Vesna: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. In this episode, I'm gonna talk about how to overcome midlife burnout or exhaustion. Okay, so midlife or middle aged in the research that I'm looking at, they consider that between 35 and all the way up to 66. That's middle aged, right? So it's quite a big age bracket. Now with the [00:01:00] Gen Xs, right, Gen Xs are more in that middle aged right now. And there's a lot of drivers that lead to Exhaustion, burnout, fatigue, a lot of hormonal complaints in this stage, right?
And so often we put it down to just perimenopause, there is a lot more going on. women even postmenopause are still struggling, And the reason for this, okay, Gen X, we're looking at some behavioural patterns here. Gen X are known as the latchkey kids. I didn't know this until the other day. So the least parented children, right, would walk themselves home from school.
This is before there was childcare and things like that. And so they became more self reliant, able to regulate their emotions better, had more skills in that way. But some of the traits for the Gen Xs are, they are people pleasersthey are perfectionists. They have self sacrificing behaviors, which I'm going to talk about.
Gen Xs were sold, or in this middle age we're all still sold, hey, we've got to have it all, right? the home life and the career life. And so [00:02:00] women have been burning themselves up for many, many years trying to have it all, which meant doing it all. And the reality is for women, there is gender pay gaps, there's inequality, and there's career interruptions along the way that create a lot more stress and a lot more burden.
And also as women enter this age, they are still, you know, parenting their children and taking care of their aging parents, which normally have, quite often, health complaints. So their schedule is full. and it means high levels of stress and high levels of fatigue down the road. Now, there are hormonal changes that happen here.
There are issues with the mitochondria, which leads to fatigue, chronic tiredness, brain fog and burnout. And I talked about that in episode 42, so you can have a listen to all about the mitochondria and how we shift that kind of energetic, Because these cells produce most of our energy, so we can restore them in order to have higher levels of energy that last all day long.
But I wanted to kind of go a little bit higher level [00:03:00] because I speak to women who have a lot of symptoms, a lot of conditions in their body, and instead of focusing on every little symptom or what systems are not in a good state, sometimes I like to go even further upstream and I look at in a very basic level the stress response part of the nervous system and the relaxation response.
And so, the relaxation response, when we're in that state, our body is producing energy, it's burning body fat, and it's in a healing state, right? It's always in a state of homeostasis and it's healing. But when we're in a stress response, we're in the survival response. So, Things are not happening as they are in relaxation response.
So the body doesn't deem reproduction important, which affects hormones, doesn't deem digestion important, which affects digestion of nutrients and microbiome and more, right? So things get taken offline because in preference of the stress response trying to save your life, right, trying to get you out of [00:04:00] mortal danger, which is what it thinks you're in.
you know, I had a client say to me the other day, when I heard her talk and I heard her schedule and everything she had on and so much the business and for the family and then trying to squeeze in something for herself, when I was listening and she had a lot of health complaints and, and we talked about this and she said, well, how much time, what's too much time in a stress response?
And I said, well, we were only designed to be in a stress response for 30 minutes every 2 to 3 days. So you can imagine, you know, when you're overworked or overscheduled and your mind's going a million miles an hour and you just don't have any downtime during the day batteries are running at full steam or your adrenaline is high because You're just always just on, on, on, on, on and doing, right?
And so when we don't spend enough time in the relaxation response, things get missed. Things start breaking down. The systems don't repair themselves. Then we get imbalances, we get dysfunction and then we get symptoms and we get disease. Okay. On a very high level, if you [00:05:00] wanted to look at it like that, because sometimes I find it, it's so overwhelming for people to look at it on every single system and symptom, but on a high level, our body is designed to heal itself.
That's what it does. And if it's not doing it, well, then we have to look at the very basics. How much time are you spending in the relaxation response? compared to the stress response and for most people I speak to, it's very little time in the relaxation. You're either in one or the other, You're either in the stress response or you're in the relaxation response.
There's nothing in between. And so if you're not feeling, calm and contentment and peace, that's Feeling that fills your body and your mind. If you're not feeling that for most of the day, you're in the stress response. Okay. There's tension. There's anxiety. There's pressure. There's urgency that's operating you and keeping you in a stress response.
And you may relate to this because I find that most women do. They don't realize they're in a stress response because they're so accustomed to it, right? When I really differentiate between the difference, which is that really calm, [00:06:00] peaceful contentment. That place, that's the relaxation response, okay?
So let's look at the drivers. So I can look at your schedule and go, okay, you're doing way too much. It's not a surprise. You've got your foot on the gas all day long, not just with your to do list, but because there's no space in your schedule, it also creates overwhelm.
So your mind is just all day, okay I've got to do this, then I've got to do that, and then I've got to go and do this, and then that, and then next week this, oh don't forget about this, and so there's this non stop mental chatter. The brain is on full steam ahead. Where it doesn't have any downtime, right?
And like I said, the hormones pick up during the day, the stress hormones, and we need to allow them to come back down. If there's no space, they're not coming back down, right? They're just going to continue to rise and continue to exhaust you. So let's look at the drivers. So when I see someone's schedule, I know that, yep, they're like, well, I have to do this for work, I have to do this for family, I have to do this, right?
And so then I like to talk about these hidden drivers because I can't get you to find time in [00:07:00] your schedule until you really understand what's driving it. Yes, you have responsibilities. Yes, you have people to take care of and a business to run, but there are still hidden drivers there that are pushing you to go to the level that you're going to.
Okay. Number one is the people pleaser. rescuer. Okay, so we, you know, the researchers show that Gen Xers are really, they struggle with this, right? And they carry this right throughout their lives without, in some they do realize, but often without being able to address it, right? So People Pleasers are about addressing everyone's needs before their own.
