Silent Lunch Breaks and Compassion Fatigue: How Your Voice Can Fight Burnout and Reignite Your Purpose

Do you eat lunch alone, scroll your phone, sit in silence on the drive home, and feel too tired to talk—even though you ache for connection?

That isn’t rest.

That’s your nervous system in shutdown—and it’s making your compassion fatigue worse. In this episode, discover how the polyvagal theory explains your nervous system's shutdown response to silence and why your voice is a powerful somatic healing tool that can reignite your purpose and resilience. 

In this episode of Compassion Fatigue Cure: From Burnout to Radiance for Women Healers Over 50, I’m naming what no one in healthcare wants to admit:
Silence is not self-care. It’s a trauma response.

I break down the neuroscience of why texting instead of talking, scrolling instead of speaking, and isolating instead of co-regulating is training your nervous system for deeper exhaustion, emotional numbness, and purpose loss.

We explore how your voice—not breathwork, not mindfulness apps—is one of the most underused tools for nervous-system repair, resilience, and burnout recovery.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why your vagus nerve requires voice-to-voice connection to release stress and counter compassion fatigue
• How healthcare systems condition women healers over 50 into silence, efficiency, and self-abandonment
• Why “being too tired to talk” is actually a symptom of nervous system shutdown—not your personality
• A throat-chakra–based practice to reclaim your voice as medicine when grounding doesn’t work
• How speaking truth out loud restores clarity, connection, and purpose

This is not about being social.
This is about survival, sustainability, and reclaiming your life force.

If this episode cracked something open in you—and you know you can’t keep white-knuckling your way through exhaustion—I invite you into my live 7-Day Burnout to Radiance Intensive, starting February 2, 2026.

For seven days, we work directly with your nervous system, identity erosion, voice suppression, and compassion fatigue patterns—live, embodied, and supported.

👉 Save your spot now.
This is not information. This is intervention.

We rise together.

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.

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.

