Burnout is shifting – it’s not just exhaustion anymore, but overworking to the point of depletion. In this episode, I talk to Maegan Megginson, a Business Mentor, Licensed Therapist, and host of Deeply Rested, to unpack what burnout really looks like today and why high achievers (especially introverts and highly sensitive people) may be more susceptible to it.
We explore the trauma response connection to burnout, why capitalism and patriarchal narratives fuel overwork, and how aligning your work with natural rhythms can help you break free. Plus, Maegan shares her personal burnout and recovery journey, offering insights, strategies, and a sensitive introvert’s perspective on success, rest, and resilience.
Tune in to hear:
- How burnout symptoms are changing – why overwork, not just exhaustion, is the new red flag
- The financial cost of burnout – how it’s costing companies millions per year
- The trauma response link to burnout – why some people (especially HSPs & introverts) are more vulnerable
- How to untangle burnout from capitalism & patriarchal conditioning – so you can redefine success on your own terms
- Why connecting with nature can help combat burnout – and how to align your work and life with natural rhythms
If you’ve ever felt trapped in the cycle of pushing, striving, and overworking – this episode is a must-listen. Maegan brings a holistic approach to success that prioritizes rest, alignment, and breaking free from societal burnout traps.
🎧 Grab your headphones, take a deep breath, and let’s dive in!
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
🎧 Deeply Rested Podcast
📖 Maegan’s Website
📧 Read the Deeply Rested Newsletter
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Maegan Megginson: The real path out of burnout is a deeper relationship with yourself so that you can discern what’s not working for me here and where do I need to move to be really in alignment with who I am as a person. Because when you’re in alignment, it’s really hard to get burnt out because you feel so clear and so creatively juiced up by what you’re doing in the world. And you’re so clear too about your boundaries and about your limits.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Today’s guest is the wonderful Megan Meganon, who is a business mentor and licensed therapist who helps entrepreneurs to recover from burnout by creating more sustainable and energising ways to work. Now, burnout is a big deal in 2025. There have been studies abound showing the impact that it has not only on us as humans, but on businesses. The American Journal of Preventative Medicine estimates that employee burnout in the US costs somewhere between $4,000 and $21,000 per worker per year, which means that for a smallish company of 1,000 employees, it’s costing them $5 million per year in off time and disengagement.
Now, burnout symptoms have been changing, especially since COVID. 60% of people now overwork rather than being too exhausted to work. And this is one of the things that we touch on in this episode. Meghgan draws on her experience as a therapist, as a healer and as a seven-figure business owner herself. And she talks about the practical and the spiritual elements of how we need to create successful businesses and truly wealthy lives. She’s the host of the Deeply Rested podcast and the Deeply Rested newsletter which I love and I’m a subscriber of. And she likes to help people who are doing good in the world to take care of themselves.
Now whether you are an entrepreneur or an employee, you will find benefit in this episode because Megan’s sharing from a therapist’s lens how trauma response is often linked to burnout and why some people, especially highly sensitive introverts, are often more vulnerable. We talk about the symptoms of burnout, we talk about entangling burnout from capitalist and patriarchal conditioning and why it can be so hard to redefine success on your own terms. We talk about how connecting with nature can be one of the most powerful things in helping to heal from or avoid burnout.
And Meghgan shares her own burnout and recovery journey over the last 10 years, what that has looked like for her and the practice that she highly, highly recommends to any introverts that are starting to feel the pinch. I loved this episode because I’m biased, because I love Megan, but I know that the work that she does and the information she’s going to share here is going to be so helpful to anyone who is highly ambitious and wants to do a lot of things and a lot of good in the world.
It’s so nice to see you again. Thank you so much for joining me this time on the Ambitious Introvert.
Maegan Megginson: I am thrilled to be here and I’m very excited for this conversation. You promised me stats and I’m here for it.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Yeah, I have really taken to doing a lot of research now for the podcast. I mean, I always research, obviously, the guest and what we would be talking about. But with… I don’t know, with ChatGPT and everything, it’s just become really easy to get stats on these things.
Maegan Megginson: Yeah.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So true on these things.
Maegan Megginson: It’s good. It does feel like the… I mean, like my… My relationship with ChatGPT is getting warmer as time goes on. And I’m finding the ways that I refer to him as a heder. I gender my robots.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Mine’s a he is.
Maegan Megginson: Well, yeah, it feels like a he. Because he’s always trying to tell me things. Do you know what I mean?
Emma-Louise Parkes: And I’m like, trying to mansplain you.
Maegan Megginson: It’s always mansplaining things to me. Am I asking? Yes. Is it still annoying? Sometimes. But I do love just chatting. I’ve been chatting with ChatGPT on the app on my phone, you know, where you can just pull it up and, like, voice ‘great.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Is a projection that’s so good for a projector to be able to chat to it.
