Episode 9: What to Do When Life is Life-Ing Too Hard but You Still Have To Work
How to Function at Work When Life’s Falling Apart
Summary
Life doesn’t pause when work gets hard—and work doesn’t stop when life falls apart. In this honest and deeply personal episode, Ellen shares what it’s like to navigate grief, caretaking, and exhaustion while trying to show up professionally. If you’ve ever felt stuck in survival mode, spinning in stress, and wondering how to keep going when you’ve got nothing left, this one’s for you.
Ellen breaks down how the stress cycle hijacks your nervous system and what you can actually do about it. We’re talking burnout, emotional labor, and the myth of “just pushing through.” You’ll leave with 3 research-backed, real-world tactics to regulate your body and protect your sanity—without needing a wellness retreat or a two-week vacation.
This episode is for the tired professionals, the quiet overfunctioners, and the ones who hold it all together until they can’t. You’re not broken. You’re just human. Let’s talk about it.
Takeaways
Survival mode isn’t strength—it’s a stress response. Living in constant overwhelm affects your body, brain, and decision-making, whether you realize it or not.
Breathing is free medicine. Box breathing can help regulate your nervous system in the moment—no candles, no spa music required.
Naming your feelings helps quiet your brain’s panic mode. Talking to a friend (or writing it down) can literally calm your nervous system and shift you out of fight-or-flight.
Honesty builds better teams. You don’t have to trauma-dump at work, but letting people know you’re underwater invites support—and models trust.
You probably already know what helps—you’re just not doing it. And you’re not lazy or weak for that. You’re tired. Start small. Start with one deep breath.
Notable Quotes
“Work doesn’t hit pause when life falls apart.”
“Our brains aren’t wired to care if we’re happy—they’re wired to keep us safe.”
“You don’t need a crisis to deserve rest.”
“Sometimes taking a day off just means more time to deal with all the other crap.”
“Being ‘professional’ doesn’t mean pretending your heart isn’t breaking.”
Chapters:
00:00 – Intro: When Life Is “Life-ing” Too Hard
01:35 – Why This Episode Needed to Happen
02:45 – What Survival Mode Really Looks Like
05:30 – The Science Behind Stress: Lions, HR Emails & Your Brain
08:00 – Signs You're Stuck in the Stress Response
11:00 – Step #1: Breathe Like You Mean It
13:00 – Step #2: Talk It Out (Yes, Really)
15:00 – Step #3: Be Honest at Work (Even If It Feels Weird)
17:00 – Not All Stress Solutions Are One-Size-Fits-All
18:45 – Why We Know What Helps—But Don’t Do It
20:00 – Final Thoughts: You Deserve to Feel Better
21:00 – Call to Action & Free Toolkit Reminder
Keywords: burnout at work, emotional exhaustion, survival mode, stress cycle, nervous system regulation, chronic stress, emotional labor, women in leadership, burnout prevention, workplace mental health, work-life boundaries, caretaking and career, stress at work, professional vulnerability, leadership coaching
Transcript:
Okay, this is episode nine, when life is lifeing too hard of the hard at work podcast.
Hey everyone, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the Hard at Work podcast. I'll be honest, this isn't the episode I planned to record at this moment, but it's the one I needed. And I figured that means some or many of you might need it too. Because life is life-ing extra hard for me right now. Outside of working on this podcast, coaching, facilitating and building a business, which is pretty hard in its own right, I'm learning.
I've been navigating some heavy stuff with my family. Death, hospital stays, caring for aging parents. We've had a couple of months where the hits just keep coming. My cousin Nikki calls it OMT, one more thing. Like our dishwasher broke because of course it did, right? And I say all this not because I want or need sympathy. We are all in a weird and tough and uncertain time right now as I record this in May 2025. But
More I want to talk about it because I've been working on managing this emotional load and work. And we've all been in that boat a time or two or many before. Sometimes or often life comes at you all at once. Grief, caretaking, stress, obligations, the world falling apart piles up and work doesn't hit pause. So I'm not going to tell you to.
