How High Achievers Burn Out Without Realizing It

If you’re driven, ambitious, and successful but constantly anxious, exhausted, or on edge, this episode explains why. Chronic stress isn’t a mindset failure. It’s a nervous system issue, and ignoring it quietly leads to burnout, panic, and disconnection from your body.

🎧 Listen or watch now via the link in bio.
🔗 Explore Beth’s work and resources here:
🌐 https://www.linkedin.com/in/phoenixeffectbethbishop, https://www.instagram.com/theebethbishop/?hl=en. https://www.beth-bishop.com/, https://www.facebook.com/BethBishopCoaching/

In Part One of this ANEW Insight Podcast conversation, Dr. Supatra Tovar sits down with TEDx Temecula speaker, founder of The Phoenix Effect, and nervous system coach Beth Bishop to unpack why so many high achievers struggle with anxiety, panic, and burnout despite doing everything “right.”

Beth shares her personal journey from corporate anxiety to fitness entrepreneurship, and eventually to severe burnout as a business owner carrying intense financial pressure. She explains how traditional approaches like talk therapy and medication helped only partially, until she discovered the missing piece: nervous system regulation through somatic, body-based practices.

Together, Dr. Tovar and Beth explore why anxiety cannot be solved cognitively when the body is in survival mode, how animals naturally release stress through movement, and why humans have been conditioned to suppress these responses. Beth introduces her simple but powerful framework, Stop, Drop, and Regulate, designed to help people calm panic in the moment and restore clarity.

This episode also dives into the unique stress patterns of high achievers, including hustle addiction, people-pleasing, chronic overwork, and ignoring basic human needs like movement, hydration, and rest. You’ll hear why stress becomes addictive, how elevated cortisol becomes the nervous system’s baseline, and why slowing down can feel unsafe for driven individuals.

This is a grounded, compassionate conversation for entrepreneurs, leaders, and professionals who want sustainable success without sacrificing their mental health or ambition.

Main Points Covered

• Why anxiety and burnout are nervous system issues, not mindset failures
• Beth’s burnout story and why traditional approaches weren’t enough
• Why panic can’t be fixed cognitively when the body is dysregulated
• How animals naturally release stress and what humans forgot
• Stop, Drop, and Regulate: a simple framework for calming anxiety
• Movement as medicine for stress and panic
• Why high achievers ignore basic nervous system needs
• Stress addiction, elevated cortisol, and hustle culture
• The differenc

Transcript

0:00

​Beth Bishop is a TEDx Temecula speaker, founder of the Phoenix Effect, and a nervous system coach who helps high achievers overcome anxiety, panic, and burnout without losing their drive or ambition. After experiencing profound burnout as a business owner, Beth turned her personal healing journey into a professional mission studying neuroscience based stress regulation and mind body approaches to resilience. She now teaches practical methods for calming the nervous system, stopping panic in the moment, and creating sustainable success rooted in emotional wellbeing rather than constant hustle. Oh my gosh. We need to hear about this today, especially. Beth works with individuals, teams, and organizations seeking high performance with balance and mental clarity.

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-10-2025_110144: 0:02

So excited to talk to you today, especially because in learning more about you as we went through the speaker journey, um, your story is so relatable and it, you know, it's, it's especially relatable, uh, coming in and out of Covid, which was a horrible time for everyone, but especially, uh, gym owners in particular. It, gym owners were really struck hard. Uh, during Covid. If, if you could give us a picture of, you know, not even when you had the gym, but even before that, what has your journey been like, uh, you know, with stress and how did you turn the corner?

squadcaster-g6ij_1_12-10-2025_110144: 0:03

Yeah, well, I mean, I, I think everyone deals with a, a healthy amount of stress, well, an, an unhealthy amount of stress. I guess what, 83% of Americans have symptoms of chronic stress, so it's not healthy. So I'm like many of you all, um, I started feeling extremely anxious in my early twenties. When I was working my first corporate job and I was sitting in my cubicle and my chest was tightening and I was like, oh my gosh, is this gonna be the rest of my life and I'm, am I gonna be stuck behind a desk and a monitor, just like typing all day? I couldn't think clearly. I didn't know what I was gonna do with my life. I was just like, this is so awful. My life is so perfect on paper. I have all the things, but I just can't get out of bed in the morning. I feel so stressed and so just dead inside. So I went to therapy. I tried all the things, cognitive behavioral therapy, lots of talk methods, not a lot of the somatic work. Um, I tried medications, they helped ish, but it didn't actually help to really, it felt like it was masking it. Right. And then one night I had, I was standing up to just go from the dinner table to go sit down and watch some TV and relax, and I ended up collapsing, and getting a concussion. Because I was on the wrong medicine, because apparently you can't have a certain type of medicine if your blood pressure's low. In that moment, I felt so failed by the system. I had been doing all the things, but I was still on the floor, and so I got fed up with it and I was like, there has to be another way. This can't be the only way me venting in my therapy sessions every week and masking with medication.

