Mental Health Warrior & Neurospicy Mama

You'll Never Wish You Worked More

Amy Taylor Season 1 Episode 64

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"When you die, you're never going to wish you worked more." These words from Tori Jenae's grandfather became a guiding light through her darkest moments. As a trauma-informed confidence coach who has walked through fire – from childhood trauma to profound loss, from adrenal failure to divorce – Tori brings hard-earned wisdom to women caught in cycles of burnout and overwhelm.

The modern woman's burnout crisis isn't just about being busy. Women today are primary breadwinners, caregivers, emotional laborers, and household managers – all while our society still operates on outdated schemas about who should handle what. We've only had access to our own bank accounts since 1974, yet we're expected to excel in every domain without letting anything drop. The result? An epidemic of exhaustion that manifests as mood swings, disrupted sleep, digestive issues, and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness.

For Tori, burnout became life-threatening when her extremely long workweeks and perfectionism led to Addison's disease – her adrenal glands simply quit functioning. Her healing journey revealed that burnout stems from deeper patterns: people-pleasing, boundary challenges, and finding worth in achievement rather than existence. The path forward begins with what she calls the ABCs: Awareness something needs to change, examining the Beliefs driving our behavior, and Calming our nervous systems through practices that regulate our bodies' stress responses.

When we heal and evolve, our relationships often face growing pains too. Tori shares how her own marriage ended when her personal growth created an energetic imbalance the relationship couldn't bridge. Yet she emphasizes that couples who choose to "fall in love with new versions of each other over and over" can transform together rather than grow apart.

Whether you're running on empty or supporting someone who is, this episode offers both practical tools and soul-deep permission to put yourself back on your own priority list. Connect with Tori at www.torijenae.com or @ToriJenae on Instagram to continue your journey from burnout to breakthrough.

Ready to figure out who the heck you really are beneath the roles, the noise and the to-do lists? The Who Am I Journal is your unapologetic permission slip to explore the real you messy, magical and everything in between. With guided prompts and zero pressure to “have it all together,” this journal helps you reconnect with yourself, one honest page at a time. Sign up now to grab your free journal and get real-talk inspiration in your inbox from someone who gets it

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Speaker 1:

So it's really like doing that internal check to say like, who am I, what do I really want? And I love the question. I only had six months to live and I was going to be healthy, but I knew I was going to leave. What would you be doing? Would your life look the same? Because one thing my grandfather said to me right before he passed was that because he knew gosh I was like 20 at the time and he already saw how type A achiever I was. And he said, tori, when you died, you're never going to wish you worked more.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to Mental Health Warrior and NeuroSpicy Mama, the podcast where we say the quiet parts out loud and give burnout, people-pleasing and generational expectations the side eyeeye they deserved. Today I'm talking with the brilliant and deeply soulful Tori Jene. She's a trauma-informed confidence and relationship coach with over 13 years of experience, multiple degrees in psychology and let's be real the kind of lived wisdom you can't learn in school. Let's be real the kind of lived wisdom you can't learn in school. Lori helps women heal emotional wounds, rebuild their self-worth and rise strong after breakups, divorce or personal loss. She blends psychology, somatic healing and spiritual wisdom to guide women into aligned, thriving lives. And y'all she's been through it, from childhood trauma to profound personal loss. Her journey is real, raw and resilient, and she brings all of that to her work. So if you're exhausted from carrying it all, stuck in a cycle of burnout or quietly wondering is this all there is? This conversation is your call to come back to yourself. Let's dive in. All right, here we are with Tori Janay. Welcome, tori.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, it's so good to be here with you.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I'm glad to have you. Can I tell us how burnout is existing today in a woman's life, like is it just career, or is it family? What kind of burnout are you talking about?

Speaker 1:

I feel like burnout is something that I've definitely lived through, but I feel like, because women are doing so much more than we ever have in history, it's showing up everywhere because women are now working outside the home. Obviously, in a lot of homes in the US we are the primary breadwinners as well. We're outnumbering men in universities and colleges two to one almost. So we're doing more than we ever have before, but we're also still doing a lion's share of the housework and what they call emotional labor, which is checking in on your partner, checking on your kids.