So I'm not here to tell you to set boundaries around your heartbreak and life stress or schedule your grieving time on your calendar, because that's impossible. But I am.
But I am gonna talk about what to do when you have to keep going but you're running on empty because we've all been there. There are workplaces that are really good with supporting you during tough times and ones that aren't so great.
There are people who want to tell their coworkers that they're having a tough time outside of work, and there are people who don't and prefer to keep it all private. Everyone's going to approach tough life things differently. And I really hope that you're in workplaces that are supportive and that help you access your paid leave benefits if you need them. But what do you do when you're in this in-between state? It's tough going for you, but not a crisis yet. Not something you need to take FMLA for yet.
But it's a constant drain on your energy and keeping you in that stress cycle loop.
Sure, you can take a day off or leave early when you need to, hopefully, but we know those are not long-term fixes. And sometimes taking time off from work just gives you more time dealing with all the crap going on back at home. And the work doesn't go away when you take time off, so you might come back to so much to get done that it's not even worth it to take time off. And the cycle goes around and around and around. So you're in survival mode.
Guess what survival mode is? It's living in a constant stress response, which we're already fighting because our lives contain so many constant stressors that we can't complete the stress cycle and get back to a regulated nervous system.
If you've come to one of my workshops recently, you've heard this, but I'll tell it again because this concept really helped me understand the stress cycle and how our responses to it are not all under our control, our rational control anyway. Our brains aren't wired to care if we're happy. They care if we're safe. So our nervous system is really quick to jump into gear anytime that the body perceives a threat is near.
The body doesn't know if the threat is a lion running at you. The body doesn't know if the threat is a lion running at you or seeing a 4 p.m. email with HR get scheduled for a Friday. All it knows is threat. And as soon as your brain assesses that a threat is coming your way, your nervous system kicks into gear, supplying all the parts of your body that you need when you're running away from or fighting a lion.
with the extra energy to make you the strongest and the fastest you can be. So, you know, your lungs actually get more blood flow as does your heart. Your liver converts glycogen into glucose to fuel your muscles more. This is all happening because your sympathetic nervous system kicks on, which is the gas pedal. And the body smartly reserves energy in the places that you don't need to make you faster or stronger. So for example, you digest more slowly.
And importantly, the rational part of your brain is less resourced. So have you ever had something stressful happen and acted totally unlike yourself? Maybe you yelled at someone you normally wouldn't or said something you normally wouldn't. And two hours later, you're like, what was I thinking? Why did I act like that? That's because you weren't thinking, at least not as rationally as you normally would. So in the olden days, like,
way, way, olden. You would either run away from the lion or punch the lion in the nose and make it go away if you survived, which I really hope you did. This is a very neat process. Your brain sees that the threat is gone, so it turns on your parasympathetic nervous system, the brake to your sympathetic nervous system's gas, and everything regulates. You've completed the stress cycle. So guess what we don't do very well in the not olden times? Yeah.
Completing the stress cycle because so many of our stressors never go away or are around for a longer time than a lion chase. So we stay in this perpetually on mode, like a car going 90 miles an hour for days and days and days. And this is when your body starts to show the strain and you get all of those upsetting and potentially really serious side effects of living in a constant state of stress, headaches, upset stomach, feelings of dread, exhaustion, sickness, so much more. And this, my friends, is what we really, really don't want to have happen to you. And caveat here, I am giving you the most basic fifth grade definition of the stress cycle because it helps me understand and support myself better when I'm in a stress response. The solutions I will be talking about here are clinically proven to help your parasympathetic nervous system regulate your body when your sympathetic nervous system has taken control.
