Episode 300 When burnout drives your drinking: how to interrupt the cycle with Cait Donovan
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Recently, I hit a wall. Not the kind where you’re tired and you need a weekend off. The kind where you wake up and realize you don’t care anymore about any of it. The business you’ve built, the people you’re supposed to help, the goals that used to light you up. And I watched it happen. I knew I was burning out. I just didn’t stop. Stopping doesn’t feel like an option because I was programmed to believe that my needs are a liability and that success is only for people.
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who don’t fucking stop. And so I didn’t, I haven’t. And then one day I literally just couldn’t keep going. And so I called my friend, Donovan. She’s been on the show before. She is a burnout expert and host of the podcast, Fry’d, and also a human woman who knows exactly what it feels like when you realize that the dream you have been building has become a prison. And what she told me hit differently.
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than any advice I’ve ever heard before. She said that the first barrier to recovery from burnout isn’t time, it isn’t money, it isn’t your workload. It’s actually shame. It’s not believing that you deserve to have your needs met in the first place. And the way out, the way through this sounds so simple that it’s ridiculous because we’re conditioned to believe that if you want
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big results, you got to make really big changes. But Kate is here to remind us that small action steps, so simple like just peeing when you need to pee, or grabbing a drink of water when you’re thirsty, or taking a break when you feel tired. These are the basic foundational self-care skills that we lost in childhood. And it’s the lack of these skills that is quietly ruining our lives. So grab a cup of tea,
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Take a walk in the sunshine, breathe some fresh air, and join me for a raw and real conversation about what happens when you let go of that sense of urgency and align yourself with a sense of ease.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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Kate, I am so excited to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. But for those people that didn’t listen to your first episode, I will link it in the show notes. But why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us who you are, what you do, and why you do it. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation in such a big way. I love the way you ask questions, and I love your insights from your own perspective. So I’m always glad to talk to you.
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So I am Kate Dunnivan. I am a burnout expert. My background is in Chinese medicine and bio-behavioral health. So I come at this from both a science perspective and an Eastern medicine practitioner perspective. And my expertise in burnout really focuses a lot on two main core ideas. One of them is that burnout is not just a workplace issue. It has a web of causative problems. And the other is that we have to come together to create the solution for it.
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I think one of the big issues in workplace wellness right now is that everyone is pointing fingers at one another. You know, the top is saying, well, people are not strong enough and people need to manage their stress better. And people are like, you have to make workplace wellness a priority and it’s your fault I feel that way. And I wish that that could stop so that we could actually make some progress. And that’s my goal. That’s what I’m up to these days. let’s just start by reviewing or defining what
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burnout is? How does one know if they are burned out? According to the World Health Organization, as of May 28th, 2019, the definition of burnout is that it is an occupational hazard that has three components, and they are exhaustion, cynicism and depersonalization, and a feeling of a lack of productivity or lack of impact.
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And it’s interesting that that is put into the context of the workplace because I recently had a period of burnout. I kind of broke and it was two or three weeks where I didn’t give a fuck. My brain did not work and that did not end my work day. In fact, my work days were not real productive, but I was good for nothing nowhere. Talk to me about this idea that burnout is something that happens at work.
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First you have to figure out if workload is part of it.
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so that you can start to figure out what the solutions might be. You are unlikely when you’re burnt out. You just said like your brain was broken, right? And that’s exactly what it feels like. I had a client once say, Kate, did burnout make me stupid? And I said, well, yeah, temporarily probably. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. So the idea isn’t for you to have the solutions. The idea is for you to understand.
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where all the vulnerabilities come from so that you can patch the ones and align the ones that you have control over. So you have to make some tough decisions about your life. How else can you be resourced? Say you are lucky enough to have a partner that has a decent job and doesn’t work 90 hours a week. Maybe they are ordering meals and so that you always have something home cooked. They’re not maybe cooking all your meals, but they’re getting things ready for you so that you don’t have to worry about that bit. Maybe you’re pulling in a housekeeper once a week. Maybe you’re
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eating off of paper plates for the next six months so that you don’t have to put a dish in a dishwasher and unload a dishwasher. Maybe you are only buying pre-cut onions. Like, this is when it becomes not just about the workplace. How are we easing the load of your life so that the energy that remains can be put toward what you want to put it toward? What kind of resources can you add to your life? What kind of habits do you have that are making things harder for you? Like, are you
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Do you have a housekeeper, but you’re cleaning before she comes? Why don’t you save yourself that hour and a half? Why don’t you rest instead of doing that? Why don’t you throw on a 10 minute meditation instead of doing the dishes before the housekeeper comes? Let the housekeeper do the dishes. What are you doing? What I’m hearing though is where we all get in our own way. I recently realized, I’ve been living on some paradigms about myself. I make all of my own food from scratch.
