Balance & Beyond Podcast

Remember when you used to laugh more, dance more, feel more?

Somewhere between endless meetings, mental load, and pressure to perform, your joy got buried – not gone, just buried beneath layers of "should" and "must." Today we're diving deep into what makes ambitious women lose their capacity for joy and the surprisingly simple path back to reclaiming it.

Joy has been systematically replaced by control. When we're stuck in fight-or-flight mode, joy feels frivolous or wasteful. Living in our heads and disconnected from our bodies, we forget that joy is fundamentally a feeling, not a thought. And in our overscheduled lives, we leave no room for the spontaneous moments where genuine joy flourishes.

This isn't just about feeling happier – it's about reclaiming your power. When you're operating without joy, you're functioning at half capacity. Contrary to burnout culture's messaging, joy doesn't make you flaky; it makes you magnetic and followable. It unlocks creativity that bullet points and spreadsheets never could. In an age of AI and automation, your uniquely human capacity for play and spontaneous connection becomes your greatest professional asset.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

You used to laugh more, dance more, feel more. But somewhere between the meetings, the mental load, and the pressure to be "on" all the time, your joy got buried—not gone, just buried.

These days, joy might feel like a luxury or something that you have to engineer: a weekend away, a spa voucher, a well-planned holiday that you hardly enjoy because you're still mentally ticking things off your list or exhausted from trying to get there.

You tell yourself there's no time, that it's not urgent, that maybe when things settle down, then you'll come back to yourself and have some more fun.

But here's what I've seen in every high-achieving woman I work with: joy has been replaced by control—by performing, proving, earning. And so many women don't even know what brings them joy anymore, because they've outsourced it to approval, achievement, or aesthetics.

So, if you've been feeling flat, numb, or like the real you is buried somewhere under there—if you don't know the last time that you smiled—today's episode is going to help you find her again.

Let's talk about what makes us lose our joy, because in some recent data I've crunched from clients and women coming into my ecosystem, this is the thing that they miss the most—and the thing they're most looking for.

When we have a dysregulated nervous system, joy feels unsafe.

What do I mean by that? If you are in constant fight or flight mode—if your cortisol is spiked, if you're stressed, if you're overwhelmed—then joy is a threat. Or, more often, joy is a waste.

Don't have time for joy. Joy is frivolous. I will do joy when I've got through my list. Joy is something to be planned.

And particularly if you're a perfectionist, or you're a people pleaser, or you're procrastinating, then your body is likely in a state of fear constantly. And fear says, no time for joy. Have to be hypervigilant. Have to be on the alert. You never know who's going to come and throw you under the bus, or say this about you, or this ball is going to fall.

And so we start to suffocate it, and we don't allow it to come into our lives.

Another reason that we have lost access to joy is because so many women are stuck in their heads and have numbed their bodies.

By this, I mean: when your dominant emotional home becomes guilt, resentment, shame—all we end up doing is numbing out. We don't actually want to feel, because what there is to feel is heavy and dense, and we don't want to do that, even though these emotions are actually hijacking us.

So we spend time in our heads because it becomes safe. We dance with logic. We want everything to make sense. We forego our intuition or what we feel we might even need, and it's more about what we should need, what's okay for us to need, what's acceptable for us to need. These are all areas and indications that you're living in your head.

When we've numbed our body, there's no space for lightness—because, believe it or not, joy is a feeling. It's not something that you think. And so if you're completely disconnected, then there's not going to be any space for that lightness.

And then, one of the biggest reasons that I see us losing access to our joy is that joy comes when you least expect it. And joy also typically comes in small doses.

I don't know about you, but I used to spend a lot of time trying to engineer joy—let's go, have a big family outing!—and then wondered why it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be.

And yet, I used to squish a lot of the silliness. Or, you know, we don't have time for that. Come on, let's go. These overpacked calendars and the life that we lead of relentless juggling means that there's no time for spontaneity, there's no time to watch a kid do a silly thing.

And so many women I know feel terrible and harbor guilt and resentment because they can recognize that they're actually squashing joy in their kids.

We are usually born with quite a large capacity for joy. You see kids, and you see their unbridled laughter at something so insignificant. You watch them smile constantly, and they bring joy to so many other people in their lives. But yet, when there's no room for any of this—silliness, fun, a dance party before school, or watching a silly video from someone—because no, no, no, no, no, come on, come on, come on, got to get to bed or get in the shower, or no, no, no, no, I've got to go to a meeting—well, you're not making room for those little, tiny, micro doses of joy, which is what our nervous system and, to be honest, our souls actually need to make life worth living. Otherwise, what on earth is the point?