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-10-2025_110144: 0:06

And I thought, oh, okay. I guess, you know, and I tried one dose, and I felt like a zombie and, and I was like, oh no, I can't, this is this. I can't have this. This makes me numb and I need my emotions. So it was through a process of just trying to figure it out. I was like, okay, I know that there's these points that you can like hold and like, well, maybe I'll get on. And this is the powerful stuff here. And I really firmly believe, and I work with my clients every time that nothing can be resolved without regulating the nervous system. And if we can learn how to tap into that, then everything is possible. So gimme a picture of how you figured all of that out for yourself. This is, this is it. This is it. She's having a like stress response and she's moving it out of her body so she can go on with her life. And I I love that it's through dogs. I have two dogs. I am such a dog lover, and you can learn so much especially about their stress response and relaxation response. I mean, my dog saw a coyote this morning and his response was so interesting to me. 'cause it was just focused attention, you know, and just really checking out and wasn't scared, but certainly did the shaking thing and then walked off and was like, you know, everything was fine even though there was a coyote.

squadcaster-g6ij_1_12-10-2025_110144: 0:10

If you don't have awareness of something, if you just go into the trigger. Without that awareness, then you have the same things happen over and over again, and you don't feel good. So that's step one. You stop. Next is you drop, you

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-10-2025_110144: 0:11

Rather than, you know, some of the kind of more tried and true like, you know. Um, mainstream ways to do it. Like, you know, you're deep breathing or trying to activate your vagus nerve by splashing cold water on your face.

squadcaster-g6ij_1_12-10-2025_110144: 0:12

Right? Just sitting for an hour will raise your cortisol, your stress hormone by 15%. Sometimes, when I get, when I get frustrated, when I just feel like I'm just done with everybody and everything, I will just inhale up big and I will just exhale and go, ah. I which is really similar to MARs to any, uh, animal, but it's, this is something that I've picked up just from watching the horses, but when they see something and after the stress passes there.

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-10-2025_110144: 0:15

Exactly. Exactly. And I would say too, that there are so many powerful things that you can do somatically, uh, you know, on a longer basis, like progressive muscle relaxation. Meditation is my go-to, and I, I'm not that person that you, you have to sit rigidly in like lotus position or whatever. I lie down to meditate.

squadcaster-g6ij_1_12-10-2025_110144: 0:16

will say, know, high achievers. A lot of them, it's very like shocking. They're so good at the things that they do, but when it comes to basic habits that support the nervous system, so many of them do not do that. I just finished up a project, I was working with over a hundred leaders at the SoCal Gas Company. Right. So we're talking like leadership, like awesome in it to win it. One of the first things that we did is we talked about the, the morning energy vampires that you have that basically suck your joy away and increase your cortisol. A lot of high achievers aren't drinking water in the morning. There's, it's, it's the basic things that they've, they've gotten really good at their niche and they've forgotten about the basic things that you do as a human to take care of the only home you live in, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The second you start to go below that stress baseline, that's super, super high, you're sitting at home on a Saturday and you're like, I should be working right now.

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-10-2025_110144: 0:19

You, you know. They may go, go, go, go, go. But they tend to also see it as a mission. And if it's their mission, then they incorporate a lot of self-care practices. They're doing things that help to offset that go, go, go. I would say you fall into that camp and so many people that we saw at TEDx Temecula fall into that camp where it's just a passion and you can see that that mission like lights them up. If I could be this best person that this person wants me to be. If I can do all of these things and achieve all of these things, then I have safety. And it, you never really fully have safety because you never fully please anybody and you certainly don't please yourself.

squadcaster-g6ij_1_12-10-2025_110144: 0:21

Hmm. That's so great. Yeah, it is a big difference between purpose-driven high achievers and, you know, people who are not fully in alignment with what their like deep inner knowing their soul wants.

dr--supatra-tovar_3_12-10-2025_110144: 0:22

That was the core of my talk and our talks were, they're similar in a way. My was really about how can we navigate back to listening to our intuitive and hormonal selves in the era of diet culture, especially with the advent of these weight loss medications. And our method is essentially the same in that if you can, you know, drop into your body by becoming aware of your breathing and by slowing yourself down and trying to get the mind offline and get back into the body and slow down and just listen. Tell you exactly what it wants. It's gonna say, I need to get up, I need to move, or I need to take a nap. Or, I am hungry, or I'm sad. And when you actually tune in and listen what happens in the body, can you, can you go into a little bit of the science of what happens in the body when you actually do slow down, listen and calm the nervous system. And she's like, it doesn't matter. Like you're still tired. Maybe you need to calm down for a few days. And I did. When we're in this nervous system state. So I'm so grateful there are people out there like you who have realized this, who've gone through that struggle and who've found ways to do this. And we're gonna talk more about that in the second half of just, you know, kind of going through, um, how people can, um, you know, reconnect with their bodies, how they, uh, may have misconceptions about stress and all of that.