Burnout & Women’s Wellness

🎙 Guest: Bianca Best  ·  📅 Aired July 3, 2026  ·  ⏱ 55 min episode

Episode summary

Bianca Best — two-time bestselling author, award-winning C-suite executive, and founder of the Energy-SCAPE™ method — joins Dr. Susan to explore the roots of burnout and a path through it that doesn’t require sacrifice. Drawing on her own experience of burnout despite outward success, Bianca shares how she moved beyond physical and mental approaches alone to address the emotional, spiritual, and energetic dimensions of health. She and Dr. Susan discuss why women in particular are culturally conditioned to over-give, what the WHO’s recognition of burnout as a global epidemic means for working women, and how Bianca’s system of “soft power” offers an alternative to the relentless push of modern achievement culture.

Bianca’s personal story

Despite a highly successful career, four children, a launched business, and every outward marker of abundance, Bianca hit burnout — with significant physical manifestations. Her path through it revealed that the strategies she first tried were not enough on their own:

• Focusing on sleep and cutting out caffeine helped, but didn’t resolve the deeper issue.
• Physical self-care alone was insufficient.
• Mental approaches like journaling were useful, but also not enough on their own.
• She turned her attention to emotional health — specifically, where she was compromising herself and her integrity.
• The more she looked honestly at what made her uncomfortable, the more she began to heal.

This led her to a holistic model of health that encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and energetic dimensions of self — and a core question: How do I show up with integrity, in an expansive state, truly able to serve?

She moved from “push energy” — the relentless drive to achieve goal after goal — to what she calls “soft power”: a way of succeeding that is graceful, grounded, and imbued with good energy. She now teaches others this approach.

Burnout today: the global picture

The World Health Organization has declared burnout a global epidemic, acknowledging that industrialized society is under serious strain. The economic cost is estimated at around $1 trillion per year in lost productivity globally.

Women and burnout

Dr. Susan and Bianca discuss the particular challenge women face, rooted in cultural conditioning from childhood: girls are raised to nurture, play nice, and say yes. Boys are raised to be independent and to win. This creates a dynamic where a “yes” from a woman may represent a significant personal sacrifice — one that a man in the same situation might not register as a sacrifice at all.

• Despite ¾ of UK workers believing annual leave reduces burnout, only three in five employees used all of their holiday entitlement last year — and one in five workers under 25 took no holiday at all.
• The UK’s 2023 Careers After Babies Report found that 85% of women leave the workforce within three years of having their first child.
• Many women today carry both traditional domestic responsibilities and full professional lives simultaneously — a compounding load that is rarely acknowledged as such.

Working with energy

Central to Bianca’s approach is learning to recognize what kind of energy is driving your actions — and shifting from fear-based “push energy” to a grounded, expansive flow.

Recognizing push vs. flow

• Notice when you are motivated by push energy — fear, the need to control, the urge to manipulate situations, or the drive to prove yourself or be “better than.” These are expressions of the lower self.
• Shift instead into your intent: the creative expression of what you genuinely want to contribute and share.
• Go within to connect to the essence of what you want to give.
• Our culture has normalized ignoring internal signals — learning to read them again is a foundational skill.

Cycles of expansion and contraction

• We all move through natural cycles of expansion (expressing our core essence) and contraction. There is a point of stillness between them — this is integral to wellness.
• Stillness makes us feel grounded, present, and safe.
• Ground into expansion: from that place, you can express your core essence — your soul — most fully.

Directing attention intentionally

• If you stay in constant inputs and distraction, your energy becomes dispersed — this is exhausting.
• When you direct your time toward what matters most, time itself begins to expand.
• You can slow down, connect with soft power, and still have genuine impact.
• Being wholly present softens the nervous system into a grounded state.

Self-regulation in moments of stress

• Identify what soothes you in moments of high stress or terror.
• Learn to self-regulate: recognize when you are in a spiral, and reconnect with your core.
• A simple grounding technique: take a deep breath into the belly, rub your thumb against your two forefingers, and become aware of your body and feet.

Bioenergetics & healing energetic blocks

Bianca introduces the concept of bio-energetics — the idea that we are energy fields connected to a universal energy, and that emotional distress or unresolved trauma can create energetic blocks in the body.

• These blocks can grow as we repeat patterns from childhood, shaping our character and directing our behavior.
• We tend to attract experiences that reinforce these blocks until we choose to heal them.
• We create unconscious belief systems that act as metabolic walls — often built to keep us safe in a defensive way, based on outdated or distorted beliefs.
• If we slow down and feel what is happening in our system, we can sense where these blocks are — and begin to release the stagnant energy so things can flow again.
• Love is the most healing vibration available to us. We can, in any moment, choose love.

Surrender as a skill

• Surrender is not giving up — it is a skill that encourages patience and presence.
• In a moment of crisis, ask: What am I here to learn from this?
• Trust that on the other side of difficulty, something better is waiting — but it requires faith, and trust in self.

Closing messages from Bianca

• All the magic you seek is already held within you.
• Dreams shrink through fear — there is no need for that.
• Ground yourself into your own power; there is rich potential there.
• Stay in love, integrity, and kindness — enjoy the journey.
• The hard times are there for your growth; there is solace and serenity on the other side.
• When stressed: take a deep breath into the belly, rub your thumb against your two forefingers, and become aware of your body and feet.