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That’s how I identify. And guess who’s been real hungry and tired because she can’t, she doesn’t have time to make all of it. And so like, like what you said, you have to make some hard decisions. you can do about anything you want if you provide yourself with the support and the resources. I, I envisioned my dog trying to get through the door.
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carrying a five foot stick and the doorway is three and a half and she can’t come in. And it’s like, yeah, if this is the doorway you want to go through, you’re have to put down the stick. You can’t fit through the door with your values. Like I made dinner last night and I used a store brought salad dressing as a marinade. But I was like, at least someone get to eat. At least someone get to eat. And those are the things that we have to do on the personal side. And from the leadership perspective, you have to be aware of
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where the gaps are in resources for your employees. You have to look around and understand when someone’s been promoted too quickly and they’re not actually as skilled as you thought they were at the thing that they need to be skilled at. The leadership side is being responsible for the things in the workplace that affect it, but they can’t chop your onions for you at home. I know in my own organization, I’ve worked very hard to provide coaching for people.
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in their personal life. When you’ve got children running around and you’re trying to work from home, or you’re not planning for meals, you are not structuring your life to refuel the car that is your body, that is the vehicle that will get you what you want. We have to take our own needs seriously. This is such a foreign concept to those of us that were raised as high-performance people pleasers, is the idea that our needs are not actually negotiable.
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I didn’t even know that I had needs. Right. It’s not even that I thought that they were negotiable. I just didn’t think that they existed. And that’s not something a workplace can fix for you. When I was, when I first read all the research, it was 2016. I was going through my own burnout. I was trying to figure out what was going on. It said 80 % of burnout is caused by the workplace. And I owned my own business. And I was like, but I am the workplace. I created the workplace. Huh?
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I did it. It’s mine. So it’s my fault. It’s my fault then. And I started digging deeper into the things. And when I realized all the things that they say, it’s all about alignment, Is alignment in workload and alignment in autonomy needs and alignment in values and alignment in fairness and alignment in recognition, alignment in community. It’s all about matching as best you can to the place that you work. thought, I created a place that I don’t match with.
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How did I do that? It’s mine. How did I do that? Well, and I did that because I didn’t think I had a need at all. Not needs, plural, like a need. So I started to look at how I structured my business and how I was charging and how much I was charging compared to what people were getting and what kind of fears sat behind how I was setting up my business, the scarcity fears and the
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I’m not good enough fears. I was never gonna create a workplace where I was good enough or had enough. Because that was not my paradigm. So yes, it was sort of my fault. And also, these were things I learned in childhood, which is not my fault.
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So the burnout was the thing that said, hey, ding dong, time to pay attention to this. You’ve got to do things differently if you want to like actually survive your life because you you’re actually killing yourself right now, slowly and miserably. Yeah. What I noticed when I kind of hit the wall was I was very motivated to take it seriously because the last thing I wanted was to wake up
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and truly not give a fuck anymore. Like I have spent years building my business and the brand and building a team and a community. And I thought all of that is in danger if I don’t take this seriously because I’m going to wake up and I’m not going to care anymore. Yeah. And that’s what happened to me. When I was, my first acupuncture job was in Poland. I was working as an independent contractor in a fertility, Western Fertility Treatment Center.
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and I was the only Eastern practitioner. was the only person that was not like medical doctor, you know, strict. And it got to the point, and this is like so embarrassing, and still brings up a little bit of shame for me. But I got to the point where the only reason I cared whether or not people got pregnant was because it got them off my schedule. Yeah. That’s burnout. That’s awful. I didn’t, I had no connection to the impact of my work anymore.
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I had no connection to the why of my work. And if I think about it, I was never really designed to do that type of work. That was the work that I could find when I was in a foreign country, speaking a foreign language, trying to find my way through. That’s the job that I got and I made it very successful. But I was never passionate about that. I don’t even want children. I don’t really, I care if you want children and you get them because I think that that matters, but I don’t actually care if there are more children.
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in general. That’s not important to me. There’s some people that just like lost their lunches because I said that out loud. But the fact of the matter is like I set uh up a business and a system and a job that was missed Matt. I was doing the skill, using the skill I wanted to use. I was doing acupuncture and herbs, right? So I did, I was using my master’s degree and I was doing, and I was helping people one-on-one, which I really wanted to do. So there was a lot of things that were aligned, but the thing I was actually helping people do was not something that was really that important to me.
