From Healthy Friend To Burnt Out: Why I Chose Functional Medicine Coaching
I did everything right and still ended up dizzy, exhausted and burnt out. This post shares the story of my health crash, why standard tests kept saying everything was fine, and how functional and integrative medicine finally helped make sense of what was happening. I talk about why I chose to train as a functional medicine health coach, and what this approach can offer if you are living with anxiety, fatigue, hormonal symptoms or nervous system overload that do not quite add up.
I used to be the healthy friend.
Bone broth before it was trendy. Coconut water, turmeric paste, alkaline diets.
If there was a health trend, I had probably tried it.
On paper I was doing everything right:
Eating well
Exercising hard
Saying no to the obvious things we are told to avoid
Inside, something else was happening. The harder I tried, the more disconnected and exhausted I felt. I was wired and tired, a bit anxious for no clear reason, and quietly worried that my body was not keeping up.
Everything came to a head when I decided to do an intensive detox. Twenty one massages in three weeks. The massages themselves felt like heaven. My body did not agree. After each treatment I felt worse, not better. I was more dizzy, more overwhelmed, sleeping badly and waking unrefreshed. I did not know it then, but my capacity to detox was already under strain. Pushing my system harder in the name of health was the last thing it needed.
By the time I landed in an integrative doctor’s office, I could barely hold a conversation together. My brain felt foggy. Simple decisions felt hard. Testing showed:
Stage three HPA axis burnout
High copper
Low magnesium
Hormonal imbalances
A nervous system that had been doing its best to cope for a very long time. None of this had been picked up when I had gone to my regular doctor with vertigo, insomnia, bloating and ongoing fatigue. I was trying to be healthy. My body was trying to survive. I remember feeling both relieved and heartbroken that it had taken a full crash for anyone to see the whole picture.
That experience changed what I believed about health. It also changed the kind of coach I wanted to become.
Why I chose functional medicine coaching
In the months that followed, one question stayed with me.
Why had none of these tests been considered earlier
I was not asking for the most obscure investigations. I simply wanted to know what was actually happening in my system. Why I was so tired, dizzy, anxious and wired when my blood tests kept coming back as fine.
Working with an integrative doctor was the first time I felt like the whole picture was being taken seriously. We were not only talking about symptoms, but about:
Patterns over time
Links between stress, hormones and sleep
How my nervous system had been holding everything together
There was a map for why my body had reacted so strongly to well meaning detoxes and why I had crashed so hard. It explained why my sleep was so disrupted, why my hormones felt out of balance and why my nervous system had tipped into burnout. It was confronting, but also a relief. Something finally made sense.
When I started researching health coaching programs in Australia, I realised many were designed mainly around general lifestyle change. Some ran for a few months and skimmed the surface. Others were longer, but barely touched on ethics, nervous system load or complex health histories. I was not interested in a quick certificate. I wanted a way of working that respected the complexity of real bodies and real lives, including chronic stress, anxiety, hormonal issues and nervous system dysregulation.
That is why I chose to train with the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy (FMCA). When I mentioned FMCA to my integrative doctor, she recognised it immediately and said it was a certification she would trust. That mattered to me. FMCA offered a way to bring coaching together with a functional medicine lens, so I could support change while also holding the deeper context of someone’s health story.
For me, this was never about collecting a fancy title. It was about choosing a path that reflected what I had lived through. I have learned that even good advice can be unhelpful, or even harmful, if it does not match your body and your situation. I wanted to be trained well enough to sit with that complexity, not push people through it.
What this means in practice
Many of the people I work with look like they are coping. They are often the reliable one at work or in their family, the person who keeps things running, the one others lean on. They read, research and try. On paper they are doing most of the right things, yet their body tells a different story. They might say:
I am functioning, but I am always tired
I am anxious and wired at night, then flat and foggy in the morning
Some, like me, have tried things that were meant to help, only to find their system reacts in ways they do not understand.
In our work, we still talk about habits, but we do not start or end there. We look at your health history, your current stress load and any testing you have had, and notice the patterns that show up as you tell your story. A session might include:
Mapping what has been happening over the past few years
Experimenting with small changes that your system can actually meet
The aim is not to make you work harder. It is to help your body feel safe enough that change does not feel like another threat.
The shifts that follow are often quiet. A little more steadiness in the morning. Less bracing through the day. Feeling a bit less anxious and on edge. A sense that you are not constantly fighting yourself.
Choosing the support that fits you
My work now lives in the space I once needed myself. I bring functional medicine coach training together with nervous system and movement based work, so we can look at your habits and your history, your goals and your capacity, without asking you to push harder than your system can hold.
You do not need perfect words or a neat story to begin. If any part of this feels familiar, we can start with a simple conversation and see what kind of support might help your body feel a little less like a struggle, and a little more like home.
If you would like to explore working together, you are welcome to fill in the contact form on my website or email me directly at sarah@sarahneylon.com.au. From there we can decide together what a gentle next step might look like for you.
For those who are interested in reading more about HPA axis dysfunction from an integrative perspective, this article offers a useful overview of current thinking and clinical considerations:
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(25)00353-5/pdf