Healing Compassion Fatigue Starts on a Tuesday; Not on a Vacation and Here's Why

If you've been telling yourself that burnout will lift once you finally get a break, once the vacation happens, once the workload eases, once you earn the rest you keep postponing, this episode is going to stop you in your tracks. Because the healing your nervous system is waiting for isn't on the other side of a milestone. It's available right now, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the actual texture of the life you're already living. 

In This Episode You'll Discover

Why the Default Mode Network, identified by Dr. Marcus Raichle at Washington University, is hijacked by threat-detection during chronic burnout, and why that neurologically impairs your ability to experience ordinary moments as worth living

How Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's prediction-science research at Northeastern University explains why a burned-out brain categorizes ordinary days as meaningless or dangerous and how to interrupt that pattern

What Dr. Bruce McEwen's decades of allostatic load research at Rockefeller University reveals about the way chronic stress literally reshapes the brain's capacity for self-reflection and meaning-making

 How Dr. Roberta Brinton's research on hormonal transitions at the University of Arizona intersects with burnout in women healers over 50  and why this demographic needs a distinctly different recovery approach

The step-by-step Ordinary Day Reclamation Protocol, a solar plexus–based somatic intervention using mechanoreceptor-vagal signaling to restore your Default Mode Network and reclaim your sense of authorship over your own life

Somewhere along the way, the healthcare system handed you a ladder and told you your worth lived at the top. So you climbed. You gave everything to your patients, your clients, your colleagues — and you ran your ordinary days on autopilot while you waited for the reward that never quite came.

That is not a character flaw. That is compassion fatigue operating exactly as designed, stealing not just your energy, but your ability to be present to the life that is already happening. What Dr. Julie calls the Floating Head of Competence: all professional function, zero embodied living.

This episode is the neuroscience-backed reclamation. The Ordinary Day Reclamation Protocol, anchored in the solar plexus chakra and the science of mechanoreceptor-vagal signaling, gives your nervous system a way back to the only moment healing can actually happen: right now.

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.

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Stop guessing. Find the leak. Fix the circuit.