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The scariest thing of all though would be realizing that in a state of burnout because you don’t have the energy. But maybe would you say that realizing that unlocked the motivation to pursue when you gave yourself permission to acknowledge that there was a mismatch? Say more about that.
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Yeah, so one of the things that I did, I didn’t realize at first that that was the problem, because I would not admit that at first, because it sounds terrible to say, and my patients were really struggling, and infertility is an awful thing to go through. So it felt really callous to me, and it took me ages to admit it. So before I admitted it, I moved countries. I was like, I told my husband that my burnout, you know, my issues and every, the reason I felt the way I did was because we lived in Poland. He got a job in the Czech Republic, we moved.
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After I moved, my practice changed a bit. I wasn’t doing only fertility. I did some, but not only. I was more of a general practitioner at that point. And when I left Warsaw, I sold my practice to people who were really passionate about doing fertility work. And their business blew up. I was already, I already had a six month waiting list by the time I sold it. I was busy anyway, but it blew up under the people that purchased it from me, which is so amazing. But they were...
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completely aligned with what they were doing. Now she teaches fertility acupuncture all over the world. I mean, it’s an absolute and loves it. And it’s absolutely incredible. I could not have chosen a better person. It was ideal. And then when I got into the new space and I was doing more general practice and I was working less hours, I got to the point where I was like, fertility really wasn’t my thing. And then I got to the point where I was like, I don’t know that acupuncture is my thing.
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But I spent $100,000 on an education. Four years of a master’s program, $100,000. I can’t not do it. I can’t not do it. The sunk cost fallacy had me in a chokehold until we then, about a few years later, we moved back to the States and I was getting ready to open an acupuncture office in New York City.
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I ruptured my Achilles and could not. So that got put on hold for five months because I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t stand. So I wasn’t going to be able to get to the office, taking the train and getting off the train. I mean, it was just, I literally couldn’t put any weight on my foot for 16 weeks. So I four or five months that I couldn’t do anything. Then I finally opened the office six months later. And then five months after that COVID hit.
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So now I’m paying rent on an acupuncture office in New York City that I can’t use. I have not built up a big enough patient base to carry me through something like the pandemic. I held on for, I think, four or five months, and then I was like, I can’t do this anymore. So the world also sort of conspired to move me out of that. It was like, no bish. Like, no bish. You are not doing this anymore.
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And at some point along the way, my best friend in Poland is a professional speaker. So I knew that that was a thing. I knew that how stress affects the body was incredibly important to me even before burnout happened. Then learning all the things I learned about burnout and it all started to sort of come together. I started the podcast, together stories for my book and I wrote a book and just sort of things started like bubbling up and following a direction. And that was, gosh, I opened my business now in 2019.
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I think officially, like officially got an LLC in 2019. And now in this past year, during 2025, I spent the first sort of six years in this business on individual people, like I did in acupuncture. And the past year and a half, I’ve been moving into the business space much, much, much, much, much, much more. So I’m no longer, even in my content, I’m not talking to individuals anymore. I’m talking to organizations. And so,
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that alignment has now shifted. It’s not that I was out of alignment before, it’s that folks alignment changes because you change. And you have to let yourself go with it. So you were saying before, it would be a shame to lose these things because of your burnout, but it would be a shame to keep them if they’re not yours anymore. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hear the fear in that statement, you know, that I need to allow.
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myself to change. I feel like I have, I’ve stepped back from, like I’m not going back to operating the way I was and I’m still recalibrating. And I have found, I’m still very passionate about my content and what I do. I’m just not going to do like, I don’t know, 120 hour weeks for years on end anymore. Like it’s time to not do that. And there’s just so much.
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There’s so much matrix and framework and introspection that you have to do to find alignment. But alignment, like what I know, it’s a feeling. And when you get the pieces aligned, like it does unlock motivation and energy that you think is gone forever. And I think that’s what I would like to say is it’s not gone forever.
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you just have to do the work to recalibrate. have to do the work to recalibrate and you do have to, before you do the work to recalibrate, you have to go through a restorative and rebuilding phase because the actual effect of stress on your body means that you have lost brain volume, you have lost muscle volume, you have lost good gut bacteria. Like your body requires rest and restoration before you can fully get on board with like, all right, what am I doing next?