Maegan Megginson: Yeah, just. Yeah, chatting. Send in a question and then just, like, have a little chat about something. And, I. Yeah, I’m warming up. I’m warming up to the idea of the robot.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I think people can probably tell that we already know each other and we’re…
Maegan Megginson: Friends, as they’re like, wait, I thought this was an episode about burnout. Why are we talking about ChatGPT? I don’t know, but it feels important in this moment, so I’m just rolling with it.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Okay, we’ll go with it. So, yeah, I do have some stats. I have a lot of thoughts about burnout. Not as many as you, because you are the expert. So tell us first of all, set the scene, your own journey and why you ended up niching into this and why burnout became, like, such a mission for you.
Maegan Megginson: Yeah, well, I was burned out and it was very upsetting. You know, I am a highly sensitive introvert and I’m very ambitious. So first of all, love your podcast, the Ambitious Introvert. I’m like, yes, that is my whole personality. You resonate, resonated. Really, really resonated so deeply. So just taking you back in time a little bit to give some context to my burnout journey. I. Well first of all, I think I’ve been burnt out since like the seventh grade if we’re being honest. Definitely a people pleasing, perfectionistic, high achieving youth. And those qualities, they don’t go away when you transition from youth into adulthood. They just, they’re just amplified.
I went to grad school right after college to become a therapist. And right out of grad school I opened a private practice, a therapy private practice. Did that for a number of years and got to the point in my therapy private practice where I was charging a premium fee, I had a full caseload and I was so bored. I was just so bored because that ambitious entrepreneurial part of me, the creative part of me had reached the top of the staircase, so to speak. And it felt like there was nowhere else to go. I was just kind of looking around going, wait, I’m like 25 years old. Is this it? Like this can’t be it. Like this can’t be it. I need more, I’m hungry for more.
So I decided to start a group practice, which is the logical next step for people who are in the therapy field. And starting a group practice means you hire other therapists to work for you, you create an agency, basically that was the low hanging fruit at the time. And I dove into that project and there were other things going on in my life too that were adding stress to the mix. My husband and I had moved across the country from Texas to Portland, Oregon. And my husband, he was an engineer in Texas. He quit engineering and was kind of soul searching. What was he going to do next?
And we decided, I was really feeling really ambitious at the time, he was soul searching. So we decided, let’s start this group practice together. Let’s join forces and create this business. So we dove in to the group practice and now I was seeing a full caseload of therapy clients. I was hiring new therapists to work for the centre that we were creating. And it got to be a lot really quickly. It got to be too much.
About a year into the group practice, I was discovering that group practice ownership actually wasn’t the right path for me. It was like the wrong path for me. But I. I had some cost fallacy at that point. I was so deep in it that I couldn’t see a way out of it. And my burnout, it just started intensifying, right? My exhaustion, my fatigue, my sense of hopelessness about the future, all of these feelings and struggles I was having. It was like being kind of caught up in a tornado. And I felt like I was just being whipped around and around and around, and everything felt kind of blurry.
And it got to the point where my body was really. My body was absorbing the stress that I was feeling. I was experiencing the burnout somatically, which is common for lots of highly sensitive people. We feel it in our bodies. So I was having headaches, physical, aches and pains. My body was shutting down. My body was telling me that, this was not working. This was not a sustainable path for the long term.
So I decided to take a sabbatical. I knew intuitively, I knew that I needed to hit pause in a really significant way. To step back from everything I had created, to step out of the tornado, really, and to get still and quiet and try to feel into what is really happening here. Why do I feel so terrible and is there a path out of the burnout for me, or am I just not cut out for entrepreneurship? I really. I wasn’t sure at the time, so I said that was going to be a brief summary of the story. I feel like it turned into just the whole version of the story. But there you have it. That was. That was my journey to, like, the depths of burnout. And that was in 2018.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Okay, so not that long ago. In the scheme of things.
Maegan Megginson: That’s 2025 now. So how many years is that? I don’t know. I can’t do math.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Seven.
Maegan Megginson:
Great. It was seven years. Seven years ago. Seven ish years ago.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Seven ish.
Maegan Megginson: I felt terrible, and now I feel great.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Well, that’s good. We’ll save that bit till the end because we’ll save the aspirational parts till the end. But look, there’s… I think there’s so much I wanna dive into just from that story. The first thing is, obviously you’re a therapist. You have an understanding of psychology, of human behaviour. Could you see those things in yourself? Could you actually be objective and say, oh, I’ve got some cost fallacy here, because I’ve invested so much time and effort into this. That’s why I feel I can’t step away.