Speaker 1:

Is your mom okay? Is your sister okay? Is your brother okay? So we're managing so much more than we ever have before and not much is getting taken off of our plate. So I really see burnout happening in almost all women. Even if it's a stay-at-home mom, it doesn't mean she can't be experiencing burnout. So I definitely want to expand the definition because I think sometimes women particularly feel guilty if we can't perform or achieve or do tasks at a high level. We almost have this inner need to be super busy and take care of everybody else, and that is really creating burnout.

Speaker 2:

You know, I was thinking about what you said about not taking any of the chores off. Thinking about what you said about not taking any of the chores off. Why is it that you think that families are still set in that like 50s mentality, that the woman does all the chores?

Speaker 1:

I think it's like outdated what we call schemas or mental structures or beliefs. You know it's like we're very few generations removed from that right. Like my grandmother stayed at home and raised all of her children and my mom worked some. But we forget that like women, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, like in the Western world, we've only had access to our own money and jobs for like less than 50 years. People forget that women could not have a bank account in the United States in her own name until like 1974, which means right before I was born, my mom could not have her own bank account. So our roles have just been so well definedasking. And this fits in very well to neurodivergence, because I actually feel like there's a.

Speaker 1:

My personal theory of neurodivergence is the brain is also trying to adapt to all of the stressors, all the new things that are trying to keep multiple tabs open. There was this really beautiful and funny study that they did with college students in a pretend kitchen and had females, you know, born females, males we won't get into gender very much, but just those who identified and are physical females and males. And in this fake kitchen there was a baby in a walker, a fire on the stove and something else went wrong, and almost all of the time women could prevent the baby from going down the stairs, put out the fire on the stove and take care of the other thing. Men failed over 50% of the time. So I think women can and we have this ability, and then we have this guilt when we don't take care of everything because we know that we can, but it's really coming at a cost to our mind, our body and ultimately, I think, our soul, because one of the things, one of the interesting signs of burnout is a feeling of hopelessness.

Speaker 2:

How does burnout show itself Like? What are you looking for to see if you're burned out?

Speaker 1:

I think one thing you can check for in yourself is like mood swings, feeling a little bit checked out, like you're just tired all the time. You have no energy. You might start having some physical issues like having I love the saying you feel tired but wired. So maybe three o'clock in the day you're so exhausted and you cannot wait to get to bed, but then when it's time to go to bed you're having a hard time winding down. That's a big sign because that means your adrenals or your stress system is just in this on state all the time, and so at three o'clock our cortisol naturally dips. So when that goes down, but then it starts to rise again, we can also feel really like increased emotional sensitivity. So things that bother us now they maybe didn't used to or maybe we had more, and what I call emotional bandwidth or regulation things are making a snap a little bit easier nowadays.

Speaker 1:

I see it as just like this feeling of being overwhelmed, hopeless, feeling like you just got to get through one more week. You just gotta, you just gotta do it. And then I do see a lot, like I said, in sleep, digestive issues, energy. Even your cycle, your menstrual cycle, if you still have one is going to show you that your body is burning out. So that's one of the first. The early signs that we forget is how is our body working? Because our mind will make up all kinds of things, but our body will never lie to us.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's good. Yeah, All right. So yeah, that makes me wonder do women just give up at that point and, like you know, throw away the marriage or throw away the job or whatever, or are there actual ways to come back from?

Speaker 1:

burnout. Yeah, I think it's recognizing that you have it and knowing that it's okay and that there's nothing wrong with you and that you know. I think the hardest thing for women is knowing that they're going to have to shift and change how they show up, they're going to have to ask for help, they're going to have to change how much they're doing and they're kind of afraid to let things fall. I find so when I'm dealing with people with burnout, they usually have, you know, a pretty successful job or a passion project, something they're doing. They're taking care of, possibly kids or family members, like they have a lot on their plate and they are having a hard time understanding like how can I get all this done still and take care of myself?

