[00:00:00] Vesna: today I'm going to talk about adrenal fatigue in business owners adrenal fatigue, or feeling like you're burnt out, or in functional freeze, or you know that you're in adrenal fatigue, these are all nervous system responses, and they're all on the way to burnout right?
[00:00:53] So there's different stages, and the end stage is feeling completely burnt out, where it's virtually impossible to even work anymore. Adrenal Fatigue So the symptoms look like feeling tired, but wired, right? So anxious and on edge and urgent and under pressure. Feeling that sense of urgency every day as soon as you wake up in the morning.
[00:01:10] There's always something that's kind of urgent, right? Feeling anxious, I've had clients that you know, can't get past 2pm because their anxiety builds up to a certain level. And they just cannot work after that. Or, you're so tired that by the time that you hit 3pm, you can no longer work because you're exhausted.
[00:01:28] You can be irritable with your partner, with your customers, with your kids. You can be not loving your work or your business anymore. So really losing that passion for what you're doing. And, you know, I've had clients that, you know, they're monitoring everything they do in terms of even the time that they spend with kids and watching their sports games.
[00:01:46] They're looking at their clock because they just want to go home and lay down. They just want to go home and go to bed. So that real. Tiredness, but still being able to complete tasks. But obviously when we get to burnout, we're not able to complete our tasks anymore. Now I want to talk about this because it's something that I see so often.
[00:02:03] So, a lot of business owners or women in leadership, they are aware that they are in this position and they want to change it. They know that they can do much better in their work and their personal lives without having this adrenal fatigue, without having these symptoms. But a lot of people are not even aware that they're in this right?
[00:02:21] And so they think it's part of their job, part of the business because they're getting older because they're a mother with kids, whatever it is. But it's all these things that you have on your to do list, it feels like those are the reasons why you feel the way that you do. And it may have absolutely nothing to do with that, right?
[00:02:37] It's really about how our body is able to produce energy respond to stress, and complete everything that we need on an ongoing basis. So, our body, the more we do, the more we can do, right? So the more energy we expend, the more we create. It's just a natural process in our mitochondria, which is the cells that produce our energy.
[00:02:58] The more that we do, the more mitochondria produce energy, right? But if you're getting through the day and you feel exhausted and maybe it doesn't register as exhaustion, maybe it registers, I just can't be bothered. I've got all this work piling up. I've got messages piling up and I just can't be bothered getting to it.
[00:03:15] Right. So maybe there's just not even the mental power or the headspace to deal with that stuff. Right. And so when we are at our best, when we have health and vitality, we can do things. Create more energy, have more energy to do more, right? That's the way it works. It doesn't mean that we do a lot of work and then we're exhausted because we've used up all of our energy, energy is infinite okay? So it's not a finite resource. So if you're in this place, you can keep pushing. I want to share my story because I've been in this place twice and I've learned a lot through this experience and that's why I specialize in this kind of work because I can see how your life can really change from.
[00:03:53] someone who probably loved what they did and was a really happy and energetic person to really feeling just not yourself and exhausted and just wanting a way out and just feeling unhappy and like you've lost yourself in the process, So years ago when I started my first clinical practice, I put everything into it.
[00:04:10] It had to be successful, right? I had no plan B. And I worked very hard and I put a lot of my mental energy into it, right, and it was successful, but I was becoming burnt out, right? I didn't realize that I was getting tired over time. My fatigue was building. I eventually got to the point where I couldn't work a full day without having a nap in the middle of the day.
[00:04:34] I was that tired. I'd have to find a massage table that wasn't being used in the clinic. I would literally Have a nap in the afternoon because I couldn't get through the day. I was stressed about everything, right? I was always worried all the time. If it was a good week in business, if it was a bad week in business, if we had some clients cancel, my mind would catastrophize, right?
[00:04:53] I'd be like, Oh, we're going to go broke. It's going to be the end. Right. And all the little problems that came up were like big problems for me. And I was always carrying my work home with me. I could never switch off. And even at nighttime in bed, I couldn't switch off. Yeah. So I had the fatigue, but I also had this extreme bloating.
[00:05:10] I always felt like I was about six months pregnant, but I wasn't. I did a lot of gut work. I did a lot of gut support because obviously I was doing that in my clinic, but none of the things were working for me. I remember getting a food allergy test or food intolerance test done. And I'll never forget the woman said, I have never seen anyone with this many food intolerances like you have.