Maegan Megginson: Yes and no. No in the immediate moment because I feel like anytime we are in the weeds, we’re in the forest. Know that the expression can’t see the forest for the trees. When you’re in the forest and you feel so overwhelmed by your emotional experience, it doesn’t matter how many degrees you have or how excellent of a healer you are, you can’t see clearly what is happening in your own life. I knew that something was wrong. I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t healthy, wasn’t sustainable. But I didn’t know exactly what was out of balance. But I did know that the way to see the forest for the trees was to create space, to be still and to listen.
So that was a huge benefit I had working for me was that as a healer, I knew. When we’re overwhelmed by our own experience, the only way to get clarity about what is happening in our bodies and our hearts and our souls is to slow down, to pause, to reflect and to let our intuition rise to the surface to tell us what is wonky here. What do I need to do to find more alignment, to find my own centre again?
So I have so much gratitude to 2017, 2018 Megan for being brave enough at the time to say, I’m gonna take a sabbatical, I am going to step away that it’s a really scary thing to do to step away when you feel like your life is in chaos. You just want to keep working, you know, to keep, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying to solve problems, trying to plug the holes in your boat. You know, there’s this kind of anxious, frenetic energy to try to make things better. It takes a lot of courage to say, actually, I’m going to stop ailing things on. I’m going to step away and get really still and I’m going to listen.
And then from that place of listening, my therapist brain was able to click into gear, be like, okay, girl, here’s what’s up. You know, this is happening, this is happening. This. You have some cost fallacy, right? You jumped into a business model that people were telling you you’d be good at, but you didn’t actually check in with yourself first to see if that aligned with your personality and your needs.
So that spaciousness and that quiet gave me the opportunity to reflect in a way that gave me, really valuable data that I was able to use to craft my path out of burnout.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love that. And I mentioned to you before we hit record, I listened to a long podcast about burnout with Dr. Aditi Narruka, who is, you know, Harvard educated burnout expert. And she said the same thing. She burnt out and she was like, how embarrassing is this?
Maegan Megginson: So embarrassing.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I’m the expert in stress and burnout, and I’m burnt out. And one of the things that you alluded to there that she said is a lot of people think burnout is “I’m exhausted, and I can’t get out of bed.” Almost like adrenal failure type—you know, I’m flawed and I can’t move.
But she said the symptoms of burnout are changing, so it’s harder to diagnose. And one of the things is people are becoming more committed to their work. They’re unable to disconnect from their work. So 60% of people now in 2025 suffering from burnout are overworking rather than being too exhausted to work.
Maegan Megginson: Yes. And I think that we can look at trauma response to help us understand why that happens.
I also want to say too, as a quick disclaimer, that the conversations about burnout are really different for employees versus business owners. Because I am a business owner and work with—I serve—business owners. So those are the people I’m having these conversations with most frequently.
And I think the most incredible privilege of being a business owner is that we actually have the agency to make changes to our lives to combat our burnout. And to really—we can align the way that we’re working with who we are as people because we’re in control. We’re the boss.
Conversations about burnout for employees need to be different, because employees don’t have that agency. They don’t have that control. They don’t have the ability to say, “I’m going to reconstruct my work environment to better serve my energy or my natural inclinations as a person.”
So I just want to say that as a disclaimer for people listening. Just know that the way you’re going to move through your burnout and work on recovering from burnout—it’s going to be really different depending on how much control and agency you have over your day-to-day life. Okay?
So I just wanted to put that out there. I think that’s really important to know. Because, for example, I’ve had conversations with friends before who are employees, and they’ll be asking about my work or what projects I’m working on, or they’ll be asking about my podcast and I’ll tell them about it.
And I’ll see them deflate a little bit because they’re like, “Wow, that sounds really cool—and like, none of that is possible for me.” And those conversations have really helped me see that we need to be really clear when we’re talking about burnout—that the pathway to recovery is going to be different depending on what your life circumstances are.
Okay, so there’s that disclaimer. And let’s circle back to trauma response. This is really very—
Emma-Louise Parkes: I’ve kept a pin in that in my head because I was like, this is important.
Maegan Megginson: It’s so important. I want to start with that disclaimer because that’s the foundation.
But now looking at trauma response, I think the easiest way to understand trauma response is to think about something in the therapy world we call the window of tolerance. And the window of tolerance is basically your ability to regulate your emotions.
So if you can imagine—imagine like a bell curve for a second. Okay? And the centre of the bell curve is this space emotionally that we all have access to, right?
Some days we’re really happy, some days we’re kind of sad. Sometimes we’re scared, sometimes we’re nervous, sometimes we’re confident. Right? Our emotions can kind of flow in this window in really healthy ways.
