Chronic Fatigue & Moving Through Emotions with Michelle MacDonald

Listen to the full episode.

Chronic fatigue can be one of the most confusing, isolating experiences. You can look “fine” on the outside, yet feel like you’re dragging yourself through each day with a body that won’t cooperate. And when you’ve tried the usual health and wellness advice — eat cleaner, take more supplements, push yourself to exercise, “think positive” — it can start to feel like you’re missing something obvious… or worse, that you’re the problem.

In Podcast Episode 185, Filly from Chris and Filly Functional Medicine is joined by life coach Michelle MacDonald to explore a different angle on healing: the role of emotions, mindset, and the body’s lived experience in recovery from chronic fatigue and body burnout. Michelle is the creator of the Trigger to Truth framework, and she brings a grounded, practical approach to mind body medicine — one that doesn’t bypass the body, and doesn’t pretend healing is just about willpower.

This conversation sits beautifully at the intersection of burnout functional medicine, holistic health, integrative medicine, and healing from within. Because yes, we want to understand the physical drivers of fatigue. But we also want to understand the patterns that keep the nervous system stuck in survival — the ones that quietly drain energy, disrupt sleep, and make the body feel unsafe.

When Body Burnout Starts Early: High Performance, Perfectionism and “Pushing Through”

Michelle shares about her body burnout crash after years of high-level dancing and performing, running perfectionism patterns, and then birthing her baby.

That mix is a perfect storm for so many people: high output, high standards, constant self-pressure, and then a major life transition that changes your identity, your routine, your sleep, and your sense of autonomy.

From a holistic wellness perspective, chronic fatigue rarely comes out of nowhere. It’s often the end of a long chapter of “I can handle it” energy. The kind of energy that is fuelled by adrenaline, people-pleasing, perfectionism, or a belief that rest has to be earned.

This is why root cause medicine matters. It asks: what has your body been carrying for years? What has it been compensating for? And what happens when it can’t compensate anymore?

In Chris and Filly Functional Medicine, this is a core theme: symptoms are not random. They’re signals. They’re information. And when you learn to read them through a whole body health lens, you can stop fighting your body and start working with it.

Feeling “Trapped” After Becoming a Mother (And Why That Matters for Fatigue)

Michelle also speaks about feeling “trapped” after becoming a mother.

That word can carry a lot of shame, but it’s also incredibly honest. Many new mums love their babies deeply and still feel trapped by the loss of freedom, the constant responsibility, the identity shift, and the emotional load. When those feelings don’t have space to move, they don’t disappear — they live in the body.

From a mind body medicine lens, feeling trapped can create a nervous system state of freeze or shutdown. It can look like:

• exhaustion that doesn’t lift with rest
• low motivation and “flatness”
• brain fog and difficulty concentrating
• feeling disconnected from yourself
• irritability or emotional numbness
• a sense of heaviness in the body

This is where alternative medicine and integrative medicine can be misunderstood. It’s not about choosing “emotions” instead of “biology”. It’s about recognising that emotions are biology too. They’re nervous system signals. They’re chemical cascades. They’re patterns of tension and breath and posture and muscle tone.

And when those patterns stay locked in, fatigue can become a protective response.

The Two Biggest Levers: Sleep Hygiene and Emotional Processing

Michelle names two of the biggest things that helped her recover from chronic fatigue and associated symptoms and patterns:

1. sleep hygiene
2. mindset and emotional processing

Let’s unpack that in a way that supports health optimisation without turning it into another perfectionistic checklist.

Why sleep hygiene matters (especially in body burnout)

Sleep is when your body repairs, detoxifies, regulates hormones, and recalibrates the nervous system. In burnout functional medicine, sleep is not a “nice to have”. It’s foundational.

Sleep hygiene doesn’t mean you need a perfect routine. It means creating cues of safety and consistency for your body. Things like:

• a wind-down rhythm that signals “we’re safe now”
• reducing overstimulation late at night
• supporting your circadian rhythm with morning light
• lowering the pressure you put on yourself around sleep

When you’re in chronic fatigue, sleep can become stressful — you’re exhausted, but wired. Or you sleep, but wake unrefreshed. That’s often a sign the nervous system is still on duty.

Why emotional processing changes the body

Emotional processing isn’t “talk about your feelings and you’ll be fine”. It’s learning how to let emotions move through your system rather than getting stored as tension, shutdown, or chronic hypervigilance.

This is healing naturally in a very real sense: you’re restoring flow. You’re restoring capacity. You’re teaching your body that it doesn’t have to brace against life.

