Why Your Nervous System Never Leaves Work and Erodes Your Purpose

Your body clocks out of work, but your nervous system never does—and that’s why rest doesn’t work anymore.

If you are exhausted but wired, unable to sleep, overwhelmed by silence, or finding that “time off” does nothing, this episode explains the neuroscience of why your body stays on call after the shift ends.

For professional helpers, work is not something you simply do. Over time, work becomes something your nervous system becomes. Your body does not experience work as a job—it experiences it as responsibility, relational threat, and survival.

As I wrote in In Pursuit of Soul Joy:
“Burnout and compassion fatigue create a state of re-experiencing negative events, increased arousal, avoidance symptoms, and flat-out exhaustion. The crazy thing about all this is that your brain can’t discern between your trauma and your client’s trauma. Your body’s response is the same.” (p. 11)

According to polyvagal theory, your nervous system organizes around perceived safety, not time. So even when the shift ends, the threat does not—and your body does not stand down. This is why you’re exhausted but can’t sleep, why silence feels unsafe, and why relaxing feels impossible.

And after 50, this gets more intense. As estrogen declines, the nervous system loses one of its natural buffers. Stress becomes stickier. Recovery takes longer. Functioning is not the same thing as being regulated.

Western psychology explains what is happening. Chakra psychology explains where it’s happening.

For women in helping professions, chronic work stress most often embeds in:
Root chakra — safety, survival, hypervigilance
Solar plexus — worth, decision fatigue, over-responsibility
Heart chakra — emotional labor, absorbed grief, compassion fatigue

As I state in the book:
“The person of the clinician cannot be separated from the work you do. A lack of self-care impacts you personally and professionally.” (In Pursuit of Soul Joy, p. 23)

This episode gives you language for why your nervous system won’t disengage—and a neuro-somatic practice that starts teaching your body how to actually come home.

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.

Stop trying to "Self-Care" your way out of a physiological crisis.

If bubble baths and deep breathing actually fixed compassion fatigue, you wouldn't still be staring at the ceiling at 2:00 AM. Your burnout isn't an attitude problem, it's a biological pattern. You are stuck in one of four distinct "somatic signatures." Until you identify yours, you are just throwing water on a grease fire.

Take the 2-Minute Quiz

Stop guessing. Find the leak. Fix the circuit.

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

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

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.

Transcript

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In this episode, you'll discover that the same empathy that makes you extraordinary at your job is literally rewiring your brain and causing your burnout. 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. So I wanna invite you to stay until the end for these three reasons. The biological reality, nobody taught you. I'm gonna tell you about that. I'm gonna tell you about heart chakra depletion crisis that we're in, and I'm gonna introduce you to the power matrix practice, which is a visual decision making tool way back from Eisenhower. So. The neuroscience. Let, let's talk a little bit about the neuroscience of why empathy can become a weapon against you. And this is a reality y'all. They did not tell us in school. I think they're getting better at it, but back in the nineties when I came through, we were not warned. So as I was writing. In pursuit of soul joy, or rather as I wrote in Pursuit of soul joy, I say that being a clinician helper, healer educator is very demanding work, and here's the part that should make you feel a bit angry. Burnout and compassion fatigue aren't just common. They are listed as occupational hazards. Built into the system we work in. Thank you, Dr. Charles Figley for introducing that to us. Did you know that in 2021, around 78% of mental health professionals reported being impacted by burnout and compassion fatigue? And this comes from the American Psychological Associations. 2021 COVID-19 practitioner survey, y'all. That's not just one or two clinicians out there struggling, y'all. Those are our colleagues. That's us. That's nearly four out of five of us. And the pandemic, well, it increased demand for our services while our bandwidth decreased. So this is where it gets real if you ask me, and I really invite you to hear this clearly, because it's gonna change how you understand what's happening in your body. The crazy thing about all of this is that your brain, any brain can't discern between your trauma and your client's trauma. Your body's response is the same. A triggered polyvagal system, you know, fight or flight, and you kick into survival mode, dumping all kinds of wicked hormones into your body that you have to metabolize, right? And over time, this relentless cycle devastates your mind, body, and soul. So let me say that again. Your brain. I cannot tell whose trauma this is. So when your patient is describing their panic attack, your amygdala is lighting up like it's happening to you. Research by Tanya Singer and her team at the Max Plank Institute demonstrated that when witness that when we witness. Others suffering are anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. The same brain regions activated during our own pain experiences. They light up in response. When you're recounting or when your clients are recounting their childhood abuse, your nervous system dumps cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream. A 2018 study in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that therapists treating trauma patients showed elevated cortisol levels that persisted even after session ended. Your polyvagal system, that ancient survival system, first mapped by Dr. Stephen Po. Hayes. You know, in, in his polyvagal theory, which most of us therapists and helpers love, um, that polyvagal system screams danger. Even though you're sitting safely in your office chair, this isn't you being weak or giving in. Not at all. This is human neurobiology doing exactly. What it evolved to do protects you from threats and the problem. Your brain genuinely believes their trauma is a threat to you and responds accordingly, and it causes cumulative devastation. One session. Your body can handle that. You metabolize those stress hormones, you go home, you recover. But eight sessions in a day, oh, don't do that to yourself. But say you did 40 sessions in a week, which no, we're not gonna do 40 sessions in a week. 20 sessions in a week. Yeah. That, that's thousands of trauma stories a year for 10, 20, 30 years. Right. Straight. Ah. Sweet soul. That's just not sustainable. That's systemic biological injury. And here's what it steals from you. And I talk about it in my book. In my book actually, I describe the general symptoms of burnout and compass fatigue across three areas. So I look at your mind. And in your mind you, it creates this excessive self concern, loneliness, powerlessness, despair, dread, and lack of joy. You can't remember the last time you felt genuinely excited about anything. Everything becomes risk management and hypervigilance. That's your mind then in your body. Whew. Sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal back to her polyvagal system. The prolonged stress leads to immunosuppression. Hello, my breast cancer, frequent illness and exhaustion. And research validates this. In 2019, a meta-analysis published in psycho neuro, I'm not gonna try to pronounce that, but published in a psycho. Oh, psycho neuroendocrinology. Oh, I slaughtered it. But it was published in this publication and it found that chronic stress leads to dysregulation of the hypoth hypothalmic actuary adrenal axis, resulting in immune suppression and increased inflammatory markers. You are getting every cold, every flu, chronic pain, digestive problems, hormonal, chaos, exhausted even after a full night's sleep, if you can sleep at all. And why might I ask our health professionals, do they make these words so damn hard to pronounce. Just asking because. We could say it easy if we had easy words. Okay, so I'm just, I'm gonna laugh at myself instead of getting upset and we're rolling with it. So, in your soul, here's what happens. I. Rejection is created separation, loss of control, giving up destruction, isolation and emptiness, destruction from horrible decisions you start making because the I don't give a F shows up. That terrifying feeling that you've lost yourself somewhere between intake forms, insurance, paperwork, and caseloads. The devastating isolation of knowing nobody really gets what this work costs you. I don't care if you're a doctor, nurse, educator, therapist. Our work comes at a cost, and again, research is validating this. Integrative research teams have demonstrated that compassion fatigue. Leaves its mark on your beautiful brain and body in 2017 in the Journal Frontiers in Psychology. See, I could say that one used MRI imaging to show that therapists with high compassion, fatigue exhibited reduced gray matter, reduced gray matter volume. Y'all in regions associated with emotional regulation. And empathy. So chronic psychosocial stress doesn't just impair your personal and social functioning. It overwhelms your cognitive skills, your neuro indoctrine in systems. What does that mean in plain English? God, I can't even say English. What does that mean in plain English and words? I can't pronounce. Well, y'all, your memory fails, okay? It just fails, and