Parenthood is one of the most demanding life transitions, yet it remains one of the least supported phases in the workplace, especially for women starting families after age 35. In this episode, Dr. Anjali Agrawal, founder of Back in Balance and an integrative chiropractor and functional nutrition specialist, shares why pregnancy, postpartum, and the return-to-work period are silent drivers of burnout, disengagement, and attrition.

Drawing from 18+ years of clinical practice, corporate wellness experience, and her own journey as a mother, Dr. Anjali introduces her Five Trimesters of Health framework. She explains how proactive, nervous-system-centered support can protect leadership pipelines, strengthen culture, and help employees stay engaged through one of life’s most critical transitions. This conversation bridges personal health, workplace performance, and long-term retention with practical strategies leaders can apply immediately.

Takeaways

1. Parenthood is a major retention risk when support is missing
2. Many women disengage or exit during mid-career parenting years
3. Policies alone don’t address real pregnancy and postpartum needs
4. Nervous system regulation impacts burnout and performance
5. Proactive support improves engagement before and after leave
6. Partner support reduces stress and improves focus at work
7. Education shifts culture around stress and productivity
8. Personalized wellness outperforms generic programs
9. Structure, function, and emotional capacity must work together

Topics discussed in this episode:

1. The Five Trimesters of Health framework
2. Pregnancy and postpartum support for employees 35+
3. Retention challenges during parenthood transitions
4. Burnout, disengagement, and presentism at work
5. Nervous system regulation and stress resilience
6. Structure, function, and emotional capacity as pillars of health
7. Supporting employees before leave and after return-to-work
8. Including partners in workplace wellness support
9. Education-driven culture change
10. Personalized vs generic wellness programs

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Connect with Dr. Anjali:

▶ Learn more about Dr. Anjali’s work and access summit resources

👉 https://backinbalancehealth.com/summit-links

▶ Connect with Dr. Anjali on LinkedIn

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/dranjalidc

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Burnout to All Out. Fam, I am so excited for you all to get a chance to hear from the cream of the crop. These are our Burnout to All Out Elevate 360 mastermind clients who've been in my master, my high level mastermind all year this year. And we do a summit once a year with our mastermind clients to debut their zone of genius.

What is incredible is that these clients all embody a 360 degree approach to business. They all contribute in one way, or fashion as subject matter experts that contribute to the pillars of Elevate 360, which is truly that we believe that bodies build businesses and that we have to have business strategy and legacy strategy as well. And so what is really cool about these clients is that

through a series of a couple of days of a summit, they were able to highlight and bring value and educate in their fields, whether it was around self leadership, leadership in business, business strategies, energetics and mindset and or legacy and how we take what we're doing and make our money work harder than we did for it to create impact and legacy over time. And so they,

really embody all that represents the 360 degree approach to business and the burnout to all out through line of our mastermind. So over the next couple of episodes, you are gonna hear from all of these experts. You're gonna get the details to their work in the notes section. And hopefully you're inspired as well as to what is possible.

for you as an entrepreneur and scaling your businesses the way these incredible human beings have. So hope you enjoy the series. let me, I'm gonna do, Anjali, I'm gonna do the formal bio on you. So Anjali is the founder of Back in Balance, the non-cracking, non-popping chiropractor and integrative functional nutrition specialist with over.

18 years of experience in private practice. She has also spent 15 years partnering with corporate workplaces to help teams reduce stress, improve performance, and build long-term wellness from the inside out. As a wife and mother of two daughters, Dr. Anjali brings both professional expertise and personal insight to her work. She's passionate about helping families and organizations

thrive through holistic frameworks of moving well, eating well, and living well. Parenthood is one of life's most demanding transitions, yet often the least supported at work. And in this talk, Dr. Anjali is going to share the five trimesters framework to help parents, especially women, 35 plus, stay healthy, engaged, and resilient through pregnancy, postpartum, and returning to work.

The attendees are gonna walk away with practical strategies to improve structure, function, and emotional capacity benefiting both employee, wellbeing, and workplace performance. Dr. Anjali, I am excited to hear this. You know, I'm like, gosh, if this had been available during my pregnancy journey as a pregnant woman, but also a leader in corporate, like, I think it could have made such an impact. So I am excited. I know I'm gonna have my pen and pencil.

And I know that the community at large is excited to hear from you. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to you, my friend.

Hi, thank you. Like Melissa said, I'm Dr. Anjali. I am the founder of Back in Balance, and I've spent the last 18 years helping people to regulate stress, rebuild energy, and thrive through major life transitions. So today, I want to shine a light on a retention challenge that can often fly under the radar, and that is supporting employees during pregnancy and postpartum.

