So, where would you recommend somebody start? Whether they're dealing with mold issues, are just exhausted and at rock bottom like you were, still recovering from childbirth, or experiencing complete burnout, there are a million and one pieces of advice out there. If you're thinking about someone who's overwhelmed, where would you suggest they start?
Balance & Beyond Podcast
Episode Summary
#97: Biohacking for Burnt Out Women: What No One Tells You
When Camilla Thompson woke up in hospital after collapsing with sepsis, the doctor told her something chilling: "If you'd gone to bed last night instead of coming here, you likely would have slipped into a coma."
Two days earlier, she'd been at work, pushing through fatigue and dismissing symptoms while juggling single motherhood and a demanding corporate career.
This wake-up call was just one chapter in Camilla's journey to becoming a biohacking expert. From postpartum depression that conventional medicine couldn't address to discovering her family home was riddled with toxic mold that was making them ill, Camilla's path reveals why so many women struggle to find answers to their health challenges within traditional healthcare systems.
In this eye-opening conversation, Camilla shares accessible, practical biohacking strategies specifically designed for busy women. Forget the expensive gadgets and complicated protocols pushed by "tech bros" – these are real-world solutions for women juggling multiple responsibilities while trying to reclaim their energy and vitality.
Learn why women need different approaches to sleep optimization, nutrition, and stress management, and discover simple five-minute hacks that can transform how you feel (including why a spoonful of honey before bed might be the sleep solution you've been searching for).
Perhaps most importantly, Camilla addresses the martyrdom mindset that keeps so many women from prioritizing their health. "We get stuck in survival mode," she explains, "running on cortisol and adrenaline, putting everyone else first." But what if the most revolutionary act is simply putting yourself at the top of your to-do list? Your health – and everything else in your life – might just transform as a result.
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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…
Jo (Host)
Welcome to Balance and Beyond. Today, I'm joined by Camilla Thompson, who is a trailblazer in biohacking, an executive coach, and the author of Biohack Me—and also one of us: a mum of two with a burnout story and a health story. Today, she's here to help us understand what is actually going on with our bodies and how we can, as women, really step into our best lives—which, of course, includes our best health and energy. Welcome, Camilla.
Camilla (Guest)
Thank you, it's wonderful to be here.Â
Jo (Host)
Why don't we start off? You've had an interesting journey that mirrors that of many women who are listening to this podcast and have come into our world. Why don't you tell us a little bit about where your journey toward biohacking began?
Camilla (Guest)
Yes, so look, there are sort of three key pivotal points in my life that put me on this path. But I guess it started at a very young age. I grew up with a mum who was a bit of a hippie—a very progressive thinker. Our house was low-tox, no chemicals, and our food came from local farms. We weren’t allowed sugar. So I really set my blueprint for health from an early age.
Obviously, I rebelled a lot when I was a teenager—I ate Maccas, had lots of sugar and alcohol, all those things. But I came back to it. That foundation has always been instilled in me, and my mum taught me so much. It’s funny—there are so many things coming out in the last couple of years that she was talking about 20, 30, even 40 years ago. So yeah, that’s where it all sort of started for me.
I call her the OG biohacker, because she was—she’s one of the originals.
But look, there are three things that really shaped this journey. The first was when I had my first son, Ollie, in London. He’s 22 now.
I had an awful labour—two days, very traumatic. They couldn’t get him out—suction caps, forceps. His poor little head was so misshapen. I had two epidurals and pethidine. He was stuck. So we ended up going with a spinal tap, which shouldn’t have worked, then a general anaesthetic—and I went under general and had an emergency caesarean section. So it was two days of hell.
Apparently, I sounded like something from The Exorcist, according to some of my friends. But eventually, we got him out, and he was healthy, thank God, because his heart rate had dropped as well. So there was a bit of a panic to get him out.
But I felt like I’d had a car accident. I had no idea I’d had a baby. They sort of said, “Oh, you’ve had a beautiful baby boy,” and I hadn’t held him for hours. So our bonding was really strained.
It was London, it was miserable, it was winter. I didn’t recover very well, and I just got more and more depressed. I was crying a lot, and Ollie had colic and he was crying—he was really unsettled. His poor little head was so misshapen, and I ended up getting craniosacral therapy for him when he was a little bit older because I was so worried about the damage to his head. But we were both struggling.