Clinical anxiety, depression, neurodiversity are all bigger topics that someone who is licensed should tackle. So how do you know you're stuck in this survival mode, in this stress response? Here are some symptoms according to the London Psychiatry Centre and count how many of them you have. A sense of ongoing stress, difficulty making decisions, poor short-term memory, difficulty relaxing, difficulty relaxing, mood swings, trouble sleeping, a sense of numbness or disassociation, lack of motivation, poor eating habits like overeating or forgetting to eat. So if you listen to that and we're like check, check, check, then I want you to really listen.
And I also want you to pre- and I also want to preface this with the knowledge that I am not a medical professional. And I encourage you to talk to your doctor about any medical conditions. But what I can tell you is if you're checking a lot of those boxes, you're headed towards burnout or an emotional explosion or something worse. And friend, I'm guessing that you know all this. You could give this talk, right? So why aren't you doing the things you know you need to do?
to get yourself out of this stress response. Like, and I'm not blaming you, because I have been there. I have heard these symptoms countless times at conferences and workshops and books and, you know, at a conference giggled a little bit with my neighbor, ha ha ha, I have all of these, don't you? Making light of it, making a joke out of what is truly distress. Because we're not supposed to show that distress at work or even within some of our communities.
We're supposed to be strong and stalwart and quiet. Stay professional in quotation marks.
We think being professional means pretending that your heart isn't breaking or pretending that you're okay when you really aren't. And we need to stop normalizing that.
So my dears, you don't need to stay stuck in that horrible blah blah.
So my dears, you don't need to stay in that horrible stuck place. I don't care what anyone says, you deserve the right to take care of yourself so that you're not in this endless cycle that will not have a happy ending. So what can you do about it? And trust me, I totally know the feeling that you can't do anything, that it's all important and urgent that you can't stop and breathe. I have been there more times than I can count. But here are some tactics.
that are very simple, that are clinically proven to help, you stay out of the sympathetic nervous system response for longer or to not go too deeply into it.
Number one.
Breathe. Ideally, step outside and breathe, but if you can't, your cube or your desk will do or that empty conference room no one uses. Study after study shows that deep and purposeful breathing techniques will calm you down because deep breaths stimulate your vagus nerve, which controls the parasympathetic nervous system. Remember that break we talked about? There are many different breathing techniques to quiet your limbic system.
And one I'm a huge fan of is box breathing, which is where you breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, hold for four, and repeat. I do this every time I get on a plane because takeoff is really not my favorite. So like I'm telling you that there is a fail safe way to help yourself feel better when you are overwhelmed. And it is a
breathing moment. So I want you to do it. Now caveat, this might not work if you're well into the stress response or having a panic attack. Breathing can help in those situations, but when you're spun up really high, it might take some other tactics to recover.
What I have found is that breathing exercises, stepping away and doing breathing exercises are incredibly helpful when you feel yourself starting to spin into that stress cycle where that overwhelmed choking feeling is starting to take over. What our brains want us to do is to keep going because that's the course we know. And because we think everything's important, we think we have to keep going and keep going and keep going. But we actually need to reset.
our nervous system in order to keep going in a sustainable way.
So step one is breathe. Step two, phone a friend. Just talking about your stress or overwhelm with someone you love and trust is gonna help you. And don't take my word for it. Here's a quote from Psychology Today, revealing why verbalizing helps heal our emotional pain.
Revealing why verbalizing helps heal our emotional pain, neuroscience studies have found that labeling our feelings reduces activation in the amygdala, our brain's alarm system that triggers the flight or flight reaction. When we give words to our emotions, we move away from limbic reactivity by activating those parts of the brain that deal with language and meaning in the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex.
We become less reactive and more mindfully aware. Again, my friends, science. This is a thing that is proven to work. Do it. Tell someone you love what you are feeling. And if you don't wanna tell someone you love, tell yourself, write it down. I am feeling this. If you're having a hard time naming it, check out an emotions wheel.
