33 | From Burned Out to Back in My Body: The Missing Link No One Told Me

In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain and getting honest about something I forgot along the way: you don’t follow me for the science — you follow me because I translate it into something you can actually feel in your real life.

After wrapping up my 28-day educational series on Instagram, I realized I had drifted into my comfort zone of biochemistry and physiology (classic me). And while the science is a huge part of my work, it’s not the whole point. The point is why it matters to you — to the woman who’s exhausted, overwhelmed, inconsistent, or wondering why her body doesn’t respond the way it used to.

So today, I’m coming back to the heart of it: my burnout story — and the moment I realized biology was the missing link.

In this episode, I share:

• the truth behind my burnout and the patterns I didn’t see
• how cycle syncing became the doorway back to my energy, intuition, and identity
• why most women are burned out (and why it’s not a discipline problem)
• the connection between burnout, biology, and the spark you’ve been missing
• why I built In Sync and why I believe every woman deserves this foundation

If you’ve been feeling off, inconsistent, or disconnected from yourself, this story is for you. And if you’re curious about In Sync, we start in January — send me a DM or email and I’ll share the details.

Connect with me on Instagram HERE

☕️ Stay bold, stay balanced, stay thriving

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Transcript

 want to apologize to you guys, and the reason I want to apologize is because I just wrapped up my 28 day series on Instagram. Maybe you've seen some of it, and really it was a 28 day series dedicated to educating you about your body as a woman. And we talked about lots of things. We talked about cold plunging, we talked about nutrition, we talked about cycle sinking. But I want to apologize because I did something that I tend to do. I got a little obsessed with the science, and I love science, and it's really important that, you know, a lot of my work is science backed and has women science at the forefront. But what I realized, or what I remembered, is that you guys don't actually care about the science that much. I mean, some of you do, but the way that science speaks to me, the way that I understand it, the way that I light up when I learn about my body as a woman, from a scientific standpoint, is probably not normal. That's why I went to school to get a Bachelor's of Science in Human Ecology. So I've realized, and kind of remembered, that my job here is to show you guys why it matters to you. You don't need the nitty gritty biochemistry science about the mitochondria and the ATP cycle and all of that. You want to know why it matters to you. How is my life going to be different every day, right? What does that really translate to daily living? So I want to apologize, while that series was still very important and wonderful, and I certainly had a lot of fun with it, I tended to fall I got back, I got a little obsessed with the science and not really the storytelling. Again, that's my purpose, is to share with you guys why all of this matters. So today's episode, I'm going to do that in the best way that I know how, which is storytelling. I'm going to share my story, you know, and I have talked about my group program in sync that is coming out in January, and it really is a lot about cycle syncing. It's about the connection between burnout and our biology and our intuition. And a lot of people, though, don't even know what cycle syncing is. And so again, I've done you all a disservice, because I promise you that this program in sync is the program that, like I wish 15 year old Carly heard. It's something that I dream about being able to speak to every woman on stage to share, and what it is is actual preventative health. We're not just treating symptoms anymore. We're going to start to learn why women are burned out and what we can do to prevent it in the future. So for one, if you are still interested in sync. We start in January. So shoot me a DM, send me an email. However, you want to reach out to me. I would love to chat with you further. And then today's episode is really the why, the why of my work, the why you know, why the information that I shared in the 28 day series matters to you, why the science matters to you and why every single woman should learn about their cycle. So buckle up, and I'm going to take you guys back to my story. Some of you may have heard some of this before, but I think this is really going to help paint the picture for why in the most authentic way that I know how. Enjoy you.
Welcome to Coffee with Carly. Your weekly wake up call to a happier, healthier life. I'm your host, Carly Schade, and I'm here to uncover how good life can get you.