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So there is a period of time that requires mostly, I guess, really the best word for this period of time is nourish. Nourishment, nourishing, nourish, in all the forms of that word. You need to be nourished in every possible way, by food, by people, by yourself, by rest, by all the things. And then you start to sneak out of it and say,
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this feels bad, oh, that or the, oh, actually over here, oh, wait, and then this, and then, and you start to sort of play that alignment game. Like a chiropractor for your life, you know? Have you ever read The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck? No. Oh, the way that she speaks about integrity is about being in alignment with yourself and being integral as being whole, not leaving parts of yourself behind, not.
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exposing one part of yourself and hiding the rest, not as being whole. And it’s such a beautiful description of how it is possible to exist in the world that I wish everyone would read it because I think one of the best books has ever been written. Well, let’s get down to what stops people from
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from pursuing wholeness. What stops us from nourishing ourselves is that we are in survival mode because of the fear of financial insecurity. You know, like the pressure to get aligned real fucking fast so that you can come up with a profitable business idea or pivot in your career or whatever, like it’s kind of a luxury.
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Um, and I know in my own self, it’s also a mindset where I’m like, no, you actually are safe and you are fine. You’re not going to be living in a van down by the river next week. If you take a nap today, like you’re fine. But, and there is a very real cost, which is why we stopped nourishing ourselves, which is why we don’t hire the housekeeper or have the meals made because we think we can’t afford it. Can Some people can’t to be clear.
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Some people can’t. But I think the first thing that gets in the way is not that. I think the first thing that gets in the way is shame. Okay, say more. So in order to be aware that you have needs and then meet those needs, you have to not be ashamed to exist. You have to understand that you deserve to be alive. And shame is the thing that teaches you that maybe not, maybe you don’t. And so you’re not ever going to even meet your most basic needs, never mind the higher level.
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but you’re not even gonna meet your most basic needs if you don’t think that you deserve to be alive in the first place. So I think in order to to get there, we have to play with that idea. And in order to do that, I had to start to unwind some of my behavior. So I was a people pleaser because I was afraid that if I wasn’t, that I wouldn’t be loved. So what I started to do, and this is a technique that we use. Everybody get your pencils out because this is, you’re gonna like this.
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The thing that we do in companies and people is we practice something called strategic disappointment, where we start to disappoint the people and even customers and things in our lives in very small ways that we on an intellectual level know are unlikely to create harm for them or for us.
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So there are safe ways, that’s why it’s strategic, there are safe ways to disappoint people. And we practice doing that on a very regular basis until our nervous system starts to understand that if we are not people pleasing all the time, we will be okay. So this is part of it. So you have to practice. So strategic disappointment for me was something like, for example, my husband and I were ready to go for a hike. I was dressed, you’re ready to go. He was dressed, ready to go. The dog had a harness on. He was opening the door and I had to go to the bathroom.
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And I asked him to wait for me to go to the bathroom instead of shutting up, ignoring my physical need and getting in the car so that I didn’t have to ask to bother him to wait for me for 60 seconds. Because we were already dressed, we were ready, we were getting in the car, everything was happening. And I said, I’m gonna go to the bathroom before we go. And he went, okay. But before I said it, I was afraid. Not because my husband has ever cared that I have stopped and gone to the bathroom.
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has nothing to do with him. Right. And for some people in their lives, it does have to do with how that person reacts, right? And that’s real. But for me in this situation, that was not a real thing. It was some shit that I made up along the way. Strategic disappointment, many disappointments in our lives all day, every day. Your kid opens the fridge and says, Ma, there’s nothing to eat. And you say, I trust that you’ll find something.
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Instead of saying, there’s leftover lasagna, there’s four yogurts, there’s grapes that are pre-cut. No, shut up. Yeah, stop trying to fix problems that aren’t yours to fix. And allow people to be a little bit disappointed and allow yourself to learn that people can be a little bit disappointed in you and still love you. Yeah. And if they can’t, they’re shitty people anyway. Yeah. Right? So strategic disappointment is a big one. The other...
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big sort of pattern that leads to burnout is hyperindependence. And hyperindependence is also about shame of needing to do everything by yourself because if you don’t do it by yourself, then you aren’t good enough and you can’t count on people. Right? So hyperindependence is one of the hallmark signs of hyperindependence is an incredible fear of asking for help. Not just like a, I don’t like to ask for help, like a fear and a...
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There’s a particular word coming into my brain that I can’t fully grasp, like just an absolute abhorrence to asking for help. And your job in that case is to ask for many help. So when my husband, I was doing things like my husband would be going into the kitchen and I’d say, can you grab me a glass of water? I wasn’t even thirsty. Just to strengthen that muscle. Yes, just to practice asking for things.
