the floor. Not hard, just a gentle, intentional, pressing feel. The floor pressing back to support you. This is the earth. It's been here for billions of years. It's solid. It's not going anywhere, and it's. Holding you right now. If thoughts come up and they will just notice them and bring your attention back to your feet. Your feet, the floor, the Earth supporting you. Good. Now, keep that awareness in your feet, but expand it up through your legs, through your leg bones, your femur, your tibia, your fibula. Strong, stable, literally holding you upright right in step two. Connecting your root. Now bring your awareness to the base of your spine, your tailbone, your pelvic floor. This is where your root chakra lives. Place one hand on your lower belly, just below your navel place your other hand on your lower back. Right where your tailbone is, you're literally holding your root chakra between your two hands. Take a slow inhale through your nose, let your belly expand and let that belly expand into your front hand, and you count 1, 2, 3, 4. Exhale slowly through your mouth, letting your belly soften. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The exhale is longer than the inhale and this signal safety to your nervous system. So repeat that breath three more times. Good. Now, just keep breathing naturally. Don't control it. Just notice the rise and fall of your belly. Feel it under your hand, and as you breathe, I want you to visualize a red glowing light at the base of your spine red, like earth, like clay, like roots. See it glowing gently with each breath. This is your root chakra. Foundation, you're right to be here. Step three, the safety affirmation. Now we're going to teach your body, not your brain, your body, that it's safe. And we do this through something called a somatic affirmation. It's not just saying words. It's saying words while you feel. Into your body. So keep your hands where they are, the front and tummy and back. Keep breathing, keep feeling your feet on the ground. And I want you to say out loud if you can, silently, if you must. In this moment, I am safe. Notice what happens in your body when you say that. Does your jaw clench? Does your body resist? And that's okay. That's information. And I want you to say it again. In this moment, I am safe. You might not believe it yet. Your brain might be arguing, but your body is listening. And again, in this moment, I am safe. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your hands on your body in this moment. I am safe. Notice if anything softens your shoulders, your jaw, your breath. In this moment. I am safe. One more time with a full breath. Inhale. Exhale. In this moment, I am safe. Noticing is important. So we're gonna move to step four. Noticing what shifts. I want you to just be still. Hands in, pla still in place on your holding your root chakra, feet on the ground. Notice what's happening in your body right now. Is your breath deeper? Is your jaw softer? Do your shoulders feel lower? Does your belly feel more relaxed? Don't judge what whatever you notice. There's no right or wrong. We just approach this with curiousness. You're just a witness. This root shock or repair, this is teaching your nervous system that safety is possible. It might feel subtle, and that's okay. Subtle shifts accumulate. And if you didn't feel anything, that's okay too. Your system. It might need more time, more repetitions, more proof that it's actually safe to let go. This is a practice. You're not trying to achieve anything. You're building a relationship with your body. Step five is sealing the practice. When you're ready, you take one final deep breath. As you exhale, you imagine that red light at your root chakra growing brighter, growing stronger, more stable. You're planting roots, you're reclaiming your foundation, you're teaching your body that it's safe to be here. So gently release your hands and wiggle your fingers and toes. And if you have your eyes closed, open'em whenever. Ready? And welcome back to your body. So what just happened? What you just did was profound. Even if it felt simple. You practiced downregulating, your nervous system through a bottom up technique grounding through your feet, connecting. Your body through touch, extending your exhale to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, using a somatic affirmation to create a felt sense of safety. This is not just relaxation, this is training. You're teaching your body a new pattern, a new possibility. Repetition matters, and here is the truth. One 10 minute practice isn't going to undo decades of nervous system dysregulation, but consistent practice will if you do this practice daily for even just five minutes. In the morning before bed, your nervous system will start to learn that safety is possible. It's neuroscience. You're building new neural pathway. You're shutting down the ones that aren't serving you anymore and building a new 1 67 days. Remember to retrain your brain, those neuro pathways of hypervigilance, y'all, they will start to quiet. They will. And new pathways of groundedness presence and trust will strengthen. So what you might notice over the next few days and weeks, if you choose to keep practicing what you might notice, slightly deeper sleep, less urgency in your body, more ability to be present, reduced anxiety. More access to your emotions, and yes, that might mean crying. That might be anger, it might be whatever. It's good. That means you're thawing a sense of coming back into your body after years of living in your head. These are all signs that your root chakra is beginning to restore. Okay, breathe all that in. So here's what you learned today. Let's bring this all together. Today you learned that chronic exhaustion that doesn't respond to rest. It is not a personal failing. It's a nervous system dysregulation. You learned that rest is not the same as recovery. Your body can be physically resting while your nervous system is still in a threat state, and when that happens, you don't actually restore. You learned about functional freeze that state. Where you're still performing and showing up, but you're numb and heavy, disconnected and exhausted, and you learn that this isn't a weakness, it's an intelligent adaptation to an impossible situation. You learned that for women, over 50 hormonal changes amplify stress, making the same demands feel harder and harder to metabolize. And girl, you learn that your root chakra, your energetic foundation of safety and stability is where all of this lands. And when your root chakra is depleted, your body cannot shift from survival to recovery. And most importantly, you learned a practice, a real embodied somatic practice. To begin teaching your body that it's safe. Safety precedes energy, safety precedes rest. Safety precedes healing. So here's your path forward. As I said, you cannot think your way out of this exhaustion. You cannot willpower your way into recovery, but you can practice your way into a new nervous system. State one breath at a time. One moment of grounding at a time. One affirmation of safety at a time. Your body has been in survival mode for so long. It doesn't trust that it's safe to let go, but with practice, with patience, with fierce self compassion, it will learn. And when your nervous system finally believes it's safe to rest, that's when the real restoration begins. So things to look forward to. Okay. If this episode resonated with you, if you felt seen, if you felt that, oh my God, yes moment. I need you to do two things. First, practice what we did today. Don't just listen and move on. Actually do the grounding practice. Put your feet on the floor, your hands on your body, and say the words, do it in the morning. Do it tomorrow evening. Do it before bed. Do it in your car before the shift. Build the practice. Your nervous system, girl. It's waiting for you. And second, please go to the show notes and take the shadow healer, architect. Shadow healer archetype quiz because understanding how your nervous system learned to survive and what it actually needs to heal, that's the next level of this work. The quiz is gonna show you your specific pattern, your specific adaptation, and it will give you the roadmap to move forward. I want you to move from survival to thriving. So listen, I know you're tired. I am too. Um, I know you've been tired for so long that you can barely remember what it feels like to not be tired. And I know it can feel hopeless when rest doesn't work anymore, but you are not broken. Your body is brilliant. It has kept you alive through impossible circumstances, and now it's ready to do more than just survive. Your body wants to feel safe, it wants to rest, it wants to restore. It's just waiting for you, and it wants to show you that it's allowed. This is Dr. Jules. This is Compassion Fatigue Cure From Burnout to Radiance for Women Healers Over 50. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for practicing with me today, and thank you for choosing your self. If this episode hit home, don't just nod and move on. Give yourself what you actually need. Tap the show notes right now, and girl, if you know another woman healer who's running on empty, please share this episode, y'all. We rise together.