In this interview, host Speaker A and love‑and‑emotional‑healing coach Rebeccah Silence explore why burnout disproportionately affects women and how to prevent and heal it. Rebeccah identifies two core drivers: an achievement‑focused mindset that ties self‑worth to external validation, and emotional dysregulation stemming from high empathy and the need to absorb others’ emotions. They discuss "invisible responsibilities" such as constantly moving goalposts and unpaid caregiving labor that keep women in a perpetual state of over‑extension. The conversation highlights anxiety and depression as primary warning signs of burnout, explaining that anxiety reflects rejecting one’s truth and needs, while depression reflects shutting them down. Rebeccah differentiates ordinary stress from nervous‑system dysregulation using the fight‑flight‑freeze model, describing how each state manifests emotionally and physically. Practical strategies are offered, including radical self‑acceptance, prioritizing self‑care, and somatic regulation techniques. Rebeccah promotes a free "Emotional CPR Masterclass" that teaches nervous‑system regulation, and provides her Instagram handle (@rebeccahsilence) and website (theunsilentwoman.com) for further support.
Chapters
As Women's History Month comes to a close, I wanna take a few minutes to address something a lot of us deal with, okay? It's called burnout. And raise your hand if you're watching, you're at home, if you're feeling it. Well, with us today is, yeah, everyone's raising their hand. So with us today is love and emotional healing coach and one of my absolute favorite people, Rebeccah Silence. She has been very helpful to me in my journey. Hello.
I'm so grateful to be here and we're about to go deep.
We're going deep, y'all. We're going in deep.
We're gonna heal you.
We're gonna heal, all right? So Rebeccah, anyone can experience burnout, but why does it impact women so specifically?
Because, I'm gonna give us two reasons nobody else is gonna tell you. Oh. Okay, we're way too achievement-focused, right? So we need to be needed, we need to accomplish, and we get our value that way.
I 1,000% agree.
All right, and that almost killed me, quite literally.
Like getting external validation.
I ended up with a 5% chance to live and a cancer diagnosis because I was working and doing 10 client sessions a day a day, 7 days a week, with a 6-month waitlist, and I thought I was crushing it. And that achievement paradigm I was living through almost killed me. I got pregnant, I got diagnosed, and I lived my practice of emotional healing to save my life and gave up achievement paradigms forever.
How good for you.
This is personal to me. Achievement, and then the other major source of burnout for women is emotional dysregulation.
I'm in that too.
Okay, but it's our emotional dysregulation and we don't know how to not be impacted by other people's emotional dysregulation.
Because we take in what we, the empathic part of us, okay.
Yes.
It's really hard.
And if they're not happy or okay, how could we be happy or okay?
Right, right, there's no separation at all.
Yes.
Great points, talk to me about the invisible responsibilities. My friend Sam Schocker who works at 9NEWS always brings this up. What are they?
Well, I think back to achievement paradigms, the number one invisible responsibility is I've gotta be more, I've gotta be more. So I cross this finish line and now I gotta go to the next one.
The goalpost is moving, right?
And we don't give ourselves time to celebrate as women and to receive how freaking fabulous we are. And both achievement and emotional dysregulation are trauma responses. So we have this responsibility to not be weak. We have this responsibility to have it together and for nobody to know that we're not fine, that we're not okay.
We're not regulated.
And we keep pushing through. And you don't need to get sick or to have life hit you or have a breakdown to force your hand to reprioritize.
You could do this beforehand as preventative, y'all.
Yes, you do not need breakdown to break through. I don't care what anybody else says.
Wow. You don't. That's a big statement to say. And I know a lot of you are moms out there watching. Moms also have, let's just be honest, another invisible load they're taking care of little things that sometimes, I'm just gonna say the dad doesn't always do, so there's another added responsibility. So what does burnout, Rebeccah, look like, and what should we be on the watch out for so we don't go to breakdown?
Yeah, well the two signs that I want you to consider are anxiety and depression.
Ah!
Okay?
I got two out of two.
So let's just make this simple, and I'm the coach that teaches you how to make your trauma your biatch, Anxiety and depression are symptoms, and they're real, and they can heal. I'm a trained therapist. I'm trained to diagnose you, but I won't. Here's what anxiety is. It's you rejecting your truth, your needs, and your emotions. Here's what depression is. You're shutting down your truth, your needs, and your emotions. And that truth and those needs and those emotions, they ain't going anywhere.
They're just— until you face, move through, and conquer them with the right Radical acceptance on that one.
Well, and you've got to just be willing to be honest with yourself and own you matter too. Please factor yourself into your own life. What you need, how you feel, what you want, these are important.
There's a line I always heard that said, if your self-care and compassion doesn't include oneself, then it's incomplete. You don't just do care for everybody else around you, you have to have self-care. And self-compassion.
And you won't be loved back as much as you love other people. You're loved back at the level you show up for yourself and love yourself. So don't think, oh, I'm giving all this, so it should be coming back to me. How much are you giving to you?
To yourself, exactly.
Right, and that—
That's the mirror.
Is the indicator of why or how much you're burnt out.
Wow, okay, so it can be hard to tell the difference between stress and nervous system dysregulation. I've been learning a lot about dysregulation and somatic healing and breathing. Tell me about the differences.
Yes, so nervous system regulation is one of my jammy jams.
Yeah.
And really, I'm just making it as simple as possible. If you're in fight, flight, freeze, your nervous system is dysregulated, right? And when you're in fight, you're sad and you need to cry.
Yeah.
And when you're in freeze, you are angry and you need to get it out in a healthy way that doesn't hurt anyone.
What if you're flight?
And if you're in flight, Fear has you stuck and has taken you over. So I just want us to get, there's a reason why we're in fight, flight, freeze, and it's how we cope because we don't wanna touch our emotions at all, which also will have us burnt out.
Exactly, so if you're not facing those, you're gonna burn out even quicker.
Yeah, and I have a gift for us today.
Oh, what is that?
It is my free Emotional CPR Masterclass. Oh wow. Because I wanna teach you for free how to navigate this. So all I need everyone to do is follow me on Instagram @rebeccahsilence and DM me CPR, and you will get the best of the best of how to right away start regulating your nervous system from me, and I will break it down for you in a way that will change your life.
Rebeccah, I'm so happy to have you here. Guys, actually do this because you will find a change in your body immediately when you do stuff, and she is the best of the best, she really is. You can continue the conversation, you can connect with Rebeccah, it's not just me who gets to talk to her, y'all can talk to her by following her on social media. Her handle is @rebeccahsilence. DM her for her free emotional CPR masterclass to heal burnout fast, or find her online at theunsilentwoman.com. Thank you. We went deep. We went deep.
