Vibrant You

From Burnt Out to Balanced: Holistic Strategies for Preventing Burnout as a Type-A Female Professional or Entrepreneur

• Bindi Stables

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If you're a passionate, type-A female professional or entrepreneur out there, (like me!) This episode is for you. We're talking about holistic strategies for preventing and recovering from burnout.

For you to show up as your best, attract high caliber clients, and make the money and impact you desire, having a clear, balanced physical channel, balanced mind, and pristine energy levels are not luxuries you’ll focus on “later” - they are the keys to building your empire.

In this episode, I share my personal story of burnout and how it happened to me back in 2020. You'll learn how I personally recovered and the steps I'm taking to avoid mental and physical overload now as I manage all the ins and owns of my growing business.

You'll learn:

  1. What burnout actually means (it’s more than just a buzzword for “I’m tired”)
  2. The top 10 signs and symptoms of burnout
  3. The 4 stages of adrenal fatigue (and a self-assessment to see what stage you may be in!)
  4. The impact of high or low levels of cortisol on your mind, mood, and mojo
  5. What's happening hormonally when you're experiencing next-level fatigue
  6. Holistic strategies for preventing or recovering from burnout
  7. Practical work hacks for type-A professionals and entrepreneurs to stay balanced
  8. Intentional business strategies to strategically free up your time and make space for more wellness, ease, and freedom (without compromising your client experience or sales!)

Take care of yourself (and your energy!) so you CAN show up in your work at your best and create the impact and income you know you're here for.

Links:

  1. Optimize and Rise: Luxury Wellness Portal for the Entrepreneurial Goddess 
  2. Calming Magnesium: https://equi.life/products/natural-calm?irad=1309379&irmp=2996914
  3. Adrenal Soothe: https://equi.life/products/adrenal-soothe?irad=909026&irmp=2996914
  4. Adrenal Energy Support: https://equi.life/products/adrenal-life-energy-support?irad=909025&irmp=2996914
  5. Daily Brain Support: https://equi.life/collections/longevity/products/daily-brain-support?irad=1244652&irmp=2996914
  6. Cell Boost: https://equi.life/collections/longevity/products/cell-boost?irad=1244650&irmp=2996914

Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be SO grateful if you could leave me a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, that way we can inspire and educate even more people together.

I’d love to connect with you on IG: www.instagram.com/bindistables

Visit my website for more resources and ways to work with me: www.bindistables.com

Bindi:

Welcome to the Vibrant you podcast. I'm your host, bindi Stables, and here we talk all things wellness and vibrant living. You'll learn about integrative health, functional medicine, holistic biohacking and enjoy raw and real conversations on personal growth, mindset and motivation. Optimize your body and mind and become the happiest, the healthiest, most vibrant. You Enjoy the show, hey, and welcome back to another episode here on Vibrant you. Today we are talking about something so important for all of my fellow type A female entrepreneurs and professionals out there that are really wanting to stay at your best when it comes to your health, so that you can show up in your business with more inspiration, more focus, peak performance, more energy, which really is the very lifeblood of your business and your success. So I'm going to be sharing with you some holistic strategies for preventing and recovering from burnout. I'm going to share with you my own personal experience with burnout and how it happened for me back in 2020, how I recovered from it and how I'm personally taking these steps that I'm going to share with you here today to avoid mental and physical overload happening again and leading to burnout, as, of course, I manage all the ins and outs of my own business and launches and content creation and admin and team management and serving clients. I mean it can be a lot. So I'm going to share with you what burnout actually means, which is so much more than just a buzzword for I'm tired. I'm going to share there's 10 main signs or symptoms of burnout and how to know if you're experiencing a level of burnout. There's four different stages of adrenal fatigue and a bit of a self assessment that you can do to see what stage you may be in, if you're noticing yourself more tired or fatigued, to see if there may be a level of burnout going on. And then, of course, I'll share with you some holistic strategies for preventing that and staying at your best, your peak performance in your work and your business, as well as some tips for recovering from burnout If you are experiencing a level of that in your own body right now. And then, of course, we'll get into some just practical work and business life hacks for type A professionals and entrepreneurs just like you, so that you can really take care of yourself and show up as your best in your work and your business and really share your mission, share the work and the passion and the purpose that you are meant to share with the world.