We feel—we still feel grounded, we feel regulated, we feel clear. That’s the window of tolerance. Right? This kind of spectrum of emotional experience we can have. We can go from low to high and back again, but still—we feel okay. It’s not taking control of us.
But then something can happen that kicks us out of the window of tolerance into the outlier areas of those bell curves. And when we get out of the window of tolerance, we experience what we call hyperarousal or hypoarousal.
Hyperarousal looks like a trauma response of fight. Right? This is where we’re going to do more. Our energy gets amped up, we can’t sleep, we’re super anxious, we’re go-go-going, we’re overworking. And we’re doing it not because it’s a choice, but because we are responding to a really stressful situation happening in our lives. And that’s how we’re responding.
We are over-functioning. We are hyperaroused. We are fighting for our lives. Right? That is that overworking response we see when people are burnt out. Does that make sense?
Emma-Louise Parkes: Totally.
Maegan Megginson: The other end of that spectrum—hypoarousal—is more like the trauma response freezing or fleeing. And this is when hypoarousal is when we collapse in on ourselves. This is when we can’t get out of bed.
This looks like depression. We’re really sad, we don’t have energy to move, our limbs feel like lead, it’s physically hard to move and do, and we just shut down.
So I do think—similar to what you’re sharing—that because of everything that is happening in our world right now, a lot of people are moving into hyperaroused states. They’re fighting, they’re overworking, they’re overcompensating, because they’re really scared of collapsing.
I think we’re all really scared of collapsing.
Okay, I’m going to stop there. It’s a lot of information, but I do think it’s helpful for people listening. Like, if you’re wondering if you’re burnt out or you’re feeling kind of burnt out, it’s really helpful to know that your burnout can fall on either end of this window of tolerance.
Neither is like better or worse than the other. They both suck, to be honest. But it’s helpful to kind of gauge—which direction do I trend when I’m feeling stress, when I’m feeling overworked or burnt out?
Do I trend towards collapsing in on myself, getting depressed, not having any motivation? Or do I trend towards hyperarousal—where I start doing more and more and more, even though it feels terrible?
Emma-Louise Parkes: And this is why people are doomscrolling, right? Because they feel anxious, they feel over-vigilant, hyper. Someone was explaining it to me and she said, “When I feel really worried about things and worried about what’s on the news or what’s going on in my business,” she said, “I find myself scrolling because it’s almost like I’m looking for some comfort. I’m looking to solve it.” It’s this fixation on solving a problem, like you would, primally.
Maegan Megginson: And I think—I think that’s what our minds tell us we’re doing. I mean, it is what we’re doing, right? We’re seeking something that makes us feel better.
I think the reason that we do it is because we are really bad at being still and quiet. Because when—most people who are experiencing some degree of burnout are experiencing that burnout because they’ve been pushing too hard, right? They’ve been pushing too hard, doing too much, acting out of alignment with their natural energy or their natural inclinations.
It’s the polar opposite of being still and listening. And yeah, if given the option between being still and really allowing myself to feel my discomfort—to feel my fear, to feel my existential angst—and scrolling Instagram, which is a dissociative activity, right? That’s a way that I’m actually checking out of the discomfort of my body, even though it still feels bad…
Most people are going to choose doomscrolling because we’re tricking ourselves into thinking that that is making us feel better. It doesn’t make us feel better, really. It’s just a more accessible option than sitting with our own discomfort and really listening to the wisdom of our bodies.
Because we just don’t know how to do that. We don’t know how to do that in a way that feels safe.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So you shared that as you realised that you’re in this burnout, a lot of it was happening somatically, and your body was literally screaming to you and saying, “We need to stop.” Up until that point, did you do any work with somatics? What was your relationship like with being still and sitting with your own emotions, even as a therapist?
Maegan Megginson: Mm, I did not have much of a relationship with my somatic body at that time. This is such a good question. I’m just—I’m filtering through right now, okay, wait, what are the most important bits that want to come forward here?
So here’s a little story. When I was in grad school, that was when—grad school was when I really started feeling my stress somatically in a way that I couldn’t ignore. In hindsight, I can track ways I was feeling my stress somatically my whole life.
But I grew up in a family that is not—does not have a deep emotional connection. Right? My family, they’re not big feelers. They’re not talking about their emotions and their somatic sensations. And, you know, so I didn’t have many models for that—or any models for that, really—growing up, of listening to the wisdom of the body.
When I got into grad school, my body started communicating with me in a way that I could not ignore. My physical pain was so intense that I started going through the gauntlet of Western medicine trying to find like a physical cause for my pain.