You can find them online. I'll put a link to one in the show notes. I bought one from Etsy. They're great. Put one up on the wall of your cube. If you're like me and it's hard to name exactly what you're feeling other than mad, sad, or happy, these emotions wheels can be incredibly helpful to get to that nuance of what you're actually feeling. Name it, write it down, tell someone about it.
And number three, and this is something that we've heard in this podcast from a lot of our experts that we've talked to, but be honest about what you're feeling. So we've heard from a lot of our guests that transparency and honesty are must have qualities for good leaders and that modeling healthy norms will help your team adopt them too. So say to your team, hey, I'm feeling a little underwater right now and I just want you to know
in case I'm not getting back to you fast enough or if I seem a little stressed. You know what might happen? Someone with more capacity might offer to take something off your plate or someone could hear this and think, you know, maybe I'll wait until next week to bring up this big new idea. Humans actually want to help other humans.
It can be scary to be this honest. It doesn't feel right. We feel like we can't do this at work. But as we've talked about over and over again, this kind of honesty builds trust and allows you to build a team that while you in no way, or form need to tell anyone what's going on in your life, but if you tell them that you're not at your best,
That helps them understand how to modulate their behavior and the work so that they can support you. And if you model it as the leader, your team will model it as well. That's really important. If you are a leader and you say to your team, hey, you I want you to be honest if you're not feeling great about something, but you never model that and you're positive all the time, even though we know something's up with you because you've been extra crabby lately.
you know you have to model it or they won't trust you and then they won't do it.
So those three things again, three things to help you when you're feeling overwhelmed at work, but you are still having to show up because it's not quite crisis to take time off for yet, but there's still way more going on than you can manage successfully. One, breathe, do a breathing exercise. Two, talk to a friend or yourself and name the emotions you're feeling. Three.
Be honest about how you're feeling with your team. And again, everyone's gonna experience this yucky space differently. When you're stressed and overwhelmed and possibly in a stress response or headed there, some people might need to take a day off or more. Some might prefer to compartmentalize and just not think about it while they're at work. Some might feel like they need to go to sleep immediately. Some might need a pint of ice cream. If you don't realize that by now, this is a podcast.
If you don't realize it by now, this is a podcast that doesn't assume everyone's the same. So take my advice with a grain of salt. If it's not for you, it's not for you. But these are three researched backed, highly evidenced ways to help you ground yourself when you feel like it's too much.
And you have very likely heard these suggestions many times. But are you doing them? And if not, why? Think about what's stopping you from taking these easy but precious steps to regulate your mind and live less in the chaos zone. Your body will thank you for it. And we'll get into that more in a future episode because let me tell you how hard it still is for me to listen to my body.
how hard it was to admit when I was in a burned out state. It was really hard. I'm still a little embarrassed saying it out loud, to be honest, because I feel like I failed.
But I know that I didn't. And I know that that burnout came because a lot of different reasons. And some of those reasons were because I was acting in ways that I thought I was expected to that weren't working for me and weren't helping me process.
I've learned some ways to change my thinking that have been absolutely life-changing and I want to share them with you in case they'll help you too.
So that's it for me this week. Thanks for listening. I am really, really enjoying hearing all of your comments and feedback. Please keep it coming. Tell me what topics you want to hear about, who you want to hear from, whether hard at work is making you think about things differently. I hope it is. Whether you agree or disagree with what I'm saying here, I really want this podcast to be something that works for you. So please give me some feedback. If you haven't already,
go ahead and subscribe to the show on your podcast listening platform of choice. It would be amazing if you could rate it and leave a review or send it to a friend. I would really appreciate that if you're liking what you're hearing. And if you haven't downloaded my free Boundaries at Work toolkit that I announced a couple of sessions ago, that I announced a couple of episodes ago, it's got a lot of ways to set boundaries and track your battery level to figure out when you're headed to burnout.
and do something about it rather than just let it happen. And you can find that at ewbcoaching.com backslash toolkit. All right, thanks everyone. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I'll see you next time.