Bindi:

So the reason why I'm recording this episode is, of course, like most episodes, because it's a bit of where I'm at at the moment. So, as always, pretty much every episode that I record on here is really from my own lived experience and what I'm needing to remind myself of or what I'm working on within myself at the moment, whether it comes to my health or my mindset or the wellbeing of my relationships and so on. So I'll be fully transparent that I have gone through a bit more stress significantly a bit more stress than usual over the last few weeks, and there's nothing really massive or dramatic that happened other than just the buildup right of work related tasks and some new collaborations coming in, turning the podcast into a more interview based podcast and starting to interview gas, which you know is really exciting. But there's just been a lot more than usual on my plate and I've been feeling the effects of it. And I must say that I've had some sensations in my body over the last couple of weeks that felt familiar to a few years ago, when I was in proper burnout, proper exhaustion, proper, you know, couldn't get out of bed in the morning and I just never want to go there again. So I'll share with you a bit of my story of what I went through, I guess a few years ago now, 2020, anyone else think that's so weird that 2020 was now like three years ago, almost four years ago? I'm just mind blown by that. Like so many people out there, back in 2020, I went through my own process, my own initiation, of course.

Bindi:

So much change, so much transition, so rapidly and just with the pandemic and having gone from managing and teaching and working with an amazing wellness retreat center here in Bali, indonesia, to basically taking my practice fully, virtually right, and going from a very in-person business model to a way of serving people and supporting their wellness. That was fully virtual and going fully on my own after having worked in collaboration with yoga and meditation center here in Bali. So there's just like a lot of stress, a lot of overwhelm, a lot of unknown with this whole global pandemic. Nobody knew what was up, no one knew how to respond. You know it was so isolating, just like a bit of a pressure cooker to be taking care of all this and just with that insane increase of mental, emotional, life, structural stress going on inside of my life, my body went through so many a sequence of events that happened to my adrenal glands, which is basically our primary source of regulating stress hormones in the body, and my body went through all these different layers of experience where first I felt like superwoman. I felt like I could do anything. I had insane amounts of energy. I feel like I could just go from 6 in the morning until 11pm and just you know I had an insane superwoman energy, which I'll share with you. What that means on a lab test in terms of our stress hormones, in terms of what phase of burnout or towards burnout that really is. After a couple months of superwoman vibes, feeling like I could do anything and just go, go, go and busy and all in and hustle, I hit burnout, and burnout is not a fun place to be. The level of exhaustion that I felt I couldn't get out of bed. My mood was so low, I was in an insane depression. My immune system got so weakened that I experienced something called mold toxicity, which is mold bores. You know, you've obviously seen mold before, but when we have mold inside of our environments and we're breathing that in, and when we have a more suppressed immune system from adrenal fatigue, from, you know, our body's reserve saying I can't do this pace anymore. It weakens our immune system and I was susceptible then to experiencing mold toxicity. So from that you know I was experiencing.

Bindi:

I'll see if I can share a picture with you guys on my Instagram, because it is not a pretty picture, but I took a picture. I looked in the mirror one morning and I couldn't recognize my face. Literally my face was double in size. It was so swollen, so puffy. My eyes were swollen shut. There's like the darkest black circles under my eyes. It looks like I've just been punched in the face and I was so scared. Looking back in the mirror, I'm like what has happened to me? And this is mold toxicity. I had such severe allergies, debilitating allergies, that a benadryl could not even touch. This went on for months before I really figured out what it was and I was able to address it. So I'm going to share with you exactly what I did to recover from burnout. I'm sure that many most of you are not in that level of burnout and extreme adrenal fatigue as I was. However, I'm going to share with you what that could look like in those earlier stages of how to prevent getting to that stage.

Bindi:

The worst thing for business is you being burnt out and unable to get out of bed in the morning. I mean, over those five months you know of me being so unwell, I really took like five months basically off of my business. I was really only able to do the very bare minimum. I needed to focus so much on my health and wellness to recover and, of course, my business and my finances and my inspiration and creativity plummeted, with my health going down the drain as well. So let's get right into it. Let's understand first what actually is burnout. So burnout is not just a fancy buzzword that means I'm tired. I was in proper state of burnout and I have the lab tests to prove it. So of course, work gets busy, life gets busy.

Bindi:

It's so easy to just get run down or forget to take care of ourselves when we go through stressful periods, whether that's emotional stress or stress in our relationships or financial stress, work stress as well as physical stress. Right, if you're working your butt off at the gym and pushing yourself too hard, you know that can lead to burnout on a physiological level. It's not emotional stress causing burnout, not mental overload, but physical overload as well as things like pathogens If you have a gut based pathogen, you have parasites or you have something like what I had mold toxicity or you have a chronic underlying health condition or virus or something you know. Your body's going to be in a constant state of fight or flight. Emotionally you might feel fine, you might say you know, I don't really have that much stress, I don't think that I would be burnt out. But your body has been in a state of fight or flight for so long. Your nervous system can't interpret the difference between a physical stressor and an emotional one, or nervous system thinks it's the same and will still put our adrenal glands into that state of exhaustion, therefore leading to that burnout. So let's understand what all of this means.