Speaker 1:

And I do find that like there's the psychological correlation between burnout and the women that I've worked at with is they tend to lack boundaries, be people pleasers and high achievers, and you might be just one of all three of those or one of those. I mean, at one point in my life I was all three, yeah, so it's kind of like I can do this, I should do this, and they have a hard time thinking like, well, who would I be if I didn't do this, and then the guilt will set in Well, if I didn't take care of everyone this way. You know, it's like we almost find our worth in our busyness and our caring and all those kinds of things, and so it takes some deeper inner work to untangle that so that we can let go of the guilt, so we can feel like we're still enough if we're not overgiving, overdoing and what's called over-functioning, which means I'm just functioning at a high level all the time and I'm taking care of everyone mentally, emotionally, physically and I'm not ever focused on myself.

Speaker 2:

That makes sense. Do you think that women also have trouble maybe prioritizing and picking out what they can get rid of?

Speaker 1:

Oh, absolutely, because you know, I think we've kind of it's been jokingly called like superwoman syndrome, right, like we are expected, and I think the Barbie movie was kind of cute, and talking about this, when America Ferreira has that speech that she gives about you know, women are, you can't be too much of this, like you can't be too skinny but you can't be too overweight, you can't be this, you can't be that. It's like we are just boxed in so tightly nowadays, like we're not supposed to stay home because we're supposed to have a career. And then, if we have a career, well, we can't be too busy because we have to take care of our children or not, or our family members or someone, or our husbands or whoever it is in our life, our partners, and then, like I think we just have these expectations that are really like through the roof and we are trying to be everything to everyone and we forget that you can have it all but not at the same time. And I know from personal experience so I have a ton of childhood trauma and life experiences have been very difficult.

Speaker 1:

But when I was in my 30s and I was going like early, like 30, 31, I decided I was in human resources. I worked for a very large company. I had about 27 direct reports. I worked for a 7,000 person company. I was going to graduate school on evenings and weekends. I was doing what they call low residency program and I was also having a coaching practice on the weekends.

Speaker 1:

I was working 100 hours a week.

Speaker 1:

I was married at the time so I was trying to have time for my relationship and I couldn't even believe how, like I had every hour of every day for about 12 hours a week, 12 hours per day, scheduled tight and unfortunately my body gave before my mind did and it really took that breakdown physically to have a breakthrough Like I had to have like a physical diagnosis, what's called Addison's disease.

Speaker 1:

It's when your adrenals, which are the little glands on top of the kidneys that actually push out cortisol and adrenaline all these hormones that give us energy mine just quit working. They just gave up. They, they were, they tapped out. Wow, it took me years to heal that and I really had to do the inner work to change how I viewed myself, how I viewed productivity, how I viewed achievement, how I viewed taking care of other people, like all of that kind of stuff, to really heal that burnout. And I also had to grieve that version of myself who could work like that, because you know that that high-performing, perfectionist type a girl had had to go because she was going to literally kill me.

Speaker 2:

It's like if she did. Oh no, so how did you heal? I mean, I know you said you kind of changed your mindset and what you were thinking, but how did you do that?

Speaker 1:

yeah so. So I always, I always had it really simple for people. It's I call it the ABCs of healing. So, a we want to have the awareness Okay, something's not working, like I'm not happy, I'm not feeling good, and that's okay, and I need to know and I need to make shift. And it doesn't have to be too scary, and I always pray people can not let it be too painful before they make that shift, because that's another thing that we do with women. It's like the pain and the pressure has to be so big that we actually do something about it. And that was definitely me. I'm hardheaded.

Speaker 1:

And then B is like what are the beliefs that I have about myself and about life? So that might be writing on a piece of paper. Like what do I think is expected of me? What am I supposed to be doing? Like, what should I be doing in life? And it's kind of a joke. I trained with Louise Hay many years ago but she used to say you can should all over yourself. So what are those shoulds you have in your life? Like do I believe that in order to be a good whatever mom, sister, brother, worker, colleague I have to be all these things? And then start to question that. And then the C is. Now I can start clearing that and calming that from my nervous system, because it's not just in the mind, it's also in the body.