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

This podcast is for women healers over 50 navigating burnout and compassion fatigue who want nervous-system-informed insight into exhaustion, cognitive fog, identity loss, purpose erosion, 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 why healing your burnout has almost nothing to do with your next vacation and everything to do with rediscovering your purpose on an ordinary Tuesday. 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. Okay, so I am so glad y'all are here with me. And I just want to take a moment. If you are a returning listener, thank you so much for supporting this community. And if you are new here, thank you so much for being here. Please, everyone, remember to hit subscribe. It makes a huge difference. So here are three reasons to stay with me today through this entire episode. One, you're gonna understand why your nervous system is literally exhausted from waiting for you to begin, and what neuroscience says about the cost of waiting. Two, you're gonna learn how your solar plexus chakra is directly connected to the part of your brain responsible for who you think you are on an ordinary Tuesday, and why that connection is the missing key to your recovery. And then three, I'm gonna walk you through a brand new somatic practice I call the Ordinary Day Reclamation Protocol. It's a body-based intervention designed specifically for us gals who are healers and helpers and caregivers over 50 who have been running on fumes while waiting for a finish line that never seems to come. Anybody? I mean, I look for that a lot. So, y'all, today I want to talk to you about something that I think is one of the most overlooked causes of burnout in women healers. And it's not what you think. It's the not the uh long hours that we all put in, it's not the impossible work load that we all carry, it's not even the compassion you pour out for everyone else before you even pour it into yourself, if you ever pour it into yourself. Y'all, it's this you have been living for milestones, and your ordinary days have been dying of neglect. At the end of this episode, I'm going to leave you with three truths that will change the way you spend your ordinary days permanently. So stay with me. Okay, let me paint you a picture that I know is going to land. You became a helper, a healer, a caregiver because something inside you, something deep and true and good, wanted to matter, wanted to help, wanted to show up in the world with purpose. And somewhere along the way, that deep knowing got hijacked. The the systems we work in told us that our worth lives only in our productivity. How much work you do, your billing hours, your outcomes. The system has handed us a ladder, and we've been told to climb. And so we climbed, right, y'all? We climbed and we climbed and we climbed hard at the expense of everything that felt satisfying. Ah, that's not even the right word. That at the expense of everything else in our life. I'll just leave it there. But here's what nobody told you. Most of your life is not happening at the top of that ladder. Most of your life is happening in the spaces between the rungs, the Tuesday afternoons, the drive home, the cup of coffee you drank, standing over the sink because there wasn't time to sit down. Dr. Ira Bedzo, a philosopher and ethicist at New York Medical College, describes what he calls the flourishing chat, a coaching conversation where he asked one simple but devastating question. What, my friend, does your ordinary Tuesday look like? And every time, every single time, people fell silent. Because we have been so trained to think about our destination that we have completely forgotten to think about the journey. And I'm not talking about a motivational poster, I'm talking about a neurological reality. And this is exactly what compassion fatigue does to women healers, helpers, caregivers over 50. It doesn't just steal your energy, it steals your ordinary days. Now take a breath and think about it. It makes you a ghost in your own life, present in body, absent in experience. And I'm gonna take back it's rare that I meet a woman I'm gonna work with, coach or therapy, who's a healer over 50, and she's embodied. It's she's all up here. It's what I call the floating head of competence, and it makes an experience feel you you don't even realize you're in that experience. We're all professional, we're functional, but zero embodied living. So let's bring in some science, because y'all know I like to do that, uh, because it's not just philosophy, it's neurobiology that we're looking at here. And I really, as I have spent 30 years in the mental health profession, I think we've done a disservice. And I'm a professor, I'm I've got a PhD in training others into uh the counseling field. And I say this with love, but I say it with honesty. And any therapist listening, I hope that um I'd be interested how this falls with you. But uh, we've always based mental health on psychology, but it's more than that. It's physiology, it's biology, it's it's all those things together. And I try to do that in this podcast and the work I do with ladies, but but as we look at the neurobiology of this, we're gonna talk to bringing in our guest, Dr. Michael Ratchell. Um, he is a neuroscientist, we've talked to him before, air quotes, and he's at the Washington University. And he had a landmark discovery that was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He identified, and we've talked about this before, it's just a reminder, um, what he's called the default mode network. Now, we've talked about the DMN quite a bit, and if y'all remember, it's the brain self-referential system, and it's a neural network that activates specifically during rest, during self-reflection, during the ordinary in-between moments of your day. And here's what Dr. Rackle found the DMN is not idle, it is working, it is constructing your sense of self, integrating your past experiences with your sense of future possibility, and this is critical, it is deciding, it is deciding what your life means. So when you are chronically burned out, the DMN is hijacked by threat detection. Instead of weaving together this coherent, meaningful self, it's