In Your Right Mind

with Monique Rhodes

A Bite-Sized Podcast Packed with Inspiration and Wisdom

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Emotions, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

5 Quiet Signs You’re Burned Out (And You Don’t Even Know It)

Most people don’t know they’re burned out. They just think this is who they have become.

In this episode, Monique walks through five quiet signs of burnout that almost nobody talks about. Not the obvious ones. Not “you’re tired” and “you’re working too hard.” The ones you can have for two or three years without ever realising you have them.

You’ll hear why losing your anticipation for small things is one of the very earliest signals, why going quiet on the group chats isn’t antisocial — it’s a system in power-saving mode — and the specific kind of evening tiredness that gets misread as personality.

Number four is the one almost everybody recognises but nobody connects to burnout.

If you have started to wonder whether you used to be more fun and you just got older — this episode is the one for you. Burnout is not a personality. It is a state. Which means it can shift.

Habits, Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety

The 9 Things Calm People Do Differently

Monique has spent fifteen years around genuinely calm people — and she means the real ones, not the ones who post about it. They all do nine very specific things that the rest of us don’t.

This episode walks through all nine. Not personality traits. Not temperament. Habits. Which means they’re learnable.

Number six is the one almost no one believes is actually a calmness skill. Number eight is the one Monique personally got most wrong, for the longest time.

You’ll hear what calm people do with small decisions, why they refuse to run a tight schedule, why they don’t argue back at their own thoughts, and the very specific thing they do with other people’s moods that the rest of us get backwards.

If you have spent the last year feeling slightly behind, slightly buzzing, slightly never-quite-arrived — this episode is for you.

Emotions, Relationships Friendships and Community, Self Mastery

7 Things You Stop Apologising For After 50

There is a kind of permission that arrives — sometimes in your fifties, sometimes later, sometimes never — and it quietly changes everything about how you live the next thirty years.

In this episode, Monique walks through seven specific things the people she knows who have this permission have stopped apologising for. Not the obvious ones. The ones almost nobody talks about.

You’ll hear the story of a woman who came back from ten days at her sister’s house, exhausted, and realised she hadn’t said the word “no” once in the whole visit. The cake at the lunch table that closed a small loop in someone’s head forever. And the moment in a workshop in Auckland when a room full of people went quiet at the same question.

Number five is the one most people quietly admit they didn’t realise they were even allowed to do.

This is an episode for anyone who is starting to notice they have spent a lot of years explaining themselves — and is ready to take some of that energy back.

Emotions, Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety

Why You Feel So Tired When You Haven’t Done Anything

There is a kind of tired that cannot be explained by anything you did.

Not the tired you feel after hard work or a bad night’s sleep — those make sense. You can trace them. You can point to a reason.

This episode is about the other tired. The tired that arrives in the late afternoon when you have barely done anything. The tired that finds you sitting on the edge of the bed at nine in the morning, already wrung out. The tired you cannot explain to anybody else and have started to wonder if something is wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with you. The tiredness has a name. And once you know the name, you can start to put some of it down.

Monique tells the story of a woman who sits in her driveway for ten minutes every evening before walking into her own house — not because anything is wrong at home, but because she needs ten minutes before becoming the person her family needs her to be. And a moment in an Auckland workshop where she asked forty women when the last time was they had been alone with their own thoughts, and the room went silent.

This is an episode about emotional labour — the invisible, unpaid, constant work of regulating everybody else’s feelings. And one small, specific practice to begin getting fifteen minutes of your own life back each day.

Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

I Teach Happiness at 70 Colleges. Here’s What’s Wrong.

I have been teaching happiness at over seventy universities for fifteen years. And I have watched the wellness industry get almost everything wrong.

Not a little wrong. Wrong at the level of the question.

In this episode, I’m telling you three things the happiness industry is selling you that are actually making you worse. Not because the people selling them are bad — most mean well. But because the entire premise is built on a misunderstanding about how humans actually work.

Happiness isn’t a feeling — it’s a baseline. Forced positivity isn’t wellness — it’s shame with a ribbon on it. And the thing being sold as self-care is usually comfort, which is a different thing entirely.

If you’ve been doing all the things and still feel flat and behind — this one’s for you.

Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

Perfectionism Isn’t a Virtue, It’s a Coping Mechanism

Most perfectionists have been praised their whole lives for being perfectionists. That’s the thing that makes it so hard to see.

In this episode, Monique unpacks what perfectionism actually is, underneath the praise: a survival contract your younger self made with the world that said, if I get this right, I will be safe.

She tells the story of a woman called Nina — a successful lawyer whose family and team had stopped bringing her their rough drafts because they’d learned she had a very accurate ruler. And the story of a brilliant writer friend with a folder of forty-three finished, unsent pieces on her laptop.

This is an episode for the high achievers who have quietly been paying the price of their own perfection for years. Who can’t tell the difference between high standards and fear anymore. Who finish things and feel relieved instead of proud.

You will leave this episode with one small, specific experiment to try this week. Not a breakthrough. Not a life overhaul. Just eighty per cent, one thing at a time.

