Why High-Achieving Women Can't Slow Down: A Story of Burnout, ADHD, and Nervous System Healing
If you've ever felt like slowing down is dangerous — like the second you stop hustling, everything you've built might slip away — this story is for you.
I' was recently invited to speak at Born to Rise, a women’s empowerment group, as a therapist and coach who works with neurodivergent women in leadership navigating burnout, adult ADHD, financial overwhelm, and the quiet traumas of growing up neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In this story,
During my talk, I traced own path — from a childhood shaped by instability and financial trauma, through years of perfectionism, overachievement, and a body that stayed in fight-or-flight long after the actual danger had passed — to the moment I finally let myself believe I was safe.
If any of this sounds familiar — the perfectionism, the imposter syndrome, the nervous system that won't let you rest even when everything looks "fine" on paper — I think you'll see myself in this story. And I hope it's a reminder that safety isn't something you have to keep earning through performance. It's something you're allowed to feel now.
You can listen to the full audio below, or read the transcript if you'd rather take it in at your own pace.
Please note: due to a tech issue at the time of recording, there is some blank space at the beginning of the audio recording below. The talk begins at 2:11.
Transcript
Kim Fuller, Introduction:
Our third storyteller is Nikolai Blinow. She's a licensed mental health counselor and coach who helps neurodivergent women in leadership navigate burnout, adult ADHD, financial overwhelm, and the sneaky traumas of growing up neurodivergent in a neurotypical world.
Her years as a yoga teacher, combined with her clinical expertise in dialectical behavioral therapy and EMDR, make her uniquely positioned to help chronically stressed-out women recalibrate their nervous systems — so they can slow down without feeling afraid of sacrificing what they've already built.
Her TEDx talk, "Yoga and Its Connection to Mental Health," has over 300,000 views and reflects Nikolai's belief in integrating holistic and scientific principles. Please welcome Nikolai.
Nikolai Blinow, LMHC:
Hi, I'm just going to jump right into my story.
I'm about six years old at the beginning of this story, and the memories from this time of my life are fuzzy — let's keep it real, I'm not even in grade school yet. What I do remember is a nasty divorce, growing up middle class in a small town, and being the little girl with the big house and the cool toys. Everyone wanted to come over to my house because I had a computer in the '80s. It's crazy.
But now I'm six years old, and all of that has changed. My mother is taking me out of my childhood home — the one place I ever remember feeling safe. In reality, the adult part of me knows she probably wasn't dragging me, but that's what it feels like when I think back to it. I remember crying as I watch my safe place, the home I grew up in, disappear into the background. It's gone forever, and I never go back.
(Has anyone here watched The Real Housewives of Rhode Island*? Try telling me that's not trauma, my girl Alicia.)*
Flash forward — I'm around eight years old now. In the two years since I left my childhood home, my family and I had to move out of our small town so we could be closer to my grandparents. My father, who has strong narcissistic traits, was inconsistent with his financial support, which meant we were now poor. So we lived in a small, sad apartment near my grandparents, so they could help my mother with childcare.
Somehow, in those two years, my mother managed to scrounge up enough stability to move us back to our hometown. Except everything for me was now different. I no longer had the comfort of my childhood home, the toys friends used to come play with, or even the same friends. Instead, we lived in another small apartment, and my mom worked pretty much all the time — three jobs. She was literally never home.
Around this same time, I was celebrating my first birthday since moving back, and we didn't have enough chairs for everyone because we were poor now. My mom had to sit me in one of those woven lawn chairs that were popular in the '80s. As people were singing "Happy Birthday," my chair literally collapsed, and I fell through it and got stuck inside it, in front of everyone. I'm mortified, as you can imagine — I'm eight. All I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and hide.
That was one of the first moments where I learned something potentially dangerous for me: that safety can be earned through performance, productivity, and staying invisible. Because in that moment, the last thing I wanted was to be seen. I'm not safe. There's something wrong with me. Being seen means being vulnerable. Those were the messages those early childhood experiences created in me. As a result, I learned to hustle hard, to be productive, to overachieve. My goal was to stay inside my comfort zone.
Now I'm 17. I graduate third in my class and receive so many scholarships at senior awards night — I couldn't believe it. They kept calling my name, and my best friend Ryan's, over and over again. My hustle had paid off, at least on the outside. I'm well liked, I'm high performing, and I'm about to be the first person on both sides of my family — my dad is also an immigrant from Eastern Europe — to ever go to college.
Stability and safety feel within reach, and yet inside I still feel restless. At 17, I'm exercise-obsessed, I probably have disordered eating, and I'm definitely a perfectionist. I love feeling in control. While the path forward looks stable, I still don't feel safe enough to relax. Staying productive is how I keep myself safe from the early financial traumas of losing my home, my town, my father, and my friends. Flying under the radar and being the best at everything is how I "face my fears" of being seen for who I really am. It works, to a point — but I'm not fully fulfilled.