[00:05:30] And the only thing that I wasn't reacting to was meat, chicken, fish, right? So the protein sources. And I wasn't really surprised because I had so many gut symptoms. And so we can get like a false reaction to food because our gut is so, there's so much dysfunction in the gut. And so the immune system reacts to all different foods and it looks like a food intolerance, but it's not.
[00:05:51] So, I had this bloating, I was cutting out all these foods from my diet. I gained about 10 kilos, which felt like it was virtually overnight. I tried all the different diets, right. Cut out carbohydrates, exercised more, counted every morsel of food that I had, cut out everything. And it was really stressful, okay.
[00:06:14] It was really stressful. Because I didn't feel well, I didn't have the energy, I had this massive bloating, I gained a lot of weight, I had to buy new clothes, I didn't like the way that I dressed and the way that I felt, I looked at myself in the mirror in the morning and I was like, what has happened, right?
[00:06:26] While being very healthy, right? I was a very healthy person, I always ate well, I took my supplements. At that point, I was taking a fistful of supplements three times a day. two herbal medicine dispensaries in my practice. So I would always make up herbs, I was taking those, and none of them were helping.
[00:06:43] None of them were working to get me back to feeling like myself again.
[00:06:47] And my hormones were a mess, right? So I remember at PMS, it was a disaster. I felt almost depressed at that time, which was very new for me, right? So, I had a lot of hormonal changes going on inside my body. So, I I was doing all the right things. I was taking the right supplements, the right herbs, doing the diet, sleeping, exercising where I could, but I was exhausted and it wasn't helping.
[00:07:07] So I went to see other naturopaths. I went to see a Chinese medicine doctor. I went to see a doctor, a specialist, a psychologist. I meditated. I did really look for other modalities to help me. And again, I stayed stuck in this place for five years. Now, I had gone to see specialist and she had a look at my hormones and I was in my twenties at this point.
[00:07:30] She had a look at my hormones and she just looked at me, she looked at the results and she looked at me and she said, What are you so stressed about? And I was like, completely not wanting to, you know, be in my body in that moment. I was so disconnected because I was just trying to always figure out, you know, how to feel better and how to keep my business running, etc.
[00:07:51] But in that moment when she asked me that, I said, I don't know. looking back, I knew that if she'd asked me one more time, I think I would've cried because it was just sitting below the surface. I didn't want to acknowledge it, like I didn't have the awareness, right?
[00:08:04] I wasn't really connected then. And so she could see in my hormone profile, my cortisol and DHEA was off the charts right? It was like the levels of a postmenopausal woman and I was in my twenties. It's not to say it had impact on my menstrual cycle, but it had a massive impact on how much my body could tolerate stress and how much energy it could generate, and that was.
[00:08:26] A bit of an aha for me, but I'd kind of already known that I was in this adrenal fatigue state, but that was really good, I guess, acknowledgement of, hey, you've got to pull back a bit, right? There's, there's way too much stress going on and That was controlling my hormones. That was preventing my body from healing, right?
[00:08:43] So when we're in this stress state, our body cannot heal. It doesn't matter how much goodness we put into it. When we've got one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake, we're not getting anywhere, right? And the foot on the gas is this constant stress that we're generating. Even though we're putting the good stuff in, we're just not going to move.
[00:09:02] We're just going to burn out, right? We're doing a burnout, like in the car, right? If you've ever driven a manual car, that's how you do a burnout. So that's what we do to our bodies, right? And we don't, unless you know this, unless until you have awareness, you could be doing all the right things and feeling really frustrated as to why you're not moving forward and not feeling better.
[00:09:19] Now, it took me a long time to really see the stresses in my life, right? So initially I was like, okay, so the stress is my business. I was also in a very stressful relationship and a really big aha moment for me was when I left that relationship. My symptoms, like my gut symptoms, that I'd struggled with for five years and I could barely put any food in my mouth without reacting to it, those gut symptoms disappeared from one week to the next, right?
[00:09:43] And so I remember going to my mum's and having like pasta and bread and stuff which I hadn't touched in years and I was able to eat those foods without any reaction and that was like a massive aha for me. my digestive system really shut down due to all the stress that I was experiencing.
[00:09:59] And so of course I did feel like, okay, so in order to get your body into recovery mode, it has to be in healing mode, which means we have to remove all the stress. And so later on, when I felt myself getting burnt out again, I took off to Argentina. I thought business was too stressful, life was too stressful, I needed a break.
[00:10:16] But When I was there, I spent a few months there, I was still exhausted. I was sleeping all the time. I was really anxious all the time as well. And I'd really come to see that, you know, that saying, wherever you go, you take yourself with you well, this was it, right? I could see that the stress wasn't what was happening around me.