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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 eat lunch alone, scrolling on your phone instead of calling a friend, your nervous system thinks you are in solitary confinement and it's making your compassion fatigue worse. 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. Sweet soul. Stay with me today because I'm going to give you three things that will fundamentally change how you understand your exhaustion and isolation. One, I'm going to give you the neuroscience behind why texting your colleagues instead of actually talking to them is training your nervous system for disconnection. Not support. Two, you're going to learn why the silence in your life like eating alone, driving home and quiet, avoiding phone calls, isn't rest. And three, I'm going to show you, or rather give you a throat chakra practice that has nothing to do with breathing or grounding. This is about reclaiming your voice as a tool for co-regulation. When you're too exhausted to even know what you need, I need to tell you something. I witnessed last week that y'all, it broke my heart. I had a lunch meeting at a hospital and I was in the hospital cafeteria. And you know, it's really a fluorescent lit purgatory where our lovely healthcare workers, such as yourself and other healers go to pretend they're taking a break. And I watched this sweetener sit down at a table all by herself. She pulled out her phone and she scrolled as she ate her sad little desk salad. She never looked up, she never spoke to anyone. And here's what really killed me. There were three other nurses, same color scrubs. Sitting at nearby tables, also alone, also scrolling. Also silent four women all experiencing the same exhaustion, the same moral injury, the same soul crushing workload within 10 feet of each other, and not one word was spoken between them. Yeah. This isn't antisocial behavior by any means. This is what workplace induced traumatic dissociation looks like. This is your nervous system and protective shutdown convincing you that isolation is safer than connection. I know this happens. At universities, I know this happens at counseling clinics. It's not just at the hospital. It happens. Well, I could go on. It's not just at the hospital. But one thing, we are working in systems that love this. Y'all an isolated worker, she's not gonna organize. They don't demand better. They don't support each other. They just quietly burnout and leave. Today we're talking about something that might seem trivial on the surface. This is quote marks why you text instead of call. Why you scroll instead of speak. Why you eat lunch alone instead of with colleagues. It's not trivial. This is about how digital communication and enforced silence are literally rewiring your nervous system. For compassion fatigue and burnout and how your voice, the actual sound that comes out of your mouth, is one of the most powerful tools you have for healing. So I came across an article by Gina Baraka about how we should call people instead of texting. And while she was writing about friendships, every word landed in my body as a truth about healthcare workers, healers, those of us who are in this field about us and burnout, because y'all, we are living in a profession that demands constant communication. About your patients, about your clients, about your students, while systematically destroying our capacity for the kind of communication that would actually sustain us real messy voice to voice, human communication. So let's dig into the neuroscience of voice and co-regulation. I found this quite fascinating as I was researching this. I wanna tell you something about your nervous system. That is it. It just changes everything. Your voice is directly connected to your vagus nerve. That massive cranial nerve that runs from your brainstem down through your body, and that vagus nerve controls something called your social engagement system. Now this goes back to my favorite theory polyvagal by Dr. Po Hayes. And it explains why texting your work wife, I'm so tired, doesn't give the same relief as hearing her voice say, huh girl, me too, me too. And here's how this works. When your nervous system feels safe, your ventral vagal pathway is activated. This is the part of your nervous system responsible for connection, calm, and what PO Hayes calls social engagement. And when this system, this amazing system is online, your facial muscles are mobile, your voice has melody and range, and you can make eye contact and your body is open and receptive. But when your nervous system detects threat and y'all chronic workplace stress absolutely registers as a threat. You are gonna move into sympathetic activation as we talk about a lot, that fight or flight, or that dorsal vagal shutdown, which we call freeze collapse Fawn. And here's what matters for us that work as healers and helpers and caregivers. When you're in shutdown, your voice flattens. Your face becomes a mask, and you stop reaching out. You isolate. Does that sound familiar? Sure does. To me, Dr. Baraka writes how we've become more intimately attached to our devices. Where is that these devices than to our friends, but for women, healers over 50 dealing with compassion fatigue and or burnout. Y'all, it's worse. See, we've been systematically trained by this system that we work in to keep your voice even and professional, never too emotional to communicate efficiently through charts and texts, never wasting time on a real conversation. And to solve problems independently, don't you go burdening a colleague and to keep moving. You know, never lingering for actual human connection, don't you go wasting time. Your nervous system has learned. Connection is dangerous. Mm. Efficiency is survival, and silence is safety. I had the most wonderful administrative assistant that I still love with all my heart, giving Theresa a shout out,, at a university I worked at and she was so good at human connection, she would come in my office and sit down and make time to connect