In this episode, we dive into the reality of chronic stress, burnout, and the mindset shifts needed to break free. My guest shares her deeply personal journey—experiencing burnout twice, first in a demanding job and later as a business owner and mother. She opens up about the turning point that made her reevaluate everything and commit to lasting change.We discuss the impact of stress on productivity, relationships, and overall well-being, as well as the power of boundaries, self-care, and asking for help. But the biggest lesson? Mindset. Without it, no strategy truly sticks.If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, stuck in survival mode, or wondered why success still feels unsettled, this conversation is for you. Tune in to discover how to move from just coping to truly thriving.🎧 Listen now and take the first step toward a healthier, more balanced life.To take the quiz click hereSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/you-can-inspiring-women-in-business/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Chapter 1: What are the signs of chronic stress and burnout?
Welcome to the You Come podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Jolly Jarvis, and today I am joined by the very lovely Jen Wilson, and she's going to introduce herself in just a moment. We're going to be talking around overwhelm and the kind of busy being busy society that we tend to find ourselves in. So Jen, over to you to start off with. Please introduce yourself to us.
Hello, I'm Jen, and I help women who are overwhelmed and burnt out to get organised, take back control and start living a joyful, happy life again.
And then that's the kind of crux of it, isn't it? Is it actually fun? Are you actually happy and enjoying life when you are running around, feeling overwhelmed, feeling super busy? And I think when we really search for it, most of us are like, no, it's actually not. It's not that nice. It's not that fun.
No, it's not fun at all.
So Jen, tell us a little bit about what got you into this.
My own personal experience, I was chronically stressed for over a decade. And in that time I experienced two burnouts. So originally brought on by work, a really stressful job, but then not having anyone really to tell me it wasn't normal to feel that way. Nobody to guide me and say what I could or couldn't do. So I just kind of got on the best I could with life.
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Chapter 2: How did Jen Wilson overcome her own burnout?
Although looking back now, I wasn't really getting on very well with it at all. But I just muddled my way through being chronically stressed for a really long time. I didn't realize at the time, but looking back, I realize that now. And then I hit my second burnout as a business owner. And that came about when my son was only four.
And that was really my turning point because it was just really significantly impacting my relationship with him. And I just thought, what am I doing? This has got to stop. So I promised myself from that point on that I was never ever going to allow myself to burn out again. And I started making lots of changes.
There was a lot of trial and error of trying to find ways to manage my stress for the long term. to avoid hitting burnout again. I then worked with the coach myself because I got so far that I felt better, but there was still something missing. So I got some additional support and it was during that time that I had a light bulb moment and I thought, hey, do you know what?
I could I could retrain and I could help other people, help other women. And that's my mission now, really, is to help other women so they don't have to suffer alone like I did. And what was missing?
Like, can you can you kind of express that better now? Like, you know, you felt better, but you didn't. There was just something not quite still fitting.
Yeah, it's still quite hard to put into words. So I made a lot of changes. So I put a lot of boundaries in place. As a business owner, I wasn't very good at that at one point. You feel like you've got to be there all the time to please everyone, especially when your business is quite new. So I didn't have boundaries. I was always rushing my son to bed because I had work to do.
Looking back, I was so stressed. I was incredibly unproductive. So although I was working really long hours, I wasn't actually achieving very much at all. So boundaries was one, sort of saying no, asking for help more from family and adding that self-caring, trying to take better care of myself. So all those things added up to feeling better, but I was still really, really, I call it unsettled.
I just, something was just amiss. My mind was racing. It just went 100 miles an hour all day, every day. I didn't know whether to do my business, whether to get a job, whether to do this, whether to do that. It was just, yeah, it was a really strange time. When I started working with a coach, what I realized was missing was mindset.
And we spent a lot of time working on mindset, which I'll say now is still ongoing. It's probably one of the hardest things to address. I can see why it's the last thing I address. It wasn't a conscious decision. I didn't actually know a lot about mindset then. I didn't really know a lot about it, but I learned from Rachel, my coach, that's what it was.