we've had episodes on this. You show up in your kitchen to get your keys, and you have no reason why you are in your kitchen. Right. I mean, we've all done that and this is part of what's happening from this chronic psychosocial stress. So your memory's gonna fail. Research by Arnon at Yale has shown that chronic stress impairs prefrontal cortex function. The brain region responsible for executive function, working memory, decision making, all the crap we use at work. Your problem solving ability is gonna crash your creativity, girl, it's gonna disappear. Your hormones go flipping haywire, and you can't figure out why you used to love this work and now you fantasize about never seeing another patient again or making another appointment or just sitting on the beach with daiquiris. So why this really matters for us gals over 50. And sweet. So if you're a woman healer, helper, educator over 50, you've got to understand this. Estrogen plays a critical role in stress resilience. It buffers the effects of cortisol. A landmark study in neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews demonstrated that estrogen modulates the stress response By regulating HPA this axis activity, it regulates HPO axis activity and reducing cortisol reactivity when your estrogen drop. Drops during perimenopause and menopause, you lose that protective shield. The same job stress that was hard at 35 is now biologically harder at 55, 65, 75 and beyond. Your body can't metabolize that stress like it used to. And research that's been published. Found that postmenopausal women showed significantly higher cortisol responses to psychosocial stress compared to premenopausal women. This was a 2020 study and it helps me understand why my breast cancer developed at 60. It, it's not aging. It isn't weakness. It's biology and the system is using us up. So let's look at the heart chakra psychology when empathy becomes depletion. I wanna talk about what this does to your heart chakra in, in week two of my book, I explain that this is your fourth chakra. The first. That relates to your emotional self and the focal energy of the heart. Chakra is the middle of the chest. It represents compa, compassion, love, and devotion, forgiveness, openness and trust, and emotional peace and contentment. This is the energy center. That made you choose healing work in the first place. You feel people, you feel their energy. You want to help. Your capacity for compassion is your superpower, but here's what compassion does to this beautiful gift. Your heart chakra becomes a one way valve. Okay. Energy is flowing out to everyone else. Your patients, your colleagues, your students, your family, but nothing flows back in. You're hemorrhaging your life force with every session. Nobody taught you how to seal the leak. In my book, I explain what happens when this shocker becomes underactive from depletion. It can cause you to feel emotionally lost, angry, jealous, lonely, stressed, high blood pressure, experience, heart-related health problems, and behave coldly and distantly. I don't know if that sounds familiar to any of you. I was impacted. Emotional numbness that really got me the distance. You feel, even from people you love research on compassion fatigue by my hero. Figley and others have documented this phenomenon of secondary traumatic stress showing that caregivers develop symptoms nearly identical to PTSD, including that emotional numbing. And social withdrawal. And that's not you becoming a bad person. That's your heart chakra in protective shutdown, trying to survive by closing off the very thing that makes you who you are. And here's the part that's not comfortable to say out loud. You start to resent the very people you're trying to help. You see their name on your schedule, and dread sets in instead of purpose. You hear yourself getting irritated at their lack of progress and you fantasize about cancellations. Y'all, there's no shame in this. There's just awareness and curiosity to be had. This is your heart chakra desperately trying to protect itself. The only way it knows how. By shutting down access, you build walls to survive, but those same walls trap you in isolation. So when your heart chakra is depleted. You'll notice tightness in your chest, that crushing sensation like something sitting on your sternum. Shallow breathing, heart palpitations, upper back pain between your shoulder blades. That's where we store grief of caring other people's pain For far too long. Research on heart rate variability by the HeartMath Institute has shown that chronic stress and emotional depletion significantly reduce HRVA key indicator of nervous system dysregulation and cardiovascular risk. The emotional symptoms, anybody cynicism. Numbness, that terrifying moment when you realize you don't feel much of anything anymore. You used to correct commercials and now you can hear the worst trauma story and feel nothing. That's not strength, that's dissociation, and it's stealing your humanity. So I am not gonna waste your time on another meditation app or breathing exercise. Y'all have got all those. I'm gonna give you a practical tool that helps you reclaim your time and energy so you can actually create some space for healing. So in week six of my book, soul Joy, I introduce something that I know changed my life. When I, oh, when I was in my own burnout, my goodness, I crashed and burned. I call it the power matrix, and I talk about how decision fatigue can paralyze you in this chapter. So I'm gonna explain it here, uh, because you need this, but in the book, I really go in depth, but I write in the book how many decisions. We make a day and y'all as a clinician, teacher, doctor, we're nurse. We're making more than 35,000 decisions daily, and that's probably a low estimate. 35,000. I, I'd hate to think I'd sit there accountable. We're doing treatment plans, crisis assessments, documentation, if we need to report, if we need to, hospitalize, if, oh, whatever it might be. The last one that will get me is, do I really need to answer this text at 9:00 PM And I'm gonna tell you no, but here's what's happening. When I allowed my burnout to incarcerate me, I would become paralyzed in making decisions outside of my clinic. I could not even tolerate being asked where I wanted to go for dinner, let alone something of real importance like, I don't know what makes me happy? This paralysis is well backed by research. Roy Baumeister's work on decision fatigue, which was published in social psychology, demonstrated that making repeated decisions depletes our mental resources. Leading to decision avoidance and impaired self-control. In a 2011 study in P-N-N-P-N-A-S found that judges were significantly more likely to grant parole early in the day versus late in the day after, making hundreds of hard decisions. I don't know y'all. Does that sound familiar? I mean, y'all are brilliant and decisive at work, but when you get home, huh? Do