So overachieving and being the busiest human in the world has been my identity for pretty much as long as I can remember. And the reality is, it's because the world rewarded me for it. Okay, from freshman class president, yes, I did wrap Eminem as my speech, the real slim, shady to varsity soccer, to grad school, to get the fancy letters after my name, to traveling the world, to getting the promotion be competitive as shit, climb the ladder. I've done all that, and it's safe to say that I nailed that formula that we have all been fed about how to be successful, happy and abundant. You work hard, you stay busy, you keep climbing. And for a while, it worked. I mean, life kind of did take off for me. I did walk away from a career in dietetics after seeing massive limitations in conventional health care. Right? Red tape, people not wanting to help themselves, people not getting better, systems that just like didn't make sense. And so I left that, and I took a leap of faith, and I ended up working internationally in a tiny village in Southeast Asia. And so I was guiding trips. I got to see what discomfort and adventure can do for people. I was empowered as a leader, right? And I also got to watch real change happen in volunteers in the communities we work with when you empower others. Now, yes, I was killing myself working hard, but at least there was purpose, there was passion. It felt worth it, right, like I was doing something that mattered. So it was all fine quote, but then covid happened, and the job changed overnight, you know, travel and adventure became a desk, and suddenly I was behind a laptop, doing operations, marketing, admin, work. You know, I was still a manager. I still loved who I worked with. I still loved the purpose, but the day to day was completely different, and that's when this massive dissonance started. There was a huge gap between who I thought I was and the life that I was actually living, between the version of me in my head and the reality that was right in front of me. So something had to change, right? We all know that our bodies, our minds, the universe, right? It isn't like this dissonance. We have to fill the gap somehow. So something had to change. But instead of looking inward and asking, What do I want, or is this still aligned with who I am? Is this still important to my values? Instead of doing that, I did what I'd always done. I tried to fix and control every outcome and everything and everyone around me. I chased my worth and my fulfillment and my validation in projects. I kept saying like, if I could just improve the systems, make the meetings better, get everyone more organized, then I'd feel okay, but it was always more force, more control, more doing, more organizing, more discipline, and the more that I tried to manage and improve everything around me, the worse I felt. Now, of course, like we can blame the environment, to some extent, it was chaotic, but I never once stopped to check in with myself, and that's because most of my life I'd been living from the neck up, and for a long time that really did work, like I told you, I tasted success. I climbed ladders like I had the dream job, but eventually borrowed energy always runs out, and my body finally started screaming so loud that I couldn't ignore it. Burnout had officially arrived. And burnout is really it's such a strong word, but it looks different on everyone. Okay. For me, it was anxious, overwhelmed, digestive issues, chronic fatigue, stress, zero excitement for everything, like making everyone else responsible for my happiness, even planning a vacation felt like another chore. It was like my to do list was this imminent threat that just kept getting bigger. But somehow, if I kept rewriting it every single day, it would like feel more manageable. And I just kept telling myself, like, if I can just get through this list, then I can relax, then I can feel that safety that I'm craving, then I can feel that peace that I know is in there somewhere. But like, whatever I'm feeling, this isn't normal, but I but I know that if I just finished this list, that's where I'll find that feeling. But the list never fucking ended, and it never does, right? We all know this. It never ends. Everything was urgent. Every project just needed an adrenaline rush to get started. It was like there was there was no flow anymore. It was like I had to feel like this was the most important thing. My heart had to race, and then I had this momentum to get a project started. It's like it was the default for my body to, like, do work. And so I finally decided this job is draining me. This job burned me out, and I'm done. It's time to go do something else, right? I'd outgrown this environment. I mean, after all, I had done it before I left dietetics, and life rewarded me, right? I had taken the leap of faith. I did the hard thing. So I told myself, if I just jump again, right? If I quit with no job lined up, the universe will catch me. So I left, and I thought that everything would fall into place after that. I'm just gonna chill, and the universe will reward me, the opportunities, the feelings, everything I'm looking for will just fall into my lap. But here's the plot twist that I did not see coming. Things got worse, a lot worse before they got better. Okay, like I had this dream of starting my own business. I always have, and I'd experiment with some things that. An Etsy store, some catering gigs, some freelance marketing work, but all roads kept coming back to health and wellness. It's my first passion. It's my true passion. It's where my experience and passion naturally live. But almost immediately, all of the patterns that I thought I left behind with that job followed me. Right? They followed me into my business, into my workouts, into my relationship, right? And it was the patterns of over functioning, overdoing, controlling