Flash forward again — I'm in my 20s now. I've completed a year of AmeriCorps service and landed the "perfect" job (in air quotes, because it wasn't perfect for me). I perform well and even get promoted quickly, but I often feel burnt out. I suffer from chronic tension headaches, and I come to the conclusion: this just must not be the right job for me. So I decide to switch careers — that'll be the answer.
I leave the corporate world behind, do about a bajillion hours of school and clinical training to become a therapist, and eventually start my own private practice. Here, I tell myself, I'll finally feel stable, safe, and give myself permission to relax — because I work for myself now. I live the dream. When I'm the one running the show, I can finally let go of hustle mode.
Spoiler alert: that doesn't happen.
My business thrives, but it also plateaus, as businesses do — it's literally impossible for anything or anyone to achieve constantly. I'm constantly chasing the secret to slowing down and finally enjoying the benefits of my hard work, but it always feels just a centimeter away. Balance and sustainable success are so close I can taste them, but they chronically elude me. So what do I do? I work harder. I cultivate my inner control freak, and I push and push to be the best. I earn good money, I do good client work, I have a solid reputation in the community — and still, I do not feel safe to relax.
Eventually, I realize the problem was never my work ethic. It was the beliefs underneath it.
So, flash forward one last time — to now, when I'm 41 years old. As a therapist who works with neurodivergent women battling burnout and imposter syndrome, I became interested in training in EMDR, a trauma-focused therapy that helps people reprocess painful memories and the beliefs attached to them. I wanted to pursue this training to help my clients, but the overachiever in me thought: I have to do it first. I have to be a client before I train in it clinically — I should walk the walk. Plus, maybe it would help me let go of some of my own old, unhelpful beliefs that kept me stuck in hustle mode. A win-win.
One of the first memories we processed was the loss of my childhood home — the time I learned that stability is elusive, and that you can never truly feel safe. The time I was programmed to hustle and work hard to avoid ever feeling that way again. A belief that 41-year-old me was finally ready to let go of. I wanted to believe that I'm safe now, that I can only control what I can control, and that it's okay to rest.
So that's what we did. We processed the memory using EMDR, and I let go of the old narrative. In my mind, as I processed it, I saw my adult 41-year-old self go back to that childhood home and find my inner child there. My adult self and my inner child went to the garden my mom used to keep, and we dug up one of my favorite plants to bring with us — we brought the positivity with us. Then, in that same session, I imagined my adult self and my inner child burying the old traumas, beliefs, and narratives about myself in that same garden. I saw myself burying it and walking away. In that moment, I knew I had let go of this memory and the beliefs about safety attached to it. I genuinely believe, from that moment on, that I am safe. Now I am safe.
My EMDR therapist and I then moved on to that birthday party where I fell through the chair — a time I felt like a complete outcast. While life for everyone in my town had moved on, that was a time I felt like my life had been uprooted, dismantled, and stolen away, and that I no longer belonged in the world I was returning to.
If you've done EMDR, you know that your therapist will ask: when you think about this memory, what would you like to believe about yourself instead? My therapist asked me that, and I said: I would like to believe that I'm okay as I am, and that it's safe to be seen. As a small business owner, try marketing yourself if you don't feel great being seen — that's a real problem. You end up staying too far inside your comfort zone, staying home, not going anywhere.
That's what I wanted to believe. And I wanted my inner child to believe that she still has worth, even though everything in her life felt different. We processed that memory, and I let go of the traumatic feeling around that birthday party. I let go of the fear of being seen and the old belief that there was something wrong with me. Instead, in my mind, it just becomes a birthday party. That's all it was. It was just a really bad birthday party. I realized that I am safe now, and that I am okay as I am. I let go of the old, unhelpful memories and the patterns they created in me.
So, in closing, I want to say this: letting go, for me, wasn't just one moment. It was a series of moments during which I faced my fears with the help of a really good EMDR therapist, chose to be vulnerable, and was willing to let go of the beliefs and behaviors that kept me stuck in hustle mode. Now, as a therapist and coach, I feel so grateful to facilitate these same moments for my clients.
Here's what I can tell you, as a mix of clinical expertise and personal lived experience: I think we all have old thoughts, narratives, and behaviors that no longer serve us. Many of us become high achievers because somewhere along the way, achievement felt safer than vulnerability.
So if any of this resonates with you, I invite you to ask yourself, as I asked my 41-year-old self: what is something I need to let go of? You may find that in doing so, you can slow down, breathe, and enjoy the benefits of your achievement so much more. And perhaps even more importantly — you can finally feel safe.