What Got You Here Isn’t Working: Why Success Leads to Burnout

You’ve worked hard to get where you are, pushing yourself, proving yourself, and striving for excellence. And it worked, but now you’re exhausted, stuck, and maybe even resentful. What once fueled your success is now burning you out. In this episode, we’ll explore why the habits that got you here are no longer serving you, how to redefine success on your own terms, And what steps you can take to shift from survival mode to a more balanced, fulfilling life.

Let’s get into it. Welcome to Calmly Coping, the podcast for high achievers who want to feel calm, balanced, and confident from within. I’m Tati, a therapist and coach, and I’m here to help you stop overthinking, stop overworking, and crush self doubt. Every other week I share actionable tips and strategies you can implement right away to create more balance and ease in your life.

Thanks so much for tuning in. Let’s get started. So if you’re somebody who considers yourself to be high achieving, maybe a perfectionist, maybe puts a lot of pressure on yourself or has high expectations, then I’m sure then whether it was in school, the beginning of your career, building your business or any moment or multiple moments.

In your life, you probably worked hard and pushed yourself to get to where you are now. Maybe you worked long hours. You went above and beyond to prove yourself and excel. Your attention to detail might have made you stand out amongst your peers. Your diligence, reliability, and willingness to do it all made you successful.

You pushed, strove, and hustled. And it worked out. you probably achieved your goals and potentially more. Maybe you got good grades in school, you built a successful business, or you moved up the ladder at work, but now you’re exhausted and burnt out from pushing for too long. You’re so afraid of negative consequences and dropping the ball because your identity is so closely tied to achievement, success, and doing well.

So that makes it hard for you to stop or slow down. Maybe you didn’t spend any time cultivating relationships or hobbies or just enjoying your free time during your periods of study, career advancement, or business building. So you feel stuck and you don’t even know where to start when it comes to those things.

Or maybe as though you miss the boat and you’re feeling behind in those aspects of your life. Maybe you don’t even know how to relax or enjoy yourself when you’re not working because you’re so used to overworking and pushing yourself that it feels foreign. So even relaxation and self care turn into a form of competition and a way to push yourself harder.

You may feel resentful for giving so much to your work and not enough for yourself, but you don’t know any other way because this feels comfortable and familiar. In other words, what got you here is no longer serving you. It’s no longer sustainable, and it no longer aligns with the values you have and the life that you want to live.

But shifting out of this way of living isn’t like flipping a switch. This is a conditioned way of living, meaning that it is something that you have learned over years, if not decades, of your life through repetition. It has served you in the past, so your mind, body, and nervous system wants to continue that way of being and functioning in the world.

And oftentimes, our nervous system is focused on survival and not necessarily happiness. So this helped you to survive in the past, and your body, mind, and nervous system assume this will help you in the future. This is something that happens with trauma. And although the circumstances you’re experiencing aren’t necessarily trauma, of course, unless you have experienced something like traumatic circumstances at work, including maybe a toxic or abusive workplace, extreme poverty, or anything else that could have been potentially traumatic.

The framework is the same. What helped you to survive in the past, in this case, what helped you to succeed, is no longer helping you in the present. So what can you do about this? I’m going to share my three tips to help you to shift when what got you here is no longer serving you. First is to notice, and this is bringing awareness to what is no longer serving you.

Maybe some of the things that I just stated may have resonated and brought to awareness the things that got you here that may no longer be helping you out. So it could be patterns of overworking. It could be fear based behaviors and I have an entire podcast episode on this where I talk about when fear and anxiety fuels your behaviors.

I’m going to link that in the show notes or the description and if you’re watching on YouTube I’ll link it in the corner. Maybe the negative impacts on your personal life, like your relationships, mental health, or symptoms of burnout that you might be experiencing are getting to be too much, and you’re noticing that something needs to give, something needs to change.

You can’t continue to live this way. Maybe it’s the lack of boundaries that are no longer serving you. Whether it’s physical boundaries through overworking, which I mentioned previously, or maybe it’s even the mental boundaries. Sometimes we can struggle to mentally disconnect from work, and that can sometimes even be more challenging, because even though we have closed the laptop, gone home from the office, we may still be running over things in our mind, and that pattern of overthinking things and worrying about things is no longer helping us.

Maybe it’s the being fueled by pressure, intense criticism, or perfectionism that’s no longer serving you. Or maybe something that’s no longer serving you is more external. Maybe it’s a toxic workplace that doesn’t respect your boundaries or doesn’t value the need for work life balance. Or maybe they focus more on harmful criticism than helpful feedback.

Or they’re not respectful of your mental health or physical health needs. If this is the case, you might realize this was something that maybe was helpful in the past, maybe it was never helpful to be in this kind of environment, but now you’re finally realizing, I’m not sure if I can do this anymore.

The next step is to envision what is it that you do want. So now that we’ve identified what you don’t want, you need to replace that with something. You need to move towards something. So this can look like identifying what you personally value. What you want your life to look like. Maybe you value having balance.

Maybe you value having freedom with your time. Maybe you value your mental health and your peace of mind. Or maybe you value relationships. And connections with those that you love. Whatever it is, identify what’s important to you, what you want your life to look like, and how that might differ from what you have now.

And it can help to visualize this in detail. Maybe you can sit down, close your eyes and envision your ideal day in the future, and journaling about this can help as well. So writing down and identifying from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed. What does your ideal day look like? And then reflect.

on if your current life aligns with this. And what changes would you like to make to help you get closer towards this vision? This isn’t a magical elixir that we’re gonna drink and is going to magically change our lives, of course, but this is about identifying what you want things to look like and then making incremental steps towards that change.