Emotions, Self Mastery, The Mind

Apologizing Too Much? This Might Be Why

If you say sorry when someone bumps into you — this episode is for you.

In this conversation, Monique talks about the slow, quiet erasure of yourself that happens when you’ve spent years apologising for existing. The waiter, the wrong order, the friend who talks over you, the text that begins “so sorry to bother you.” All those tiny moments where you choose someone else’s comfort over your own legitimate need. Again. And again. And again.

She names where this comes from — the fawn response, the way some of us learned, very young, that small was safer than seen. And she shares a moment with a friend who apologised for crying at her own father’s funeral, an apology so deep it had become a reflex, ready before the grief had even fully landed.

This is not about becoming inconsiderate. It’s about the difference between real warmth and compulsive self-erasure. One is a choice. The other is a held breath.

If you’ve been doing this for so long that you can’t tell the two apart anymore — please listen.

Grief, Relationships Friendships and Community, Stress and Anxiety

The Sandwich Generation

You are caring for your kids, your parents, your work, and your own grief — and somewhere in that pile, you forgot you were a person too.

This episode is for the women in their forties, fifties, and sixties who are holding more than anyone is acknowledging. The ones who know their mother’s medication schedule the way they know their own phone number. The ones who track who needs which form, which appointment, which gentle phone call. The ones who park outside the supermarket for five quiet minutes because they cannot face one more aisle yet.

Monique tells the story of her friend Maeve — fifty-two, two teenagers, a mother with dementia — who phoned her from a carpark after a specialist appointment and realised she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked her how she was doing. She tells the story of a woman at a workshop who hadn’t seen her own GP in three years because it had started to feel selfish.

This is the long, quiet grief of caring for someone you love while they slowly become less of who they were. Of doing something extraordinary in almost complete silence. Of being asked to be infrastructure when you are, in fact, a person.

If you’ve been holding everything together — please listen. You are not failing. You are doing something almost no one acknowledges. And this episode is one quiet acknowledgment.

Emotions, Grief, Relationships Friendships and Community

Why Mother’s Day Hangovers Hit So Hard

If Mother’s Day was harder than you expected, and now it’s Monday and you’re not okay — this episode is for you.

Not the catastrophic kind of hard. The quieter kind. The kind that happens when your mother is still here, you maybe even saw her or rang her yesterday, and yet you spent the whole day performing a version of your relationship that felt three inches away from the truth. The kind of hard that doesn’t fit on a sympathy card.

In this episode, Monique talks about what she calls the Mother’s Day hangover — the flat, hollow Monday that lands after a day of holding it all together. She shares a story about her friend Tess phoning her in tears the morning after, and a quiet moment in the supermarket card aisle looking for a card that didn’t exist.

This episode names something most people are carrying alone: that you can grieve a relationship that still exists. You can grieve the mother you needed even while the one you have is still on the end of the phone. And you don’t have to have any of it sorted by today.

If yesterday was hard, please listen to this. You’re not the only one.

Emotions, Grief, Relationships Friendships and Community

The Hidden Cost of Being “The Strong One” in Your Family

If you are the person everyone calls when they’re falling apart — who do you call?

This episode is for the strong ones.

You know who you are. You’re the eldest daughter, the friend everyone leans on, the person who keeps the family together, the one who organised the funeral. And you’ve been wearing that role so long you might not even realise it’s a costume.

In this conversation, I want to talk about the hidden cost of being the strong one. The way it gets handed to you so early you don’t remember putting it on. The slow, quiet loneliness of always being the giver and never quite knowing how to receive. And the strange panic that can rise up when someone genuinely asks how you are — because you’ve been so fluent in everyone else’s pain you’ve lost the language for your own.

I share a story about my friend who organised her father’s funeral and then spent months crying in supermarket car parks. I share my own honest experience of trying to put the costume down. And I offer one small, slightly terrifying invitation: tell one safe person you’re not okay. Just one. One crack in the door is enough.

You are allowed to fall apart. You are allowed to need things. You are allowed to be held.

Emotions, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

You’re Not Lazy. You’re Emotionally Depleted.

If you’ve been calling yourself lazy lately, this episode is going to gently change something for you.

We’ve been taught to read exhaustion as a character flaw. Can’t get off the couch? Lazy. Can’t reply to the message? Lazy. Skipping the workout? Lazy. But what most of us call laziness is actually emotional depletion. They are not the same thing, and treating one like the other is making people sicker.

In this episode, Monique walks through the difference between lazy (“I don’t want to”) and depleted (“I literally cannot”), the way emotional debt accumulates without us noticing, and what to do when your body is sending you a signal that your mind keeps trying to override.

If you’ve been waking up tired, snapping at people you love, or staring at a task you “should” be doing and feeling absolutely nothing — this conversation is for you. You’re not broken. You’re depleted. And those are two very different roads.

Habits, Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety

Why Your Morning Routine Is Making You More Anxious

If you wake up and immediately start running through a 12-step morning routine — cold plunge, journal, gratitude list, supplements, workout — and somehow still feel anxious before you’ve even made coffee, this episode is for you.