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and teaching my nervous system that I can ask for things and get them or not get them, but that I can ask for things and be safe. People often have a problem with the asking for help because they’ve asked in the past and not gotten what they needed. That’s going to happen just because you ask for something doesn’t mean somebody has to give it to you. Right. But the ask, the act of asking hasn’t changed the core of your relationship. Right. You’re still safe. You’re still okay.
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whether or not you got the resource that you needed. Yeah, Yeah, that’s a big thing. Being safe enough to ask a question, being safe to accept or be rejected. These are not skills we are taught in kindergarten. No, they’re skills that we actively unlearn because of our interactions when we’re children. Yeah. Right.
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So these are, and I’m not even blaming parents. Again, like I’m in the blameless camp. Blaming is not useful. It doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is the behavior exists and you’ve got to shift it now because that will benefit you. The rest of it doesn’t matter. So I think that when it comes to creating alignment and integrity, the first steps are...
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shame steps. Before we get into the finances, before we get into, so they’re shame steps. The next series of steps are meeting myself steps. And this is what we call in my business, we call this foundational self care. And this is the pee when you need to pee stuff. I think we talked about this a little bit last time. Foundational self care is use the bathroom when you need to use the bathroom, drink when you’re thirsty, rest when you’re tired, move when you’re anxious or antsy.
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Close your eyes when they’re burning from a screen. Eat when you’re hungry. The very basic foundational, your body is giving you a signal that it needs something and then you respond appropriately within a decent amount of time. You don’t have to write six more emails before you go to the bathroom. Just go to the bathroom. The reason that this piece of it is so important is that
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This grows a skill called interoception. And when that skill of interoception grows, your emotional management improves and your ability to recognize when you are in or out of alignment goes up. So I don’t want you to start getting aligned before you’re peeing when you need to pee because you don’t know what aligned feels like. You don’t know what taken care of feels like. You do these things first and then you start working.
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on alignment. In the meantime, you can work at any old job because we all need to get paid, sister. I’m fine with that. But when you know that the job exists to provide you the financial security that you need to learn these skills, the job also creates less stress in your world because you know what its function is. It’s not your meaning for life. It’s not, I’ve had people on burnout leave
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Be like, you know what, I just needed to use my hands, so I started mucking out stalls at my local horse stables. That’s what I did for job for like eight months. It got me enough money just to skate by and bought me the space that I needed to like get back into myself. Fine. My coworker, the director of coaching at my company, she went back to waiting tables. She’s an acupuncturist, but it was COVID. After COVID, her business was all messed up too.
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She went back to waiting tables just because it was fast, easy money. Then she could use the rest of her day to practice the rest of these skills. So I’m not asking you to use an incredible amount of privilege to get aligned and then do the thing that your life was designed for. Relax. Like, no, no. I didn’t grow up like that. I told you I spent $100,000 on my education. I spent every single dime of it myself.
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I worked full time throughout my degree and I still graduated with $100,000 in student loans after and I had to pay them back and I did it. It was incredibly hard and one of the reasons I burnt out. So I’m not saying this for today, I have a financial privilege. I had did not up until this point. So you do not need financial privilege to get aligned. You need awareness. You need practice.
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You need some resources that are not always money. And you need a couple believe people that love you enough to want the best for you. Thank you for saying that. Because what I’m hearing is that you can practice strategic disappointment. You can practice foundational self-care without knowing what you’re going to do next. But just knowing that you’re in the process of recovering.
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yourself so that you can get aligned later at some point in the future. But how can you get aligned if you don’t even know what anger feels like in your body? How can you align if you don’t even know what your body’s signals are? You said earlier alignment, you can feel it. You maybe can. Not everybody can. If you don’t feel your bladder when you need to pee, you don’t know what alignment feels like. Yeah, no. And this is like...
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This is a blind spot. I would have told you that alignment felt like what I would term like a manic high. And this is me realizing I’ve been burning my adrenals and my thyroid out because to me, I was mistaking, not always, but let’s just go 10, 12 hours a day. I was mistaking alignment with urgency and a to-do list.
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And what I didn’t realize was that stress can be masked with very positive. You know, it’s not like all my stress was life sucks and all this bad stuff is happening. No, all this good stuff is happening. And I thought alignment felt like a firecracker up my ass every single day. That’s what I thought it was. I didn’t know what true alignment was, that it comes from a place of safety and
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big picture thinking. is not urgent. Alignment is not urgent. No. Mind blower to me. No, there’s absolutely zero urgency in it. Alignment is a settling. Yeah. Alignment is when there’s a natural ease that underlies not everything, because there’s going to be places in your life that like, if you hate doing the dishes, you’re never going to feel ease doing the dishes. It just is what it is. Get over it, you know?