Anyway, we moved to Australia when he was a year old, and I didn’t really know anyone here. So then I was suddenly in another country with a baby, and my partner was working all the time. I got diagnosed with postnatal depression quite late, and 22 years ago, there wasn’t the support that there is now. There weren’t the conversations that we have now, or that sense of community to support you. I really did feel very alone.
I got put on some SSRIs to help with the depression, but they didn’t really work for me. I think I was on the wrong ones, and again, they’ve developed them so much now, whereas back in the day, they weren’t—you know, I was on the wrong one. So I came off it because I, I put on lots of weight, I couldn’t get out of bed—like, it just wasn’t a good time. I was already feeling so crap, and then it was sort of compounding. I just sort of lost all joy and hope and, um, it was really tough. So I came off the SSRIs and had a complete breakdown—like, my emotions, I couldn’t stop crying.
I ended up finding myself walking into a Chinese Buddhist place in Rose Bay—an acupuncture guy—and he sort of sat there and held my hands while I sobbed. I was like, “I don’t know what to do.” And he just laid me on this bed, jabbed loads of needles in me, gave me these black and funky sort of herbs, and I kept coming back.
Week after week, I got better. I started healing, I started getting in nature, I started eating better, I could get out of bed in the morning, and I just—I found joy. And, you know, we managed to heal. I realized that my little boy needed his mum, and I’d been so, you know, distant—just trying to... You know, I felt like a complete failure as a mum. I was like, “Why is this not working?” I was 26, 27 years old, felt young—I was just like, “This... I’m not good at this.” So it was a really tough time.
Anyway, that was my first experience with some traditional Chinese medicine and learning other ways to heal the body. I guess another one is—I worked in corporate media for many years. Real perfectionist, pushed myself really hard, juggling two young boys.
I’d left my partner at the time, so I was massively in survival mode—having to financially support two boys on my own for a good couple of years—and I just pushed really hard. I was the only one—well, one other person had children in the agency—but I was the only other person with young kids, so I was overcompensating.
It was like, “Just because I’m a mum doesn’t mean I can’t do what you guys do. I’ll just be superwoman.” So: push, push, push. Had to be the best. Terrible perfectionism—you know, I’ve worked on that so much over the years—those feelings of not feeling good enough and the overcompensation to achieve all the time to give you those feelings of worth.
And I was suffering from high-functioning anxiety. So on the outside, I was like superwoman: power, I’ve got this, I’m all over this, I’m high-performing. And on the inside, I was just crippled with self-doubt and anxiety and, you know, a really negative inner critic. So this resulted in me just working too much.
I knew I wasn't feeling very well, but I just kept going to work—push, push, push. I went into a fever at work, went to the doctors, and they were like, “You've got a kidney infection. Here's some antibiotics. Within 24 hours, if you don't feel any better, come back.”
Well, within 24 hours, I was in A&E, and I woke up in A&E the next day in the ward. They said, “You had sepsis,” and the doctor said, “If you'd gone to bed last night, you potentially could have gone into a coma because you were that sick.” Two days before that, I'd been at work.
Jo (Host)
Really bad wake-up call.Â
Camilla (Guest)
It was! When I read Dr. Libby’s book The Rushing Woman in hospital that I was like, Ah, she’s written this book for me. Every page, I was like, This is me. What have I done to myself? Why have I been doing this?
And I was so disconnected from my body, how I was feeling, and my intuition—that something was wrong. I was blaming it on full moons and Mercury being in retrograde. I’d say, I feel really heavy. No, you're actually ill, you’ve got an infection.
But anyway, that was a big wake-up call, and it set me on a new path. I started working in mental health and well-being, co-founded a business with my ex-business partner, and, yeah, I guess the final thing that got me into biohacking—something we both share in common—is mold.
So, I spent eight years living in mold in Rose Bay. Funnily enough, they think I started getting really sick after I had sepsis, and that the mold took hold because my immune system was so weakened. I spent years going back and forth to doctors for immune system issues. My eyes would swell up and weep, I was constantly dehydrated, my bones creaked like an old woman’s, anxiety was through the roof, and I just felt terrible all the time, like I was on a permanent hangover, and I wasn’t drinking.
Eventually, I was bedridden, not well. One of my friends, who had been working in mold remediation in Sydney for a while, came over to my house and said, Camilla, you've got mold everywhere. It was in my bed, in my bedside cabinets. We had water damage in a cupboard, and it had spread.