Speaker 1:

It's just like we have a visceral reaction to things we might have trauma. You know all people pleasing comes from a childhood that we had to people please in order to things. We might have trauma. You know all people pleasing comes from a childhood that we had to people please in order to survive. And it comes from love and it's not a bad thing. It's just that those old patterns of being will not get us where we want to go.

Speaker 1:

I always say you know, what got you here won't get you there and that, like the way that I was wired was very like high achieving and you know that came from a lot of like. I wanted recognition, I wanted to feel good, I wanted all the kinds of love and things that I didn't get growing up. So I got it from achievement right. That was like the first time people had been like, wow, you're amazing, look, how do you do all this stuff, look at how far you've come. You're only 30 and you've made it here. And I was like, oh, and I just ate it up. But I didn't recognize that that wasn't going to actually fill the void that was in my heart.

Speaker 2:

Not only not fill the void, but once they've said that you feel like you have to live up to that jokingly call destination addiction.

Speaker 1:

Like we found this place that feels really good and we keep thinking, oh, if I get the next thing or the next promotion or I do the next better thing, I'll feel even better. But we just wear ourselves down even more. So it's really like doing that internal check to say like, who am I? What do I really want? And I love the question. I only had six months to live and I was going to be healthy, but I knew I was going to leave. What would you be doing? Would your life look the same? Because one thing my grandfather said to me right before he passed was that because he knew gosh, I was like 20 at the time and he already saw how type A achiever I was.

Speaker 1:

And he said, tori, when you died, you're never going to wish you worked more, because he had cancer and he was dying and he was a hard worker and he wanted to point that out to me and it took me many years to actually integrate that stuff, but it always stuck with me.

Speaker 2:

I got chills, though that's so important and so nice that he shared that with you. He definitely was concerned.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a great book called the Five Regrets of the Dying.

Speaker 2:

Oh, okay, definitely was concerned.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a great book called the Five Regrets of the Dying.

Speaker 1:

I think her name was Bonnie or Bronnie Ware, but anyway, she was a hospice nurse who sat with thousands of people who were passing and she started to record their stories, because everyone wants to know that their life matters, of course. And in writing all of their stories and recording them, she started to find that there was themes to everyone's story and so she wrote a beautiful book and I thought I read that, luckily when I was like 33. And then I've had a lot of loss, like I've lost my sister, my mom, my dad, my grandparents, my like most, I'm the oldest living person in my immediate family, so I've experienced tons of loss. But what I really learned about from that book and my own loss is that it teaches you how to live, and so that's where I really get with women on like burnout and taking care of themselves and like aligning their life to their truth is like life is short, it's going to pass you by so quickly and you don't want to look back with regret.

Speaker 2:

Oh, definitely not. So what about partners and family and friends? How can they support someone that's going through that burnout?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean it's good if we can communicate to them and ask for the support and even tell them, if you are a partner and you see it, it's kind of bringing it up to that person with love and say like, hey, I see you're doing a lot, I see it taking an effect on your health, or you know, I'm really concerned, I'm here for you, can I help you? So if you are that partner or that family member, you can definitely try to have a loving conversation and just bring it up, but with a lot of caution, because they may not be ready to face it. And so it's the hardest thing on the planet is to know that we can't fix anyone but ourselves. Yeah, and that is kind of where I think women also fail, and myself too. You know, both my parents had addiction problems and my sister did as well, and so I tried to help and save them. And so I don't say that from someone who hasn't tried to do it herself and failed and learned the lesson the hard way.

Speaker 1:

Everything I share, even though I do have multiple degrees in psychology and all kinds of training, I've walked the fire of everything I speak about. I've been through death and divorce and I've pretty much lost everything in life, from my money to my health, to my marriage, to my house, like you name it. I've had to give it up and rebuild myself. So I guess when I share, these stories.