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Chapter 3: What role do boundaries play in managing stress?
mindset is massive you know like you can be so skilled I've seen some really really talented people whose heads just have not been in the right place to make the most of those talents and it's it's really frustrating to see and it's like people want to be skilling themselves all the time and they don't realize that actually they've got the skills they need it's just their head needs to be in a different place looking at things differently and that's really hard to do on your own yeah and I think as well well I don't think I know when you stress that looking back now I know that
mindset's really impacted because you get into this really negative thought spiral and that you can't break free from. And as the stress continues and things continue to get worse, that negative thought spiral gets worse and worse and you get stuck in that really bad place with your mindset. So you kind of got to almost dig your way back out.
Which is hard work, isn't it? I mean, that's the thing is, is whenever you think about mindset stuff, like, as you said, it's kind of always ongoing. There's always stuff to tweak and improve and everything else. But it's like it's not easy.
No, it's really not. And you've got to unlearn things that you've. you've learned years learning that you didn't even know you were learning yeah and it's coping behaviors that you take on that you don't know you've taken on that you've taken on to try and manage the stress they're actually not very good coping behaviors and you've almost got to relearn relearn them it is it is challenging yeah
but so when you do it so thinking about the whole because I said at the beginning like we have this culture of everyone's being quite you know people quite stressed they're quite overwhelmed like the word overwhelm I use so often in in my own house and even the kids will be like mommy's overwhelmed but you know but like you know what why do we how do we get ourselves in this situation
Life. Life's busy, isn't it? I think overwhelm and stress, both those words are thrown around, aren't they? Like people say it flippantly. I'm so overwhelmed or I'm so stressed. But it's actually really quite serious, especially when it impacts your day to day. And I think that's the thing is it's knowing that when you are, this isn't a good place to stay. No, it definitely isn't.
And I think that. I was just talking to someone today when, when you're there, when you're in there, you're just trying to get through each day. You're just trying to survive. Yeah. Don't really stop to evaluate what you're doing and how you feel.
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Chapter 4: How does mindset affect stress levels?
And you know, it feels pretty awful because you're not particularly enjoying every day and having fun in life, but you don't have the time to stop and evaluate what you're doing. That's making you feel like that. Cause you literally are just trying to get through the day. It's quite scary, isn't it?
You know, like, It's frightening to face up to what might be causing that because it I don't know, I think it's easy to get ourselves into a situation where you feel like actually it doesn't like I've got no choice. You know, like if if it's my kids that are making me overwhelmed and it's my job that's making me overwhelmed.
Well, I need my job and I have my children and I, you know, neither of them are going anywhere. And so it's like, what am I going to do once I know?
Yeah. It's one of the biggest mistakes women make. They think that it's just the way life is and it's just the way life has to be. So I've just got to get on with it. Yeah. Get on. That's that's the card you've been dealt sort of thing.
And I think also there's an element of feeling like.
like it's a reflection on us that we can't deal with it because you look around like social media is not helpful with this but you look around at other people and they seem to really have it together you know like you have the odd one who videos themselves crying on the internet but in general people look like they're on it and they're doing all these things and their houses are all great and everything else and so it feels like it's a reflection on you that you're not able to do this
Absolutely. And nobody wants to admit like that they aren't coping. You feel like you're a failure, like everybody else is getting on just fine. So why aren't I? Well, I'll let you into a little secret. Everyone else isn't just getting on just fine. Everyone's really good at putting a front on.
And I am one of those people because I used to put a front on and it was only really close family that actually knew how serious things were. People at work when I was first signed off, when I first had the first burnout.
they had no clue they were like whoa where's Jen gone what's going on because I just put this front on that everything was fine and we all every woman that I work with does that I've got a friend you would have no idea she's so outgoing so happy she's always laughing but underneath it's a mess and we're made to feel like we can't say that life's hard or we're not coping or we need some help because like you've said society is like programmed us to believe that
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Chapter 5: What strategies can help break the cycle of overwhelm?