scanning for danger, for the next demand, for what you didn't finish, for what you might have fucked up, right? What do I screw up? I'm that's me. I'm terrified I'm gonna mess something up. Yeah, what might go wrong? So we're gonna couple that with a good friend of ours that visits the podcast frequently, air quotes, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. And again, she's a neuroscientist at Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made. How fascinating is that? She describes the brain as what, y'all say it with me? Prediction machine. That's right. Your brain is constantly constructing reality based on what it expects. And when your ordinary days have been repeatedly categorized as survival mode, your brain begins to predict that ordinary moments are threatening or worse, meaningless. And now we're going to layer that in with another good friend of the podcast, another visit, air quotes from Dr. Bruce McEwen, and he's at Rockefeller University, but he documented through decades of research the chronic allostatic load that y'all, we gals have ignored this. Nobody told me about allostatic load and to be cautious about how I take care of myself. Back when I was in grad school in the early 90s, nobody told us. I hadn't told my grad students about it until recently, because hell I didn't know. It's important as we're planning our careers and our lives to know how this chronic overload is going to impact us. And in short, this allostatic load is the accumulated physiological cost of ongoing stress. So I'm not editing that out. That was a call. I did not know my phone was on. And you might say that added to my allostatic load, but I'm not going to stress. We're all friends here. But so this ongoing cost of the stress literally reshapes the architecture of the brain's prefrontal cortex. It's a very important part of our brain. Because it's the region responsible for self-reflection, meaning making, all the decisions that we make. Can we talk about decision fatigue, adding to that allostatic load? Girl. So in plain language, burnout, compassion fatigue doesn't just exhaust you. It's neurologically, it neurologically impairs you. Impairs your ability to experience your own ordinary days as worth living. Big deep breath there. Let's get grounded just a little bit. Here's where it gets personal, especially for us gals over 50 who are in the helping professions. Let's talk to Dr. Roberta Brinton, air quotes. She's at the University of Arizona. She has informed the research of the podcast before. And she's done the extensive research on neurological transition, especially at the time of menopause and peramenopause, which is where we're all living. The hormonal shifts of this life stage, specifically, y'all, the decline of our estrogen, it directly impacts our hippocampus. And that is our brain's memory and context center. And it impacts the DMN's ability to construct a coherent narrative of self. So we have a beautiful woman who has spent 25 plus years burning her candle at both ends for others whose DMN has been hijacked by allostatic load, whose brain is simultaneously navigating a hormonal transition that affects her self-narrative. And we tell her, you just need a vacation. So much more is going on. And we wonder why we wake up on a normal Tuesday and wonder who the hell we are and whose life this is. And I just don't feel like myself anymore. There's a lot of reason behind that and research behind that, which is why I want to tell you about that on the podcast. I want to normalize it for you and give you some solutions. So telling someone they need to take a vacation when all this other stuff is going on is not a solution. It is an insult dressed up as advice. It's basically gaslighting. What she needs, what you need, is to reclaim your ordinary days at the level of your nervous system. And that is exactly what we are going to do right here, right now. Okay, before we hop there, I want to take you um into another something I have for you. Because if this is landing for you anywhere at all, if you're recognizing yourself in this picture of living for milestones while ordinary days just go unchecked, unlived, if you will, you've got to check out a brand new program. It's in the beta phase as we speak about this. This is June 2026, launching August 2026, if um on my website. It's where you can check it out. But it's basically a 28-day nervous system healing, if you will. Check that out. If you're interested in the beta, please hit me up with an email. I need ladies to get into this program. We cannot continue to rob our DMN and our frontal cortex be compromised while we're not living our ordinary days. Okay, to the somatic practice. I call this the ordinary day reclamation protocol. And I want to introduce you to uh the chakra you know well if you listen to the program, but we're gonna work on the your solar plexus chakra today. And this is located in the center of your abdomen, between your navel and your sternum. And in chakra psychology, not woo-woo, this is science to help understand your polyvagal system. If I'm a neuroscientist, I'm talking to you about polyvagal. If I'm in chakra psychology, I'm talking to you about chakra centers. Same thing. I'm running that vagus nerve runs through those chakras. Same thing, different terminology. Ancient wisdom, Western uh wisdom. Okay, but in chakra psychology, the seat of your personal power is located in that solar um plexus. That's your identity, your will, it's going to govern your sense of agency, your felt experience of being someone who acts in the world on purpose, not just in response to demands. And when that chakra is depleted, y'all chronic burnout, chronic compassion fatigue depletes it. You better bet it depletes it. You lose your sense of authorship over your own life. You feel like you're being lived rather than living, like you're a character in someone else's story, but you really don't even know how to tap into your feelings. Now, here is where the neuroscience really gets beautiful because the solar plexus region is home to the enteric nervous system, what Dr. Michael Kershan at Columbia University calls the second brain. And it's a network of 500 million neurons lining your gut. That's why