and talk. How healthy is that? I really appreciate it. But I'm gonna move on to the next piece of research, which is from Dr. Sue Carter, and this is on oxytocin. And y'all know that's the love hormone, your bonding hormone. And this research shows that social connection, particularly voice to voice communication, which Theresa was so good at, triggers oxytocin release. And oxytocin doesn't just make you feel warm and fuzzy. It literally counteracts cortisol. And that's the stress hormone that floods our system when we're in compassion fatigue and burnout. And here's the devastating part. Oxytocin requires real time social engagement to be released reading a text from your friend. Even if it's saying something like, Ooh, thinking of you does not do it. Seeing an encouraging emoji isn't gonna do it. Even listening to a voicemail later doesn't do it in the same manner. Your nervous system needs live synchronous voice to voice co-regulation, and the systems that we work in have been engineered to take that right out of our workday. Your chart, you chart. Instead of having team huddles, you text instead of calling you eat alone scrolling. You're scrolling the news about other people's disasters instead of sitting with a colleague who understands your disaster. Then we wonder why we feel so isolated, so disconnected, so beyond the reach of the very profession that's supposed to support and care about connection. There was another study from the University of Chicago and it found that loneliness creates the same physiological stress response as pain. As pain, the same inflammatory markers are present, the same wear and tear on your body. They call this allostatic load, the cumulative burden of chronic stress on your system. And for those of us that are healers and helpers and caregivers in the system, the allostatic load isn't just from the work itself. It's from doing that work in enforced isolation without the co-regulation that would make it sustainable. So see, you're not burning out because you're weak. Oh sweet. So what has nothing to do with that? You're burning out. Well, really,'cause you're good at what you do. You're burning out because you're trying to regulate a dysregulated system all by yourself. And human nervous systems were never designed to work that way. So I wanna tell you why this matters specifically for US gals over 50, and even if you're not 50, there's plenty of yummy stuff here for you. But specifically for those of us over 50, we came into healthcare, into the system, we're in the helping Healing system wherever you might be in a very different era. This was an era, let's say, when nurses had longer breaks, when doctors had time to actually talk to patients. When counselors weren't pushed against all the regulations that insurance hold us to. There was slack in the system for human moments. You remember what it felt like to sit in a break room and debrief a hard case with colleagues. You remember lingering after work to check in on someone who seemed off. You remember phone calls to friends that lasted hours, and somewhere along the way, all of that disappeared. Electronic health records turn patient care into data entry, efficiency metrics turned healing into production. And if you're in a education setting, all the. All the mandated testing and all the pressures about, uh oh, I could go on and on. But the systems have become far more electric than they were once upon a time. And I don't mean electric just plugging into a wall, although that's part of it. I mean, all the shocking and it's just, it's not as, nurturing. As it once was, we learned to communicate in the fragmented, asynchronous way. The system demanded once all, everything got plugged into the wall, if you will. I mean, I remember the good old days. I was just talking to a client about this earlier today,, where I had a pen and a piece of paper and I wrote my note out. And that morning I went and talked to the gals that did all the filing to retrieve the files I needed for the day so I could review'em before I saw my client. And after I saw my client, I wrote by hand, you know, uh, in the chart. And then at the end of the day, I took it back. To the lovely lady that would go file it. And we visited and we talked about the day. I mean, you know, now you just open your computer and heck, if, if you're on like, on um, headway, they have, um, AI notes you can do, you know, you just plug in a few things and poof, you have a note. It's just so different and I think we've lost some art of being with others. But in the article I read about by Dr. Baraka, um, she describes watching families at restaurants, and I know y'all have been there and seen this, where everyone on is on a device and they're saying nothing. I mean, you know, they're sitting at this expensive restaurant, they scrolling on their phones, no one's talking to each other. You just as well have stayed home. I mean, oh, it's just, it has. It is just so different. Here's what she calls it, unnerving. But friend, think about this. This is your lunch break. This is your drive home. This is your evening after a long day of work, silence, scrolling, isolation masked as decompression, and your nervous system. Uh. It is screaming that something is profoundly wrong because here's what the research on compassionate fatigue and burnout shows us. The antidote to secondary traumatic stress isn't more self-care apps or meditation podcasts. It's connection. It's having colleagues who witness your struggle and reflect back. Yeah, this is hard. You are not imagining it, but you can't get that witnessing through a text thread, y'all. You just can't. You can't get co-regulation through an emoji reaction. Your nervous system needs to hear another human voice saying your sacred name, sighing with recognition, laughing at the absurdity, crying at the injustice, and the systems we're in know this, by the way. They know that connected workers are harder to exploit. Workers who talk to each other start noticing patterns. They start saying, wait a hot minute. This