The Bonfire Trick That Stops Burnout Before It Starts

• Daniela’s bonfire analogy for the real difference between stress and burnout
• The three pillars of her Exhausted to Empowered formula
• Why 75% of our self-talk is negative, and how to catch it
• A one-minute, five-times-a-day practice to protect your energy
• Why your kids are watching what you do, not what you say

“We bring the temperature with us to every room we walk into.”

“Stress is okay. It’s when we stack too many things without room to breathe that burnout happens.”

“No action is too small to make an impact for yourself and everyone around you.”

“It’s not about eliminating your responsibilities, but doing it in a way that keeps your energy high and positive.”

“When you think differently, you feel differently. And when you feel differently, you act differently.”

Expert

Why do so many working moms feel like they’re checking every box and still running on empty? In this episode, Anne Rajoo sits down with burnout and confidence coach Daniela Wolfe to unpack the dual burden of holding a career and a household together, and why reduce work stress conversations so often miss the real culprit. Daniela shares a bonfire analogy that reframes burnout entirely, her Exhausted to Empowered formula, and a one-minute daily practice built on self compassion that helps you protect your energy without a total life overhaul. Whether you’re deep in mom burnout or simply trying to be more intentional about being present for yourself, not just everyone else, this conversation is a warm, practical permission slip to put yourself back on your own list.

TRANSCRIPT

Anne Rajoo: I’m very excited to have Daniela with me today because our missions are super, super aligned, and I know this is one of those conversations I probably won’t stop thinking and talking about.

Daniela, your work really revolves around women and burnout, and the way they can put themselves onto their own to-do list. Why does that matter to you as a person, as a coach, author, podcast host and all the amazing things you do?

Daniela Wolfe: Thank you so much for having me, Anne, and honestly, I appreciate you naming all those pieces, author, coach, speaker.

But the reason this matters most to me is that as a mom, as a woman, as someone who’s been on this journey and unfortunately been to my own place of burnout, by not doing the things I teach now, by not putting myself on the to-do list, by putting everybody else’s needs first and taking care of myself last, I found how much it mattered, not just to me, but to my kids.

My journey started about 20 years ago. I was going through a divorce. I was a single mom with two little kids, four years old and six months old, and I’m a high achiever. So I wanted to prove I could do it all, be it all, show that I was capable of handling everything.

I drove myself straight into my own burnout. On the outside it looked like I was checking every box and super successful. On the inside I was constantly overwhelmed and stressed. I was irritable. I was snapping at my kids more than I wanted to, and I knew that wasn’t who I was meant to be or who I wanted to show up as, as a mom.

So I started, being a social worker myself, always taking care of everyone else, to practice what I help everyone else with: starting to take care of myself. It wasn’t massive action. It wasn’t a big life overhaul. It was small, actionable steps, like a daily gratitude practice.

There was a gym near me with free childcare at the time, and taking advantage of that meant working through some of the guilt and mindset noise that came up when someone asked, “oh, where are the kids?” and I felt like I needed to over-explain and over-justify taking that space for myself. I joined that gym, and I found that not only did I start to show up better, but my kids did too.

They were happier. People noticed, and started asking how they could fit this into their own lives too. I think we’re all looking for that validation and permission that it’s okay to take time for ourselves. That’s where my journey began, 20 years ago.

Now that my kids are young adults, we actually talk about it, and they’ve told me how they learned to take care of themselves based on what I modeled, not the things I said, but the things they saw me doing. That’s where this matters to me: not only as women and moms, but as the role models, the blueprint our kids follow for how to take care of themselves.

Anne: Oh my God, yes. This is definitely one of those conversations where I’m just nodding along. We said we’re not publishing the video, but I promise you, I’m sitting here going yes, yes, yes.

That really feels like a big part of my own journey too, especially the snapping and becoming the kind of mom I never wanted to be. That sounds so familiar. Like you, high achiever, proving I’m capable, I’m able to do this, even though I had a partner, I still felt like I needed to prove I could do it all. And then watching my kids mirror the same stress response, the same snappiness. Children really are the mirror. You hear them say things or see them do things that you’re doing, and think, oh my God, that sounds like me, and I don’t like it.

It really hits home. So you changed, and then you modeled that for your children, and now they’re in their twenties and taking care of themselves differently. I love that, because mine are still relatively small, so I still have that part of the journey ahead of me.

