From Burnt Out to Resilient
How I evolved my relationship with stress in four stages
A few days ago, I did something that would have been impossible even a year before: I went out to a women’s networking event and spoke with the group in German, promoted an event I was hosting later in the week, and presented a webinar on women’s hormonal health in the evening.
Everything I did that day - presenting myself in a foreign language, promoting my work, and hosting an event - took me out of my comfort zone and yet even as I felt the stress, I wasn’t stressed out. I felt excited and energized.
The distinction is crucial because I run a business helping women unlock more vitality, confidence, and beauty and have learned that beneath other challenges, most women struggle with a broken relationship with stress. For some, the stressor is a major life change like a divorce or dating again; for others, it’s the overwhelm of managing work and family life; for still others, it’s something that happened in childhood that keeps replaying in the present.
While I’m no therapist, I understand my clients because I struggled with stress throughout my teens and twenties and have spent the past six years changing my relationship with it. I’ve hit absolute burnout and illness, learned to counterbalance stress with breathwork and play, and finally reached a relationship with stress that leaves me feeling capable, balanced, and excited. I want to share exactly how I got there, starting with where I came from.
Stage 1: Burnout
When I graduated college at 22, I followed the footsteps of most of my friends: I moved to New York City excited to start my adult life and work my way to success.
Unfortunately for me, a lot of the expectations I had about success and even about life in general were unclear at best and more often dead wrong. I believed I should work hard to be successful, but I never defined what success meant to me or the boundaries of “working hard,” so I often worked to exhaustion. Even more painfully, I believed that my worth as a person was linked to my ability to prove myself to others, so every frustration with my career became mounting evidence that something was wrong with me.
Over the next three years, the energy and enthusiasm I started my work life with spiraled into disappointment and anxiety. I was often stuck at jobs I didn’t enjoy and unclear about what I wanted out of life. Layers of contradictory beliefs, advice, and assumptions kept me running in circles.
One day as I sat on the subway exhausted on the way home from work, with a homeless person screaming beside me and an impersonal voice announcing a delay, I thought over and over, “I wish this would stop, I wish this would stop…”
In a strange way, my wish was granted when I woke up the next morning with severe exhaustion and arthritis in both hands. I was in a full burnout and knew that I didn’t have the energy or will to go further, so I quit my job, moved home with my family, and took the time to re-evaluate my life.
Stage 2: Expanding the Blue Zone
In the nine months that followed, a doctor finally diagnosed me with chronic Lyme disease triggered by chronic stress. For the first time in years, I stopped running in circles and finally started paying attention to what gave me energy and what drained it.
I immediately quit drinking and removed dairy, soy, and processed foods from my diet because they drained me physically. I let go of friendships that left me depleted emotionally. I let go of my career in data science and banking and turned down similar offers.
Though my physical health remained in limbo, I spoke with a therapist who offered a wonderful piece of advice:
“Of the limited factors right now that are in your control, what can you change right now that would make you feel better?”
Reflecting on his words, I realized that I needed a complete change of environment and a break from New York City. Right before the pandemic hit, I moved to San Francisco and stayed with my brother until I found a job I was excited about at a mental health startup.
When the pandemic hit, I leaned fully into reducing stress. I biked down to Ocean Beach after work most days, became a breathwork facilitator, and strolled to my favorite cafe in Golden Gate Park every morning before work. For the first time in my adult life, I consciously carved out time for relaxation and doing what made me happy. I was expanding my nervous system’s capacity to experience safety and relaxation, or what author Kimberly Ann Johnson calls “expanding the Blue Zone” in her book “Call of the Wild:”
“In our relationships, for example—until we have a safe anchor to return to in blue, it’s not helpful to continue to go into the red… We need a level of safety in our relationships before we can begin to expand our capacity—whether that means a deeper level of commitment, intimacy, or sexual connection. Blue can be many things: humor, play, adventure, or pleasure. In communication, blue might mean expressing the things that you appreciate about your partner, your relationship, or the way you connect, before you express what’s not working and what you don’t like.”
And the more I got to know myself and what I wanted, the more one desire became clear: I wanted to move to Europe and find a culture better suited to my values. So I packed my bags and moved to Germany.
Stage 3: The Power of Choice
“So you moved to Germany with an unresolved health issue, no job, and no connections?” a date asked me quizzically over coffee.
“Yes”
”That’s brave,” he said, though his face reflected something between admiration and judgment.