And especially for those who are starting families later in life, because that is my personal story. And so I like to help others navigating that as well. So we're gonna look at why this matters for your business, how it impacts culture, relationships, leadership pipelines, and how the simple proactive solutions can really make all the difference. So the reality is that more and more employees are starting families after the age of 35.

And these pregnancies and recoveries often come with unique challenges, right? Whether it's physical, emotional, professionally, and add to that the pressure of balancing home and work. And we see higher risks of burnout and disengagement. So most employees, or many employees at least, make it through the leave, but then they quietly quit because they were trying to reduce their workload or they just step away entirely. And...

And that's right when they should be moving into more leadership roles. So this is one of the most silent and costly challenges that people are facing today. So why this matters to every leader and you don't have to be an HR to care about this because the impact is company wide and whether you're an entrepreneur and you're have a small team or if you're in a company because when an employee leaves the cost is at least one and a half to two times their salary.

But the hidden costs are even bigger because burnout spreads, teams will underperform and leaders will start to lose time and momentum. And so when women exit mid-career, that's usually around the parenting years, the leadership pipeline really weakens. So even if the best policies can't fix this, then the employees don't feel supported in practice. So the company culture really suffers.

as does the bottom line. So as Melissa mentioned, I've been in practice for over 18 years now, and I bring the two perspectives of this to work. So it's really bridging the gap between, or bringing clinical experience, corporate challenges, and personal experiences. And so really I want to help offer services that are the integration of all of these worlds.

that are designed to help companies retain their best talent through one of the most critical transitions of life. So having lived this myself as a mom and have two kids and a wife, and I've supported so many families, I know the difference that it can make when employees really feel supported. Because the question is, how can we bring that kind of support into the workplace in a way that's practical and scalable? And that's exactly what the services

in the five trimesters of health that we offer. And that's what it was designed to do. So let's talk a little bit about that. So the five trimesters of life programs, there is a variety of programs and they're all designed to help support employees, whether you're 35 plus and you're navigating pregnancy, postpartum, return to work, because most companies think that maternity support is about the policies, about having leave time or EAP or maybe even a lactation room.

But what's really missing is the real human transition because there is energy regulation, recovery, the balancing of family and career, and actually feeling prepared to return. So these programs really fill in that gap. It gives employees not just permission to take time, but really the tools to actually thrive in it. So when they come back, or even when they're navigating pregnancy, they can bring their full selves and not their burnout.

So we deliver this in multiple ways, making it really easy for companies of any size to plug in support without reinventing the wheel. So Lunch and Learns are a series of bite-sized workshops to offer stress resets or nervous system tools or productivity strategies that really create awareness across the entire team. This is not just for parents and this allows for lasting changes. So it's not just checking off a box to say that yes,

we sat through another training. And then virtual programs like the Parenthood Pivot or the Healthy Human are really designed in a strategic way to provide structured guidance across preconception, pregnancy, postpartum, or in the general category of adulthood. And for those who need a higher level of support, one-on-one coaching is available to really help provide personalized care to keep employees healthy and engaged.

So each service can work on its own, but together we really create a culture where employees don't just survive parenthood and transitions, but actually thrive through those transitions. So this approach works because it goes deeper than generic wellness, right? Wellness is not just doing the ergonomic checklist or drinking your water or taking a little break. It's a combination of things. So all of these programs are proactive. They're about

catching stress and symptoms and exhaustion before they turn into attrition. It's practical because every tool we teach can be applied in real life at work or at home. You don't need a ton of special things available to you. It can be simple things like Dr. Emily talked about putting the ice cream in the garage refrigerator or freezer, right? Simple tools that can really help make a big difference. And it's personalized.

so that employees can feel supported as people and not just workers. And it's proven because I've been doing this for over 18 years to help people regulate their nervous systems, recover their energy and stay engaged in their lives and in their work. So let's pause for a moment so we can experience this difference together. when it comes to regulating our nervous system, there are multiple components in play, right?

In my perspective, there's structure which informs function, which determines emotional capacity. And that in turn leads to how our structure functions. So when we restore structure, we give the body physical alignment and movement and patterns that reduce strain and creates stability. And when we restore function, we support the internal systems like our sleep or energy or digestion or hormone regulation that really keep our body resilient.

And when we rebuild emotional capacity, we help the nervous system regulate and adapt and recover so people can stop living in survival mode and start living with presence and energy. Because these three pillars don't operate in isolation, it is virtually impossible to separate structure from function from emotional capacity. So when one goes off, the others have to compensate. And this is why people end up in cycles of pain or fatigue or burnout.