And I went to so many doctors and I finally ended up in a rheumatologist office because everyone was like, the only thing we can figure here is that you have some rare type of arthritis. And no one could quite figure out what it was.
They gave me this very obscure arthritis diagnosis and then put me on this regimen of medication—like really intense medication. And I took the medication for a couple of months.
And then, through a magical series of synchronicities, I stumbled upon the Highly Sensitive Person literature. And I was like, hold on a second—like, that describes every single thing about who I am and the way that I’ve experienced my life.
So I would say that finding the Highly Sensitive Person literature really opened a door for me to begin treating my body as an extension of myself. Which sounds like—silly to say now, it’s like, of course your body is an extension of yourself.
But actually—that my body carries more wisdom than my brain, than my thinking mind. And I didn’t know that until I started learning about being a highly sensitive person.
And one thing that I did—I mean, I went all in. I got obsessive about highly sensitive people at that moment. And I decided, I decided to make drastic changes in my life immediately, to experiment—to see: if I really start treating my life like a highly sensitive person “should,” what changes?
And almost immediately, when I made these changes—and the changes were really around sensory stimulation, like really reducing my sensory stimulation, reducing the amount of time I was spending with other people, just tending to my nervous system more thoughtfully—almost instantly, all that pain that had been racking me for years just disappeared. It just, like, went away.
And I was like, what is even happening right now?
I was like, my body has just been trying to tell me for years that it needed something different. It needed me to interact with myself and with life in a different way.
So that was really the beginning of my journey to understand my body, to understand somatics, to understand stillness and meditation. And the deeper I go down that rabbit hole, the calmer and clearer and wiser I feel as a person. Because I’m really listening now to all of the parts of me—not just my thinking brain.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I love it. I’m going to tell this story even though some listeners will have heard it numerous times—but you haven’t heard it. So I’m excited.
Again, I purchased the Highly Sensitive Person book. I remember—I remember exactly where I was. It was 2019, I was at Waterloo Station, waiting For my train and I saw it in the bookstore and I thought, oh, I’m gonna get that. Because that’s my friend to a T. She’s very overemotional, she’s very, you know, sensitive to any criticism. And this will be a great book for her.
I did not in any way, shape or form resonate as being sensitive because I don’t consider myself to be overly emotional. And so I bought this book and took it home and it sat there for a few weeks.
And one night I thought, I’m gonna start reading this book, and I read the intro and I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, this is interesting. And I remember sitting there really resonating with everything, and there’s a quiz that you can do to like, are you a highly sensitive person?
And so I went online and I did the quiz and I can’t remember the numbers exactly, but it was—I think it was out of 24. And if you scored more than 17, you’re probably highly sensitive. And I scored like 21.
And I went, oh. And it was this huge, like, mind blown because—oh, it doesn’t mean sensitive like that. It means sensitive.
Maegan Megginson: That’s right.
Emma-Louise Parkes: And then like you say, my whole life made sense. It’s like, that’s why I couldn’t wear polyester pyjamas as a kid. And it used to drive me mad. That’s why if there’s a seam on the inside of my sock, I feel like I’m gonna die. All of these.
That’s why I can’t bear labels. That’s why I get too hot and then too cold and it’s too noisy. Like, you say all of these things.
Maegan Megginson: Yeah, yeah, I do. I think that’s like the simplest way to understand the highly sensitive person trait—it’s about sensory stimulation, sensitivity and sensory being.
Any—any could be any of the five senses. Like, do you feel sensitive to vision, to light? Do you feel sensitive to loud noises? Do you feel sensitive to strong smells? Do you feel sensitive to textures and fabrics on your skin?
That it’s not actually about emotionality. I think that can be a part of it. But at the core, the highly sensitive person trait is much more about stimulation and how we’re taking in information about the world.
And truly, it’s a gift because—ah—we have heightened sensitivity. We can take in so much more information in a more nuanced way than people who are not highly sensitive.
So we can harness that as a gift in our lives and in our work, but only if we understand what our personal needs are, so that we can take good care of our bodies and we’re not constantly overwhelming our systems with more and more information.
And I think—I don’t have any stats to back this up—but anecdotally through my work and my personal experience, I think that highly sensitive people, introverted people, are much more susceptible to burnout.
Because we’re naturally more sensitive to all of the energies and sensory information coming at us in the world. That’s my working theory.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I would agree with that. After working solely with introverts and mainly highly sensitive ones for the last five years.
And in fact, I was talking to a client about this the other day because she works in a very extroverted team. And of course what they can deal with and the amount of messages in the group chat and not switching off straight after work—she is really finding that hard.
And it’s like, hey, you need something different. Your nervous system is getting frazzled and worn out before theirs because your baseline is so much higher to start with.