[00:10:35] It was how my mind was processing it. It was what was going on in my thinking that was actually generating all the stress for me.
[00:10:41] So when my stress lifted, my symptoms resolved very quickly, right? And so I could see why I had been stuck. I could see why then my clients had been stuck in this place as well. And so the first place that I went to with my clients was, you know, number one thing we need to do is remove all the stress from your life, right?
[00:11:00] Let's have a look at your work. Let's have a look at your relationships. Let's have a look at everything, right? And remove the stress. That wasn't a game changer for my clients. I'll be honest because as I'll explain to you that, doing that kind of work, I wasn't seeing amazing results with clients, but I knew that stress was still a factor.
[00:11:15] And the biggest realizations that I've had, and I want to share with you here is that Stress without some kind of recovery plan affects everything in our life, right? It's going to wear you down it's going to disrupt your hormones. It's going to disrupt your brain chemistry. Your gut health has this full downstream effect on our body, and it's going to wear you down where you won't get the business results or your work results as you once did.
[00:11:40] You'll want to quit. Okay. I went through that process. It'll affect your relationships. It's where it could affect it so much that the relationship ends. It'll affect your time with your children because you're unable to be present and all you want to do is just rest and relax and just kind of recover.
[00:11:56] also deteriorates your health to the point where it can lead to a chronic illness. So stress affects everything that's the one realisation. It's really the number one handbrake that we have, not from experiencing health and vitality, not just that, but really experiencing the results that we want to create in our life, whether it be in our business or through our work or in our community or in our family.
[00:12:18] Stress is the number one thing holding us back here. Number two realization is that stress is not coming from our work. It's not coming from the business, right? It's not coming from anything outside of us. That was a really hard thing for me to see. Or, not hard, but once I saw it, I couldn't really unsee it.
[00:12:36] Because I've had financial stress, right? you know, in the beginning of this online business, I had a lot of financial stress. But there were days where I was so stressed, So stressed at the point of anxiety all day when I look at my bank account, the number in my bank account terrified me, right?
[00:12:51] But then the very next day, I'd be really hopeful and positive about what the future was going to Bring. Yet the number in my bank account was exactly the same. So I could see that stress. Yes, we have challenges in our life that we have to overcome and that we have to find solutions for, but the stress of it, the overwhelm is coming from our thinking
[00:13:12] and that's my third realization was this overthinking, this worrying, this living in our mind, catastrophizing, holding onto. Scenarios and what could be, right? Freaking ourselves out by what could happen is actually what's draining our system. It's wearing us down and it's causing too much stress and it's elevating our stress hormones to the point where it could be all day long.
[00:13:36] And what you may not realize and what I did not realize at the time is that We do really well with a calm, quiet mind, right? We don't do well with a busy mind. We think that if we're busy, we're going to, you know, have everything covered, and we're being more productive. But actually, all we're doing is creating a lot of overthinking, overwhelm, anxiety, and stress.
[00:14:01] And stress is not the best place that we work from, right? The best place that we operate from is from a quiet, calm mind and that means we can be creative, we can have new, innovative ideas. We can, you know, help to make better decisions in our life and in our business. We can be more rational, we can handle stress, we can handle the challenges from completely different perspective.
[00:14:24] So it's kind of that saying, you know, like. we can't solve our problems on the same level of thinking that we created it with. There's something like that's the Einstein quote, I think, which I've definitely got wrong there. But the idea is, is that when we're in that busy mind, we're only going to come up with the same ideas that we've had before.
[00:14:39] But when we have a calm mind, we really have more clarity to see our way through the challenge. Okay? So definitely in the, in this online business when I began, I had a lot of overthinking that kept me stuck for a very long time. Okay. And I couldn't see it at the time, but the value of a quiet mind versus the worry, the overthinking and the mental stress and that we can go full out.
[00:15:03] You can work hard, you can achieve your goals, but you need to have a recovery plan in place right? We can't just go full steam all the time. We need to have habits and recovery plan in place to keep your body in check, keep your mental health in check, So you can do your absolute best in everything that you do.
[00:15:17] So if you're a woman in business or leadership, that's kind of heading down this road, maybe you feel like you're already burnt out or you went to the doctor and he said, Oh, I think you're depressed. And you know that you're not. a woman knows.
[00:15:28] that something's not right that it's not depression, okay? And if it feels like you're already in burnout or adrenal fatigue, then I want to assure you that there is so much that you can do to get back to where you were before, probably even better than what you ever were through a recovery plan.