Bindi:

Let's title together so our adrenal glands are these little hormone producing glands that sit on top of our kidneys and those are really responsible for releasing and regulating our stress based hormones. One of the main stress hormones we have is called cortisol, which basically helps us respond to stress. So having that balanced stress response and a healthy cortisol rhythm so the rhythm of which you know we have higher levels of cortisol when we go through a stressor and then our body's ability to adapt and bring that stress hormone down, bring our body back to balance in non stressful moments. This is really essential for having a balanced body and nervous system, and stress hormones and brain. So what happens, though, is when we go through periods of prolonged stress, right and again. That can be mental, emotional stress, that can be physical stress with less than an ideal diet, nutritional deficiencies that causes stress on the body, increased toxic load, right All of the toxin exposure that we experience on a day to day basis, a buildup of pathogens in the body, viruses, hormonal imbalances, bacterial overgrowth, as well as lifestyle factors like alcohol or smoking, or just overworking all of those things.

Bindi:

When we do go through those levels of stress, our adrenal glands can easily go from a state of balance to a state of burnout. So let's explore what that actually means. There are four main stages of adrenal fatigue, and in each stage, our hormones, as well as our feel good brain chemicals, our neurotransmitters, all drastically fluctuate. So let's get a little bit deeper into the four stages of adrenal fatigue, and, as we go through, I invite you to just listen to the symptom picture of these four stages of adrenal fatigue and see what sounds most familiar. Right? Maybe you're in a healthy cortisol rhythm, so that's great. Use these tips I'm going to share with you to really maintain your adrenal health and prevent, you know, burnout from busy lifestyle and work and whatnot. So, okay, the first stage of adrenal fatigue is actually just healthy adrenals. It's a balanced stress response and normal cortisol. Right, cortisol is that stress hormone. So in a healthy person, our cortisol levels, our stress hormones, should actually be highest in the morning and lowest at night. So having higher stress chemicals in the morning is actually not a bad thing.

Bindi:

You may be thinking I know this confused me for a while. Why would I want high stress hormones at any point in the day, don't I want my stress hormones to be really low? Well, if you've ever been in a state of burnout which I have I can tell you for a fact you do not want depleted levels of stress hormone. We need that stress hormone to be flexible. We need to have higher levels in the morning, because cortisol sure helps us to respond to stress, but it also gives us energy. That's the hormone that makes us have this get up and go feeling. It gives us motivation, it gives us zest for life, it gives us passion, it gives us drive. And when we don't have adequate amounts of cortisol, this stress hormone. We feel fatigued. So this healthy cortisol rhythm, cortisol stress hormone should be highest in the morning, lowest at night. In this healthy cortisol rhythm, our hormones and our neurotransmitters, our brain chemistry, is overall balanced. We tend to wake up in the morning, in the early morning, experience our highest energy and motivation and focus in those early morning hours and then naturally our energy levels naturally wane throughout the day with our lowest energy before bed, with no major highs or lows. So our body will naturally wind down and is generally tired by bedtime and it's pretty easy to fall asleep and to wake up the next day feeling refreshed. So that's healthy, right. That's our balanced cortisol rhythm. We like that OK.

Bindi:

Stage two of adrenal fatigue we're on our way to burnout is what we call the wired stage, so also known as the alarm stage of stress. Now, in this stage, this is high cortisol and I actually lab test this with my clients. This is the exact lab test that I did back in 2020 when I was next level fatigue and I was like what is going on? I had never experienced this before. This is what we lab tested for. We did a saliva based test and I tested my waking cortisol, so how much cortisol was in my system upon waking? And then I tested three more times throughout the day so I could really see that cortisol rhythm and where my cortisol levels were throughout the day. Now I didn't test at this stage because generally in the wired stage we feel pretty good overall, right, there's no major things that we would consider wrong. But this wired state over a period of time is a recipe for burnout. So in this wired stage we have what we see on a lab test we have high all day cortisol levels, so that cortisol, that stress hormone, is just high all day long. It doesn't go down at night like it should.

Bindi:

And in this stage we may feel like we are invincible. So when I shared with you, you know, in the beginning stages of the pandemic, when I was, you know, remodeling my entire business, dealing with a global pandemic, the first few months I felt on top of the world. I was like wow, so many great changes. This is an opportunity. How do I want to make the most of this? And I had super woman energy and vitality. I was like I was working from six am to 11 pm at night. I was just go, go, go. I was on fire and I felt amazing. There was actually like I felt really good in this stage Not healthy, hard to sleep at night, but I felt, you know, wired. So in this phase we can feel like super woman with invincible energy. You may feel like you can run on very little sleep, little to no sleep.