Maegan Megginson: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So you were—we put a pin in—you were in a good place, you took a step back, you’re able to see. Tell us what happens after.
Obviously, you have this realisation of like, this is not the business model for me. And obviously here you are now in an online business. So what happened for you to get from there to here?
Maegan Megginson: Mmm. A thousand different things happened to get from there to here. As is true with all fulfilling journeys, it’s a thousand different things—a thousand different threads that weave together to form the tapestry.
High level, I think that the most important thing I did was I started listening to myself in a more intimate way, in a more nuanced way. Right?
So I got really boundaried about taking in ideas and information from other people. That was the first big change I made that really made a difference in my relationship with burnout—I called it the mass muting.
I just went through and muted so many things. I got off of social media—I… or, if I like, I got off of social media professionally, stayed on Instagram personally.
But I developed this practise of muting. You know how you can mute people on Instagram? Like—I just muted anything that made me feel bad. Period.
People, businesses, advertisements—like anything that made me feel stressed or urgent or less than, I muted it. I now spend very little time on social media at all, but that was a gradual process of getting off of social media.
I started unsubscribing from newsletters in my inbox that made me feel like there was something I needed to be doing that I wasn’t doing.
So… and that included unsubscribing from friends, which was tricky. But I just knew it was really important for me to hold boundaries around what kind of information I was allowing into my system.
Because as a highly sensitive person, I’m catching everything. I’m feeling everything.
So when I hear people saying, oh, you really should be doing this, or you really should be doing that, or like the trend is this or this is what’s going to happen, or here’s—oh—do you want to join this programme? Do you want to come on this retreat? Or like—bam, bam, bam, bam.
I felt assaulted by other people’s ideas day in and day out. And I recognise that in that place of really feeling it and that—it’s a big word to say something feels like an assault—but truly that is how it felt in my body.
And I hear really similar things from the people that I work with too—that the world feels like it is assaulting me with information and ideas and comparison and pressure.
And so long as you’re allowing yourself to stay in that space where you’re constantly being pelted with other people’s ideas and suggestions, it’s going to be really, really hard to listen to yourself.
And truly, you are the only person who knows what you need to be well. You are the only person who knows what you need to work sustainably.
So the first step for me was setting boundaries so that I was receiving a lot less feedback and information from other people, and I was clearing space to sit with myself. To be silent more often. To be reflective. To be in meditative spaces.
I began the journey of diving deeper into who I was as a person. And the deeper I went, the clearer it started to become what I needed to do and what I needed to release or let go of.
So along that journey I stopped seeing therapy clients. I realised that my chapter as a therapist had come to a close, and I transitioned full time into serving business owners as a holistic coach.
That was where my magic really wanted to come through—it was holding space for business owners to be able to talk about all of this. To talk about the woo and the spiritual and the emotional and the personal development—talk about all of that—and to weave it in to the strategic reality of running a business.
Because as a business owner we need to be able to hold both conversations. We need to be able to talk about spiritual alignment and cash flow. Both of those things have to be integrated.
So I felt the more that I listened to myself, the clearer it was that my work was this. This was the conversation I’m having with you now.
And arriving at this point required stepping away from lots of different things that I had invested a lot of time and energy in in my life. I think being a therapist was the biggest shift because the cost fallacy of that was real.
Like—what? I’ve invested 10 years of my life and training and certifications and licensure and I’ve built this whole seven-figure business around couples and sex therapy… and how could you possibly walk away from that?
But the quieter I got, the clearer it was: that chapter is closed. Now it’s time to move into something new.
And I share that because I’m finding with the clients I’m working with, that recovering from burnout isn’t just about finding new strategies.
I think it’s easy to find burnout advice out there that’s like, well, try this efficiency strategy or use this software to make your life easier. We’re putting band-aids on gaping wounds, right? It’s not going to work.
The real path out of burnout is a deeper relationship with yourself so that you can discern what’s not working for me here and where do I need to move to be really in alignment with who I am as a person. Because when you’re in alignment, it’s really hard to get burnt out because you feel so clear and so creatively juiced up by what you’re doing in the world. And you’re so clear too, about your boundaries and about your limits.
So the more you get to know yourself, the easier it is to create a life where burnout can’t touch you because you’re immune to it. I feel more immune to burnout today than I did seven years ago. And it doesn’t have anything to do with strategies or software or really helpful productivity methods.
It has everything to do with the way that I now prioritise and honour who I am as a person and listening to my intuition instead of listening to the voices of all of the other people out there who are telling me what I should be doing and how I should be feeling.
Emma-Louise Parkes:
Something you touched on there that I think is really important—and I’ve had this discussion with clients—is, yes, having your boundaries around, say, tech usage is something that I do a lot of work with clients around. Of not being on screens past a certain time or not working on a certain day and making sure that they’re having that rest to be fully recovered and perform at their best.
