What Your Environment Says About Burnout

I grew up down the street from a hoarder — and for years I didn't understand it. Then I went three years without cleaning my own back patio, and it finally clicked.

In this episode, I talk about the connection between physical depletion, chronic illness, and the state of the spaces around you — and why "just clean up" advice misses the point entirely for burned-out high achievers. I also share an update on my own health journey (three surgeries in eighteen months, a medical system that kept telling me I was fine when I wasn't) and what it actually looks like to start feeling well again.

If you've ever felt like a failure for not keeping your space together while running on empty, this one's for you.

In this episode:

• Why your environment is a symptom, not the problem
• The hidden cost of pushing through chronic illness while appearing "fine"
• What getting well again actually looks like
• This week's practice: The One Small Thing

🔗 Book a call: [Free Chat with Renae]

Mentioned Resources:

FREE Week One of Burn the Blueprint: [Week One of Burn the Blueprint: Identity Reset]
📩 Subscribe to The Weekly Recharge newsletter: [Subscribe Here]

Transcript

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When you're living inside of the chaos, it just becomes the air that you breathe. You stop registering what it's doing to you. But the environment was always reflecting something. If you've ever looked at the mess around you and felt like a failure for not fixing it, this one is going to relate. See, Mrs. Brown was the hoarder who lived on the street for me. Two uninhabited homes, cars filled to the brim with junk, pellets of oranges rotting outside in the sun, and for years I never understood it. Until this weekend, when I finally cleaned my own back patio for the first time in three years. And while I wouldn't consider my back patio encroaching hoarding behavior, the principle underneath it is the same. When you're depleted, your environment starts reflecting that. Mrs. Brown's oranges in my overgrown patio are just different volumes of the same thing. Hey guys, I'm Renee, host of the Hustle Rebels podcast, and this is the weekly recharge newsletter, audio and video version, where I take whatever's actually living in my head that week and turn it into something useful for you, nervous system regulation techniques, whatever it might be. So let's roll in like a tuna roll I might eat for lunch today. Here's the weekly recharge. This weekend I cleaned my back patio. That probably sounds like the most underwhelming thing I could open up with this newsletter, but just stay with me. When Nick and I moved in, I had this whole vision for the back patio. String lights, a little seating area, somewhere cute where I could sit with my coffee in the morning and a little drinky drink at night. The kind of space you actually want to be in. And then two months later, life had other plans. I won't go deep into the whole story today. It's a whole newsletter in itself, trust me. But the short version is this. What followed was three major life-changing surgeries in 18 months, and then a few sporadic other things in the three years of my life have been marked by a kind of physical suffering that most of the people around me had no idea was even happening. Unrelated rogue staples that were found inside my ovaries, a supposedly minor procedure that ended with me bleeding for two hours straight, being rushed to the ER, and then being discharged and passing out in the vestibule, concussion and everything, ferritin levels at a seven while being told everything was normal, stage four adrenal fatigue dismissed as above their pay grade, and through it all, I just kept showing up. Nobody knew. And when you feel like absolute dog shit every single day, you just stop caring about string lights. I'd look out at that patio and see failure, the overgrown stuff, the things piling up, the version of the space I had wanted it to be versus what it actually was. And instead of doing something about it, I would just feel worse. And then guilty for letting it go. Too depleted and in pain to fix it. And then aggravated all over again that it still looked the way that it did. Round and round. I've been watching this show called Filthy Fortunes lately, and if you haven't seen it, the premise is that they go into these hoarders' homes, sell off a massive amount of their belongings, clear out the junk, and then do a full deep clean of the house. And what gets me every single time is the moment the person walks back in. The relief on their faces. Like someone physically lifted something off of their shoulders. Like they can breathe for the first time in years. Because here's the thing: they couldn't see that from the inside. When you're living inside of the chaos, it just becomes the air that you breathe. You stop registering what it's doing to you. But the environment was always reflecting something. It always is. And this weekend for the first time in a long time, I woke up and felt good. Genuinely physically good. And something in me just said, today's the day. It was hot, I did not care. I got out there, I cleaned that fucking patio. Not perfectly, not the string lights I had envisioned three years ago, but clean. It was refreshed. Something I could look at and actually feel proud of. And standing there afterward, I thought, this is the thing nobody talks about. We want people to change their lives, clean up their habits, take better care of themselves and their spaces. But if someone is physically depleted, running mentally on fumes, and has been just white knuckling through their lives every single day just to appear functional, they don't have the bandwidth to care about the fucking patio. They don't want to fix what's around you when they can't fix how they feel inside. The environment isn't the problem. It's never been the problem. It's the symptom. And when you finally start to feel better, really better, the desire to take pride in your life, it just comes back on its own. You don't have to force it. You just want it. That's what getting well actually looks like. And here's what I do know. I know what it feels like to trudge through mud every single day. To be your own advocate in a medical care system that keeps telling you that you're fine. To feel invisible in your own suffering because you're too proud or too conditioned to let anyone see that you're struggling. And I know what it feels like to get to the other side. If you're in the mud right now, I want you to know the patio isn't the problem. You are not the problem. And when you're ready to start feeling like yourself again, I would love to talk. I have a link down there to book a call with you, and I would love to figure it out together. So this week's practice is gonna be the one small thing. You don't need to overhaul your space, you just need one little corner. Look around your home or outside your home and find the one spot that bothers you the most. The one thing you avoid looking at or feel a little sink in your chest when you see it. Set a timer for 20 minutes, that's it. Not a whole project, not a whole day, just 20 minutes. Notice how you feel when the timer goes off. Not just about the space, but about yourself, how accomplished you might feel. The point isn't about a clean house. The point is the moment you realize you're someone who just does the thing anyway. And then this week on Hustle Rebels Podcast, if you missed last week's episode, I sat down with Dr. Shruti Punjabi, an urban planner and applied social scientist, to talk about something that doesn't get named nearly enough. The invisible labor that high-achieving women carry every single day. If you've ever felt exhausted by work that nobody acknowledges, guilty for taking a vacation while everything around you is on fire, or like you're buried under expectations that were never even yours to begin with, then this episode with Dr. Shruti Punjabi is going to be for you. We get into why your brain gets valued at work, but your full identity doesn't, how cognitive overload and invisible labor are colliding in real time, and what it actually looks like to redefine success on your own terms instead of the ones that were handed to you. Sruti's lens on burnout isn't theoretical, it's lived. And this is a conversation that truly reflects that. So you can watch it on YouTube or listen on any of your favorite platforms. And if you're new here or feeling nostalgic and want to read some previous newsletters or subscribe, that link is also going to be available. So that's this week's weekly recharge. If something here landed for you, if you're in the mud right now and you're ready to feel like yourself again, grab the first week of my Burn the Blueprint identity reset program for free. Or better yet, book a free call with me and let's have a chat. The link for both of those is in the show notes. And if you want these delivered straight to your inbox every single week before they hit your ears, go subscribe to the weekly recharge newsletter. You guessed it. The link is also in the show notes. Until next week, keep turning inward because the answers that you've been chasing might already be there. See you guys next week.