I Think I Just Figured Something Out. Has This Been Your Experience Too?
This isn't another blog that's going to give you more to do, I promise.
If you're anything like me, and like the women I work with, the last thing you need is one more thing on your list. Or one more self-care hack that doesn't fully do the trick.
Here's what's been going on for me.
I think I've finally nailed why traditional self-care strategies keep eluding certain women. And in doing so, I've answered the question I lead my signature workshop with.
Why do I keep burning out, even when I'm doing all the right things?
Most women I know have been secretly wondering if their chronic exhaustion is a result of their strategies. Or worse, themselves. I want you to know it's neither. And I'd like to explain why.
I think I've found the root of why you're forever running on empty.
And now that I can see it, I'm seeing it everywhere... in casual conversations, in intimate ones, in the women who find their way to my work and in my own friendship circle. I can't unsee it.
I'm genuinely curious what you think. If any of this resonates, even a piece of it, I'd love to hear from you as I continue to deepen my understanding of what I'm noticing.
So here's what I see.
I've recently been giving deeper thought to something I'd actually been trying to nail for a long time. A pattern I kept seeing in myself and in the women I work with. Something that none of the frameworks I'd read, the trainings I'd taken, or the therapy I'd done had ever quite named.
There's a specific kind of woman who does everything right to support her health. She's dialed in her sleep, her nutrition, her supplements, her workouts. In addition to her cardio, she's tried yoga, meditation, therapy, massage. She's read the books and listened to the podcasts. She's genuinely committed, not halfheartedly. And still, she can't quite get ahead of the exhaustion.
When her routine breaks, she doesn't just feel off. She feels worse than before she had any of these tools. Which secretly terrifies her. Because if the routine is the only thing standing between her and feeling like this... what does that mean for the rest of her life?
When can I stop working so hard to only feel so-so?
That's the question she doesn't say out loud. But it's there. Often late at night. Usually when she's tired enough that the part of her that keeps everything running is finally so exhausted it can't keep thinking straight.
Is this just my life now?
I know the pain and frustration of that question intimately. And so do most of the women who find their way to my work.
And if any of this sounds familiar, here's what I want to share with you.
It's not your strategies. And it's not you.
Every single thing you've tried was the intelligent, reasonable, right call given what you knew. The yoga, the therapy, the sleep routine, the supplements... none of them were a mistake. Those are genuinely good tools. They work for a lot of people.
The problem is that you've been pouring good water into a bucket with holes in it. And those holes were invisible.
The Bucket With Holes
Stay with me here because this image is the thing that finally made it click for me.
Imagine pouring the freshest water you can find into a bucket with holes in the bottom, never knowing the holes were there. The water is genuinely good. You're pouring consistently. You observe it going into the bucket. And yet no matter how much you pour, it never seems to fill. And you're still thirsty.
You didn't choose the wrong water. You also didn't know you had a holey bucket. The holes weren't something you caused. They formed in the making of the bucket itself, before you ever picked it up.
So, not realizing there was a structural problem, those of us who are thinkers and doers did what we always do. We found ways to adjust how we poured. We got smarter about it. More precise. More committed. Some of us even learned to conserve how we pour. Those of us who get things done find ways to adjust.
What I've come to see, both in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, is that these holes formed early. Before we ever had language for what was happening. Before we had any ability to recognize the gap or name what was missing. And because they were just there all along, navigating those invisible holes became just how we do life.
But even though the holes were invisible, that doesn't mean they weren't significant. They were key to developing a solid foundation. And they were missing in the formation.
What caused those holes in our buckets... what was missing for us, is something I'm calling complete witnessing.
Can I explain what I mean? Because while I've talked about the holey bucket before in my work, what follows is the why behind it. I think this might be the missing piece we've been working so hard to find.
What Complete Witnessing Actually Is
Witnessing isn't just praise. It's not just someone telling you that you did a good job. Those are nice and we all appreciate them. But that's not what I mean. That's just the surface of it.
What I've come to understand is that complete witnessing is a four-part exchange. All four parts have to be present. Miss one and an essential piece of the foundation is missed.
Here's how it looks when someone witnesses you completely.
I see what you did. It mattered. I see what you gave up to do it. And that cost matters to me.
To fully understand it, read it again. And as you do, think about a recent moment when you shared something important with someone. Did their response contain all four parts, in words or in body language? Did they notice what you did and acknowledge that it mattered? And did they notice what it took for you to do it... and acknowledge that cost?