Bindi:

Someone in this wired stage is the kind of person that says you know, I really only need, you know, four, five, maybe six hours of sleep a night. That's wired, that's a hormonal imbalance. Somebody that can get by quote unquote on four hours of sleep a night is not in a healthy cortisol rhythm. They're in this wired stage and it is a recipe for burnout. Give it a few months in this energy and definitely there's gonna be a crash. So in this stage, because that cortisol doesn't come down at night, you may have terrible insomnia and really irregular sleep patterns. Naturally you're gonna feel more anxious and more restless, more quote unquote wired. You feel more jittery, more nervous and in this phase our neurotransmitters in our brain, our serotonin, our dopamine, our happiness and motivation chemicals are generally really high. So that's why I felt good, I felt invincible, I felt motivated, on top of the world. But when something's. It's a pendulum. When we have high for too long it has to crash. So often in this stage, things like gut issues, hormonal imbalances. They start here in this phase, but they generally don't show up on lab tests yet. So this is why at this stage most people don't test.

Bindi:

Mostly once we get to the third or the fourth stage of adrenal fatigue, that's when people come to me because they really start to feel a problem. But this is where it begins is with that wired high cortisol, that alarm stage. Okay, stage number three towards adrenal fatigue is what we call tired and wired. So this is the resistance stage of stress, or what we call an inverse cortisol pattern. Instead of having that nice high cortisol in the morning and low cortisol at night are actually our pattern reverses. So a person in this tired and wired stage, they actually have low cortisol in the morning and their cortisol actually increases throughout the day and is highest in the evening. So this kind of person it feels really difficult to get up. In the morning, you know you wake up, you don't feel refreshed, you feel tired. It takes you a long time to wake up. Then in the afternoon, in the evening and definitely before bed, that's when your energy levels pick up. So someone that identifies as a night owl is likely to be experiencing some level of resistance stage of stress, this tired and wired stage.

Bindi:

You struggle to fall asleep, no matter how tired you are. You often wake up in the night. You toss and you turn. You feel tired all day, but wired at night. You may develop a more unhealthy dependence on caffeine. You may go through periods of feeling extreme brain fog, especially during the day. Your sex and your thyroid hormones start to go imbalanced and at this point it can start to show up on a lab test.

Bindi:

Now, at this stage, you still function properly in your daily life, but you've begun to lose your zesper life. Your usual motivation and focus and performance start to decline. But it's not bad enough yet that you know. You say something's been going on. I don't know what. I just feel so tired all the time. What's going on? That's tired and wired phase. So this stage we really need to address it If you're not in proper burnout yet, but some of these signs and symptoms resonated with you definitely. We wanna be maybe testing your adrenals and seeing where your cortisol levels are at to confirm if you are having this more resistance, inverse cortisol stage and really starting to address it with a proper adrenal fatigue protocol. So certain nutrition and herbs and adaptogens and nutraceuticals, self-care practices, you know, reestablishing work-life balance to really start to rejuvenate those adrenal glands that are starting to show signs of fatigue.

Bindi:

Okay so phase four is formal burnout. So this is the exhaustion stage of stress. So in this stage our body went from being on cortisol high to that inverse, that you know opposite ratio of cortisol, to now our body's just tired, is exhausted. It's saying, okay, I tried for so long to tell you to slow down, woman, and you didn't listen. And so now I'm gonna make you slow down because I'm gonna stop producing cortisol.

Bindi:

And when we have these all day, every day, low levels of cortisol, we have no motivation, we have no focus, we have next level brain fog. So what happens is when we have these lower levels of cortisol, our happiness and motivation, chemicals in our brain, our serotonin and dopamine, is on low, it's depleted. We feel depressed, right, we went from feeling anxious and the tired and wide stage to now you're just depressed, right, all of the body systems are now depleted, all of our immune system is shut down. We have this unshakable brain fog and fatigue. We feel exhausted all the time. No matter how much you sleep, you're still exhausted the next day. We have heightened levels of maybe anxiety initially that turns into depression lower levels of mood irritability. We feel more susceptible to acute and chronic. We feel more susceptible to acute and chronic infections.

