Written by Megan Winkler, author of Breaking Up with Burnout and host of The Glow Up Revolution Podcast. Megan works with perimenopausal women who are ready to identify burnout patterns, reclaim their energy, and reconnect with themselves through a blend of trauma-informed coaching, astrology, Human Design, and energy healing.
I’d done everything “right.” I knew how to meditate (and did it on the reg), I journaled, went to therapy, and I still burned out. On the outside, my business was thriving and about to hit that coveted $100k a year mark. On the inside, though, I was equal parts frustrated and exhausted. If I was doing all the right things, then why did everything feel so…wrong?
The Myth We Bought Into
The wellness industry, as we know it, exploded in the 1980s. If you have visions of Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta making suggestive hip thrusts at each other in an aerobics class, you get the vibe.
So much of that vibe was also about conflating mindset with medicine. As if, no matter what was going on with your body, energy, or emotions, your mindset could get you out of it.
In a world of Tony Robbinses and Rachel Hollises, the airwaves, social media feeds, bookshelves, and websites all around us seem to claim that positive thinking will get you through any overwhelm or hardship.
And when we believe that all it takes is a mindset shift to get us out of an overwhelmed funk, we start believing there’s something wrong with us when it doesn’t work.
If you’re struggling with any level of burnout, it’s not your fault. You’re very human, and you’re in a society that values mechanized productivity, emotionless responses, and a “let them” attitude that doesn’t solve the core problem.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Let’s explore what’s happening in your body before we talk about the solution.
What Chronic Stress Actually Does to Your Body
Ok, I promise not to get too scientific here, but we need to talk about the nervous system for a bit. Chronic stress can lead to a condition in which the body’s own stress-regulating system stops responding properly.
This then leads to more inflammation and heightened stress, even when there’s not a lion chasing you on the savannah. Doctors can even see the effects of long-term stress on lab results once it’s gone on long enough (International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2025). Hopefully, it should go without saying to see your medical provider if you think your hormones are off or you’re having physical symptoms, but just in case you need the reminder, there you go.
So how can this show up in your day-to-day life? Some of the symptoms of having an overloaded nervous system (aka dysregulated nervous system) include:
- Sleep disturbances – insomnia or even sleeping too much
- Physical pain
- Headaches
- Mood fluctuations
- Hormone imbalances
And if you’re a “woman of a certain age,” your body is less forgiving of chronic stress, even if you’ve managed it for years. In fact, a study of 228 burnout patients, in which 69% of participants were women with an average age of 43, found that 98% reported at least one somatic (of the body) symptom and 45% reported six or more (BMC Psychiatry, 2014).
Burnout isn’t just mental or as simple as a mindset issue. It lives in the body too!
Why Mindset Work Alone Isn’t Enough
Mindset work, gratitude practices, journaling…all have their value. I would never dissuade anyone from practicing these (Or seeking therapy, obviously! Therapy is amazing!).
Mindset work lives in your head, but burnout affects your mind and body. While mindset work is great for helping you shift how you think about stress, it doesn’t undo what stress has already done to your nervous system. It’s valuable, but not the full solution.
We want to address burnout and overwhelm at the somatic and energetic levels, too. That means integrating practices that work with what’s happening in the body as well as the mind.
When you learn to complete the stress cycle through somatic, body-based practices, you open up to a whole new level of healing. If you’re able to layer in energetic tools, even better!
What Doing the Work Actually Looks Like
Real recovery from burnout, the kind that shows up in your bloodwork, sleep patterns, and conversations, tends to require a few things working together:
- Addressing the nervous system directly by completing the stress cycle
- Identifying and clearing the energetic and emotional patterns that keep the body at a low-grade stage of threat
- Taking into account the complexity of women’s physiology, especially if you’re in your 40s or beyond
I’ve found the biggest predictor of a woman being able to recover from burnout is if she meets her body where it is, not where she wishes it was. Starting from this grounded, realistic, and ultimately compassionate foundation, you can begin to recover from burnout without feeling like you’re doing something wrong or relying solely on mindset hacks to recover.
Burnout is Not a Personal Failure
You aren’t broken. However, you’ve been marketed solutions that don’t cover all the bases and, in some cases, don’t serve your unique challenges or biology. If you’ve felt like you’ve done everything right and things still feel off, it’s not you. Burnout can be incredibly complex, and since it develops over a long period of time, it also takes time to recover from it. The good news is you don’t have to figure it all out today. You only need to stop blaming yourself for solutions that only go halfway.
Explore Megan Winkler’s Work.