If they didn't... what did you feel in that moment? My guess is that some part of you wanted to re-explain. That maybe they didn't quite understand. Or maybe there was a quiet feeling of being discounted, like they didn't fully get it.
That feeling... that reaching to be fully understood... is exactly what I want to talk about. Because that's what happens when consistent witnessing is missing in childhood.
For the women I work with, and honestly for me personally too, key people in our lives have offered one, maybe two of those parts on a good day. The contribution gets noticed sometimes. Occasionally someone says it mattered. But the cost... the thing we gave up, the trade-off we made, the full price we paid quietly and without sharing it... how we felt almost never gets seen.
And when it doesn't get seen, something in us keeps reaching. Keeps explaining. Keeps trying to get far enough across the finish line that someone finally sees the whole picture.
Except for most of my clients it feels like the finish line keeps moving.
We deliver everything that was asked and the scope broadens. We achieve the milestone and a new one appears. We give more than our share and somehow the conversation circles back to what we didn't do, what we could have done better, what's still missing.
One of my clients captured it in a way that gave me real pause.
She was sitting at a pool on a beautiful sunny afternoon, spending time with her daughter, genuinely wanting to be present and completely unable to get there. So that you understand her level of self-awareness — she's already done therapy, made significant mindset shifts, and knows it's important to rest and be present. What I'm saying is, she's done the work. And still...
She sent me a message and said, "I turn joyful activities into jobs and then use them as weapons against myself. Everything is a performance with a grade at the end."
She could see what she was doing. She just couldn't understand why. And until she understood why she was caught in the cycle, she couldn't get out of it.
She'd been told, like most of us, to just relax. Be present. Don't bring work into your time off. And she'd created those boundaries. Consistently. And presence still wasn't landing in her body the way she heard it could.
Here's what I want to name carefully. Because this is the part that tends to produce the most shame.
She'd also tried somatic work. Body-based practices specifically designed to help her drop in, feel her feet on the floor, connect with what's present. And those hadn't fully landed either. Which led her, as it leads most of the women I work with, to conclude that she was doing it wrong. Not consistent enough. Not able to go deep enough. One more thing that worked for everyone else and not for her.
But the truth is she wasn't doing it wrong. And she wasn't the failure.
There was a reason presence and body-based work eluded her that has nothing to do with effort or willingness or skill.
Why She Runs Differently Than Other High Achievers
Before I explain the root of this, I need to name something about this specific woman that most frameworks have missed.
She doesn't just run high on cognitive performance the way other high achievers do. She runs two full systems simultaneously, at full capacity, all the time.
She's what I call a HADA woman — high-achieving and deeply attuned. I've talked about this before, and if you've been around my work, this will sound familiar.
The first system is cognitive. High-level analytical thinking, strategic planning, problem-solving, achievement orientation. This is what most high achievers run at full blast. It's the engine that produces visible results. The thinking and the doing.
The second system is emotional attunement. The ability to read rooms, track emotional undercurrents, sense what others need before they can articulate it, absorb the relational temperature of every environment she walks into. She doesn't choose to do this. It's how she's wired. And she runs it at the same intensity as the cognitive system. It's the emotional connection and the feeling behind everything.
Most high achievers run one engine at full capacity. The woman I'm talking about runs two.
Which means she's doing more than it looks like she's doing. Always. In every room, every conversation, every meeting. There's the visible work and the invisible work of constant attunement running underneath it simultaneously.
Her exhaustion isn't proportional to what appears on her calendar. It's proportional to the full weight of what she's actually carrying.
And before anyone says it — the answer is not to care less or dial down the attunement. To stop being so sensitive. Her emotional attunement is not a flaw to be corrected. It's one of her greatest capacities. It's what makes her extraordinary at her work and in her relationships. Asking her to turn it off would be asking her to amputate part of who she is.
So the dual system running at full capacity explains why she's more tired than her peers doing ostensibly the same work.
But it doesn't explain the thing that confuses her most.
Why am I the one who's chronically exhausted? Why can't I recover? Why doesn't rest restore me? Why do the tools work briefly and then stop holding?
That's where complete witnessing comes in. And this is the piece I've only recently been able to see clearly.
The Root: Why She Can't Drop In
The lack of complete witnessing in early childhood is what keeps her nervous system in a state of chronic hypervigilance.
Waiting to be fully witnessed.
Always scanning. Always slightly on. Waiting, without knowing it's waiting, for the finish line to finally hold still.
A chronically hypervigilant nervous system cannot fully drop into rest. Cannot fully drop into presence. Cannot fully drop into the body, no matter how much she wants to. No matter how clearly she understands that she should. No matter how skillfully a somatic practitioner guides her.