you have a hard time deciding what to eat? How about getting dressed in the morning, or whether to go out or stay in? You tell yourself, I'm gonna figure out I, I'll figure this out tomorrow. You'll set limits. Next month you'll finally take that vacation. Someday. But as I write in my book, this loop has you living in limbo, telling yourself that you'll get to it tomorrow, but y'all tomorrow never comes. So here's what we're gonna do. If you're able grab a piece of paper or bookmark this and come back to it, or better yet. Open up your copy of In Pursuit of Soul Joy and turn to week six where I walk you through this in detail. The power matrix is designed to help you discern, discern, how do I put this, where and how you're investing time.'cause it is an investment. It's the only, it's the richest investment we have. I mean, time is our precious commodity, and where you spend it matters. So this tool is designed to help you get clear on exactly where your time goes. Once you have that data, you can make decisions with clarity. So here's how it works. You're going to map your average week into four. Quadrants, this framework. Well, I adopted it from Eisenhower's work and Stephen Covey, I'm surmised he got it from the Eisenhower stuff because Eisenhower was here first. But lots of people have used this matrix. Uh, but we're using it today to help us validate what we're doing. And this matrix has been validated as well by decades of organizational psychology research. So quadrant one, that's our urgent and important do now stuff. These true emergencies, clear deadlines, real consequences. The patient is in crisis, the report is due tomorrow, the parent teacher conference, you committed to whatever it might be. It's urgent. Uh, it's urgent and important. And then quadrant two is not urgent and important like your schedule. This is strategic work, future planning, relationship building the work that actually moves your life forward, but gets sacrificed. First, things like setting up a therapy appointment for yourself, having a date with your husband, planning your exit strategy, having that conversation with your supervisor about your caseload, and then quadrant three. That's urgent, not important. Delegate everything that feels urgent because someone else made it your problem. A lot of those most meetings, most emails, most quick questions. The committee you joined out of Guilt, the favors someone asked that you said yes to when you really meant No, those go there. Those go into delegation. It's amazing. I have resigned from committees and the world continued to turn. Okay, quadrant four. Not urgent, not important. Delete time thieves. Perfectionism, disguised as professionalism. Saying yes to things that don't serve you. Taking on tasks that could be delegated. Cat videos, although I kinda like my cat videos here. And again, but don't let that doom scrolling happen that might need to go in a quadrant four during certain times of the day. So now is the important part. As I write in my book, you wanna check in with your solar plexus right here and ask what does the energy feel like? Now's the time to trust yourself, to put tasks in the boxes, to delegate and delete. And if you find yourself frozen, run through this. Run this through a superpower model, which is in my book and earlier episodes of this podcast. I walk you through'em. Your solar plexus is your power center. It sits right below your rib cage, so place your hand there right now and notice what you feel. If you find yourself unable to put anything in the delegate or delete column, that clutch in your gut comes up, that resistance, that's your power center screaming for help. That's not anxiety. That's your inner wisdom, begging you to stop betraying yourself with Yes. When you mean hell no. This is what I invite you to understand. If you want life to be different, you have to do things differently. Clean the slate so you can open up time for soul joy. You deserve to delegate. You deserve to delete. You deserve to protect your time and energy like the precious resources. They are not when things are calm, not when you have more energy now, while you still have enough of yourself to reclaim. So let's anchor what. You're discovered today, the biology of empathic liability. Your brain literally cannot distinguish between witnessing trauma and experiencing it. And as I write in my book, your Brain, any brain can't discern between your trauma, your client's trauma, your body's response is gonna be the same A triggered polyvagal system. And after years of this, your mind, body, and soul show devastating symptoms that are occupational hazards, not personal failures. And the heart chakra depletion your energy center of compassion and love. They become a one way valve. Well. It's not they. It's one your heart chakra. It becomes a one-way valve and compassion fatigue, energy hemorrhages out and nothing is flowing back in. And that leads to that numbness. You're feeling that resentment, which is sacred. Listen to your resentment and emotional distance, and you're ashamed to admit it. I know I was. And then we went over the power matrix tool. It's a practical system for mapping your 35,000 daily decisions so you can delegate, delete, and reclaim your time. And this is how you interrupt the paralysis that keeps you stuck in burnout limbo. So sweet soul. If this episode landed in your body like a truth, if you felt that recognition in your dread, that catch in your throat when I described what's happening, I need you to take action right now while that spark is still lit. Grab a copy of my book in Pursuit of Soul Joy, a 12 week guide for overcoming burnout and compassion fatigue, everything we covered today. The neuroscience of why your brain can't tell whose trauma it is. The heart chakra psychology, the power matrix tool, the decision making models, the chakra work, it's all laid out in a 12 week roadmap designed specifically for women healers just like you. This isn't just theory. Not at all, y'all. This is the exact system I used to go from my own burnout crash. Where I nearly lost my marriage and everything I'd built to creating a life and practice that actually lights me up out here on the ranch in my barn office. On page after page, I'm gonna walk you through the practical tools and somatic patterns, the chakra work that's gonna move you from survival to restoration, and you're gonna learn how to balance every chakra. Everyone, you're gonna reclaim empathy as a gift instead of biological liability. So get the book while this resonates. Just it's linked in the show notes below. Um, just drop down there and grab the book. And if you do, shoot me an email and if you have questions or wanna do a one-on-one meeting or study about the book, reach out. I am here for that. Absolutely. I'm here for that. So I'll see you next week, and I'm so damn proud of you for being here. 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.