But there is a difference between a client saying, “Oh, I decided to work until 10pm last night because I was on fire. I was so excited. I had all these ideas and I went in and banged it out and it was great,” then the client saying, “Oh, I worked till 10 o’clock because, you know, I felt guilty logging off and I feel so behind and I felt like I should do this.”
So there’s nuance there. Like you say, when you’re juiced up and aligned and doing the things that you love, it doesn’t always feel like work. Whereas if you’re doing it out of an obligation or shame or guilt or ‘should-ing’ yourself, that’s a completely different energy.
Maegan Megginson: I totally agree, and I think that it’s important. So what you’re describing, I would say, is allowing yourself to have a more fluid relationship with your energy, right?
So instead of saying, okay, I’m going to set these rigid boundaries—I’m going to say that I shut my computer at 5:00 every day, you know, and I never work on the weekends—we set these sort of rigid boundaries that inevitably, they’re not going to work. Because we as humans are not rigid beings.
We’re fluid. Our needs are fluid. Our creativity is fluid. Our energy is fluid. We’re always changing, and we’re changing with the seasons and with the cycles. Like, rigid rules don’t work.
So what I recommend is allowing yourself to experiment with the different natural flows of your energy. Which—it’s like, yeah, there are seasons. Like right now, I’m in a season where I feel really creatively juiced up about my work, which means I’m “quot working” a lot more. I’m in spring. I’m like, I’ve got ideas that are here, they’re ready to come forward.
Now where you have to check yourself is in making sure that you’re allowing full cycles to move through your body. If, for example, I stay in this juiced-up, slightly manic mode about work for three to six months, that’s a red flag. That’s a red flag.
Again, as humans, we’re not designed to sustain one type of energy for a super long time. So I find it’s really helpful to have a couple of trusted intimate partners—if it’s your romantic partner, if it’s a business partner, if it’s a best friend—people who you can ask, “Hey, if you notice X, Y or Z about me, can you let me know?”
Right? If you notice that distinction that you were just making between: I worked till 10 because I’m so excited about this new idea, and I worked until 10 and I hated it. And I’m so exhausted and like, I hate my life and I hate my business.
Like, “Hey, if you notice me starting to move towards category B, can you let me know?”
So, we need to have checkpoints. We need to have people or systems in place so that we can notice if we get out of balance. That’s really important.
When you’re allowing yourself to be more fluid, you need to have ways to check to make sure that you’re not accidentally falling into old patterns or old conditioning. But as long as you have that in place and you’re giving yourself permission to be imperfect, to make mistakes, right?
As long as you’re giving yourself permission to check in, to receive feedback from other people—I say do whatever feels good in the moment. Let go of the old rulebook and see what happens when you start trusting your natural energy cycles.
Follow the joy. Follow the ease. Follow the lightness. And sometimes the joy and the ease is going to look like a lot of effort to somebody else. They might be like, “Ooh, you worked till 10pm? That’s a red flag.” But how did it feel in your body?
Did it feel joyful? Did it feel easy? Did it feel exciting? Beautiful. If you worked until 10pm and it felt stressful and exhausting and you’re kind of resentful about it, that’s valuable information. That is saying you need to adjust course.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I quite often work on a Sunday because I live in a city and it’s quiet on a Sunday. You know, there’s not as much traffic. It just—I don’t know—it feels calmer and I’m not getting pings and notifications because no one else is online.
And sometimes I’ll just, you know, do a couple of hours and it feels really good. But I never do it because I’m like, “Oh, I should work” or “I can’t relax.” It’s more like, “Oh, I feel like doing this,” and then I generally start a little later on a Monday ‘cause I’m like, “I did some stuff yesterday.”
Maegan Megginson: So fluid. I love that so much. And I think we know. We know when it’s a, “Oh, I have to work on Sunday because I’ve got this deadline or this launch coming up.” You can feel it. Your whole body is mad at you. You know? Like no part of you wants to be doing that.
Great. Notice that information. Respond accordingly.
Not all Sundays, but maybe like 50% of Sundays, I love to take my laptop to my local coffee shop, put on some noise-cancelling headphones, and write a newsletter. I love—like you’re saying—that role.
Emma-Louise Parkes: At the weekends when we’re on there, I love it.
Maegan Megginson: I’m like, I’m gonna go, right? Because it’s like—ooh, there’s just a juicy Sunday energy. I love the energy at the coffee shop on a Sunday. Like, people are just relaxed and they’re chatting and no one’s in a hurry.
I love being in a creative zone when I can feel people relaxing and connecting.