And here's why.
Dropping in requires a felt sense of safety. Not just intellectually knowing she's safe. A felt sense of safety — the kind that lives in the body, not the mind. And her nervous system, still running the program it learned in early childhood, doesn't yet have enough consistent evidence that dropping in is safe.
So when she tries to be present at the pool, her body won't let her all the way in. When she tries to meditate, her mind keeps running. When she tries to do somatic work, it stays in her head. And she concludes she's doing it wrong.
She's not doing it wrong. The sequence was wrong for her.
You can't drop into a body that doesn't yet believe it's a safe place to land.
The body-based work, as good and as important as it is, requires a foundation of felt safety that her nervous system hasn't consistently received. And I don't want to blame the practitioners. They're skilled at what they know. They didn't realize she was missing a foundational piece. And truthfully neither did she.
This is why she's been told, by well-meaning professionals and well-meaning loved ones, to just relax, be present, connect with your body... and it hasn't worked.
She's been using the right tools in the wrong order. And every time the tools didn't work, she absorbed a little more quiet evidence that she was the problem.
She wasn't the problem. The tools were right, used in the wrong order. And nobody told her there was an order.
How It Started — Earlier Than You Think
Here's where it gets tender. And I want to be careful about how I say this.
Your childhood may have been genuinely lovely. The people who raised you were very likely doing their best. I know mine were. This isn't about blame and it's absolutely not about deciding your childhood was bad or broken.
What I've had to sit with myself is this. Intent doesn't always equal impact.
When complete witnessing is consistently missing in early childhood, not because a parent is cruel or intentionally hurtful, but simply because most people were never taught to offer all four parts... a developing nervous system draws a conclusion before you have words for it.
They don't fully get me. I have to figure out how to make myself seen.
And a strategy is born. Do more. Fix things. Be more indispensable. Read the room more carefully. Anticipate what's needed before anyone asks.
I spent years telling myself, "they didn't mean it that way" and "I know they love me, it just came out wrong." I know now that was a form of self-gaslighting. Making generous allowances for everyone around me while holding my own felt experience to an impossibly high standard of proof before I'd let it count.
Here's what incomplete witnessing can look like from a well-meaning parent. As you read these, I'm genuinely curious whether any feel familiar.
Your feeling that got redirected. You're hurt by something a friend did. You bring it home and your mom listens genuinely, then says, "Well, have you thought about what your friend might have been going through?" The intent was to teach you empathy. And yet your own experience — the hurt, what it cost you to trust that friend, what it cost you to bring it home at all — was quickly brushed aside. You began to absorb a quiet lesson. That being a good person meant making room for other people's experiences before your own.
Your invisible labor that became expected. You were the one in the family who noticed when things needed doing and you did them without being asked. Maybe there was a sick sibling, or a parent navigating something heavy, or a household running on a tight budget or depleted energy. You set the table. You kept the peace. You managed your own schedule so your parents didn't have one more thing to worry about. You did it on your own and out of love. And it worked, which meant it became expected. Nobody noticed your effort anymore because you made it look effortless. Nobody thanked you for carrying more than your share. And nobody told you that you didn't have to. That it wasn't your job, as a child, to hold the family together.
Your achievement that became about the gap. You come home with a 94 on a test. Your dad looks at it warmly, genuinely proud, and says, "This is great... what happened on number seven?" Not harsh or unkind. He was invested in your success. And yet what got the attention wasn't the 94. It was the gap. The effort that produced 93 correct answers went unseen. The one that wasn't correct became the whole conversation. You filed it quietly and got back to work. Note to self: what I do isn't what gets noticed. What I did wrong is.
Over time you stopped bringing up your feelings or the cost. You learned to absorb it alone. To smooth things over before anyone noticed. To be the one who held it together without making it anyone else's problem.
And because that strategy worked, because it kept you connected to the people you needed, and because our culture rewarded the grades and the degrees and the output, it stopped feeling like a strategy at all.
You never consciously decided to be a go-getter. It just became who you are.
Why This Particular Woman Crashes When Others Don't
Here's the question I've been sitting with. And I want to be honest that I've only recently been able to answer it clearly.
But first, I want to pause and name something before I go further. Because when I first understood this for myself, I felt a sting of shame. I'd spent years working to build my capacity — for rest, for presence, for resilience. So when I realized capacity was actually the issue, my first thought was, so all that work wasn't enough either?
It helped me when I understood the distinction clearly.