Trigger to Truth: A Practical Framework for Moving Emotions Through the Body

Michelle’s Trigger to Truth framework is a 6-step process that starts with awareness of an emotional or visceral trigger, and then supports you to move it through and out of the body.

This is such a helpful reframe for people on a wellness journey, because many of us have been taught to either:

• suppress emotions (“I’m fine”)
• intellectualise emotions (“I know why I feel this”)
• explode emotions (because there’s nowhere else for them to go)

But the body doesn’t just want explanation. It wants completion.

A trigger can show up as a thought, a tight chest, a sinking feeling in the belly, a clenched jaw, a rush of heat, or a sudden urge to withdraw. When you learn to notice the trigger early, you can respond differently. You can create space around it. You can meet the part of you that’s activated, rather than letting it run the whole show.

That’s not only good for emotional wellbeing — it’s supportive for chronic fatigue recovery, because it reduces the internal stress load that keeps the nervous system stuck in survival.

If you’d like to explore Michelle’s work further, you can purchase her “Trigger To Truth” online practices here.  and follow her on Instagram.

The Three Types of Emotions (And Why Movement Matters)

Michelle also talks about the three types of emotions, and the movement to match the emotion.

This is a key point that often gets missed in mainstream health and wellness conversations: emotions are not just mental events. They’re physiological states. They have a shape in the body.

Sometimes an emotion needs grounding. Sometimes it needs expression. Sometimes it needs discharge. When you match movement to emotion, you’re helping the nervous system do what it was designed to do: process and resolve.

This is one reason practices like yoga, somatic work, walking, shaking, breathwork, and gentle strength training can feel so supportive — not because they “burn calories”, but because they help the body complete stress cycles.

In functional nutrition and integrative medicine, we might talk about nutrients, hormones, gut health, and inflammation. In mind body medicine, we talk about safety, expression, and completion. Both matter for whole body health.

Giving Younger You What You Needed (And Making a Promise to Yourself)

One of the most powerful themes Michelle shares is the practice of giving younger you what you needed in the past, and making a promise to yourself.

This is deep healing from within.

Because so many burnout patterns are not random habits — they’re old survival strategies. The overachieving. The perfectionism. The “I’ll be okay once I’ve done enough”. The fear of disappointing people. The belief that rest is lazy. The belief that your needs are too much.

When you meet the younger parts of you with compassion, you start changing the internal relationship that drives these patterns. And when that relationship changes, the body often softens. The nervous system settles. Energy begins to return — not because you forced it, but because you removed what was draining it.

How This Fits with the Ending Body Burnout Method

At Chris and Filly Functional Medicine, the approach to chronic fatigue and body burnout is never one-dimensional. It’s not just mindset. It’s not just supplements. It’s not just “eat clean”.

It’s personalised medicine that looks at the full picture — physical and emotional, practical and subconscious. That’s exactly what the Ending Body Burnout Method program is designed to do: help you identify your root causes, support your body systems, and rewire the patterns that keep you stuck.

If you’re seeking a deep, holistic root-cause healing approach, doors are open to the 6-month Ending Body Burnout Method program — join now for early-bird bonuses and to secure your spot (limited spaces available).

If you’re feeling called to an in-person experience, you can come along to the next retreat — Heart Meets Land Retreat (limited spaces available).

And if you’d like a gentle next step and some clarity on what support would suit you best, you’re warmly invited to book a Discovery Call or connect the dots with us. No pressure — just a supportive conversation.

Listen to the full episode.

Chris & Filipa Bellette are the Founders of multi award-winning health practice Chris & Filly Functional Medicine, which is best known for ending body burnout (for good!) in “busy” people with energy, mood and gut issues. They have worked with over 3,000+ burned-out clients in the past combined 30+ years, with their own passion for ending body burnout coming from their own personal experience of body, mind, family & business breakdown, after a prolonged period of physical and mental stress.

Filipa is an accredited Clinical Nutritionist, Functional Medicine Practitioner, Coach & Trauma Therapist. She is also a Ph.D. Scholar, author & regularly featured the media, such as Forbes, Body+Soul and The Daily Telegraph. Chris is a Burnout Recovery Coach & an accredited Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) Master Practitioner, with a Bachelor of Human Movement Science. He has existed in high-performance realms of the sporting (think national athlete) & business industries and knows what it takes to get out of hustle-and-grind culture to thriving. 

They were recently awarded as the Tasmanian State Winner & National Finalist for the Telstra Best of Business Awards, and Winner of the Australian Women’s Small Business Champion Awards.