So our goal is to restore balance by strengthening all of these. So let's try a 90 second reset. That's so you can feel this right now. So go ahead and join me for a moment. If you're sitting, I invite you to stand and take a break if you would like, or you can remain sitting or vice versa. But either way, I'd like you to feel both of your feet on the floor. So we can ground ourselves with the ground. And I'd like you to gently wiggle your toes just to awaken the awareness there.

And if you're sitting or standing, I'd like you to think about stacking your spine one vertebrae at a time. So your ear is above your shoulder, above your elbow, above your hip, and if you're standing above your knee and above your ankle. So that is that your head is supported, it is floating upward, it's kind of suspended from the ceiling. Let the tension drop, soften your jaw, relax your shoulders, and let your hands rest easily.

We're gonna go through one of my favorite exercises to do. I call it the face washing stretch. So we're gonna begin by bringing our arms as close together as we can. It's okay if your elbows don't touch. We're gonna take a nice deep breath in and then as our arms come up towards the back of our head, we're gonna hold our breath as our elbows come out to the side and then take a nice exhale as your arms come down. We'll do that one more time.

Take a nice deep breath in as your arms come toward the back of your head. Hold your breath as your elbows come out to the side. And then exhale slowly as your arms come down. So I'd like you to just notice for how one minute of alignment and breath and presence can really make you feel more stable and clear. And this is what we really mean by nervous system centered health, because it's not about the big complicated interventions.

but about building practices that help your body to feel safe and supported in daily life. So when parents and professionals can learn how to do this, the whole system can recalibrate through structure, function, and emotional capacity, being able to work together again. So some of the strategies that we implement is support before leave, because so many companies think about support beginning when leave starts, but that's often too late because

by the first trimester, nausea or second trimester, fatigue, stress and health issues can already impact your performance and morale. So our approach starts early because we teach employees how to regulate their energy with various nervous system tools, nutrition strategies to reduce complications and ways to stay focused. So this means that they remain engaged and effective for longer, protecting

the whole business continuity. And strategy number two is rethinking postpartum. Because postpartum isn't just the first six weeks. For so many employees, the return to work transition at 12 weeks is actually the hardest. And postpartum, let's be honest, can actually last for years after you actually have your baby. So without real support, employees often come back physically present, but just mentally drained. And that's what we call presentism.

because with ongoing touch points, we reduce isolation, we prep employees before they return to work, and we give them the tools to handle fatigue and mental load. Does this sound familiar to anybody? Has anyone ever experienced this? I'd love to hear from you. And then strategy number three is really including the partners because companies often overlook the role of the partners in this whole journey. But if the partner is struggling at home, then they can't show

fully at work either. So our programs are extended to support the partners, reducing household stress, improving recovery and creating stability. And so that way the employees who feel supported at home can bring more focus and energy to the job. And then strategy number four is using education. So one of our most powerful levers is education. So with Lunch and Learns or the virtual programs,

or the one-on-one coaching, it's really about bringing cultural awareness, not just across parents, but across the whole company, because we want to normalize the conversations that are happening around stress or productivity and nervous system health, because we often think about our bodies as being broken or needing to be fixed. And really it's about understanding how the symptoms are pointing to what kind of support is needed.

so that we can regulate our nervous systems appropriately. And culture is what is gonna drive retention. And really it's about addressing people's health and wellness needs on a one-to-one basis or in a personalized manner, because every employee is different. Some need general guidance, others need deeper support. And that's why we offer these one-on-one opportunities, because it really allows us to personalize care so we can catch health issues before they escalate and they can have tailored strategies

so that the employees can feel truly supported. So some things that we often hear when we were talking to different companies is like, we already have leave or EAP and isn't that enough? Or we offer the ergo assessments or we're trying to do X, and Z. But the reality is that leave and EAP are important, but they don't address attrition because they're not keeping people engaged through the transition. So, or you might be thinking, especially for some of you who might be entrepreneurs or...

just starting out, you might be saying that, you we're too small. And in smaller companies, especially every single person matters even more. So even losing one senior employee can be a really big hit. And a lot of times we will hear, well, employees actually use this, right? Cause I've seen, I've been to countless companies where people have gotten the assessments or they've gone through the trainings and it just sits on the desk somewhere buried under some dust because

there is no transition or there is no integration of the content to an application to their day-to-day practices or their day-to-day life. So for us, what we've noticed is that yes, employees do use this because this isn't just general wellness, it's actually practical and personalized, and it speaks to the exact challenges that people are facing. So just to share an example from clinical practice, I had a 43-year-old corporate leader

