The Great Crash Out of 2025: Why You’re So Tired (and How to Finish the Year Softly)
Black Girl Burnout
Kelley Bonner
4.7 • 765 Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Kelley names what’s really behind the collective exhaustion so many Black women are feeling: layer after layer of crisis, an overworked nervous system, and the cultural push to lock in when we barely have anything left to give. Drawing from her lived experience and burnout expertise, she breaks down the three layers of the Great Crash Out of 2025 and offers a liberatory alternative: finishing the year softly. Instead of urgency, shame, or “push harder” thinking, this conversation ushers listeners into practical softness, lowered bars, micro-permission slips, and deep rest — a grounding reset for anyone who is tired in their spirit, body, or bones.
Key Takeaways (3–4 max)
- Nothing is wrong with you — you're living through a collective burnout event.
- Survival mode is incompatible with high performance, and your nervous system is doing its best to protect you.
- Finishing the year softly is an act of liberation, not laziness.
- Practical softness > performative productivity, especially in seasons of depletion.
Episode Highlights + Timestamps
- 00:00 — Naming the Great Crash Out of 2025
- Kelley opens with a clear, compassionate framing of the exhaustion so many are feeling and affirms that nothing is wrong with you.
- 07:30 — “Me too, girl. Me too.”
- She shares transparently about grief, family stress, financial uncertainty, and her own nervous system overwhelm — offering shared humanity rather than performance.
- 10:31 — Survival Mode vs. High Performance
- Kelley explains why creativity, focus, and motivation go offline under chronic stress, grounding the conversation in evidence-informed truths about burnout.
- 18:00 — The Soft Pivot: Practical Over Productive
- She offers three soft-life strategies: lowering the bar, finishing the year softly, and giving yourself micro-permission slips.
- 22:43 — Your Only Goal This Month: Soften
- A liberatory reframing of December as a time to reclaim capacity rather than perform productivity or self-reinvention.
If This Episode Spoke to You…
If this episode made you feel seen, relieved, or less alone, share it with another woman who deserves softness and liberation in this season. Leave a review on Apple or Spotify to support the movement — it’s free, deeply impactful, and helps this message reach more women who need it. And stay connected across platforms at Black Girl Burnout for community, softness, and what’s coming next.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast. Kelly here. And today we're talking about something I've been watching slowly build over the last few years. And now it is here. Loud and undeniable. If it feels like you're not locking in this season, if it feels like you're crashing out instead of |
| 0:21.7 | catching up, if you're exhausted or distracted or overwhelmed, if you're wondering, what is wrong with me? |
| 0:29.7 | I want you to hear me clearly. Nothing is wrong with you. You are living through what I am calling |
| 0:37.2 | the great crash out of |
| 0:39.1 | 2025. And today we're going to talk about what it is. We're going to talk about why it's happening |
| 0:45.5 | and how to soften your way through this season instead of shaming yourself for being |
| 0:50.4 | tired or disconnected or just not feeling it. |
| 0:57.0 | I think we're all collectively running on fumes. |
| 1:01.7 | Everywhere I am looking right now, it's my clients, my friends, the news cycle, social media, |
| 1:07.8 | people aren't just tired. |
| 1:10.0 | They're done. Crispy, burnt out. They're tired in their |
| 1:16.3 | spirit. They're tired in their bodies. They're tired in their bones. And what's wild is like when you |
| 1:23.0 | go on social media and start scrolling, you are screamed the messages that are the opposite. |
| 1:29.6 | They're telling you lock in, push harder, finish strong. But so many of us are barely finishing |
| 1:36.8 | the day. This season, the cultural pressure doesn't match the emotional capacity that most of us have. |
| 1:47.2 | And when there's a gap like that, there's this tendency to fill it with shame, to think I should |
| 1:52.6 | be doing more, I should have been further along. |
| 1:55.5 | See, at the end of the year, I didn't get my goals done. |
| 1:57.5 | I should have had more discipline. |
| 1:58.9 | Why can't I get up and go to the gym five days a week? |
| 2:02.0 | And I'm here to tell you, do not fill that gap with shame because no to doing more, |
| 2:10.3 | no, you shouldn't be further along, and no, you don't need more discipline. |
... |
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