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But alignment is just this natural ease that floats underneath you and carries you a little bit like a soft current, right? And for us, was, I remember reading this and I wish I could remember what book it came from, but there was a positive psychology textbook from my undergrad that said that in order for us to feel fulfilled and have like meaning in our lives, we have to be aligned with our values 60 to 80 % of the time. So basically you can be like failing.
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Because 60 is a fail in my mind, right? Like anything under 65 is an F. So you can get an F in values alignment and still be in the bucket of what’s considered good. So alignment also doesn’t mean perfection. Alignment also doesn’t mean never making a sacrifice for your community or your people. Alignment doesn’t mean feeling ideal all the time. It means that for the majority, even slight,
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majority of your time that you are awake and engaging with the world, you are doing so from a place that is true to you as best you can. Yeah, it’s a feeling. It’s a feeling and it’s also like the some of the green, we call them green flags and burnout recovery. So we can use green flags for alignment too. I haven’t thought about this very clearly, so I might not be really articulate, but like there are green flags for alignment and
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They are things like when you own your own business, green flags for alignment are like those, you know, you get surprised customers when you need extra cash. You know, like that’s a green alignment flag that like the universe knows that you want to do this extra thing, you want to invest in something. And then all of a sudden you get a client that pays you almost that same amount. Like there’s those weird sort of like ding, ding, dings start happening in your world.
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that are green flags of alignment. one of my best friends owns a acupuncture and holistic medicine office, integrative medicine office in two of them in Westport, Connecticut and Stanford, Connecticut. And she said that every single time her clientele, her patient base has started asking for a new service, she’s suddenly met someone that provides that service that she really gets along with well. And then she’s brought them into her company.
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She has a big company now and it started out just her by herself in a little acupuncture office and now she’s got two offices and X amount of people and all these practitioners. And she said they just seem to show up when it’s time. That’s a green flag for alignment. Yeah, yeah. So what would you say to the woman who’s listening, who’s underwater?
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and doesn’t know when she has to pee and isn’t even in touch so much with her core values because she’s so busy chasing the applied values. Do we just start with disappointing people every now and then and going pee? You start, when you need to pee is the unofficial hashtag of my podcast for very good reason. And so many people resonate with it.
35:43
Because so many of us ignore our bodies in the most basic ways. And so yes, that’s literally where you start. And I had someone a while ago that said, I said, all right, well, here’s how I want you to start. Like for the next month, the only thing I want you to do is pay attention to your bladder. I just want you to really learn the rhythm of your particular bladder. And she was like, how much money am I paying you to tell me to like pee? And I was like, I just do it. Just.
36:09
Just humor me. If you hate it, I will literally refund your money. Like, just do it. And she called me two weeks in. We weren’t supposed to be on the phone for another two weeks. She called me two weeks in. She said, Kate, I said what? She said, this is changing my life. I said, well, tell me how. What do you mean? Because we need to write this shit down. Because in two months, when you’re like, I don’t know if it’s working, we need to remember this moment. I said, all right, well, tell me more. What do you mean?
36:37
And she said, I have noticed so many other needs that I have simply by tuning into my bladder. I had no idea how upset I was about all these different things that were going on at my office and in my house. And I just, there’s so many things going on that are misaligned for me. There’s so many things that are off and I didn’t notice any of them until I started focusing on my bladder. It sounds
37:07
I know that, but I also know that when you grow this skill, it grows a certain part of your brain. And when that part of your brain builds, you start to your awareness of what’s happening internally when you are with other people and when you are, it changes. And when you can start, people are like, listen to your body. And you’re like, what? Like, what does it mean? Listen to my body. I don’t even know what that means.
37:32
It means pee when you need to pee. Start there. Eventually, it will mean tune into that very specific section of your intuition that you’re aware of now because you built that starting by peeing when you needed to pee. Tapping into something’s not right in this relationship because every time this person shows up, I feel a little drained. I’m not killing myself. I’m not dead. I’m okay. And I love them. Something’s not right here.
38:00
When you catch those things earlier, you can take action on those things earlier. You protect yourself from so many big drains and irritations and issues that pile up and pile up and pile up. And those are the things that weigh on our stress response system and keep it kicking into gear all the time that lead to chronic stress, that leads to burnout, no matter how utopian your workplace is. And the workplace still needs to do their job. We only talked about workload, but it’s supposed to take care of all of those things.