Bindi:

You seem to be just picking up every little cold and flu that goes around. All of our other hormones get shut down. So this is where we would lab test and we see all of these brand new sex hormone imbalances and you know female sex imbalances. You're having PMS, you're missing your periods, you have your regular periods or you're having issues with your thyroid. So you get your you know annual blood work done and they say, oh, you have a thyroid imbalance, you have hypothyroidism. Well, what caused that hypothyroidism? Was it your adrenal glands being burnt out that didn't allow your thyroid to function properly? Because our cortisol levels influence all the other hormones in our body and when our cortisol goes off, every other hormonal system goes off. A lot of hormone based imbalances, whether it's sex hormone imbalances or thyroid hormone imbalances, often root from this cortisol. This stress hormone imbalance.

Bindi:

Burnout feels like a proper rock bottom with our physical and mental health. No amount of coffee or naps or sleep is enough to bring your energy levels back and at this stage we really need a long term in depth protocol to restore that adrenal function. So that becomes really important at this phase. So those are the fourth stages of adrenal fatigue. Let's go over now some of the most common signs and symptoms of those different levels of adrenal fatigue. So here's a bit of a self-assessment. I'm sure you're able to pick up on some clues from those four phases of adrenal fatigue to see where you may be.

Bindi:

But let's go through a little self-assessment. Here we're going to go through the top 10 symptoms of adrenal fatigue and I invite you, as we go through each one, just give yourself a little mental score of whether you experience this or not. So I want you to add up how many of these symptoms you feel at least once a week. Okay, so if you're experiencing any of these symptoms at least once a week, give yourself a point and the closer you are to 10, right, the more of these symptoms that you have, the more likely you are to be experiencing some level of adrenal fatigue and you'll want to take care of that. So symptom number one is chronic fatigue. So if you are experiencing that more persistent and unexplained fatigue, that unshakable fatigue, give yourself a point. You know, individuals with this adrenal fatigue often feel more tired in the morning. You're experiencing that energy slump in the afternoon chronic fatigue.

Bindi:

Symptom number two is brain fog. So if you're noticing moments of being unable to focus, you can't think straight, you have more cloudy thinking, you're forgetting more things. Big sign of burnout. Number three is anxiety, which longterm leads to depression. Right, so are you feeling more overwhelmed, more anxious, more stressed, or just lower levels of mood? That's another key symptom. Okay, symptom number four is difficulty sleeping. Are you feeling a level of insomnia? Is it hard for you to fall asleep? Is it hard for you to stay asleep? Are you waking up the next day not feeling refreshed from your sleep? Give yourself a point. Are you experiencing symptom number five difficulty handling stress.

Bindi:

So adrenal fatigue is often linked to we are unable to cope with the stresses that come our way as effectively, both physically and mentally. We feel easily overwhelmed, we feel easily triggered. This is a big sign of adrenal fatigue. Symptom number six are you having more cravings for things like salty foods or sweet and sugary foods? So adrenal fatigue, because of the mineral status, the sodium balance, that goes imbalanced with adrenal fatigue. We may crave more salty foods. Another way is that, because we're always tired all the time, we may crave more sugary foods as a way to artificially boost our energy, because our adrenals aren't doing it for us.

Bindi:

Symptom number seven are you experiencing more muscle weakness than usual? So feeling a heaviness in your muscles is another big sign associated with adrenal fatigue. Are you feeling not as strong as you used to be in the gym that you used to? You know, every little physical activity just seems to exhaust you. Or you do go to the gym and it takes you days to recover. Your recovery time is reduced. Number eight lowered immunity. Are you feeling more frequent colds and flus? Every little bug that goes around you seem to catch it and it seems to take you a little bit longer than usual, or longer than the people around you, to really recover from those bugs that goes around Right.

Bindi:

Symptom number nine is headaches or migraines. So are you noticing more tension, headaches or migraines throughout the day? This can definitely be a sign of adrenal fatigue. And then, finally, I would say, lower levels of mood. So, lower levels of mood throughout the day, mood swings or you're just moving towards feeling a little bit more on the depressed side. This would be another sign. Okay. So there is a massive mind-body connection here.

Bindi:

So I'd love for you to just kind of feel into an assess. Is adrenal fatigue a thing for you? Are you experiencing a level of that? If you're not great if you only had like one or two points in there and it's not very often great you're on a great track. All the tips that I'm going to share with you shortly are going to be to maintain that right and to prevent burnout is going to be really great. If you are experiencing something like that, try to explore all these tips I'm about to share with you and you may consider working with a practitioner to really rebalance those adrenal glands at a deeper level, because it does require. You know all these general principles are going to be great, but it does. You know, I share from experience and having worked with clients in levels of burnout for years now, that it does take a bit more in-depth protocol to really rebalance those adrenal glands after you know a period of adrenal fatigue.