gut health is so important. The enteric nervous system communicates directly with that vagus nerve. How cool is that? And that's what Dr. Porhays, in his polyvagal theory, which we know well on the show, identifies as the primary regulator of your social engagement system. Y'all, that's your capacity for safety, connection, and meaning. And here is the key. The eneric nervous system is rich in mechanoreceptors, sensory receptors that respond to physical pressure, movement, and touch. These mechanoreceptors send signals directly up the vagus nerve to the brain's interceptive processing centers, including the regions that interfere with the default mode network. So what am I saying here? Jills, what the hell are you saying? Well, in other words, gentle, intentional physical pressure over your solar plexus region activates those mechanoreceptors that signal safety through the vagus nerve to the very brain network responsible for constructing your sense of self and your experience of everyday meaning. This is the science behind the ordinary day reclamation protocol. I'm not just sitting in here doing crazy. Well, I am sitting in here doing crazy things, but there's research behind all the activities that I designed for y'all. And I developed this practice specifically for us women, healers, helpers, and caregivers over 50 whose DMN has been co-opted by threat, whose solar plexus chakra has been chronically depleted by years of self-abandonment in service of others. So here's how we do it. You can do it right now. If you're driving, pull over to a beautiful little park and do it, or do this after work. But please do this for you. It's one thing to listen to these things, but it's another to actually embody the knowledge. That's what this does for us. So I want you to sit comfortably with both feet on the floor, hands, both hands stacked on top of one another directly over your solar plexus. That's and it's just this soft space right above your navel, below your rib cage, and apply gentle but deliberate pressure, not uncomfortable, but felt. How many of us even notice that? If your mind immediately says, Girl, that's nothing. Perfect. That's exactly. Exactly the neural pattern we're looking for, and I want you to notice it and I'll and stay with it anyway. Just that one moment. If that felt interesting, I want you to come back to it. But right now it's just that one moment. You're holding on to that, you're staying with that. The solar plexus breath. Now slowly breathe into the space beneath your hands, and imagine you are breathing directly into your solar plexus. As you inhale, feel into your hands, feel as they raise slightly, and as you exhale, feel them fall. With each breath cycle, silently say, This moment belongs to me. Just feel what that does to your nervous system. Girl, it's not this achievement, it's not this outcome, it is this simple, beautiful moment. Do five breath cycles with that. And step four, the reclamation statement. This is where we do the neural repattering. Still holding your solar plexus, complete this sentence out loud. Yes, it needs to be out loud because your auditory cortex, your vagal pathways, both process spoken language in ways that silent cannot replicate. That's why speaking is so important. Auditory cortex, vagal pathways. Two things need to hear the spoken word. And here's what you need to say out loud, hand still right here. My life is happening right now, not later, right now. And this ordinary moment is the actual substance of my living. Say it like you mean it. Say it even if you don't mean it yet. Repetition is how the brain rewires. We're building new neural pathways. You got to give yourself 60 to 90 days, but you've got to start. Hell, if you don't start, it's not going to happen. You've got to start. And then step five, the somatic signature. Here is how you anchor this into your body so you can access it anywhere. Press your solar plexus one more time, both hands, deliberate pressure, and take one more breath. Then release your hands. Shake them gently at your sides. Shake, shake, shake. That shaking is so good to help release and get that nervous cycle into completion. Okay, this is your somatic anchor for the ordinary day reclamation protocol. The next time you're in a Tuesday moment, commuting, cooking, charting, waiting, press one hand to your solar plexus and breathe. Your nervous system's going to remember. It's important. Okay. I promised you three truths at the start of this episode, and here they are. Truth one, your burnout is not a character flaw. It's what happens when a brilliant, capable woman is trained by a system to live entirely in milestones and starve the ordinary. The system has failed us. Your ordinary days did not. Truth two, your nervous system cannot heal the future. It can only heal right here, right now, in the present moment, in the actual texture. The actual texture of the day you're living, the ordinary day you're living. Recovery is not a destination. It is a practice that happens on a Tuesday. The life you've been waiting to live is the one you're already living. The work of healing is not to achieve something new, it is to come home to what is already here and to finally let it be enough. So, sweet soul, thank you so much for spending part of your ordinary day with me. If this episode stirred something in you, if you recognize the floating head of confidence, if you realized you've been a ghost in your own Tuesday, I want you to do one thing. Check out my new program, the 28-day nervous system transition. The name is going to evolve a little bit. I'm still working on just the right name, but I designed it for you. This is the work, week by week, ordinary day by ordinary day. Until next time, I'm Dr. Jules, and this is your reminder. Your ordinary Tuesday is not the warm-up, it is the whole beautiful, messy, sacred thing. Okay, ciao sweet soul, give yourself what you actually need. Tap the show notes right now to discover your somatic signature. Because if bubble baths and breathing exercises could fix this, you'd already be back to your radiant self. You need the right map. Let's find out which of the four somatic signatures your body is using. Girl, this isn't homework. This is a homecoming.