It's women are very nurturing. And I feel very selfish to say no to family or people in need, but it's our programming. We've been programmed to be nice girls, to put other people's needs before our own, to use polite language, to be accommodating, and not be too demanding, not be too complicated, right?
We've been programmed from a very young age to be like this. Unfortunately, that just isn't sufficient in our adulthood, okay? That is not going to help us to be strong [00:08:00] and empowered women in our adulthood. So, what drives these rescuer traits? And I talked more about this in episode 27 back. I went deeper into it.
Is the fear of rejection. Okay, this is what drives a rescuer. Now, I 100 percent identify as a rescuer for, all my life, okay? And it's Since I've been doing this work into understanding more about it, that I've been able to see my traits and make different choices. Because we end up putting ourselves in a situation which is so exhausting, we feel so undervalued, we feel so not taken care of, and then we become the victim.
And from a place of a victimhood, we're really powerless, right? We're really unable to step into our greatest potential. There is an underlining fear of rejection, that if we don't do what people ask, they won't want to spend time with us, they won't want to be with us, they won't love us, they won't value us, right?
We're always doing, doing, doing, doing. in the end, people pleasers become resentful. and it's a whole cycle, right? You become [00:09:00] the victim, and then the victim, You know, if you're like taking care of your kids so much, they become the victim, right? You don't allow them to step up and therefore the victim then becomes the aggressor and then they fight back at you and you're like, I'll do everything for you.
I can't believe that you're now having a go at me, right? And this is dynamic, okay, that we innocently and unknowingly and unconsciously put ourselves into due to these hidden drivers, right? A lot of them programmed into us. Most of them, let's say all of them program into us. Which is just an idea that was given to us at a very young age that we believed and we took it on and we still believe it today and therefore it still runs our life, okay, it runs our actions.
The second one is being a perfectionist. So perfectionism at its core is about fear of criticism. Okay. So if you don't do a good enough job, if you make a mistake and someone calls you out that you made a mistake, it's like, Oh, I'm not good enough. I didn't do a good enough job. I'm not good. Right. And so it's a fear of and judgment from others.
You know, sometimes [00:10:00] when I go to put something out there, if I do a post on social media or do a video, even sometimes when I do these podcasts, right. I'm like, Oh, Make it sound good. Make it sound clear. because there is a fear of it's gonna go out there. Well, also in the beginning, in the first couple of podcasts, I was like, Oh, it's gonna be out there.
It's gonna sound terrible and people are gonna pick up on it and they're gonna judge me on it. Right? And so this driver to make it perfect then is to avoid the criticism and the judgment. Now, I can assure you this is self judgment. Yes, people may say something, you might do something perfectly and people still comment.
I mean, certainly on social media, right? And really the judgment and the criticism is self judgment and criticism. So it's really coming from you because honestly, people do not think about you that much. We are so obsessed with ourselves, our own reality is from our own thinking, our own beliefs, our own thoughts.
It's we really just have a holding a mirror up to ourselves all day, essentially. And we're thinking about ourselves, okay? Everything we [00:11:00] see is based on our own thinking. And so therefore that judgment isn't coming from outside, it's coming from you. And I think there's a little bit of Something we can relax into when we know people just aren't thinking about you that much.
Okay, they're not analyzing everything you do. They're not judging everything you do. They won't even notice it. Okay, and if they do, they've already forgotten about it in five minutes. Because again, we go back to think about ourselves. The third one is proving your worth. So this kind of comes with The Rescuer, but a little bit deeper I look at it in this kind of feminine masculine energy, right?
So proving your worth is like making sure that do things that make you valuable in this world, make you valuable as a woman. And That's not really a feminine energy. So when we talk about feminine and masculine, the feminine energy is more receiving. It's more about letting go of things, allowing things to come to you, whereas the masculine energy is more about creating, doing, making it happen, okay, forcing it, using power, using strength.
And I definitely come from more of a masculine [00:12:00] energy. I have done all my life. And so trying to understand these dynamics and be a little bit more. allowing things to come to you, relinquishing control, not having to prove your worth, because this idea of, proving our worth through our value in what we do, or our career, or what kind of a home we have, or how our children are doing, or how much money you make, or what kind of a car you drive, whatever it is, I mean, you make that up, right?
You decide on what makes you then valuable, what your worth is, right? But your worth as a human being is the same as everybody else's. Like, I once had an example I heard from someone. If, if you found a hundred dollar note on the ground, that had been in the gutter, in the mud, Right? just sitting there, and you found that and you picked it up and you cleaned it up or, compared to a 100 note that had just come from an ATM machine, would they have the same value?
Even though this one's dirty and lived in a gutter and whatever, would they have the same value? Yes, it's kind of intrinsic in it, [00:13:00] right? I don't know if intrinsic is the right word, but the value is in it regardless okay? And as a human being, we have our value regardless of what we're doing, okay? And I think that trying to understand more about maybe your feminine and masculine dynamics is really helpful to allow you to step back a bit, okay?
I think that women in this middle age because of careers, because of family, because of doing it all and trying to have it all has meant that you've stepped more into the masculine and stepped out of the feminine and it's a bit foreign. It's a bit foreign for you to step back, relinquish control and allow things and receive things and allow people to do things for you, allow your partner, allow your children while you sit back and allow that to happen.
So that's a bit of a foreign concept, but that is literally the feminine energy. Okay, so let me know in the comments below how much of this resonates with you. Can you see yourself in these traits? Can you see how they may drive you to work longer hours to prove yourself to be better than maybe someone else because then, you know, [00:14:00] you're good enough?
Can you see how it drives you to do more in your family without, saying no to things, right? Can you see how these drivers are actually making you exhausted? Let me know in the comments below.
