Why aren't we talking about this: Burn Out

"She's so resilient. She's got it all together."

That's the badge. And for a lot of high-functioning women, it's the thing that almost destroys them.

When you've spent years accepting that label- being the one who copes, who holds it together, who doesn't quit and admitting you're not coping becomes almost impossible. And shameful. You're supposed to be the one who handles everything.

My guest this week knows that feeling intimately. She kept going through a divorce, a seriously ill child, full-time work, and hospital stays. She convinced herself she was fine. And then one day her body made the decision she wouldn't. What makes this even more striking: Sheena has spent 20 years as a medical professional and when it happened to her, there was no real support or understanding of what she'd been through.

Sheena is a rehabilitation physiotherapist, a health coach, and a burnout survivor. In this conversation she explains what burnout actually is not the buzzword version, but the physiological reality of what happens when your stress system breaks down completely. Why you can't sleep it off. Why this is not just about work, work may have contributed, but it is about their full life. Why the people most at risk are the ones who look the most capable. And how to start being honest before it reaches the point of no return.

The word that keeps coming back to me from this conversation: conditioning.

We are conditioned to carry more than we should. We are conditioned not to ask for help. And somewhere along the way, that conditioning became a crisis.

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Why Aren’t We Talking About This? is a series of honest conversations about the stuff we rarely discuss but probably should - big feelings, weird thoughts, life, death, and all the messy, beautiful parts of being human.

Hosted by me, Carly Osman-Holme, on a quest to dodge a full-blown existential crisis. I’ve reached that point in life where I’m asking the big questions: How did I get here? What do I actually want? And why didn’t they teach us any of this in school?