isn't normal, this isn't sustainable, this isn't okay. So the system is very much okay with the fragments of you keeping you isolated, benefits them. This keeps you communicating. Through screens instead of speaking truth and power or speaking truth to each other, and women over 50, bear the brunt of this because you carry an additional burden. You were taught that being difficult or needy or too emotional was professional death. Think about the time we came up. It was a different game. We were the first in a lot of these leadership areas. Uh, it was a different game 30 years ago in the workforce. We had to overdo it just to be able to do it to you, learn to be the easy one. The one who doesn't complain, the one who can handle anything. And that self silencing, it's stored in your throat chakra as an energetic scar tissue, and it makes it harder and harder for you to speak up, for you to ask for help to say, I need you to hear me. Right now. Research on women in the helping profession, especially in leadership shows that assertive women. Are penalized more harshly than assertive men. Hence, we learned this pretty early. You learned that your voice was a liability, so we stopped using it. You text instead of calling because calling feels to vulnerable. And too demanding you scroll instead of reaching out because reaching out feels too needy or too much. You sit in silence because speaking your truth feels too dangerous and your nervous system, how? That brilliant adaptation machine that it is, goes into deeper and deeper shutdown to protect you from the pain of your own isolation. And here's what I want you to understand. Using your voice actually speaking out loud. Calling instead of texting, having real conversations instead of emoji exchanges is not a luxury and it's not old fashioned and it's not inconvenient. It's radical nervous system care, and it's an act of resistance against systems that profits. From your isolation, Dr. Baraka writes that your voice is singular. When you miss a person, you don't. I'm gonna do that again. Your voice is singular. When you miss a person, don't you miss not only hearing from them, but also hearing. Their voice. I'm thinking of my daddy, who I lost in 2014. I was thinking the other day how much I miss his voice. He would call me ladybug and that, um, no one else in the world's gonna call me Ladybug. Um, but I do miss his voice. I mean, think about that. When's the last time someone heard your voice? Not your professional voice, your real voice. The one that cracks when you're overwhelmed, the one that speeds up when you're excited, the one that goes quiet when you're holding back tears. Your voice carries information, your words can't, inflection, hesitation, warmth, exhaustion. When you text, I'm fine. Nobody hears the brittleness behind it. When you speak, I'm fine with that specific tone. Your real friends hear it immediately and they're gonna say, no, you're not. What's up? That's co-regulation. That's nervous system support. That's a, humans are supposed to help each other survive hard things, and you're not getting. It threw your thumbs on a screen. A study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that voice-based communication creates significantly stronger feelings of connection than text-based communication, even when the content is identical. Why? Because your nervous system is reading the vocal cues, sati timing, the millisecond pauses that signal. I'm listening to you, and you're not gonna get that from a thumbs up or heart emoji, or even perfectly crafted text that took you 10 minutes to word correctly. But I know some of y'all, y'all are probably thinking, all right, Jules, good to hear it, but I'm too f-ing, tired to talk on the phone. Texting is all I have energy for. Been there thought that, but sweetness. I get it. I do. I'm not dismissing your exhaustion. I've lived it. Read my book. But here's what I need you to hear, that exhaustion. That's not your baseline, that's your nervous system in shutdown, telling you that connection requires more energy than you have, and the only way out of that shutdown is through co-regulation, which requires voice, which requires vulnerability, which requires doing the thing that feels too hard. Have you ever, ever. Dreaded so much going to a meeting that you had or, or maybe a lunch. Maybe you have something planned and you're like, oh, I'm so tired. But you get there and you get so energized and so co-regulate, you leave there feeling so much better. You just have to get over that hump. The goodness is on the other side. Now, this is the trap of compassion, fatigue and burnout. The very thing you need most. Connection is the thing your nervous system has made the hardest to access. Okay? So with all that yummy information. I'm gonna take y'all into a practice I put together for you. I call it voices medicine. And, um, it, it's, it's practical. I like to get practical with y'all. So I promise you this throat chakra practice and it's not breathing and grounding'cause we've done that plenty. And just listen to another podcast if you need, I mean. One of these podcasts, compassion Fatigue, care Cure Podcast, if you need that. But today we're gonna do something a little different. This is about reclaiming your voice as a tool for self-regulation and connection. Um, so this is the Resonance Reset. So first. If you're driving, and if you can't do this, bookmark this and come back to it. If you're cleaning, um, try to do this. But I really invite you to take two or three minutes for yourself here. But I want you to place one hand on your throat and one hand on your heart, and I'm going to ask you to make sounds. Not words, just sounds, and I promise, I guarantee it's gonna feel awkward and it's gonna make you feel goofy. Do it anyway. So first sound one, the hum of recognition. So that's where you close your mouth and hum. Just a simple hum. Feel the vibration in your throat and in your chest and in your skull. Mm oh, it's might make you sneeze too. This is your nervous system