And that’s what I’m going to talk about in the next step. And also reflecting on, are these more internal changes? Are these external changes? Maybe both? A lot of times I’ve noticed in the clients, students, and listeners that I speak with, we often think that it’s external changes that need to happen. I just need to quit this job.

I just need to get more time. I just need to be less busy and overwhelmed. And that can be part of it, but the bigger part can be the internal changes that need to happen, because sometimes until we make internal changes, we’re not going to be ready to leave the job or change the circumstances. And also the internal changes are things that come with us wherever we go.

And so if you can make the internal change to put less pressure on yourself, to value your time and space and energy more, then that is going to radiate out into the choices that you make and ultimately affect your external circumstances. And number three is to begin to shift. So begin to make small shifts with self compassion in mind.

And I say with self compassion in mind because it’s important to be kind and understanding with yourself anytime you’re making changes. Making changes isn’t something that’s easy. Like I said before, our nervous system craves familiarity, even if that familiarity isn’t serving us. So it’s going to sometimes resist, and you may unconsciously resist, making changes because it feels uncertain or foreign.

And this is a normal part of the change process. So just recognizing that you may come up against blocks or things that get in your way when you’re trying to make these positive changes in your life. And that’s okay. That can be a normal part of the change process. And that’s why it’s helpful to make small gradual changes rather than big grandiose changes.

It’s not saying that you can’t make big changes and say, all right, I want to quit my job. I want to move across the country. If that’s what feels right to you, then great. But that’s not something that’s always necessary to make the longer term sustainable changes that will help you to move closer towards what you value.

It can also help to enlist support. So this can be by opening up to a friend, a family member, a colleague, seeking out the support of a therapist or a coach. Making change on our own can be difficult and sometimes having an external perspective can help us to see things more clearly and also help us to push out of our comfort zone when we are making these changes.

I talked about making internal shifts. This is looking at and challenging your fears and limiting beliefs. If you have a fear of dropping the ball and feel like you always need to be overworking, how accurate is this fear? So can you challenge some of the beliefs that maybe have gotten you here? Also things like nervous system regulation.

So I talked about the nervous system craving regularity. So if you can experience different states where you’re not in this frantic, stressed survival mode and actually do things to calm your nervous system through physical practices such as deep breathing, meditation, yoga, or anything else that will help you to get your nervous system into a more calm, relaxed, and secure state.

That is your body practicing being in the state that you want to be essentially. So getting out of that stressed, frazzled, tense, anxious state and getting more practice and experience with the nervous system state that you want to be in. And this can also look like increasing your self care through boundary setting and taking care of your basic needs.

I always think that it’s important to start with the basics when it comes to self care. There’s all the cliches of the bubble baths and massages and all that stuff, and that’s great, but that doesn’t get to the root of really what self care is. And it’s Taking care of our needs and so oftentimes people neglect things like getting enough sleep or getting proper and regular nutrition or basic hygiene, the things that might already be automatic to you or the things that you could potentially be neglecting.

And if you’re considering leaving your workplace or your current circumstances because you’ve decided this is no longer working, the tried and true pros and cons list can always be a helpful approach to take. Identifying what are the pros of staying where you are. what are the cons, and vice versa. And I want to reiterate this.

As a high achiever, you might feel compelled to change everything at once. I’m not going to tell you not to do this, but this also isn’t always the answer, nor is it sustainable. This is often a long term process filled with self reflection, self trust, learning how to listen to yourself and your needs, and building the muscle of facing your fears of failure, judgment, uncertainty, and more.

If you’re ready for the next steps, then my free training, How to Achieve a Calm Mind, Balanced Life, and Empower Confidence in 90 Days is perfect for you. This is where I explain my signature calm, balanced, and confident curriculum that has helped hundreds of high achievers to feel calm, balanced, and confident from within without putting tons of pressure on themselves and shift from the place of what has helped them in the past and is no longer serving them to creating the life that they love.

Some of the outcomes my clients and students have experienced through this curriculum are changing jobs to a more fulfilling work environment, deciding to retire that earlier than expected without the guilt, pressure, and working themselves into the ground first, scaling their business while taking care of themselves, setting boundaries at their current job to better support their personal lives.

prioritizing self care to benefit their work, family, and long term success and fulfillment, and so much more. And all of these changes come from doing the deep inner work necessary to create external long term change. You can take the free training today and start your path to a more fulfilling life because our values shift throughout our lives.

And if you continue functioning in the past patterns that got you here, you could be hurting yourself and those around you more than you are helping. You can go to CalmlyCoping.com/workshop for more information. I also have the link in the description and the show notes and be sure you subscribe or follow to the podcast wherever you listen so that you can be notified when the next episode goes live.

It is nine signs that your job is hurting your mental health. While you wait for the next episode, I have more episodes about calming your mind, improving work life balance, and feeling more confident from within. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and until next time, be calm. Thanks so much for listening.

If you like what you heard, please share this episode with a friend. And please subscribe and leave me a review on iTunes. Also, remember to check me out online at CalmlyCoping. com and connect with me on Instagram at TatianaGLPC. All content here is for informational purposes only. This content does not replace the professional judgment of your own mental health provider.

Please consult a licensed mental health professional for all individual questions and issues. Till next time, I’m Tati, and this has been Calmly Coping.