Speaker 2:

I always like people to know that you seem so together and you obviously are very intelligent. How do you deal with all of that in your history and actually heal and move on?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's not, it's no easy feat and I will say that you know, I've definitely had times in my life where I'm like, if this is what life is, I don't know if I can keep going. It was definitely times where I was like, okay, universe, if this is it, I'm ready to go home, I'm good. But that kind of grief that like cracks your soul open, and it can happen from lots of things. You know, I've had more difficult that I always remind my clients, like you know, just a divorce on its own can bring that for us. Just a child who's ill can bring that level of pain for us. Just, you know, losing a parent can bring that level of pain. And so, yeah, I've walked through a lot of those things and it's really comes down to the, really the basic tools of taking care of ourselves, which none of us want to do. And it is like particularly I know your audience is more neurodivergent, but I think in women in general like we really have to have structure in our lives. We have to have self-care and that is not bubble baths and manicures, that is boundaries, and eating well and moving our bodies and learning to say no and mindfulness, meditation. You know these kinds of things literally saved my life If I had not had these processes and these, because you know, I'm a yoga and meditation teacher. I've been practicing, I've been studying psychology for 26 years now, so I had a lot of the tools to help me get through that.

Speaker 1:

But I will always say start with your body, because your nervous system is what the body keeps the score your nervous system, your sensitivity, all that stuff. So we've got to bring in those calming practices. So take deep breaths, take walks in nature, take a yoga class. You know I would like to start with what's free because I want it to be available to everyone. But doing that breath where you draw in your breath for five or six, hold for six and then out for eight, like that, will start calming your autonomic nervous system. Yoga has been proven, and good yoga too. I would like make sure that people know that you should feel really calm when you leave yoga. It shouldn't be like weights and techno music and should be really focused on the breath.

Speaker 1:

And there's a famous book called the Body Keeps the Score where they talk about trauma and healing trauma. It's a really deep book, so I'll give you the cliff notes. But basically, when we have chronic stress or trauma in our lives, our nervous system, our body really hold on to that. That's why we can think of the classic PTSD maybe person who went to war, and they come home and they've done years of talk therapy but when they hear fireworks or they hear a car backfire, their body drops to the ground and it's because their nervous system has encoded how to stay safe and so we forget that our bodies do that too. So even if we grew up with, maybe, a really critical mother and we learned to protect ourselves from that, now we've got a critical partner or boss and that's starting to eat away at ourselves every single day. Or we've had this loss that you know, that's. Our biggest fear was losing our mother, and now we did.

Speaker 1:

So it's really getting to those calming practices in the body of grounding yourself. So it can be breath, it can be meditation, it can be yoga, it can be nature, it can be EFT, tapping emotional freedom technique, which you can find how to do online. You know there's tons of videos of how to do it for free, but it's something I practice, I'm trained in. I also do something called energy psychology, emdr, which is eye movement, rapid desensitization, which also helps us process trauma.

Speaker 1:

So, starting with the body, then moving into the mind, and the mind is really how do I learn emotional regulation? How do I look at my beliefs, my thoughts, my feelings? Am I stuck in rumination? Am I stuck in negative loops? Can I use mantra? Can I use affirmation, anything, to start bringing myself like one level up? If I'm, you know, I've been in very deep levels of grief before and I used to spend just like a half hour a day making sure I felt that all. And then I would remind myself like, even though, like I remember, when my mom died and I was building my business at that time, it was like such a stressful, my sister had overdosed, my mom died and like within a 13 month period, and I was also.

Speaker 1:

I had just started my business. So it was like I would just remember, like okay, I'm gonna feel as much as I can, because if you can't feel it, you can't heal it. And then I'm going to remind myself, even though all this has happened, I'm okay, I'm still standing, I can still take one step forward, and so how you talk to yourself is another big one.

Speaker 2:

You know, speaking of you were talking about divorces earlier. I've noticed that a lot of times and I wondered if you'd noticed this too. Noticed that a lot of times and I wondered if you'd noticed this too. When women start to I don't know evolve, when they start to really feel like I got to take care of myself and I'm going to set boundaries, and they start doing things they've never done before. Have you seen how that affects the marriage?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. When one person grows and the other person does not, there's almost like an energetic imbalance. It's like and this happened in my own relationship he's a great guy. We're still friends, we really, you know, we mediated our divorce. It wasn't anything difficult. It's just like I had really worked on growing myself for years and I had changed and evolved and what I needed evolved and he just could not match that anymore and so it started to create a lot of friction.