Bindi:

Okay, so let's get into the fun stuff. Let's talk about what are the holistic strategies for preventing or recovering from burnout. So, first and foremost is sleep and rest. Sleep and rest is one of the best things that you can do to recover your adrenal glands. If you're not sleeping enough, your adrenal glands don't have a chance to fully recover and rebalance that natural and healthy cortisol rhythm. So I recently got my aura ring. My mom has just arrived in Bali and she was able to bring it over here for me. So I've actually been learning a lot on that. I've been tracking my sleep, I've been reading my readiness score every day and it's been really great for me to see the data on how well my body's recovering, which days is maybe more helpful for me to push myself a little harder at the gym and which days are maybe better for rest. So I do recommend some sort of bio tracking tool, like an aura ring, to really track your sleep, track your heart rate variability, track your overall heart rate, these types of things to really help you in those areas of sleep and rest. Okay, holdestuck, strategy Number 2 is….

Bindi:

Really important when we're working with our adrenals and maintaining them is we've got to make sure that we have balanced blood sugar right. So when we are on the blood sugar roller coaster, meaning we're eating naked carbs, as in we're just eating straight carbs, we're eating a bag of chips, or we're eating fruit on its own, or we're eating a really high carbohydrate granola bar. Even though it sounds healthy, it's just full of sugar, very low in protein and fat, which is needed to slow that glucose absorption. So really managing our blood sugar is essential to get off of this blood sugar roller coaster that really depletes our adrenal glands. So good little nutrition hack for you is always combine carbohydrates that you eat, always with protein, fat, fiber. So if you are having some chocolate, right, can't totally recommend it, it's a high sugar food but always eating it with protein, fat and fiber so that that glucose doesn't hit your bloodstream and, you know, mess up your adrenal glands. It slows the absorption of that glucose.

Bindi:

Going for a walk after meals help to manage blood sugar levels. Eating regular meals, not fasting upon waking. If you are experiencing burnout, ladies, no fasting in the morning. For sure. If you are feeling lower levels of energy, hormonal imbalance, you want to be eating within the first one hour after waking. So no intermittent fasting, no long term, you know, without eating, because it's going to put you on that blood sugar roller coaster. It's going to, you know, spike those cortisol levels or it's going to put those cortisol levels into depletion, depending which stage of adrenal fatigue you're in. So no fasting, ladies. If you are experiencing any hormonal imbalance, especially any level of burnout, okay.

Bindi:

Next holistic hack for you is watch your caffeine usage. So it's so natural when we go from that nice healthy cortisol rhythm into feeling more wired, or feeling tired and wired, or especially in burnout, of course we're going to be reaching for the coffee and the caffeine because we're tired all the time. However, that is exasperating the issue. So if you are wanting that, I recommend, okay, go for decaf and start to support your body with adaptogens. We'll talk about those in a sec. Go for decaf If you are having caffeine which I can't recommend, but if you're going to do it anyway, it's too hard to let go of. Make sure that you're always drinking your coffee with food, so you're having it with breakfast, right, not on an empty stomach. You're always having it with protein, fat, fiber, so that the caffeine doesn't hit your system and shock your adrenal glands with caffeine, and you always want to have it within the first half of the day. So definitely no coffee, ideally after 12, but certainly not after 2pm because it's going to affect that cortisol rhythm in the evening, make it hard to sleep at night. So that's really important.

Bindi:

Okay, adaptogens is the next holistic strategy. So adaptogens are certain foods and herbs and roots and substances from the plant kingdom that really help us adapt to stress. That's what adaptogen means. It supports how our body and mind adapts to stressors mental stressors, physical stressors and so on. So they really build our body's stress resilience to respond to stress and boost your adrenal glands. So some of my favorites that I have recently started incorporating, because I'm also like, wait, the sensations I'm feeling, these feel familiar to burn out, let's not go there. I'm like, okay, let's get on top of this early. I'm a little bit in that wired stage right now. I don't want to lead to burnout ever again. So I'm bringing in things like Macca root, which is a Peruvian root crop that works on the pituitary gland. It's excellent for regulating the adrenals. Ashwagandha root, which is a very commonly used Ayurvedic root that supports the adrenal glands, really helps our body to adapt to stress.