But I couldn't find the words to put across to her that, yes, women are still being mums like they were, but then they're going to work. But it's all that other stuff that piles on top of it that makes it so much worse.
Yeah. There is just so much information. The world is so noisy. It's a noisy world, isn't it? Yeah.
And I think what comes from that is all these things that, especially as a parent, that you should be doing this and you should be doing that. And, oh, well, I better stop doing that because it might cause some damage to my child when he's older. And, oh, how should I start behaving? And, oh, I should do that.
And then before you know it, you've added all this other stuff on your plate that you've got to deal with and you're already overwhelmed. Like that adds to the negativity you were feeling because you already feel like you're failing and then you're failing at all this other stuff that all these people online tell you that you should be doing. It's crazy.
It's a lot, isn't it? It's a lot. It's overwhelming. And I think that's the thing is, because I was in the last week's episode, I was sharing kind of changes that I've made with my business. And the episode before that, we were talking around planning and looking at like what you want to achieve in the next year. And you can do that as a business owner or not.
But it was when we sat down to do the plan was when I realized how much I was expecting myself to do in still the same amount of time as I'd failed to do things so far going forwards. And it was like, actually, something has to give. And and I think that's the thing is, is sometimes we can't like you can comes from the idea that you can you can have it all. You can do it all.
But it's understanding what your all is. And and it's prioritizing. And I sat there with what I wanted as my all. And I realized actually that isn't that isn't feasible. It's not doable if I want to do things well. And I think that was a really, I was quite impressed with myself that I'd actually done that because I think we, so often we just plow on and we're like, oh yeah, it makes no sense.
Don't know where I'm going to magic that time. And we say it, I hear people say, I don't know how I'm going to magic that time out from, from, from nowhere, but you know, I've got this, this and this to do. And so I'm just going to have to crack on and do it. And it's like, we kind of set ourselves up for the stress, for the failure, for the overwhelm, for the anxiety before we've even started.
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Chapter 6: Why do women feel the pressure to maintain a perfect image?
Yeah. We place too many expectations on ourselves. Yeah. Straight away. And I don't care. Anybody says something has to give. If you're overwhelmed, something somewhere has to give because if it doesn't, nothing's ever going to be.
any different no and it's like you said before like you know you can you can take on these things and you can pretend to to be being all right but you're actually being really under unproductive and you're having that it's negatively impacting you physically and emotionally in the process yeah massively yeah I achieve more now in less time I work a heck of a lot less hours and I achieve a lot more
Yeah, because I'm not completely stressed and overwhelmed all the time. When I look back at the hours I was working and what I was actually producing was laughable now. I was like, what was I doing? I felt like I was working so hard, you know, but nothing was really happening.
No, because the stuff wasn't flowing and you weren't actually able to think straight. No. Yeah. So how do people know what's normal? So we're talking about, oh, you know, like we're normalizing and you're right. Like people do like, I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed. And it's like, it's just a normal thing we say.
And actually, before we started recording, we were talking about like the whole, I'm busy, you know, like my default for anybody used to be, you know, if somebody said, how's things or how are you? I'd be like, oh, you know, busy.
yeah and everyone would be like oh yeah yeah yeah me too I'm so busy and it's and it's it was like that we feel like I think as business owners as well but also in employment you feel like oh if I'm busy I'm I'm doing a good job I'm doing well I definitely feel like I think as an employee you have to justify what you're being paid to do yeah and I think I know me for me as a business owner it's like well
who's she floating around going for all these walks? Like, you know, she sat at a desk working really hard. So you've got to say, I'm busy, I'm working really hard. I don't anymore, by the way, but that was how I used to feel. Because as a business owner, surely you've got to work every hour God sends to get what you want.
Well, I think there is that when people that you've got two camps with it, the people who are going, it's really hard. It's a massive slog. You've got to do like 80 hour weeks, which I was like, well, that doesn't not going to work, is it? And then you've got the other lot going, oh, you know, I just, you know, it's like three hours a week and I'm a multimillionaire, which also doesn't work.