38:30
And then on top of those six factors, the workplace’s job is psychological safety and trust so that when you start practicing these skills, you have a safe enough place to do that. That’s the workplace’s job. And then your job is literally everything else. Pee when you need to pee. Pee when you need to pee. Yeah. It’s kind of, I think interoception is a bit of a blind spot for a lot of us. Like we don’t even know It’s kind of funny to say it that way. Yeah. But we don’t know it’s a thing.
38:59
What all of us do, intelligence by definition is the ability to make finer and finer distinctions. so just noticing that you have to pee is then you’re going to be noticing other things. You just need a focal point. Your bladder is a nice, loud, easy to, do I have to pee or not? Like that’s not complicated. Am I happy in this relationship or not? More complicated. How about start with, do you have to pee or not?
39:29
And then the more you tune inward and your body learns to trust that you’re paying attention to those signals, then the more you will be able to get other signals and then you’ll begin to notice them and decode them and respond to them in real time. This, what I like is this really is a skill. It’s a skill you can learn. And you can start with something simple like you have to pee. Yes. And it’s not only a skill that you learn, but it’s a skill that grows a part of your brain.
39:57
very particular, in a very particular way. So if you only did the, say you spent the next five months, you peed when you need to pee, you drank when you were thirsty, you ate when you were hungry, rested when you were tired, moved when you were antsy, like just the very basic things, and you do that for five months straight, your emotional management automatically improves without any attention from you, without any therapy, without attention, without anything else, because you will notice the emotions sooner.
40:26
and be able to react differently. know, Viktor Frankl always talks about the space, the pause between what’s happening and your reaction to it. When you are unaware of your internal sensing, the interoception is internal sensing, when you’re unaware of that, that pause is non-existent for you. This is how you create the pause. And so then you buy yourself, not only do you build the skill of self-trust,
40:53
But now you’ve built the skill of emotional management and emotional granularity without even focusing on it. This is why therapy is sometimes really hard for some people because they’re supposed to go in and talk about the things that they’re feeling and that they don’t even know. So they talk and they talk and they talk and oh, I’ve had a therapist for 13 years. And it’s like, okay, I love and don’t listen. But if you’re a therapist out there, please know I have a therapist. love therapy. I am very pro therapy and
41:22
We both know that there are some people that just are not aware enough to get anything out of it. Yeah, they exist in their head. They’re trying to think their way into awareness, but that’s not, it’s a feeling. It’s a feeling and you’d have to notice below the neck what’s going on down there. Yeah. And then what happens is you create like, you end up creating really crazy, strict boundaries and you have weird conversations with people because you’re fixing problems in your head that are emotional problems.
41:53
And then you’re like, I don’t know why they’re acting so bad. I tried to put up boundaries and it’s because they were all using me before. That’s why they’re acting this way. No, they’re acting this way because you just pulled up that boundary out of nowhere for them. You just changed the rules of monopoly mid-game. They have no idea what’s going on and they feel terrible. But if you build up an awareness and you can say, hey,
42:19
this is how I’ve been feeling. They might still feel terrible, but you might be able to actually talk about it and create a new system, a new boundary sort of space together that works for both of you instead of walking around like throwing boundaries like light sabers at people, you know? All right. So let’s land the plane with one more question. Why, why is it so hard to listen to this advice and I’m going to move, I’m going to close my eyes, I’m going to pee, I’m going to eat when I’m hungry, I’m going to rest when I’m tired, all these things.
42:49
And then we do it for a while, but we don’t stick with it. Why is it so hard to stick with these little basic things? Because we don’t trust that small things make big change. We’re looking for the overnight magic cure. Yeah. That’s powerful. That’s what I want people to take away is it is the small changes that compound over time. It is not the big
43:17
big changes. Those aren’t sustainable. No, and if you can, some places, some workplaces are toxic and you need to get out of them. Some places you can get out of and then you bring yourself to another place and the same shit happens. Cause wherever you go, there you are. Oh shit. Oh shit. And so I do really strongly believe in removing yourself from situations that are unhealthy because they are actually toxic.
43:48
Right, like if you are in a situation that is unhealthy, I think you should get out of it. But if you are in a situation that is semi-okay and you have some shit to learn, you should learn it there. Use the situation as a learning ground for yourself. Because removing yourself from it, learning those things at home and then trying to put them into another workplace is going to be much, much harder. behavior change and learning are context dependent, are environment dependent.