Bindi:

I really love lemon balm, this beautiful plant. Maybe you grow some in your garden. Maybe it grows wild in your area. Otherwise, we can get it in supplements as well. I will link up in the show notes some of the top recommended supplements that I recommend for adrenal health and adrenal support. So if you are going through, you know, higher levels of stress, even temporarily, I won't be on these supplements forever. I'm on them right now because I'm going through a higher levels of stress. There's great things happening in my life, but it is consuming more of my energy than usual and I want to make sure that I'm supporting my body with those higher levels of stress and just demand on my energy. So lemon balm is excellent. Holy basil is another excellent adaptogen. It's so rejuvenative, has such a beautiful energy, boosts our energy levels and really boosts our immune system as well. So those are some adaptogens and I'll link up some supplements that are really great that you can look into as well.

Bindi:

Okay, and then we need to work on the nervous system. So this is a big piece. So supporting our nervous system is essential for recovering from burnout and preventing it all together. So what I want you to create as your personal goal when it comes to managing your stress and supporting your beautiful little adrenals and their hormones is I want you to make the personal goal for yourself of spending at least 15 minutes a day in what we call a parasympathetic state.

Bindi:

So the parasympathetic state is simply a fancy way of saying a deeply relaxed state, right? So how do you know you're in a deeply relaxed state? Think of when you're at the end of a yoga class and you're in that beautiful Shavasana. You lie down on your back at the end of a beautiful, juicy yoga practice and you lay down for five to 15 minutes, however long the teacher keeps you there and you really drop into that deep state of ease and relaxation. You're not necessarily asleep, but you're deeply relaxed. That is the parasympathetic nervous system state. The state that when you run yourself an Epson salt bath and you lay in the warm, cozy bathtub, you light yourself a candle beeswax, toxic, free candle and you don't have your phone, you don't have Netflix. You're just in there, maybe reading a book or just kind of, you know, closing your eyes, breathing deeply. That is a parasympathetic state.

Bindi:

So to rejuvenate our adrenals, we need minimum 15 minutes a day hanging out in that juicy, restorative, rejuvenative, parasympathetic state. Okay, so choose your weapon. I right now am working with sauna. That's one of the best things. I go lay in the sauna for 20, 30 minutes every day minimum 15 minutes. Go lay down in the sauna and I just lay on my back in there, feel the warmth, I sweat and I just breathe. I don't overdo it, like my body's never in a stress response. I mean, when it comes to cold plunge and sauna, I mean you can definitely further exasperate burnout if you're putting your body into really stressful situations, shocking situations. So I actually don't recommend cold plunges if you're in burnout because it's just going to shock your adrenals more. But relaxing sauna in moderation great. I love epsom salt baths. I'm doing a lot of those right now. The magnesium sulfate is excellent for the parasympathetic nervous system. Just relaxing that warmth is really excellent. If you like, sound therapy or sound healing, light therapy, red light therapy, breath work, yoga, gentle walks in nature all of those can be really excellent. So these are some of the holistic strategies for preventing and recovering from burnout.

Bindi:

Let's get into some practical things. So some practical work and business hacks for type A professionals and entrepreneurs like yourself. So one of the little life hacks that I've done our business hacks is I've really worked hard to close a lot of what I call my vitality leaks. So vitality leaks are the things in your life and business that subtly drain your energy. So that can be too many cups of coffee or too many cups of matcha in a day.

Bindi:

Vitality leak can be lacking boundaries with clients. Are you saying that your? You know text and audio boundaries is this and you're not honoring that. You know you're crossing your own boundaries. Clients are crossing your boundaries. Are you working on weekends? Are you in a state of perfectionism or overworking? You know, when we start to become aware of what those vitality leaks are and we can start to seal those weeks, we start to close the gap between where we're at and where we desire to be in our business as well as in our wellness.

Bindi:

Of course, we also need to set realistic expectations on ourself, on our productivity, on the amount of time that we're going to be working, on the time that it needs to complete projects. Right. All of these are so important. Realistic expectations and realistic boundaries right, boundaries are the bomb, you guys. Boundaries are so important when it comes to maintaining our wellness. Boundaries protect us right and they allow us to stay balanced, stay vital, so that we can show up in our professional life, our personal life, with more balance.

Bindi:

So the next one is setting up intentional business wellness strategies. So this has been so huge for me. Remember that you don't work for your business, you make your business work for you. So maintaining that, you know, work-life balance is so important. I know, for me, when I was in that wired stage, I was working seven days a week, right, I was going from 6am to 11pm, turned on. You know, I was on my phone, I was on Instagram, I was posting, I was replying to, you know, dms, replying to email, replying to clients questions, you know, at 11pm and it did not serve me.