And so it's kind of, that's the thing is, is it's difficult, isn't it? To see, because I struggle, like I haven't got, my mum used to work, but she didn't,
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Chapter 7: How can we prioritize our well-being amid daily demands?
constantly worried or tense, problems sleeping, digestive problems is one, constipation, diarrhea, stomach pains, and then things like finding it hard to make decisions, being forgetful and finding it hard to concentrate. They're like real sort of key warning signs that you've been overwhelmed for far too long.
And the thing is, if you carry on on that trajectory, what is the potential?
The potential is that you'll burn out. So you'll just get to the point where you've got nothing left to give. And I can tell you what that feels like because I've experienced it twice. And burnout really, so for me physically, this is my interpretation. If you Google it, you'll get different ways of reading what it is.
But my interpretation, how I experienced it, physically, you're just so utterly exhausted. It's a challenge to get through the day. Like you can literally just get through the day. Emotionally,
i would say that you don't feel anything much about anything or anyone i know when the first time my husband said to me how would you feel if something happened to the dogs when i just shrugged my shoulders that's quite serious you know how much i love my dogs there was nothing there was just nothing there i can't even put into words how it felt now and mentally
You just can't take anything else in. I remember being at my job before I was signed off and people would speak to me. And I could see the mouths move. Couldn't tell you a word that said, and I told my doctor and he said, you just, you just can't take any more. Your body is just shutting down. So that's what burnout feels like.
And I'd like to say that burnout takes a really, really long time to recover from. It's not like, oh, well, let's get signed off for a few months. I'll go on holiday for a couple of weeks. I mean, some people might hit burnout quicker if there's been a really serious, stressful event, but For most people, it's over a period of time.
So if you think how long it's taken you to get to that point, you've got to think how long it's going to take you
to undo do it which is a bit like the learning of new habits isn't it it's like i've i've programmed myself to do this and then you've been doing that and reiterating it for years upon years which is what i said earlier you've almost got to in a way reprogram and you haven't purposely developed bad coping habits it's just they just kind of evolve on their own as you're trying to get through what you're getting through it's not until you
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of self-care in avoiding burnout?
Yeah. And then what should they do if they find and you do have a resource on this, don't you?
Yeah, I've got a quiz that helps people identify how stress is affecting them. So it'll either say, no, you're not stressed. You're absolutely fine. Oh, yes. You need some help. And there's a bit in between as well. But it just it asks question based based around how people are thinking and feeling and behaving.
And it gives you a really good indication because if anything, like me, I didn't know, I didn't know what stress was. Like I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what, and I thought something was really seriously wrong with me, but I couldn't pinpoint anything to go to the doctor. And I stumbled across an article on stress that listed all the symptoms and I had them all.
And I remember being like, yes, I'm just stressed. Like rather naively looking back. Oh, it's only that. I was really rather foolish. But at the time, I was so relieved that I had nothing, what I thought wasn't seriously wrong. Looking back, I now know it was seriously wrong. But just I didn't have something else seriously wrong. I felt relieved.
But then as the years went by, and now I know how that affected me long term, physically, mentally, emotionally, I'm trying to help women change.
get to that before it gets beyond as it did for me I want I want I really want women to understand and be aware so much earlier on than I was and I think that's the thing isn't it is it's like yeah it's been like oh it's only it's only stress and it's like but actually you could have had other serious illnesses that you'd got over quicker than they just it just doesn't have such a buzzword it's just been normalized a lot more than it should have been
Yeah, totally, because people just throw the word around, don't they? It's not taken very seriously, unfortunately.
My seven-year-old tells me she's stressed before going to school in the morning because she's going to be like, I'm stressed, and it's like... Really? No, you're not. The thing is, I know... You should know what stress is. But the thing is, is, you know, like it is and it's good to open up the conversation and people be more aware of how they're feeling.
Because I think that was another thing is, is there's that whole suck it up and just get on with it, which obviously it doesn't work. It doesn't help. So being able to talk about it is great. But it's understanding that being stressed in a moment and feeling like that all the time are two different things and things that we need to work on.
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