So yeah, it’s like, there are no rules. Or no—I’m so tired of like, “Here’s a checklist. You’re burnt out.” Like, here’s a checklist that’s going to help you feel better.
I’m like, no, the checklist is the reason you feel burnt out in the first place.
Burn the checklist. Burn it. Take a deep breath. Listen to yourself.
What do you want? What feels good to you? What is your body asking you for? And can you trust it?
Can you trust it? Can you follow its advice?
I hope the answer is yes, because I really do believe that feeling better lives on the other side of listening to the wisdom of our bodies.
Emma-Louise Parkes: I am struggling to think of a good final wrap-up question for you—and this never happens to me—but it’s because you’ve shared so much excellent stuff already. So let me try my best.
Maegan Megginson: Okay?
Emma-Louise Parkes: Okay. What I would love to know is: in your experience of going through burnout, and your experience as a therapist, as an entrepreneur, of being fluid in your energy and going through these seasons of life—what right now, on Wednesday, 12th of March, 2025, what is the one thing that is really working for you to be able to really feel nourished and energised?
Maegan Megginson: The thing that is really working for me to feel nourished and energised—that actually always works for me when I prioritise it—is being really mindful of my connection to the seasons of nature.
I think that so much of the distress that we feel as humans, and the struggles that we have as business owners, is directly correlated to our separation from nature. And this is capitalism. This is patriarchy, right? This is the impact— all these big words that maybe you’re familiar with or not—but these oppressive systems that we live inside of function by pulling us away from our connection with the natural world.
And when we reconnect to the natural world, when we put our bare feet on the earth, when we look at the wheel of the year and say, “Wait, where are we right now?” So at this moment, we are less than two weeks away from spring equinox. We are in the portal, the transition between winter and spring.
When you put your bare feet on the earth and you look around at what is happening in nature and you take a deep breath and you ask yourself, “How can I sync my life and my business to what is happening in nature right now?”
When I do that—when I allow myself to deepen into that process—even when it feels hard, even when it feels counter-intuitive because it’s not what anybody else is doing around me, when I allow myself to do that—wow. I feel so calm. I feel so clear. All of my needs are met. Everything moves smoothly.
So that’s what—I’m feeling so connected right now to this transition between winter and spring and inviting into my life and inviting into my business.
I’ve been in winter, right? The past three months. I’ve been hibernating. I have. Yep. I love taking my annual sabbatical during the winter. Things are happening underground, subconsciously, but they’re not happening above ground. They’re not happening consciously.
But now that spring is almost here, and I look outside and I see the tulips are popping out of the earth and the daffodils are blooming and the buds are sprouting on the trees—like, oh! I can feel myself blooming. I can feel my ideas are popping into my consciousness and I’m so juiced up. Like, I feel the energy of spring in my body.
So I would love to invite anyone listening—who has tried other solutions to burnout that just aren’t working—to set them all aside and just go outside and put your feet on the ground and look around and ask yourself:
How is my life mimicking? How can my life mimic what is happening in the natural world?
I think that is the best medicine for literally all of humanity. It’s definitely the best medicine for me as an individual. So I highly recommend giving it a try.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Wonderful advice. I love it. I love it. I couldn’t love it more. And yes, spring energy is coming and I am feeling it too, for sure.
Maegan Megginson: Yes.
Emma-Louise Parkes: So I’m going to put all of your links in the show notes—how people can connect with you, your wonderful podcast. And I subscribe to exactly three newsletters, and you are exactly one-third of them.
Maegan Megginson: Oh, I’m so honoured. I am so honoured to hear that. Thank you.
Emma-Louise Parkes: And for anyone listening, you didn’t know I was a subscriber, and pitched to be on the podcast. And I was like, I wanted to invite you on because I’m on your newsletter.
Maegan Megginson: I loved that so much. And Emma Louise is going to be on my podcast, Deeply Rested, soon. So I don’t know when this is going to come out, but it’s— I just— I love the synchronicity of how we connected.
It was such a treat for me to email you and then to get that email back and be like, What? We were already connected and we didn’t even know?
And yes, if you liked this conversation, hop over to the Deeply Rested podcast. Listen to Emma Louise’s interview, which was fantastic. I’m just so grateful to be in relationship with you and to be sharing our medicine and our wisdom in this way.
It’s such a gift, and I can’t wait to see what else we do together.
Emma-Louise Parkes: It’s so exciting. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your expertise. And it’s always a pleasure.
Maegan Megginson: Thanks for having me.
Emma-Louise Parkes: Thank you for tuning into this week’s episode. I hope that you’re feeling expanded to what’s possible for you, motivated to take action, and inspired about how you can start to own your energy.
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