44:18
So just because you learn how to set a boundary at home doesn’t mean you learn how to set a boundary at work. Those are two completely different skills and they need to be practiced in both places differently. So grant yourself the opportunity to practice the things that you need in the environment that you need them in. Yes. You know, this is a workplace thing, but that’s what I did before I divorced the second time was I was safe. It was during COVID when I was like, I got to...
44:46
And I was like, no, no, no, no, I’m gonna learn how to be happy here. I’m not gonna operate under I can’t be happy until I get the divorce. And I would say, I am happy and I am married. And I would slur that so that nobody, everybody would think I said I’m happily married. I’m like, nope, I’m happy and I’m married. And that was a game changer to invest that time in myself, to not upend my life and everything and to give myself the space to practice.
45:14
in an environment that wasn’t ideal, wasn’t aligned, but I was still able to show, to change how I was showing up. Exactly. Learn the skills that I needed to, lest I be marching down the aisle into marriage number three, wondering why I just had the same fight with a different dude. All right. Well, Kate, this has been amazing. Can you share with the audience how to find you? I think the
45:42
best place is just KateDonovan.com. My first name is C-A-I-T, last name D-O-N-O-V-A-N, KateDonovan. And everything stems from there. Okay. Well, you also have a pretty kick-ass podcast. I do, Fried the Burnout Podcast. Fried the Burnout Podcast. I love your podcast. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, Kate. Thank you. All right. Thanks for listening.
46:05
And what I’m taking away from this conversation is that I thought alignment was living like I had a firecracker up my ass. I thought it was urgency and momentum and having a packed calendar that proved that I was doing something that mattered. And Kate said, no, ma’am, alignment is a settling. It’s a soft current underneath you. There’s zero urgency in alignment. And that just really has broken me open because the path to feeling that
46:35
is not more productivity or a better morning routine. It’s just peeing when you need to pee and drinking when you’re thirsty and resting when you’re tired. Like it’s mind boggling that rebuilding trust with your own body can only be done one small signal at a time. We just don’t stick with these things because we don’t trust that small things make big change, but they do. I can tell you they do. They build the part of our brains
47:05
that let us feel what alignment actually is so that we can stop chasing the adrenaline and calling it purpose. So if this episode hit home for you, please take a moment and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. The friend who’s underwater, the one who says, I’m fine, but you know she’s not. Text the episode to a friend, share it on your socials. Just help us reach more women who are too tired to even look for help.
47:33
Because like Kate said, yeah, burnout can actually make you stupid. You can’t think clearly. You can’t see the bigger picture. You can’t build an action plan from a state of overwhelm. It’s too much. Which is why I also just want to remind you that if your drinking is a symptom of overwhelm and burnout, and you want somebody to just tell you what to do next, to build the plan for you,
48:02
so that you can stop trying to figure it all out, you can just start following directions, putting one foot in front of the other. If that sounds like the support that you need, then get into the show notes and schedule a discovery call. Because the pattern you need to break is not your drinking. That’s a symptom of the fact that you have trained yourself to ignore your needs. It doesn’t take willpower.
48:27
to stop drinking when you’ve had enough, any more than it takes willpower to not hit yourself in the head with the hammer. You haven’t lost the ability to control yourself. You’ve lost the ability to feel yourself. That’s what needs to change. That is the work we do inside the next chapter. It’s not an overnight fix, but it’s a permanent one. So get in the show notes and click the link to book a discovery call. Otherwise, thank you all for listening. Thank you all for being a part of this community.
48:56
Together, we are changing the world. We are challenging the patriarchal expectations that women have been raised with to the point where we think we have to give everything of ourselves away, sacrifice ourselves on the altar of productivity, silence ourselves to the point where we don’t even remember what our own opinions are anymore. These patterns, these habits have been encoded into our nervous system. And it can be changed with conscious intention.
49:26
and consistent effort. And the effort isn’t in your behavior change. It’s how you look at your behavior. It’s how you diagnose your problems. When you realize that your drinking isn’t a problem, it’s a symptom of the disconnect, of the overwhelm, of the burnout, of the conditioning that you are operating under, the rules you are following. When you diagnose the problem properly, you can actually solve that problem. You can create the solution. The solution...
49:55
is to understand it’s not about the alcohol. Tagline of the show. I know, I get it. We’re getting happy here, not sober. And I so appreciate you being here and being a part of this community. Again, share the episode, share the show with your people. Let’s normalize radical personal power. I don’t know, that sounds fun. Let’s do it. Let’s bring in 2026, personal power, top goal. And it’s so much fun to pursue goals together.
50:22
So again, thank you for listening. I hope you have a kick ass day and I’ll see you on the next episode.