When You Don't Want to Do It Anymore
With all vigilance guard your heart, for in it are the sources of life (Proverbs 4:23).
If some days you want to be the CEO and other days you want to quit everything, there is something deeper going on.
If you have been in business for any length of time, you likely have experienced the feeling of loving what you do but also wanting to quit everything and enter a monastery. The thought, "I don't want to do this anymore," usually just enters quietly, and you immediately push it aside or overthink it and wonder if this is God telling you it's time to close the business down. Then comes the panic underneath the thought, which is worse than the thought itself: “I can't tell if this is God, or if I'm just tired, or if I'm a quitter about to throw away the answer to my own prayers.”
If you have been circling that question, I want to give you a better one to start with, because most women trying to decide whether to stay or walk away are trying to read a broken gauge, and the reading is sending them the wrong direction.
I work with successful business owners, many at six and seven figures, who say they want to respond to the "call within a call" while also living out their primary vocations really well. Here is the loop I watch women get stuck in. You feel the exhaustion, and so you decide to take the weekend and unplug, silence the notifications, sleep in, and read an actual book for once. Then Monday comes around, and you open the laptop and feel the exact same dread you left with. So you draw the only conclusion that seems available: “I rested, and I still don't want it. That settles it. I must be done.”
Burnout and Bracing Are Not the Same Thing
There are two completely different things that both feel exactly like "I can't do this anymore," and if you can't tell them apart, you'll keep making the wrong call. If you look at the etymology of each, the words themselves actually tell on each other.
Burnout is an empty cup: you poured out more than came back in, for too long, and the tank ran dry. Burnout responds to rest the way a dry field responds to rain. The word is honest about what it is. Long before anyone used it for tired people, "burn out" meant a fire that had burned until the fuel was gone, and later an electrical fuse that quit under too much load—something that was lit, and is now spent, because there was nothing left to keep it going.
Bracing is something else entirely, and here is where the word gets beautiful. Brace comes from the Latin bracchium, which simply means arm, the very same root that gives us the word embrace. To brace originally meant to wrap your arms around something and hold it tight. Somewhere over the centuries it hardened into what we mean when we say "brace yourself:" the body gone rigid, arms locked, everything clenched to take a hit that's coming. Same arms. Opposite posture. Arms were made to open and embrace, and bracing is what those arms do when they've forgotten they were ever meant to hold or be held.
So a braced body isn't worn out from doing too much. It's tense from waiting for something bad to happen. This looks like shoulders that won't drop, the breath that stays up high in the chest, the low hum of “stay ready” that never fully shuts off. You can't rest your way out of bracing, because the body isn't necessarily tired; it's on guard. You can take it to the beach, and it will lie there scanning the beach or thinking about the emails you need to send or client follow-ups that need completed.
The majority of women are bracing, not necessarily burned out, which is why the weekend “off” doesn’t work. The guard came with you! You were never going to sleep off a thing that was never about sleep. Your mind may have filed away the reasons for the bracing a long time ago, but your body did not. In Proverbs 4:23 we are told to guard the heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life. So many of us learned that lesson a little too well and never quite got the memo that the danger had passed. The body keeps standing watch at a door the threat walked out of years ago.
The Field Isn't Dead; It's Fallow
My family lives on a farm in Pennsylvania. Anyone who has worked ground knows you can't farm the same field hard every single season and expect it to keep giving. If you push it year after year with nothing given back or time to rest, the yield will drop. The same is true for a woman standing at the edge of that tired field who can decide very quickly that the soil is depleted. It’s time to sell it and move on to more fertile soil.
However, Scripture is so practical about land, and in Leviticus 25, God actually commands the fields to lie fallow because rest is built right into how fruitfulness works, but a field that is resting looks, to the impatient eye, exactly like a field that is dead.
Most women asking "should I quit?" are at the edge of exhausted ground trying to judge whether it'll ever grow anything again. That ground is not dead. It has never been allowed to lie fallow. It certainly has never been asked the real question, which isn't is this soil finished but rather what has this soil been bracing against all these seasons.
How to Tell What State You’re In
Here is the sequence that sorts this out.
First, feed the body for real. Not a spa weekend, though those can be lovely. I am speaking about real nourishment, the kind you have to keep repeating: actual sleep, not the four broken hours you've been calling sleep; real food and not just the crusts off your kid's plate; twenty minutes of sun on your face; weekday Mass with nowhere to rush off to after; an hour in front of the tabernacle where you don't ask Him for one single thing, you just sit there and let Him look at you. Give it two weeks or more, not two days.
Then read the “gauge.” If the dread lifts, even a little, it was burnout and that tells you something huge. It means you were about to make a permanent decision from an empty tank. You should never decide anything on an empty tank.
If the dread doesn't move at all, that's your clue that it was bracing the whole time, and now you can finally ask the better question, the one hiding underneath the exit you were about to take: “What is my body still guarding against?”
What You Might Notice When You Look
When a woman traces her "I want out" back to the bracing, it's usually standing guard over something like this:
Being seen. The bigger this grows, the more people can look, critique, and find her lacking, so a part of her would honestly rather shrink the whole thing than be that visible.
Being copied or exposed. She's been taken from before, and a braced body treats that like a threat to survival, not a business inconvenience.
Succeeding. Success means more will be asked of her, and somewhere along the line she learned that the reward for holding it all together is simply being handed more to hold.
Failing in front of the ones who doubted her. Quitting on her own terms can feel a whole lot safer than being judged to have fallen short.
If you walk away to escape the bracing, you will brace against the next thing, too, whether it is you starting another business, entering the workforce, or even just the way you’re living day-to-day. The bakery becomes the coaching business becomes the nonprofit, and that same guard stands watch over every one of them; the exit is never the fix.
Once the guard comes down 一and not one second before 一the honest discernment tools finally start telling the truth. This is why so many women say that they cannot “hear” God’s voice 一because they’re so braced and ready for the shoe to drop. The goal is to become the woman whose body no longer braces against her own life, because her safety was settled by God before she ever built a single thing. From that place, and honestly only from that place, both staying and going stop being terrifying. You can hold the whole business with open hands, and open hands are the only ones that can feel which way the Lord is actually pointing.
That woman is not on the other side of a bolder decision. She's on the other side of healing. And she is not a quitter, and she is not trapped. She is free, and free women can hear God’s voice. If you want to go deeper on burnout versus bracing (because it really is the hinge this whole thing turns on) I unpacked it in Episode #79 of The Discerning Mother, "You're Not Burned Out, You're Braced."
Brigid Tebaldi is a wife, mother of five, homeschooling mom, and board certified health coach specializing in Spiritual Somatic Rewiring - a signature framework that combines nervous system repair, subconscious belief work, and the truth of Scripture to create permanent transformation at the root level. When she's not in session, you'll find her outside with her kids, deep in a conspiracy theory podcast, or in the kitchen baking something that disappears as quickly as it comes out of the oven.