Bindi:

So for me, that has been a non-negotiable. You know, evenings and weekends off these are intentional, just business practices and my clients all know that I am available for questions and I will reply to them Monday to Friday, between this time and this time. Right, I have very strict tech boundaries for myself on how available I am and that protects my energy, protects my wellness, that I can show up for my clients in the best possible way. So you know. Do you desire a week off every month? That's something that I've incorporated is I only take clients three weeks out of the month and one week I take off of clients and I dedicate that week to my wellness, to my wellbeing.

Bindi:

You know you could set up the intentional business strategy to not do sales calls anymore. Set up systems and strategies in your business that you don't have to do sales calls. You do things only by DM on Instagram or you have an application form or you hire someone else to do, you know, sales calls for you. Do you want less time in your Zoom calls? Are you finding yourself exhausted at the end of the day in seven different Zoom calls that day? So everything, all of this is to say how do you negotiate your schedule and your business structures to really strategically free up your time and make space in your life for more wellness, more ease, more freedom, of course, without compromising your client experience or your sales. So that's what intentional business wellness strategies is really all about. And then, final little business and professional little work hack is to get support. So hire team.

Bindi:

This has been non-negotiable, this has been an essential pillar in my business and, of course, my wellness as a business owner has been to delegate tasks, those energy leaks. I was like I do not love doing my accounting, I do not love doing the, you know, client onboarding process and sending these emails and sending invoices and tracking client payments and following up with clients on payments. I'm like I want to be the practitioner, I want to be the one working with clients. I want to, you know, really be in my zone of genius, of what really lights me up in my work the conversations I get to have, the amazing women that I get to work with and hang out with in my work. You know, the reading of labs and helping people create wellness protocols for people, for my clients, to really allow them to transform their health and wellbeing.

Bindi:

So get support, whether that's, you know, your own team, to delegate tasks, take more off of your plate, pass it on to other people, free up your time, free up your energy for more health and wellbeing, as well as higher support when it comes to your health. When I was experiencing that burnout and fatigue I'm a health practitioner, I know how to read my labs, I know the health protocols I still got support because I knew that what I'm able to see within myself, there's gaps and I just wanted to be held. You know, it was such a hard time and I was like I just wanted that support. I knew that I could do it all on my own, but I didn't want to. I didn't have to, and so I allowed myself to receive that support.

Bindi:

So if you are looking to, of course, accelerate that process and optimize your health and become that happiest, healthiest, most vibrant you and business owner that you desire to be, then it's a great opportunity to receive support. So all of that to share, I would love to invite you. If you are looking for support in optimizing your health, I'd love to invite you into my optimize and rise program, which is a beautiful luxury wellness portal for the empowered entrepreneurial woman or professionals such as yourself, to optimize your health and really rise into the next evolution of you and your business. So it's a four month private luxury wellness portal to optimize your well-being. Over the next four months you will in this time we're going to optimize your digestive health, your hormonal well-being, and really create that vibrant health so that you can unlock the deepest levels of energy and inspiration, vitality and productivity in your business to really help you make the impact and the income that you know you're destined to.

Bindi:

So the women that come into optimize and rise. For them, business is already flowing great. This is the good news. But they often have this hunch that business could just be so much better and, more importantly, importantly, feel so much better when they are feeling nourished and balanced and vibrant in their body, their mind and their energy. And really this frees you up. When your wellness is overflowing, when your cup is full, you just have that much more to give. You show up at your best. You attract these high caliber clients, you make the money and the impact that you desire to really having this clear and balanced physical channel of your physical body and your mind. Of course, it's not just luxuries that you can focus on later when you have more time. Really your wellness, your physical, mental, energetic well-being is really the key to building this soul led business that you run.

Bindi:

So if that speaks to you, if you love to be just held and supported as you optimize your health, recover your energy, I'd love to support you in that. You can send me a DM on Instagram. My handle is at bindistables or visit my website, bindistablescom. Forward slash, optimize, and you can see all the details there. So I hope this was helpful us going over all of the strategies to prevent and recover from burnout. I hope this was helpful.

Bindi:

I would love to hear your top takeaways over on Instagram. Send me a DM and please feel free to send this episode to anyone that you think that it could serve. If you have any fellow entrepreneurial goddess, sisters in your life that you're noticing or maybe working a little bit too hard or they're feeling a little bit more tired, a little more burnt out in their business, please send this episode their way. So thank you so much for listening and I'll see you back for another episode real soon, take care. Thanks so much for listening. If you loved today's episode, please spread the love by subscribing and leaving a review, or if there's someone in your life that you think could benefit from this conversation, please share this episode with them. I would love to hear from you over on Instagram, at bindistables, or visit my website, bindistablescom, to connect and work with me. Thank you so much again for being here and I'm celebrating you in this journey of becoming the happiest, the healthiest, most vibrant you.