Daniela: No action is too small to make an impact and a difference for yourself and for everyone around you, because we set the tone. If we walk in unsettled or out of sorts, that translates to everyone around us, whether we’re at work, with our friends or with our family. We really need to be conscious of how we’re showing up every day.

So, obviously it’s not just our kids. We set the tone, we bring the temperature with us to every room we walk into, whether that’s work, friends or family. If we’re a hot mess inside, that translates to everybody else. If we’re feeling overwhelmed, we translate that too.

Having that awareness is the first piece that helps us manage it and change how it plays out.

Anne: And how does someone get to that awareness point? Say a mom who’s still in that stressful place, doing so much and not really taking care of herself while taking care of everybody else. How does she distinguish between normal life, because life is fast-paced and stressful, and the moment where it’s actually time to look at this? How does she even realize it’s time?

Daniela: Not everyone hits rock bottom or an extreme burnout moment, and it’s not really about getting rid of stress. Stress is a normal part of life. I’d never say we need to eliminate it. Stress can be a positive thing. It can be motivating, it can help us be productive. There’s actually a difference between stress and burnout that people don’t always realize.

There’s a bonfire analogy I love that gives a great visual for this. Imagine sitting in front of a bonfire, putting logs on the fire. Those logs are the things that contribute to our stress: our job, our family, our responsibilities, the laundry that needs to get done. That’s normal. The blaze burns hot, bright orange, warm to be around.

But if you’ve ever built a campfire, you know you can’t just stack the logs directly on top of each other. There has to be air flowing between them, maybe you build a little teepee shape to let air reach the logs as you stack. Burnout happens when we stack too many things on top of each other without space or breathing room in between. That’s when you end up with those grey ashes, the kind you might fan and see a flicker of orange in, but the energy is gone.

So stress is okay. A busy lifestyle can be okay, if it’s intentionally built with space and breathing room in between, enough to keep you from burning out so you still have energy. That’s the goal. It’s not about eliminating your responsibilities or your stress, it’s about doing it in a way that’s intentional, and keeps your energy levels high and positive.

Anne: I love that you’re saying that, that it’s not just “burnout” or “stress is negative.”

Daniela: Right, it’s not even about reaching a negative place. It’s about looking at how you’re structuring your day, and how you’re intentionally building in that air and breathing room throughout it, so you don’t have to hit a negative place first. You can still be doing something intentionally positive to set yourself up for success in a better way.

When I work with clients, we go through what I call the Exhausted to Empowered formula. It takes you through three pillars: your mindset, your time planning, and your self-care, being intentional in each of those areas so you’re setting yourself up for success across the board. That means being aware of our thoughts and how they affect us, looking intentionally at how we’re planning our day, not just the things we have to do but the things we want to do, and then self-care.

Self-care can get a bad rap, like it’s fluffy or a nice-to-have, but it’s strategic, practical, daily self-care. Just like you wouldn’t eat once on Sunday and expect not to be starving by Tuesday, you can’t do one nice thing for yourself once a week and expect to be good for the whole week. So there might be moments anywhere from one minute to ten or fifteen minutes, spread through your day, and it doesn’t have to be quiet, calm or relaxing. It could be something fun: laughter, energizing movement, how you connect with others, how you eat, how you sleep, even how you think about money, how you dress, how you decorate and organize your home. That’s where your energy comes from. Self-care isn’t just being calm, it’s also your confidence, how you show up, and the energy you bring into the room.

Anne: That’s so brilliant. It reminds me that I used to have this mindset that if I slowed down, rested, or was “lazy” on the sofa, that would make me boring, uninteresting, like I’d never get anywhere in life if I did that. That came from my family upbringing. After experimenting with these micro-moments you’re describing, I realized it can actually be fun and restorative, still active, instead of that constant log-on-log, stress-on-stress pattern.

I really enjoyed the fire analogy. Could you talk a bit more about those three pillars, mindset, time planning and self-care? I’d love to hear what you’d tell your clients about each one.

Daniela: I’ll give you three actionable steps for each area too, so you can see how simple and applicable this is.

Starting with mindset: we talk to ourselves more than we talk to anyone else in the world. They say we have around 80,000 conversations with ourselves a day, and unfortunately about 75% of them are negative. I call mine the mean girls in my head. We’d never talk to anyone else the way we talk to ourselves.

So the mindset piece is about noticing which negative statements keep coming up, things like “resting is lazy” or “it doesn’t look productive.” Having the insight to ask where that belief came from matters. For me, it was “you have to hustle hard to get ahead,” “you have to put in 120%,” work 24/7, that kind of thing.

Once you’re aware of a phrase like that, pause and ask: how would I respond if a friend said this to me, or one of my kids? Would I give them the same answer? That’s how we start creating new neural pathways, almost like a new trail in the woods. It takes repetition of going over that new phrase and new response until it becomes the new default way of thinking about that topic.

So for your own mindset, pick one thing that comes up for you, or notice the first thought that appears if you try to sit and do nothing. A lot of the time it’s “I should be doing something.” Trace where that comes from, and start retraining your brain toward a new thought. That’s how we shift our mindset about taking time for ourselves and putting ourselves on our own to-do list, because we’ve been conditioned differently.

The second pillar is time planning. If we don’t plan our time intentionally, it will just happen to us, our kids, our boss, our responsibilities and our laundry will decide for us. So look at your priorities, because when everything is important, nothing is.

At minimum, as you plan your day, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes of buffer space between activities. That buffer gives you freedom if something goes wrong, which life always throws at us, so you’re not stacking those logs back to back to back. And if you don’t end up needing it as a buffer, that ten to fifteen minutes becomes self-care time instead, and it can be as small as one minute.

I want to teach you a one-minute practice: set a reminder on your phone to go off five times a day. When it goes off, set another timer for one minute, and during that minute, do nothing. Don’t scroll social media, don’t check on something. Just sit. You could do some box breathing, four seconds in, four second hold, four seconds out, four second hold. You could do shoulder shrugs, drink some water, look out the window, practice a little mindfulness. That one minute, science shows, lowers your cortisol, your heart rate and your stress levels. You get the dopamine hit of setting a goal and achieving it, five times a day, which is really five minutes of self-care woven through your day, slowly shifting your habits and systems in a small, manageable way.

I also have a free resource on my website called the “Reclaim Your Time in Ten-Minute Blocks” cheat sheet, with over twenty ideas for how to spend that time, because if we don’t plan for it, we’ll end up googling or trying to figure something out and lose the time anyway. It’s free to grab there.

These small micro-shifts in how we think, plan and act matter, because when you think differently, you feel differently, and when you feel differently, you act differently. That’s how we start to shift who we are and how we’re showing up. You don’t have to get to the point of burnout to start making these changes.

Anne: I love that, it brings me right back to a lot of my own journey, which is really why I created Peaceful Productivity and this podcast. But I want to highlight something you said: that the self-care practice can actually become a goal in itself. You and I both talk to high-achieving women, and we need a goal, we need something to work toward. It’s an interesting shift to say self-care is the goal, alongside whatever else is on your goal list.

Daniela: As a byproduct, you get an increase in creativity, productivity and success too. How many times have you had your best idea in the shower? Because you’re taking space, and that’s when your brain has the freedom to explore and come up with new ways of doing things, to tap into the side of yourself that isn’t so rigid, structured and stressed. When you intentionally create space for that throughout your day, it has a ripple effect across every other area.

Anne: You bring that back beautifully to the productivity side of things. I love that.

Unless there’s anything else you feel is a must-say, let’s wrap up. Would you share with the audience where they can connect with you? I think I was on your podcast a few months ago.

Daniela: That’s going to be coming out in the next couple of weeks, actually. I loved that conversation.

My website, BestDLife.com, is the best place to find me. You’ll get access to free resources, my podcast episodes and some blog posts there. You can also order my book from there, Balance Breakthrough: A Practical Guide for Busy Professionals to Take Charge of Their Work, Life and Wellbeing. In it I break down the whole Exhausted to Empowered formula step by step, and you get a free workbook with it. It’s really meant to be a guidebook to help you develop this system on your own.

If you’re not sure coaching is for you, or you want to explore it, or just want to chat, I always love that too. I’m also on all the socials, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and now Substack.

Anne: Substack, we’re going to run into each other there, I’m heading onto Substack too, so I’ll find you and connect. Thank you so much, Daniela, it was a huge pleasure to have you, and thank you for all the amazing work you do and the time you took with me today.