Miss Eswee and she came in, she already had a two year old and she was wanting to conceive again and was dealing with chronic fatigue. And so she had the typical challenges of, you know, not getting enough rest or even if she did get enough rest and she was still perpetually tired and she was dealing with overwhelm and emotional dysregulation and all of those things. And so with nervous system tools and nutrition support, we were able to stabilize her energy and she was able to stay engaged.

at work through that whole journey. So rather than needing modified duties or needing to leave work, we were able to help support her in her work-life balance. Or another scenario of a new mom returning to work after 12 weeks, but she just felt off. She was dealing with nursing mother's neck. She had pelvic instability. She was feeling distracted, disconnected, low energy.

often without support that leads to disengagement or resignation. But we were able to do phased planning and ongoing touch points. And so she was able to rebuild her confidence and her capacity. And within weeks she was back to contributing fully at work and at home. And that was what retention in action was really looking like for her. And then finally, culture. This was a startup client who invited me to lead some monthly lunch and learns.

And the topics included stress resets, postpartum productivity, and nervous system tools. So the leaders reported that there were fewer stress complaints, stronger morale, and higher engagement across the teams. So one of the managers said, I didn't even realize how much my team needed this until we saw the change. Because education isn't just for the parents, it's for shifting the company culture all across the board.

So like we've talked about, our framework at Bag of Malins is not about chasing the symptoms, it's about rebuilding the systems underneath. Because when we restore structure, we give the body physical alignment and movement patterns that really will help create that stability and the functional support and the emotional capacity. So we're gonna do one more reset. This is a box breath. So we're gonna take a moment. Again, you can ground yourselves by placing both your feet on the ground.

Resetting your spine in case it's shifted over the last few minutes and then we're going to take a moment to take a nice inhale in for the count of four seconds so join me for an inhale and then you're going to hold that inhale for another count of four and then exhale for a count of four and then hold for a count of four. So this box breath allows you to reset your nervous system and you can do this at any time any place.

So I like this quote because I feel like it really just captures it all. And this isn't about perks or feel good policies, but really about protecting our leadership pipeline, stabilizing our teams and creating workplaces where people want to stay. And it's bridging the personal and the corporate because we're not just supporting one person, one employee. We're really creating a ripple effect and building strength into families, creating healthier teams.

and a more resilient workplace culture. So each pillar in this program is designed to support different pieces of our regulation puzzles. And when we bring them together, that's when we really shift from being reactive to resilient. So next steps, I invite you to scan the QR code. There is lots of different freebies on there, lead magnets. I would love for you to introduce me to your HR wellness leads so that we can protect your...

most valuable assets, your employees, and then their link is going to be shared as well in the chat in case you're not able to scan the QR code. And then as an exclusive giveaway, I wish it was a giveaway, as an exclusive giveaway, we're giving one winner free access to one of our five trimesters of life virtual programs. Our next group cohort is going to kick off on October 6th. So you can scan the code there for access to that.

and I'll wrap up with one of my favorite quotes. So we'll end it there. But if anyone has any questions or anything, I'd love to hear that.

Awesome. Dr. Anjali, this was so good and powerful. A number of people in the chat were just talking about how, what a relief it was just to do the two little exercises that, you know, just for those, that moment of pause, right? To be conscious. I was realizing, I worked my upper body yesterday. This movement right here was like, how high can you go before your arms separate? so tight. Did anybody else feel that? Well, before we wrap up with you, I'm gonna ask you.

The same question I've been asking everyone, how are you as a practitioner, how are you embodying the 360 degree approach? Because you are a practitioner, you're an entrepreneur, you're a mom. Like how are you taking a 360 approach to business and life?

Yeah, I mean, that's what it's all about. It's the 360 approach is that's my model for my practice. That's my model for life is that you can't separate like in business, you can't separate business strategy from the inner work. it goes hand in hand in our health. goes, it's tying in all those pieces, right? That's the structure, the function, the emotional capacity. So I breathe and live 360 in every facet of my.

day my life. That's what it's all about.

Yes, so good. Everybody's just loving, loving, loving what you had to say. Anjali, thank you so much for your time today and your insights. And again, it's another one of those, it's another one of those stories of like your own personal journey and like purpose and passion and your journey brought you to where you are today with who you're serving. It's so powerful. Powerful, awesome.

Thank you.

I hope you found this episode as inspirational and kick ass as I enjoyed interviewing with it. If you love this and you resonated with it, please reach out, reach out to the speakers. Their information is in the notes. Feel free to reach out to us. And as always, if you're curious about mentorship and support and business coaching under the burnout to all out umbrella, go to

burnouttoallout.co and check out what we have going on in the business mentorship world today, including business coaching and retreats that are live and experiential and take a 360 degree approach to business. We can't wait to see you on the other side, wherever we collide.