We had an old house, and it was everywhere—in every room, including my home office, where there was hidden black mold. Not everyone in the house was sick—my younger son had health issues, but my older son was fine, and my husband was too. So, it was really hard to figure out what was going on and realize that our home was making us sick.
So, conventional medicine doesn't really know about mold. Unfortunately, it's not their fault—they've had no training. They don't know how to diagnose it, and they don't know how to treat it.
So, you have to take control of your health and start doing things you know to heal your body because no one else is going to do it for you, and there's no magic drug that will fix it. That’s what led me to do loads of different crazy biohacking things to try and get well from mold. So yeah, that's kind of my story as to why I’m here.
Jo (Host)
Kimberley and I were talking before this podcast, and I realized, "I think I’m also a biohacker!" I’ve got this gadget, I do this, and wow—it’s an identity I’d never really given to myself. I know you had a similar journey. These things tend to start incrementally. You don’t wake up one day and say, "I’m a biohacker." As a woman, you start with, "I’ve got this problem, I need to solve it, I need to be well."
Camilla (Guest)
And then we start taking steps, right? Yeah, and it’s so hard being a woman because there are so many other factors. It’s very difficult—like hormones, stress levels, the mental load, all those invisible loads we’re carrying. It’s very hard to pinpoint what’s making you sick or if you’re just tired.
I’ve been completely gaslit by doctors who said, "It’s all in your head." Even a kinesiologist once said, "I think you’re just choosing to be sick." And I was like, "Why would I choose to be sick? I don’t want to be sick!"
So it’s really hard. And my husband didn’t believe me for ages. Even when we found mold in the house, he still wasn’t convinced that it was what was wrong with me, until we got the blood tests, and I was like, "Here it is, in black and white."
He couldn’t believe it. It was a very lonely time as well when you don’t have a community. I think now there are some great groups and communities you can join, so you feel part of something, which has its positives and negatives sometimes.
Jo (Host)
I think you’ve put your finger on something there. As women, we’re so used to pushing through and putting ourselves last that it’s difficult to know—am I just not tough enough? Do I just need to suck it up and, you know, try a little bit harder? And if, when I get through the list, then I’ll book that doctor’s appointment. That’s a prevailing thought, unfortunately, among many women listening to this podcast.
Camilla (Guest)
We always deprioritize ourselves, and I think the one thing that, when I had that significant burnout with sepsis, I was just determined to put myself at the top of my to-do list every day. I was like, there’s no way I’m putting work in front of my health or my children. I missed out on time with my kids because I was working all the time, and we get stuck in survival mode as women.
We’re just so used to running on cortisol and adrenaline, and our bodies just can't handle it. Our immune system is impacted every month with our hormones, and more women suffer from mold issues because of the impact on our immune system.
Jo (Host)
I mean, it does happen to men, but not as frequently. It’s just interesting for context that we also sold our house because of a mold issue.
And my husband also didn't think it was that big of a deal. Okay, I hear that all the time. Yeah, I was the one who was like, "You're just being a bit dramatic." We had black mold growing in our wardrobe, which was right near our bedroom, and my daughter was constantly sick. The whole family had health issues, and no one could put a finger on it.
It was only when I finally decided, "This is going to cost a fortune," but I got a mold assessment done. It was after one of those rainy periods in Sydney, and I thought, "Okay, we have to do something about this." I just went ahead and got someone in to check if there was a problem. It turned out my daughter's bedroom was branded uninhabitable.
Camilla (Guest)
Yes, same as my son. It was so bad, the readings were so high. Within 24 hours, we were told we couldn’t live in our house. We had to get out, and everything we owned was contaminated. It’s like going through a natural disaster—you lose your home, all your belongings, but you're also sick. It's really traumatic. I came up with PTMD, which stands for Post-Traumatic Mold Disorder, and I'm like, it's a thing. We've been through it, but yeah.
Jo (Host)
Well, we then and there decided to sell our house. It was like we were going to renovate, and as part of the renovations, I thought, well, if we've got mold, let me find out how to rectify it when we do the renovation so I can fix it.
But it was going to be upwards of two hundred thousand dollars to put in the fans and refit—it was in the air conditioning vents. And I thought, I'm not paying that. I could buy a new house with that money. So, literally within the space of two hours, we decided: we have to leave this house.