Speaker 1:

And losing him in my life was very difficult, because I'd been with him since I was very young. I mean, you know, I met him like 21, 22. He'd been one of the few people I've been in my life consistently for a really long time. So I but I see this a lot in women Like when we start evolving and changing and advocating for our needs and setting boundaries, a lot of times our partner is not super happy about that and we're not exactly the person that they fell in love with, and then that, vice versa, our partner is no longer the person that we fell in love with. So I kind of say that the couples that can grow together and evolve together and choose to fall in love with the new versions of each other over and over again are typically the ones who can make it, the ones who can have the hard conversations, the ones who can say like hey, we've grown apart. You know what can we do to come back together?

Speaker 2:

I like that because I think if you involve your partner in things like therapy, you know, or going to learn a new style of yoga, or whatever you're doing, if you involve them and they move with you that seems much easier to keep that relationship together. I totally get that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're a thousand percent right and you know, sometimes they get a little stubborn. You know, here I am doing what I do and my ex, you know, great guy, but like he didn't want to go to therapy.

Speaker 2:

I'd asked him for over 11 years, oh wow. Yeah, he was set.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he was good and you know, of course people do what they're going to do when they're ready to do it and but you know, it just wasn't, it wasn't something he was into at the time and that didn't allow us to come back together.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, now you work with women on a regular basis. You're a coach.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I work as a coach because in the state of California to work as a therapist you are under a license and it's a different process and I can't work with anyone outside of my state and I actually have an international practice. So I work with people across the United States, in London and Dubai and a couple of places in Europe.

Speaker 2:

Okay, how do you actually work with them? Is it all on Zoom or?

Speaker 1:

It is. It's all on Zoom now. I do travel to those places to see my clients in person, just to like meet them, and you know I'll be going to London next month to see people and do some workshops there. But, yeah, I've been doing this work online since 2018. I got very lucky. My intuition said it was time to build my business more internationally and more freely so that I could work from anywhere in the world. I got tired of driving around LA. It was stressing me out, so I was like, okay, I've got to make a tough choice. So I had actually switched to Zoom by late 2018. So by the time the pandemic came around, I'd already been working this way for a long time, and so I do. Wow, that's great. Yeah, I do the work that I do, you know, mind, body and soul, but I do that via Zoom primarily.

Speaker 2:

Okay, Well, I've really enjoyed this and I've learned so much. Is there something that you'd want to leave our listeners with something they can hang on to if they're going through burnout or having a tough time?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, just know that it won't last forever and that it's very unlikely that we can do it alone. So to really employ some assistance anybody a partner, a best friend, anyone who can really help you, a therapist or a coach, just someone who can help guide you out of your own way because that's what we all do we can't see the picture when we're in the frame, but I truly believe and I have seen that we are all resilient, we can really heal anything and you can come out of that phase. So I've been in some of the darkest things humans can experience and I've walked out of them. So I always just hope that my story inspires people to know that for sure.

Speaker 2:

Well, it definitely is inspiring, and I love that you're giving people hope and something to hold on to, because we all need that.

Speaker 1:

That is for sure. Hope is the antithesis to all the things that we experience every day as humans, because life isn't always easy.

Speaker 2:

Right, sure isn't All right. Well, thanks so much for coming today. Thank you so much for having me. If that didn't hit straight in the soul, I don't know what would Corey brought the kind of wisdom that only comes from walking through the fire and choosing to rise anyway. Burnout isn't a flaw, it's a flashing red light, and healing starts when we stop trying to carry everything alone and start honoring what we need. If you want more of Corrie's insight and trust me, you do head to wwwcorriejanaycom. That's wwwcorrijanecom, that's W-W-W dot T-O-R-I-J-E-N-A-E dot com, or follow her on Instagram at Tori Janae. She's the real deal, and if you're feeling inspired to reclaim your power, rest your nervous system or finally put yourself on your own damn priority list stick around, hit subscribe.

Speaker 2:

We're not done here. Keep breathing and keep advancing, warrior.

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