I know when I was at the peak of my burnout, I had almost lost connection to what joy meant for me. I was doing all of the things that I thought should make me happy. I was, you know, going to the park with my kids, and then I was like, Why does pushing a child on a swing 500,000 times, five days in a row, not make me happy? Why don't I feel happy doing these things that everyone tells me I'm meant to feel happy in? But it was because they weren't things that actually brought me joy. I was so numb to it that even if it was something that brought me joy, I was never able to access it.

So all that ended up happening was I stacked my life with more and more shoulds, with more and more things like Google: what makes me happy?—but they weren't mine. And it was when I had this moment—when I caught up with a girlfriend and we were out to dinner (I probably had a couple of wines by this point)—that things started to shift.

And can you remember a moment—whether it was something you experienced recently or at any point in your life—when you were laughing so hard that you almost wet your pants? When you were literally giggling for hours and got what we call the giggles? When you just couldn’t stop laughing—you’d look at your friend and burst into laughter again—and the laughter became contagious?

I had an evening like that, and it lasted for hours. I came home and my cheeks hurt—they literally hurt—from smiling and laughing. And it was like my soul was so delighted and happy, because when that first happened to me, I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed like that.

That laughter wasn’t just joy—it was relief. It was like, Oh my gosh, you can be human again. You can soften.

We have seen clients do this all the time—have complete, mind-blown moments of realizing that they don't actually know what makes them happy. Because when they strip back, yes, you know, hanging out with their kids makes them happy—but does it really make their soul happy?

And it can be confronting when you're there going, “Oh… where do I begin?” But through the work we've done with clients—learning to be present (step one), putting down the shoulds, and letting go of “this is what’s meant to”—they begin to uncover what actually makes them happy and brings them joy.

Then, when they unlock this box, it’s like, oh my gosh! It almost becomes this complete reclamation of: oh, this thing brought me joy!

We've had clients take up tap dancing. I've had people go back to horse riding, pick up painting, start crafting—maybe even relearn how to do a cartwheel. Just doing small little things they used to love. And then you get to go on this beautiful journey of: I used to love that when I was a kid… do I still love it?

And very often, the answer is yes. And you never regret—or look back—once you've unlocked this side of you that has been buried for so long.

So… what happens when you begin to unlock joy?

An important caveat is that, initially, your nervous system is like, oh my gosh, I've been starving for this—this is amazing.
And then all the old thoughts come back: You don't have time for this. You're going to be late. What are they going to think of you?
You sat there and had a dance party with your kids, and now look—you’re late for work. You just got a look when you walked into the office, and now you're behind.

And then you spend all day behind, and you beat it out of yourself: I shouldn't have done that. There was no time for that.
That one little moment ends up having a huge knock-on effect on the rest of your day, and then you're grumpy.
And the next morning, when your kid says, "Let's have a dance party!"—you're like, "No. Not doing that. Get in the car—we're moving."

You are not a human doing. You’re a human being. And it’s only when we’re really able to step in and unlock this part of ourselves that we start feeling free again, we start feeling whole. This joy we have becomes infectious. This joy makes you magnetic. It makes people want to be around you.

It’s really important that you understand your joy isn’t an indulgence. It’s an intelligence, leaning you toward what makes you feel good. And, believe it or not, despite the guilt, the shame, the resentment you might be sitting in—you’re meant to feel good.

That’s right. You’re not meant to feel heavy. You’re meant to feel light. You’re not meant to feel resentment. You’re meant to have fun. You’re meant to laugh. You’re meant to be playful.

There’s a reason children learn through play. The brain works in different ways. And you, as an adult—spoiler alert—still have a very big inner child in you. So you also can learn through play. You can learn through creativity.

With the advent of AI, the opportunity—and the importance—of accessing these incredible parts of our brain that are locked under bullet points, to-do lists, and action items cannot be underestimated. If you are trying to lead at work, at home, and in your life without joy, with it being buried, you’re only operating at half your power.

Can you imagine what’s possible if you unlock another 50% of what you’re capable of? Not to mention how great you’re going to feel.

Joy does not make you flaky. It is not frivolous. It makes you followable. It makes you magnetic. And when women start to reclaim their joy, we change the world.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond Podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need to hear this today. And if you're feeling extra generous, leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice would mean the world. If you’re keen to dive deeper into our world, visit us at www.balanceinstitute.com to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life of balance, and beyond. Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast.