Exploring Women’s Health & Boundaries

Speaker 1

Thank you for listening to another episode of Zeta Talks. This month we are joined by Sinead Kelly. Sinead is a self-help coach and nurse. Today we look at stresses that women experience burnout and have said in bounds.

Speaker 2

to make such a big difference.

Speaker 1

After graduating coaching Psychology at UCC, Sinead became a self-help coach.

Speaker 2

This is for baby professionals to take change and embrace their own health and wellness. Thank you for joining us today, Sinead. Hi, Michelle. Thanks so much for having me today. And will we start off, and just if you could tell me a bit about your own background?

Speaker 2

Yeah. So, as you said, my background is as a registered nurse, and that is since 2004. Most of that experience is in occupational health, and that means that I looked after the health and the wellness of employees in corporate settings.

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So, now as a self-health coach, I combine my nursing experience with my own self-development and coaching psychology that I did in UCC Cork to help my clients to embrace and take charge of their health and wellness.

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And I do this from Cork, Ireland, as well as over Zoom. And there’s four interconnected pillars to my self-health work, which are sleep routine, eating healthier, moving more, and my largest pillar is stress management.

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And I personally love variety, so my work is split between people who come to me themselves for personal coaching and my work in the corporate sector, where I do health coaching with leadership to improve their performance by increasing their energy levels and resilience.

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And I do webinars, and I do in-depth six-week workshops on health behavior change with employees. So, that’s me. And can I ask, why do you think the stressors that are experienced by men and women are so different?

Speaker 2

Well, I think men and women can have very similar stress triggers, and it can be very subjective, obviously, stress. So, one person’s stress may not create the same response in someone else. So, sometimes stress is due to a very obvious cause, like it could be something big, like moving house, or there’s illness or injury in your household, or a buildup of work.

Speaker 2

But more often, what I see is an accumulation of things, of lots of things, not one big thing. And we can start to feel overwhelmed and overstretched. And so, a contributing factor to this can be caused by people pleasing, which is an area that I see more in women than in men.

Speaker 2

And there was a study done this year in America that backs this up as well, of what I see myself, in that those who were identifying themselves as people pleasers were 56% of women. Now, that’s on a spectrum, of course, with some women saying that they are absolute people pleasers.

Speaker 2

They’re on the higher extreme of it, and others saying that they somewhat people pleased. So, 76% is a lot, compared to 42% of men. So, a big part of people pleasing is generally putting other people’s needs before their own.

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So, they’re often neglecting their own physical and mental health, as everything else just seems too important. So, something that I would do with clients is work on boundaries, which can be a great way to get more balance and improve stress levels for women with a tendency to people please.

Speaker 2

So, when these women start to say no to others, they start to free up time and energy for themselves. Interesting. Can I just speak about boundaries and how important they are? How would you describe boundary setting to a person with no concept of what that would actually look like in their own day-to-day life?

Speaker 2

Well, I think first it’s important to identify if your boundaries are a source of stress for you. So some things that women can say is that they feel like they’re juggling so many things at once, that there’s too many commitments from their work life, their family life, and maybe even socially.

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So looking after yourself ends up at the bottom of a pile of growing to-do lists. So you might feel frustrated and overwhelmed and just generally drained. And so a big part of the problem might be saying yes too much to others.

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And an example of this could be, you know, your manager asks you, can you work late tonight to get this task done? You say yes, but internally you might be feeling really bad about this because you’ve already arranged to meet a good friend tonight and you don’t think that this task is that urgent that it couldn’t wait till the morning.

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But you say yes because you feel like you should and a good employee would do that. So other times you might not even be directly asked a question or asked to do something. You actually throw yourself into volunteering into something.

Speaker 2

And an example that I’ve seen with a few clients is where, you know, an email or a text goes out to all the parents in the school about organizing something. And you take it upon yourself that you feel it’s your responsibility to step up and say yes, which is great if that’s what you’re interested in.

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But if you’re already feeling overwhelmed and you already have a lot of things going on and you’re adding now to your to-do list, and you could be actually really dreading having to do this, but you’ve put yourself in the firing line as such.

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Or perhaps you do things where a question wasn’t even asked of you to do something. So I see it sometimes with people where they work through their lunch break because they feel it’s expected. Nobody has asked them.

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That question has not gone out to anybody. But they feel like they should be doing it. So it’s this kind of feeling of I should be. And so when we are asked to do something that’s not in our own best interests and we choose to say yes and we do the request anyway, we have then prioritized the other person’s needs over our own.

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So to answer your question, boundaries are the limits and the rules that we set for ourselves within various relationships that we have. So you may have assumed that boundaries is a rule for the other person, but actually the boundary is for you.

Speaker 2

It’s not an ultimatum for the other person. It’s what we are going to do regardless of how the other person reacts because we can’t control what the other person does. We can control our own actions, however.

Speaker 2

So boundaries are not about controlling other people. They’re about having a boundary for you about what you’re comfortable with, what you’re happy with and what you are going to do regardless of what the other person does.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it’s interesting there when you said about the kind of like a pair and getting the text sort of thing. Even 20 years ago, phones and technology weren’t at the same stage. So it probably didn’t follow people as much as it does now.

Speaker 2

Everyone else I found beside them at all times were email, the WhatsApp groups, everything like that. It probably does kind of the challenges that were there already. It’s just emphasized now it’s probably harder for people to get that balance.

Speaker 2

Absolutely. And so it’s having a boundary for yourself, even outside of relationships about how accessible are you? And is it that you turn your phone off at certain times of the day? Do you mute certain WhatsApp groups so you’re not getting notifications all the time?

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And keeping the things that are actually more urgent turned on and the things that are low priority, like maybe Facebook notifications. Do you need to get an alert about a Facebook notification? So really looking at how accessible are you to everybody?

Speaker 2

And so that goes beyond specific relationships, but it’s even the connection to your phone itself. Yeah, like it’s probably the sort of thing of it’s actually, it’s harder for you to implement it to yourself and stick to yourself than it will be to tell someone else to do it.

Speaker 2

Absolutely. Can I ask, how do you think a lack of boundaries, and I was saying yes, contribute to stress and it can impact your health in the long run. Yeah, so if we’re always saying yes to other people and their requests, it can lead to feeling overwhelmed and being burnt out and a very common emotion that people will feel when their boundaries need to be worked on is feeling resentful.

Speaker 2

That’s a real signifying emotion. And whether that’s at work or at home or somewhere else. So what we’re doing is that we don’t have enough time or energy for our own self-care. So that could be around getting a walk-in or some kind of exercise.

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We don’t have the time or energy to eat healthy to have time to ourselves, to just rest, to meditate, to maybe go to bed on time because we’re doing things into the evening, even having fun. So when we give so much to other people, there just is no time or energy for ourselves.

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So when we start to say something other than yes, we can reclaim some of that time and energy back and not only physically, but also from a headspace perspective. We have less things to kind of plan out or worry about.

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And that means then that we’re able to focus more, we’ve better sleep and generally feel just more balanced. A concept that really struck me when I was learning about boundaries was that when we say yes to someone else, there’s the consequence of saying no to something in our own lives.

Speaker 2

So when we say yes, we’re also saying no to ourselves. We’re saying no to quality time with our family, playing with our kids, or going having a date night with our partner, no to going for a yoga class or cooking a healthy dinner or maybe even eating at all that day, no to doing some journaling or no to hobbies that we love or no to just generally relaxing.

Speaker 2

So it’s taking something from you when you say yes to other people and you’re not happy about saying yes. Yeah, I suppose it’s that expression. You can’t give from an empty coconut.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. Self-awareness is a core component of optimizing health and wellbeing. Gaining clarity around personal needs, preferences and boundaries helps to manage daily stressors and life demands. Whether financial, relational, work-based or environmental, it is vital to recognise how common stressors can impact their physical and mental health if left unchecked.

Speaker 1

Oftentimes, self-care can gravitate into becoming another to-do list, leaving people burdened by a sense of need to do specific things in order to be healthy. By gaining an understanding of the benefits of a self-care routine, you will see positive steps in all areas of your life.

Speaker 1

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Speaker 2

What do you think would be the boundaries and different types of boundaries that people would have? Yeah, so we tend to have three different types of boundaries. Healthy boundaries, rigid boundaries, and porous boundaries.

Speaker 2

How I like to picture these, to give you a visual, is that healthy boundaries is a fence with a gate. And you can open that gate and invite people in whenever you feel comfortable. But you can also close it whenever you don’t feel comfortable letting people in.

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Rigid boundaries, your gate is pretty much always locked and shut. You’re keeping people out, and you don’t invite anyone over. Porous boundaries, which are the ones that I’m basically talking about at the moment when you find it difficult to say no, that’s when your gate is pretty much always open.

Speaker 2

So people are coming and going and saying, please, whether you’re comfortable with that or not. So that’s kind of like a little visual that I have for it. But to kind of go deeper into it, rigid boundaries are, you know, you know these people because they generally have a wall between themselves and other people.

Speaker 2

So they kind of avoid close relationships. And you don’t really get to find out too much about them or their inner world. And they’re very unlikely to ask for help or to give help. And they can be very inflexible with their own boundaries.

Speaker 2

That’s why they’re called rigid boundaries. So it could be something like, you know, I never mind my brother’s children. So in the event of, let’s say, there’s a family emergency and the kids need to be minded, they may not move on this rule because they have a rule that they don’t mind their brother’s kids, for example.

Speaker 2

Now, if we have porous boundaries, that’s the absolute opposite. And that’s where most people will sit that I’m talking to today. So they have difficulty saying no. And when they do say no on the rare occasion, they feel very uncomfortable with that because there’s this fear of being rejected.

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So we’re kind of dependent on other people’s opinions. And our self-worth is kind of entangled up in other people’s opinions. So that can lead us to people, please, and maybe even strive for perfection.

Speaker 2

So we can do this because we’re playing into expectations of what a good wife, a good mother, a good employee looks like rather than figuring out what actually resonates for us as individuals. So you might be playing into the good wife who looks after the kids and cleans the house, but actually maybe what resonates deeper for you is to be the main earner and provide security to the family.

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Like maybe that’s something that you would rather be rather than the expectation of what you should be. So people with porous boundaries are likely to be fixers and helpers and rescuers, for example.

Speaker 2

So then when it comes to healthy boundaries, there are people who are comfortable saying no. They’re also comfortable when other people say no to them. They can accept that other people can say no. And we can actually have a mix of all three type of boundaries.

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So you might actually at work, you could have healthy boundaries, but then when you’re a family, you could have porous boundaries. And then in romantic relationships, you could have a mix of all three.

Speaker 2

So we may not be purely fitting into one box. We may actually have a mix of a few different types of boundaries. But obviously working towards healthy boundaries, it helps us to respect other people’s boundaries too, which helps us in our relationship.

Speaker 2

So if I respect my own time, then I’ll be more aware of respecting other people’s time as well. Interesting. I was actually wondering when you were speaking there, was it very rigid to you’re particularly a porous person or you’re particularly, because those kinds of things can like, there will be situations where you’ve rather be.

Speaker 2

you’d be less likely or more likely to shift. Absolutely, yeah. So we can be a mix of all three. I tend to find that people are more one than the other. I’ve yet to meet somebody who is kind of like equal amongst all three.

Speaker 2

But we tend to kind of gravitate towards one or the other in general, but we can have a mix of them, absolutely.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Would you have any, like, basic tips that would help people to improve their boundaries? Because some people probably having boundaries in place would be a completely foreign concept. Yeah, I have two tips.

Speaker 2

So firstly, if you never say no and almost compulsively say yes as soon as someone asks you something. Well, then the first thing is to start to figure out what do you mind doing and what do you not mind doing when it comes to helping out other people.

Speaker 2

This is really difficult when you’re not used to thinking about yourself first. So what can be helpful is to keep in mind your comfort levels with your time, your energy, your money, because sometimes it can involve somebody asking you for money and your values.

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So you might love to help someone by making them a meal because you love cooking and you’re just adding a bit extra to a meal that you’re making anyway. But you might absolutely hate to help someone by driving them to an appointment because you’re a nervous driver and it’s going to take up a lot of time.

Speaker 2

So it might require you actually going back and thinking about scenarios where you especially felt resentful towards someone, where you kind of felt like they were taking advantage of you and figuring out why did it annoy you so much?

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Is it because I hate driving actually? So it’s not that we stop helping people. We absolutely need to continue to help people, but we do it in a way that resonates with us and that works for us. The second tip then is to replace saying yes with let me think about it.

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And this can take a bit of practice. So you won’t remember it the first time, but if you keep reminding yourself, let me think about say, let me think about it because you’re in automatic mode. You’ll you’ll say yes.

Speaker 2

And it can be it can be very confrontational to say no, it can feel like it is. Yeah. And then and then go silent and say no more, you know, so I’m not suggesting you do that. So saying something like let me think about it.

Speaker 2

It’s such a powerful phrase because you you might feel like you’re put on the spot and you may not even be sure. Is this thing that they’ve just asked me to do? Is this a problem or not a problem? Like, I’m not even sure because I’m not used to thinking about it this way.

Speaker 2

So you can go away and then think about it and consider it and see, all right, do I actually want to do this or or not? And eventually other people will start to get the message as well that you don’t always say yes, because people already know if you’re a yes person, they know that.

Speaker 2

And so, you know, in a work sense, they might always be coming to you because you’re the one that always says yes. So you’re also giving the message to other people that you’re you’re going to actually stop and think about it and you’re not going to straight away say yes to everything.

Speaker 2

Anna, how would you go about setting time for yourself and minimizing stressors in your own life? I think besides what we’ve already talked about in terms of starting to say let me think about it and that, it’s to take small amounts of time to look after your needs.

Speaker 2

always start when we’re trying to make changes we can make them way too big like it’s ridiculously big and it’s never going to work and we’re never going to stick with it so to me it’s small gestures where you are allowing yourself to be a priority too because we can always say well the kids are my priority or whatever yes the kids are your priority but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a like we also need to be a priority and in fact when we prioritize ourselves and our self-care we’re better able to look after the kids and and everything else so it starts by asking yourself what would give you some energy what would feel good and so it could be things like sleep so getting enough sleep so our ability to cope the next day is better exercising so that your you can use that time to socialize with other people as well as it being a great way to reduce stress hormones in the body such as adrenaline and cortisol that can be running around and increase it increases endorphins which give you a positive sense of well-being as well as actually loosening out the physical feelings of stress in our body you know we tend to collect stress in certain parts of our body like our you know our shoulders and in our neck so by exercising we’re actually loosening out some of that tension we can do some stress relieving activities that might only take two to five minutes we don’t need to set aside 30 minutes to do something it could be deep breathing you know that we’re doing to relax the mind and the body and bring you back into the present moment and it can help give you some perspective on your stress and what’s actually really important to you and maybe it’s a particular hobby yoga pilates you know going for a walk i find it’s a fantastic stress reliever for me like if i’m in a bad mood and i go for a walk i always come back a different person um if you have a lot of things on your mind writing it down like getting it out of your mind and putting it down on paper whether that’s a to-do list for tomorrow or is it actually something’s happened during the day and it’s kind of annoying you and it’s it’s staying with you reflecting down in a journal and kind of processing it um and you know things like resting you know and what is resting to you and how can you get good quality rest because i could sit down for an hour in front of the tv in the evening and yes that’s technically rest but i would get more quality out of a 10-minute meditation you know so looking at the quality of the rest that you’re getting um and then fun because everything is so serious in our lives you know our jobs are so serious we’re busy adulting and parenting and whatever and so putting in a bit of silliness and a bit of fun and to lighten up in some way um and people are probably sick of me saying that i always dance around the kitchen when i’m making the dinner but i genuinely do um because it feels good and so it’s it doesn’t matter if you’re good at it or not it you know you might look stupid but if it feels good why not do it you know so um yeah those would would be my my top tips i would say everyone’s busy busy busy and there’s no time to actually just like step back and like what you actually enjoy doing and actually will like make you happy yeah and that that could be a hobby or something and i hear so many times like people will say you know i really enjoyed art in school but then you know i i did really bad in my leaving certain art and it that was it that was the end of art you know and i don’t i’m not creative or whatever it doesn’t matter if you’re good or not is it like if you enjoy it and it feels good like why wouldn’t you do it you know but we tend to be very judgmental of ourselves and that it’s not perfect enough and it’s not good enough or whatever but if it feels good you know uh why not Yeah,

Speaker 2

like I like to dance around in my kitchen as well. I’m going to be honest, like, no, but I do it anyway. Yeah, so when I’m dancing around the kitchen, I try to involve my four-year-old as well in, you know, so she’s kind of getting used to it now as well.

Speaker 2

And she doesn’t judge me and my dancing. I think one question that’s kind of always interesting to ask as well for people, do any books or podcasts or anything that you’d recommend, particularly on people like setting boundaries in their life, or just books that you think people could kind of, would help and kind of make them make themselves a priority in their own lives?

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think when it comes to the general public and books on boundaries, I have found it very difficult, to be honest, to find books. And the one that I do think is good. And actually, when I was talking about the three types of boundaries, I was basing it on this book, which is Set Boundaries Find Peace.

Speaker 2

And that’s by an author called Nedra Glover-Tawab. And you can find bits about boundaries in various kind of self-development type books. So one, there’s a chapter on boundaries in Dr. Nicole Lapera’s How to Do the Work.

Speaker 2

And I like that chapter on boundaries as well. So they’d be the two that I would suggest for general public. Yeah. OK, OK. That kind of brings us to the end of today. Thank you very much for joining us today, Sinead.

Speaker 2

Thanks a million, Michelle, for having me. And thank you to you, the listener, for joining us today. Sinead, I really enjoyed our conversations. Shadows are a part of life, although it is reassuring to hear that we can take steps to minimise the strategy experience in our lives.

Speaker 2

Thank you for listening to another episode of Zevo Talks. Until next time.