I’m a meditation teacher and I’ll tell you something honestly: there are still mornings I wake up anxious before my feet hit the floor. After decades of practice. So if that’s you too — if you’ve worked at a morning routine and you’re still waking up tense — please hear that you’re not failing. Something else is going on.

In this episode, I unpack why so many of us are quietly performing wellness instead of actually feeling well. The 5 AM club. The perfect morning routine. The optimisation stack. None of it is making us calmer. In a lot of cases it’s making us more anxious, more self-critical, and more disconnected from what our bodies actually need.

I’ll share my own honest morning — the dog, the kettle, the small thing I’ve settled into after years of trying everything. The one question I ask myself before the day starts running me. And what a real, embodied morning practice can look like (it’s much smaller than you’ve been told).

If you’ve been feeling exhausted by your own self-improvement, take this as your permission to do less.

Habits, Relationships Friendships and Community, The Mind

Why Your Phone Is Quietly Stealing Your Happiness

MIT researcher Sherry Turkle found that just placing a silenced phone face down on a table between two people reduces the depth of their conversation and their empathy for each other. In this episode, Monique explores what our phones are actually doing to our happiness baseline, why we reach for them so compulsively, and shares real stories of people who made small changes to their phone habits and saw their relationships and their wellbeing transform.

Emotions, Self Mastery, The Mind

Why “Think Positive” Is the Worst Advice You’ve Ever Been Given

“Think positive” is the most common advice in self-help. It’s also one of the most damaging. In this episode, Monique breaks down the science of why forcing positivity actually makes things worse, what toxic positivity really does to us, and what to do instead. Drawing on her own journey and decades of happiness research, this is the conversation you wish someone had had with you years ago.

Emotions, Relationships Friendships and Community, The Mind

Everyone Says Get Out More. Here’s Why That Won’t Fix Your Loneliness.

The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. But the advice we keep hearing — “get out more, join a club, be more social” — isn’t working. In this episode, Monique explores the crucial difference between isolation and solitude, why introverts experience loneliness differently, and why you don’t need more friends. You need deeper ones.

Emotions, Self Mastery, The Mind

How to Stop Taking Everything Personally

I was mid-song, spotlight on me, when Chuck Berry waved me off the stage — and in two seconds flat, my brain went straight to: it’s me, I’m not good enough. In this episode, I share what that moment taught me about why we take things personally and why it has absolutely nothing to do with weakness. I walk you through three practical tools to help you stop letting other people’s storms become your story.

Emotions, Self Mastery, The Mind

What Your Emotions Are Really Trying to Tell You

I spent years trying to override my emotions — pushing past the anxiety, dismissing the anger, powering through the sadness — until I finally stopped and listened to what they were actually trying to tell me. In this episode, I share that turning point and what I discovered about the real purpose of our emotions. Your anxiety isn’t a malfunction, your anger isn’t a problem, and your sadness isn’t weakness — they’re all messengers. And when you learn to listen to them instead of fight them, everything changes.

Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

Signs You Have High-Functioning Anxiety

I spent years looking completely fine on the outside while my nervous system was quietly running on overdrive. No panic attacks, no avoidance — just an endless to-do list, guilt every time I tried to rest, and a body that had been screaming at me for years. In this episode, I walk you through six specific signs of high-functioning anxiety — including the quiet, invisible ones that are so easy to mistake for ambition, responsibility, or just being a hard worker. If you’ve ever felt exhausted behind a perfectly composed exterior, this one is for you.

Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

The Real Reason You Can’t Be Present

If you’ve ever tried to be present and found your mind halfway across the week fifteen seconds later, this episode is for you. Monique explores the real reason presence is so hard — from the brain’s default mode network to the way trauma creates hyper-vigilance that looks like awareness but isn’t — and shares three gentle doorways back to the here and now. No forcing, no performing. Just coming home.

Self Mastery, Stress and Anxiety, The Mind

How to Stop Worrying About Things You Can’t Control

This week on In Your Right Mind, Monique digs into one of the most common sources of unnecessary suffering: worrying about things outside our control. Drawing on her time riding a motorcycle through India, a teaching from the Dalai Lama, and years of working with people on happiness and mental wellbeing, she walks through a practical two-list framework and a three-step process to interrupt the worry cycle — for real. If your mind won’t stop running worst-case scenarios, this one’s for you.

Emotions, Self Mastery, The Mind

Why You Feel Empty Even When Your Life Looks Fine

This week we’re talking about something a lot of people feel but very few say out loud — that hollow, empty feeling that shows up even when your life looks completely fine from the outside. Monique walks through the three real reasons inner emptiness appears, including values misalignment and emotional disconnection, and offers three practical

Here are a few of my most popular podcast episodes:

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Everything Will Be Alright : Manifesting Reality With Your Thoughts

This can be so hard for us to believe. However, when we do, we end up making wiser problem-solving decisions.

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Fly Me To The Moon : Why Small Gestures Matter

It can be easy for us to think that we have to contribute in significant ways to make a difference. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

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A Reflection On Depression

This podcast is about coping with negative emotions and thoughts. However, it also discusses depression. It is in response to a question. I hope it is helpful.