My capacity was never faulty. My bucket's capacity was faulty. And those are completely different things.
Other high-achieving women get tired too. But they seem to recover better. Rest works for them. The tools hold. They crash occasionally and bounce back.
For this particular woman, she crashes and doesn't fully bounce back. And she can't understand why. Because from the outside she looks exactly like every other high achiever in the room and uses the same bounce-back strategies.
Here's what's different. And it comes back to the bucket.
Other high achievers get tired and they rest and the rest holds. Their bucket is solid. The water they pour in stays. It restores them. They wake up and the bucket is more full than when they went to bed.
But for the particular woman I'm talking about, she gets tired and she tries to rest. And the rest doesn't fully hold. Not because she's doing it wrong. Not because she needs to carry less. But because her bucket has holes. The water goes in and seeps out before it can restore her. So she wakes up and her bucket is less full than when she went to bed, because the bucket has holes.
It's not a her problem. It's a bucket problem.
These women were handed a faulty bucket at the start. She's not a faulty runner. She has a faulty bucket. And because of their extraordinary attunement and depth of character, they've been competing at full capacity alongside everyone else.
Nobody flagged them as needing more support. They managed the faulty bucket remarkably well. Until the effort of compensating for what the bucket couldn't hold was no longer sustainable.
That's not weakness. That is a testament to the strength of character and emotional resilience of this particular woman.
She's not doing anything wrong. The bucket has holes. And until those holes are addressed, no amount of good water will fully restore her.
How It Shows Up Now
I want to name something I hear from women regularly. Often in the first conversation. Usually said quietly, like they're not sure it's safe to admit out loud.
I can't fully relax. Even when everything is fine, I'm waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Does that land for you?
That low hum of urgency that doesn't match your actual circumstances. The sense that you need to stay one step ahead of something you can't quite name. The inability to rest all the way, even when you've given yourself permission to. The way your mind scans for problems before they arrive, not because you're anxious exactly, but because that's just what you do.
And then there's what happens when something genuinely good occurs. A win at work, a moment of real connection, a day that actually flows. Instead of just enjoying the good thing, some part of you is already preparing for when it ends. Already wondering what the catch is. Bracing for the other shoe.
That isn't a personality flaw and it's definitely not a lack of faith. That's a nervous system that never received the signal that it was safe to not hold it all together. So it stays ready. Never exhaling. Always slightly on. Hoping to finally be fully witnessed, and also quietly preparing for the finish line to move again.
Here's what that can look like on an ordinary weekday.
Your boss sends a message that reads as slightly clipped. You spend the next three hours running through everything you might have done wrong, even though nothing has actually happened. Your body is already in problem-solving mode before a problem exists.
Or you complete something significant at work, something that required enormous invisible effort, and when the brief "Thanks" comes, you feel a flash of resentment. You're not normally an angry person. And yet there it is. Something like, he has no idea what I gave up to push this through. That resentment isn't ingratitude. It's your body signaling that something essential was missing in the response. Because something was. The cost wasn't acknowledged. The finish line moved again.
Or you're on vacation, away from the routine, and instead of relief you begin to feel worse. Untethered even. Like without the structure that keeps everything in place, you don't quite know how to hold yourself together. And then you feel vaguely guilty for feeling that way, because you're supposed to be grateful for this time. And you are grateful. And yet you can't quite feel settled.
That's not ingratitude. That's a nervous system whose sense of safety has been tied to performance and routine for so long that stillness actually feels like a threat.
All of it makes complete sense given the full picture of how your nervous system developed.
Why Talking About It Hasn't Fixed It
In all the reading, the research, the therapy and the self-inquiry I've done on myself over the years, I kept landing on cognitive framing. Better thoughts. Reframe the story. Change your mindset.
What I hadn't heard was this — and I hadn't heard it in part because I didn't identify as someone with childhood trauma.
Nervous system adaptations that form in early childhood don't update through language alone. Because the strategy was learned before language existed. It lives below words.
And this is why telling yourself things like "I shouldn't be upset about that clipped thanks, he's busy" or "I should be able to relax on vacation, I should be grateful to be here" haven't increased your peace or your presence. You've been using language to address something that developed long before language ever did.
The same is true for why the somatic work hasn't fully landed. It's not a skill problem. It's a safety problem. The nervous system has to receive the foundational signal first. Then the body-based work can reach the place it was always designed to reach.
Keeping things the same is safe to the nervous system. Different, including the difference of full rest and full presence, feels like danger until there's enough new evidence to override decades of learned vigilance.