recognizing itself. This is your self soothing through voice. I want you to hum for 10 seconds. Let the sound vibrate through your hand on your throat. Mm. I won't I, I'm gonna spare y'all from me doing it the whole time, but do that for yourself and then. Sound two, the sigh of release. Open your mouth and let out a long audible ha like you're releasing a day's worth of held breath. Let it be messy. Let it be loud, and do it three times. Do one longer than the last. And this allows your dorsal vagal system. To shift. This is your body remembering it's safe to exhale something you can do anytime, anywhere, three times. I mean, feel just me doing that as I'm talking to y'all. I felt my shoulders go, oh, I need that. And then sound three. The name call, and this is the interesting one. I want you to say your own name out loud, not your full name, the name your mama gave you, not your professional title. Say it like you're calling yourself home. Say it like you're. I don't know someone who loves you. Checking to see if you're okay. Julie, are you there? So say your name three times and listen to your own voice calling to yourself. Now, this is radical, my friend. I know it because how often do you actually. Hear your name spoken with care, not just Dr. Jules or Nurse Betty or Dr. Sam, just you. Your amygdala needs to hear it. You need to hear it. Your whole body is gonna respond to this, but this is your throat chakra opening and then sound four, the truth test. Now I want you to practice saying something true out loud. Um, I'm gonna start with, I'm exhausted. Say it out loud, hear your voice, say it. Then I want you to say, I need help. Say it out loud, hear what that sounds like, and then I want you to say, I matter. Say it out loud. Notice if your voice cracks or catches. Again, this is your throat chakra opening. This is your voice. Remembering it is allowed to tell the truth. And then sound five, the connection practice. I want you to imagine calling someone you trust. Don't actually call them right now. Just imagine it and practice what you would say. Hey, I just needed to hear your voice. Say it out loud like you're practicing. Hear how vulnerable that sounds. Hear how human your nervous system is listening to you and it's listening to you. Practice connection, a practice that is going. To make it less terrifying when you actually do it. And I think terrifying is kind of a strong word. I'm gonna pull that back. I don't think we're scared at all. I think we're tired. And the thought of one more thing is just like, ugh. But I just need you to push through that for yourself. Um, I'm thinking my mom, my 84-year-old mom called me yesterday. My son, my oldest son's daughter, my daughter-in-law had sent um, us all pictures for Christmas and they arrived yesterday. And, um, mama was just in tears and she needed to connect because she was so, she just thought everyone looked so beautiful and they'd groan so much. And you know what a beautiful connection I had there yesterday. Um. We used to pick the phone up more. I think these little electronic monsters, uh, it's way too damn easy to text. I just wanna challenge y'all this week at least once, make a call instead of a text. And if you do shoot me an email, I'm gonna know how that felt. It's important. Okay, so homework before our next episode. Like I just told you, I want you to make a phone call, but I don't. I want it to be where I thought I was gonna text, but hell no. I'm gonna pick up my phone and make the call. It can be a colleague, it be a friend, one of your babies. Call someone in practice using your voice for co-regulation.'cause that's exactly what mom did yesterday. She needed to co-regulate. Ah, we need co-regulation, not just information. Your nervous system is gonna resist. It's gonna tell you, girl texting is so much easier, less intrusive. I can just get it done. It's more considerate and that's bullshit. That shut down talking. That's the adapt adaptation that's keeping you isolated. Your voice is Mattis Sun. Use it. Okay. Let's bring this home sweet soul. Today you learned three critical things about voice connection and, uh, the secondary traumatic stressors to include burnout. First, texting instead of talking is training your nervous system for disconnection. Your beautiful vagus nerve needs voice to voice co-regulation to release your oxytocin and counteract that cortisol flood in your system. Second, the systems we work in have systematically silenced us. We've been trained to communicate efficiently, work independently, and stay quiet. That's creating isolation for us. We have choices. Third, your voice is radical medicine. How fun is that? Every time you speak, instead of te um, texting or calling, instead of emailing, you use your actual voice to express your actual truth. You're doing nervous system repair. I mean, I think that's exciting. Here's what I want you to remember. You're not too tired for connection. You're too tired without it. Okay? Y'all, if this resonated with you, if you felt that spark of recognition that, my God, this is what's happening to me. I want you to do something while that energy is still lit. Please don't let this moment pass. I wrote In Pursuit of Soul Joy, a 12 week guide for overcoming burnout and compassion fatigue for women exactly like you women who've given everything to care for others and lost themselves in the process. And this isn't another book telling you to breathe deeper or think more positively. It's a roadmap back, forgetting your body. And your joy and yourself back inside, you're gonna find somatic practices, shopper work, all the stuff I use with my clients. I take you through information. I give you activities to do and things to follow up because it's not, it's not a sit on your ass book. It's a book that requires you to honestly do the work. It's available right now on Amazon. The link is in the show notes or over on my website, and I really invite you to treat yourself to that. Okay? Have a beautiful day. 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.