pressure, self abandonment. But this time, I was a business owner and employee of one. There was no culture to blame. There was no co workers, there was no chaotic environment. It was just me, Carly Schade LLC. And when you remove all those external excuses and the same shit keeps showing up, you're kind of forced to look in the mirror, right? Shit, I'm the common denominator. It wasn't just the job, it was me abandoning myself inside the job. Because here's the thing, nobody tells you, burnout is not just mental exhaustion. It is a physical disconnection, and by the time that you realize you're burned out, your body has been whispering to you for years, okay? Burnout does not happen overnight. You have been overriding every single whisper with logic, with discipline and productivity for a long time, and so when I finally left my job, I've been rereading my journals, and I wrote these three journals or and I found what I wrote in my journal like right when I left. And the three goals I had for myself, number one, heal your nervous system. Number two, reconnect with your body. And number three, take up space and do whatever the fuck you want, swear to god verbatim, those are my three goals for myself. So on paper, right, when I read that out to you like, kind of that sounds like someone who had it all together. She knows what she wants, but I didn't, because people pleasers and overachievers are really good at convincing everyone, including themselves, that they've got it figured out, right? I had all the information at my fingertips. I knew how to talk the talk, but I didn't know how to walk the walk. I knew I wanted to feel different. I knew I wanted to feel better in my body, but I didn't know how to just slow down or receive or be open or surrender or be present. I've been living from the neck up for so long that embodiment was not even a word in my vocabulary. I seriously heard it for the first time when this journey began. And meanwhile, while all of this is happening, there's also something that was happening externally, but there was also something happening internally in my world simultaneously. I didn't know it at the time, and this actually began in 2020 when I went off birth control after over a decade. And so when I went off of it, that first couple months, that first year, like I didn't think much of it besides yay, my period came back. But when I finally slowed down, I had this new right. I had left my job, I started to notice more.
There was some shifts in my energy from week to week. There was feelings of emotion, like needing to cry more. Some weeks, I felt like super woman. Others, I was more sensitive and tired. It was almost like before every day had been like, I'd just been like, waking up Adderall and like numb and just like moving through the motions. But there was just this, like, ebb and flow and a difference in energy. Like I started to notice how my body was responding to things. Turns out that was actually my intuition returning right this like quiet just knowing that I hadn't felt for years. You know, in the next thing you know, I start doing things that don't make sense to anyone else, which, for a formal people pleaser, was absolutely terrifying. Right? Being misunderstood is not something that comes easy to us. And finally I realized just how exhausted I had been from the way, or how exhausted I was from the way I'd been living. It's like all the feelings I'd push aside for years finally caught up to me, and I was feeling all of them. And it is no coincidence that this journey started in 2020 but I didn't leave my job until 2023 because while I was noticing this difference, I was noticing this change in my body. For most of that time, I was still in survival mode. My nervous system was still stuck in fight or flight, and I was not understanding the signals my body was really giving me I was feeling more Yes, but I was ultimately still burned out and still stuck in those same patterns, which is why I do what I did, what every overachiever would do, they would try to fix everything with the same pattern that broke me. So even after quitting, I had hustled harder. Right? I thought the problem was my efficiency. I thought the problem was my time management. So I kept finessing every second of every day again, even in this new role, even in this business employee party of one. And if you're listening to this, you have probably been there too, where you're trying to reinvent your life, but you're using the exact same self abandoning strategies that you got that got you here. We all do it, because before cycle sinking, I had all these feelings and these changes without really context. But the more that I learned about it, the more that I researched it, the more that I noticed my own natural rhythms, the tired weeks, the emotional weeks, the clear energetic weeks, the more it clicked. I did not burn out because something was inherently wrong with me. I burned out because I was following the wrong damn rule book. I was living a model built for men, linear outputs, same energy every day, same expectations built only on logic while ignoring our intuition. The way that I had been taught to be happy, to be healthy, to be successful, wasn't correct. None of it matched my biology, and when I learned that personal, that burnout was just it wasn't a personal flaw, it wasn't a personal failure. It was my body saying this isn't how you're meant to live. You're not going down the right path, sister. But it's almost like burnout didn't happen to me. It happened for me. My body did that for me so that I would wake up, and that is when everything changed. Like I said, I had been researching, I'm learning, and I was reading books like in the flow, by Alyssa Vitti, do less, by Kate Northrup, mitochondria manifesto, by Jack crews. And when I was reading these books, it it didn't feel like I was inundated with new information. It wasn't this just like major info dump. So when I was reading those books, it was like I was finally given a language for what my body had been saying all along. There was just this, like awakening, this realization when I read it again, like I said something, the way that I learned through science is incredible. That's why I apologized in the beginning, but when I read those books and I learned more about this, it was like someone had finally handed me a manual that I'd never got see all this time. My body had never stopped speaking to me. It doesn't give up on you, but I just never had the language to listen. And so suddenly, this newness that I had been experiencing over these last couple years, everything started to make sense, my emotions, my energy, the days that I felt powerful, the days that I was really sensitive, the days that I was obsessed with cleaning right that wasn't inefficiency, that was biology. Cycle. Sinking became my compass. It changed how I saw everything. Every aspect of my life was seen through this new lens. And it stopped me from saying, What's wrong with me? And instead, I gave myself grace. I spoke to myself differently. I just reminded myself, Oh, this is where I am in my cycle. There's things happening on the inside, on a cellular level, that are causing me to do this right my body thinks that it's primed for pregnancy right now. It wants to clean, it wants to nest. All of these things make sense. It was a permission slip to slow down. It was a permission slip to rest. It showed me when to push. It showed me when to pause. It explained why discipline stopped working long ago and all of this, it's not just Woo, it's physiology. Again, I speak biology, I speak science, I speak real life. And cycle syncing became an instruction manual that I could apply everywhere. I stopped managing my time, and I learned to manage my energy. I used it to apply to my decision, making, my confidence, my identity, my pace. I rebuilt my life around that one lens, and in that process, I reconnected with myself. I remembered who I was, and I stopped abandoning myself. That's how you start to feel like you again. That's how I started to feel like me again. Recovery from burnout does not mean that you never work hard again. It never it doesn't mean that you don't have to hustle. It doesn't mean that you're not going to run late. It doesn't mean that you're not going to have late nights, but it does mean that you stop abandoning yourself in the process. That's how I got my spark back. Not from jetting off to Southeast Asia another plane ride every month. It was from being present with myself, and it was respecting myself. It was letting myself rest. And all of a sudden, I found joy in the mundane. I didn't need these massive, big gestures to feel safe, to feel love, to feel peace. I realized that every answer I had been chasing in my co workers, in my relationships, in my job, was already just part of my DNA. Right these unexpected outcomes that came from all this were that I stopped forcing friendships. I stopped trying to fix everyone. I stopped feeling guilty for needing rest. I swapped orange theory and hit workouts for walks in the woods. When it was that time of you know, my cycle, I rebuilt my life from the ground up, but this time rooted in who I am and how nature designed me to be. That's why I do this work. That's why I created in sync. Because women are not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not undisciplined. Women are burned out because we are trying to live in a world that is out of sync with our biology. When you finally stop living against your body, you start to feel good again. That is my story. That is why the science I love it. That is why I do this work. That is my mission, right? We're not just treating symptoms anymore. We're looking at why we're getting burned out, right? And so if you want to work with me, if you want to not wait until your body screams so loud that you can't ignore it, learn about your body. Body awareness is empowerment. So I wanted to share that story. It's been a while since I've really kind of talked about the core why of my mission, of my work, why I'm, you know, so gung ho about cycle sinking. So I hope that this really helped paint a picture of how this can apply to your daily life, how this can change your life, and why so many women still stay stuck in these burnout patterns, why it's not sustainable, why these changes in their lives don't stick because we're just treating the symptom right? This is how we prevent it from happening again. We have to look in the mirror. We have to focus on our side of the equation, and we have to stop abandoning ourselves inside whatever environment we're in. And as always, everyone like a good cup of coffee, stay bold. Stay balanced, stay thriving. I'll see you next week.