Camilla (Guest)
Oh, and your daughter... It's just that I felt such incredible guilt as well with my son because the school was saying, "Oh, he's not concentrating in class," and his football team was saying, "He's just not running like he used to, he's not focused, he's not as active and energized as he used to be," and he kept getting sores on his lips.
And I just thought, I don't know what’s going on. I thought... I just... because not all of us were sick. And this is the thing: only 25% of the population has the gene, the mold gene, which is the HLA-DR or DQ part of the celiac gene sequence. That means we can't get rid of mold.
So, when we inhale it, we just can't bind it and eliminate it from our bodies. My son and I both have that gene, but my... you know, you just don't know that your home is making you ill, and what do you do? It's such a scary, fearful thing. I spent years living in fear, going to people's houses and thinking I was going to get sick again.
Jo (Host)
I don't know if you had a similar experience, but yeah, we sold our house, and we’re actually headed to a clinic in Norway. I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I was just sick of all our issues here.
My husband had a Rolodex of specialists, and no one was actually getting to the core of it. It was like, “stuff this, I’m not taking this anymore.” One of my daughters couldn’t get a diagnosis or anything. So, I knew that this clinic in Norway was the right choice—it was very much an intuitive hit. We’re going to Norway. This is it. We literally just decided.
I actually sent my husband and daughter the first week after lockdown, after the borders opened. I sent them to Norway without knowing anything about the clinic, just knowing where they had to go.
Then, this was another intuitive hunch I had at the end of 2022. We had actually booked a trip to Thailand, and I said, “We need to go to Norway.” My husband was like, “We’ve just paid for Thailand, we’re not going to Norway.” But I insisted, “We need to go to Norway.”
That trip saved all of our lives, and there's a pretty good chance my husband wouldn’t be here right now if we hadn’t gone and figured out how sick he was while we were there. He was dealing with mold exposure, but it was a whole range of other things as well.
He had heart issues, digestive issues, insulin issues, inflammation issues—you name it. The mold was just exacerbating everything and preventing his immune system from healing his other challenges.
So, we actually never let the kids go back into the house after we left for Norway. We had red light therapy and a whole range of healing treatments for various things. I went back into the house with a mask to clean it for sale, but the kids never returned.
Camilla (Guest)
I had to do everything. I had to go through all of our stuff and try to save what I could. There are pictures of me in full hazmat gear and a mask, going back in to try and salvage anything. We had to leave our cat at the house for a while because we had nowhere else to go, and she couldn’t be rehomed immediately. She lived there alone for a bit, but I went back every day to feed her.
Going back into that house was surreal. Realizing that I had been living in that environment all that time—it hit hard. I had been working from home in it all day, then sleeping in that same bed, breathing in the same air. But there’s a sense of relief when you finally know what’s been wrong with you.
But you know, it's the cost. I mean, I spent tens of thousands trying to get well—money we didn’t actually have. A lot of it went on credit cards, then paying it off, all the supplements, the treatments. I’m privileged that I could do that, but there are so many people living in social housing, disability housing, retirement homes—people who can’t afford to heal themselves. It's a crisis.
Jo (Host)
Camilla (Guest)
Jo (Host)
Camilla (Guest)
Camilla (Guest)
Camilla (Guest)
I love it. Jo, that is awesome. I am actually going to steal that now. I'm going to nick that. That is brilliant.Â
Camilla (Guest)
Jo (Host)
When you come into my program, you do a time audit, and we have a module on the mental load. We have an entire module on the mental load, so this should all sound very familiar. Absolutely well. Camilla, thank you for joining us today. You've shared some beautiful hints and tips for women, and really important messages about not being the martyr, and offering some really basic, cost-effective, time-effective hacks they can do.
Camilla (Guest)
So, plants need sunshine, vitamin D, water for hydration, and air in order to thrive and grow, and so do we as humans. Just five minutes of sitting in the sun, doing a bit of breath work, drinking some water, and hydrating properly will help charge your battery back up. So, take five minutes—no phones, no screens—and just be in your body, connecting with your senses. It’s literally like a recharge.
That, I think, is really important—just taking five minutes of stillness. You’ll also benefit if you can get a bit of vitamin D and hydration.
Camilla (Guest)
Jo (Host)
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.