So here we are. Capable, accomplished and building lives we love. Safe by every external measure.
And yet our bodies are still running programs they wrote decades ago, still at full intensity, still looking for a signal that never came.
Until our bodies get that signal, consistently, repeatedly, in a way that actually registers, they keep running the old program. Keep going. Stay connected. Don't stop.
And the tools we've been reaching for, even the good ones, chosen with the best of intentions, land on top of a nervous system that is still braced, still vigilant, still waiting.
Good water. Bucket with holes.
This Is Not Your Fault. And It's Not a Life Sentence.
The exhaustion you're feeling isn't a character flaw and most likely not a medical issue.
It isn't a failure of discipline or self-awareness or follow-through.
It isn't depression, though it can look like it from the inside. You know yourself well enough to know something just feels off in a way that's hard to articulate. That's because what's off isn't your thinking or your strategies.
It's your foundation.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, with persistent faithfulness, in response to something that was genuinely missing.
You didn't create the holes. And you couldn't have filled them with the tools you had. Because even though you were using the right tools, you were using them at the wrong stage. Without a solid foundation, even the most carefully built house eventually begins to buckle under the strain.
When I recognized this in myself, I felt a flash of anger because of the exorbitant amount of time and energy I thought I'd wasted. And then I realized something that changed how I now hold it.
The self-care routines we've built were not wasted. The therapy wasn't wasted. The yoga, the meditation, the somatic work, the routines, none of it was wasted. That water is still good. You'll absolutely still use it.
But first, we need to address the holes.
What The Work Actually Looks Like
The work I'm describing is not another thing to add to your list. I want to be really clear about that.
The thing that surprised me most about this work is that it's not all or nothing. There's no doing it right or it doesn't count. You don't need a perfect schedule or a dedicated window of time that your calendar doesn't have. It's not a practice that falls apart when you travel or your routine breaks.
Think of it less like a protocol and more like building an evidence list. And this evidence list acts as scaffolding as you shore up your foundation.
Every time you witness yourself, you're giving your body proof that you're willing to show up for yourself. You don't start from scratch when you miss a day. You simply keep adding evidence. Consistently. And while it might first feel like it's "not enough to matter," that's exactly the kind of patient, quiet pace your nervous system actually needs to update.
It's foundational work. The kind that happens underneath your life.
What we're building is the capacity to witness ourselves completely. To offer ourselves those four parts we didn't consistently receive when we were small. Not all at once. But steadily, one small piece of evidence at a time.
When the holes begin to fill, things solidify and clarity arrives.
Those finish lines start to hold still. Not because your circumstances changed, but because your response to them did. The part of you that needed someone to finally see the whole picture... you're offering that to yourself now.
One of my clients described it as a kind of healthy apathy. The urgency to explain herself, to be fully understood, to get all the way across before the line moved again... it just wasn't as sharp. She wasn't less caring or less engaged. She was just less desperate about it. Less attached to the outcome. And that shift, subtle as it looked from the outside, changed everything about how she moved through her days going forward.
The routines that felt precarious begin to feel like choices rather than requirements. The meditation that never quite worked starts to land. The somatic practices that stayed in the head begin to reach the body. Rest actually feels restorative. All of those tools you've been faithfully reaching for finally reach the place they were always intended to reach.
Because the foundation is now solid enough to hold them.
I don't want you to worry that doing this work is going to change the life you have. You don't have to give up what you've built. You won't have to quit your job or leave your relationship or spend years excavating your past. You'll still be the quick, smart, capable woman you've always been.
But you will be fortifying your foundation. The one that for others developed early on, and that you get to strengthen now, for yourself, on your own terms.
You'll no longer be unconsciously looking outside of yourself to be witnessed.
From external to internal. That's where your power is.
You get to become your own best witness.
And honestly... watching women find their way to that, watching the finish line finally hold still, knowing that she's found the sense of enoughness in her bones... is one of the best parts of this work.
I'd love to know if this resonated for you. What part of this has been your experience too?
Lisa Bobyak founded Living Fully Balanced LLC because she got tired of watching brilliant women break themselves trying to maintain excellence, in part because she'd been one of them. For over a decade, she's worked with high-achieving, deeply attuned women who are doing everything right. Competent, disciplined, and highly self-aware. Armed with strategies, protocols, and solid habits. The level of their exhaustion doesn't match their effort to feel better.
If you're a high-achieving woman who's tired of working harder at your own wellbeing than you work at everything else... you don't have to break yourself to prove your worth.
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