Objectively, my first few months in Berlin were some of the most stressful of my entire life. I scrambled to find a job within six months, struggled to obtain my visa after a number of bureaucratic challenges, and lived in immigration limbo for months. On top of that, I pushed myself to improve my German and make friends in a new culture. Whenever the stress got too high, my arthritis returned full force and inflammation paralyzed my body.
Unlike in my early 20s, this time I proactively reached out for help. I found a wonderful therapist and began a self-guided brain training program recommended by my doctor called Dynamic Neural Retraining System (DNRS), designed to help people whose limbic systems were damaged by inflammation or chronic stress.
Though no one could remove the uncertainty from my life - both regarding my health and my immigration situation - they helped me respond to it better. My therapist in particular helped me widen the gap between stressful events and my reactions, so I could choose new responses. She led me to excavate my mind and body for the sources of beliefs and stress responses so we could design new ones from the ground up.
Most importantly, she taught me that I had a choice. I could choose new responses to stressful situations that made me resilient rather than panicked. I could treat stressful experiences as learning experiences rather than potential failures.
When I found myself spiraling into old stress loops and panic reactions, I learned to interrupt them with the phrase: “My brain is stuck in a rut and is running an old program. I’m making a new choice now.”
Over six months, I got a grip on stress and learned to manage whatever came my way. Although I got better at sparring with it, I still saw stress as an adversary that I needed to keep under control. That all changed over the past year with a new book and a new relationship.
Stage 4: Using Stress to Fuel Growth
“In 1998, thirty thousand adults in the United States were asked how much stress they had experienced in the past year. They were also asked, Do you believe stress is harmful to your health?
Eight years later, the researchers scoured public records to find out who among the thirty thousand participants had died. High levels of stress increased the risk of dying by 43 percent. But that increased risk applied only to people who also believed that stress was harming their health. People who reported high levels of stress but who did not view their stress as harmful were not more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study.” -Kelly McGonigal, “The Upside of Stress"
When I stumbled on “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal, it gave me the final piece of the stress puzzle: How to turn stress into growth.
McGonigal is a Stanford professor whose book outlines how our stress mindset and beliefs alter our physiological responses to stress. McGonigal shares that in addition to the well-known “fight-or-flight” response, we are also capable of “tend-and-befriend” responses or “challenge” responses to stress, which help us grow and connect with others. What’s important about these other responses is that in addition to cortisol, they release oxytocin and DHEA, which respectively help us connect deeply with others and grow more resilient from experiences.
The type of stress response we trigger depends on a few factors:
Stress mindset: Whether we believe stress is harmful to our health or that it can be positive; similarly, whether we believe our physiological response to stress is helpful or harmful (e.g. whether we try to suppress jitters before public speaking or label them “excited energy”)
Alignment with goals and values: Whether we believe a stressor is aligned with our goals and values (e.g. that the daily stress of going to the gym aligns with our value of long-term health)
Capability: Whether we believe and truly are capable of handling the stressor
Response Strategy: Whether we believe we have to fight or flee, or are willing to reach out to others for support (“tend-and-befriend”) or stay and overcome the stress (“challenge response”)
For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had a recipe for making stress work for rather than against me. With help from my boyfriend, a psychologist, I learned to clarify my values and goals so I could see how the stressors in my life aligned with them. I looked for situations where my capabilities fell short and learned to boost them - whether that meant preparing better for presentations or studying SEO strategies. Finally, I shifted my mindset and beliefs and approached new challenges with the view, “I can handle and grow from this - and the adrenaline in my body is helping me prepare.”
Conclusion
One of McGonigal’s points deeply resonated with me: Stress is innately tied to meaning in life. We are often stressed not just because of a change, but because we feel something important is at stake.
When I look back at my 25-year-old self in the midst of a burnout, I can see that her body wasn’t broken or weak. It was simply unable to handle the relentless demands of a woman whose unclear beliefs, goals, and self-image created unending stress. Though it took years to recover, I’m finally feeling the excitement and thrill of tackling life that I felt at 22- with the strategies to tackle stress head on and grow from it. And it’s one of the gifts I’m most excited to pass on to clients.
Want guidance on changing your relationship with stress?
Join us for the virtual workshop “Dancing with your Hormones” on Sunday August 25 to learn how to optimize your hormones for more vitality, confidence, and beauty 💃
