Hilary Rose on burnout: 'I got swept up into the work, into the programming of productivity'

With a successful TV career and family, on paper, Hilary Rose was living the dream. In reality, though, she was exhausted and on the cusp of burnout. She tells Gemma Fullam how she finally found solace in nature and was inspired to launch her hit podcast

Sun, 12 Jan, 2025 - 18:00

Gemma Fullam

“Know thyself,” says actor and podcaster Hilary Rose, quoting the most famous of the three maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. “I really love that. I always come back to that.” If you thought of wellness, self-care, mindfulness and manifesting as very recent, very modern concepts and practices, well, you’d be mistaken. The ancients were early adopters of all of the aforementioned. And it wasn’t just the Greeks, the Romans were dab hands, too.

“When you arise in the morning,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in his mindfulness masterwork, Meditations, “think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” That message of living in the now, the ability to find magic in the mundane, is today often forgotten as the relentless demands of modern life obscure the things that truly nourish us.

A few years ago, Rose realised she’d become all too familiar with the modern-day malaise of ‘musts’.

“I got swept up into the work, into the programming of productivity and ‘you must do this’ and ‘you must have a family’ and ‘you must have a house’ and ‘you must have a successful career’,” the Cork-based mum of two says.

“And by the end of 2019, I was completely exhausted. On the floor, burnt out, body, mind and soul. I really had to have a good look at my life and have a good look at how and why I was doing things the way I was doing them.” The then 40-year-old Rose had just finished filming back-to-back seasons of The Young Offenders, in which she plays fiery single mum Mairéad MacSweeney, and she’d also given birth to her second child, who is now five. The pressure, she says, was enormous.

“I ticked all these boxes” — house, family, successful career — “so why aren't I happy?,” she says. “I really started to question why I was unhappy, why I was unhealthy, because I was burnt out.

“So I started to explore what were the things that did make me happy, and it always came back to nature. I tried to then immerse myself in nature to unwind my nervous system. Looking back now, nearly five years later, it was the beginning of a journey. I’m still in the middle of this journey, but it's been really wonderful.”

Rose’s exploration of healing and wellness saw her experiment “with everything” from breathwork and cold-water immersion to plant medicine and meditation, she says.

I felt a shift in me in many different ways, and I knew I was at the beginning of a different part of my journey, and that was really positive and really hopeful.

Inspired to share the things that had sparked positive change in her life, Rose began blogging and the overwhelmingly positive reaction prompted her to launch the Live Wild podcast, which “gently encourages you to live outside the box” and is now 21 episodes strong, with the remainder of season three set to drop in the near future and season four shortly after.

The list of podcast guests to date features names from the wellness world with a sprinkle of entertainment-industry stardust in the mix. The Happy Pear twins, David and Stephen Flynn, are in there, as is actor Seana Kerslake (she and Rose starred together in TV drama Smother); Wim Hof breathwork practitioner Níall Ó Murchú; comedian and My Therapist Ghosted Me podcaster Joanne McNally. It’s an eclectic bunch. Rose’s methodology was to pick people who interested her, and she has, she says, learned from each one.

“Every single guest, whether they intend to or not, drops some kind of wisdom bomb that really resonates.”

SIMPLE SELF-CARE

Hilary Rose: “Rather than trying to make it complicated and say, ‘I must get up and meditate at 6am’, or ‘I must do breathwork’, or ‘I must do yoga’, pick one thing. Keep it simple." Picture: Miki Barlok

We’ve never needed a bit of wisdom more, really. The wellness world can be bamboozling, and well-intentioned January self-care can quickly descend into months of beating ourselves up because we’re not doing the things we feel we ‘should’ be doing. Aiming for wellness can end up making us feel worse. Is there a way to stop mindfulness becoming just another January ‘must-do’? Can self-care be simple?

Yes, is Rose’s enthusiastic answer. First, she says, strip things back.

“Rather than trying to make it complicated and say, ‘I must get up and meditate at 6am’, or ‘I must do breathwork’, or ‘I must do yoga’, pick one thing. Keep it simple. Rather than adding to your life, strip stuff away. Declutter your life. Declutter your house. Declutter your workspace. Declutter your kitchen. Declutter your fridge. Declutter everything because that's how you will see what you need and what you don't need. So keep it simple, declutter, and add one thing that is simple for you to do.”

For that one simple thing, once your morning alarm has rung, Rose suggests taking five minutes in which the focus is to just breathe and reconnect with yourself.

“Set a timer, and say ‘I'm going to give myself five minutes in the morning to breathe really deeply, really intentionally, and decide what way my day is going to go’. And that's it. Other than that, strip everything away. Make your life as easy as possible.”

Breathing and decluttering don’t sound exciting, she admits, but in light of how overwhelmed and drowning in clutter most of us are, it’s her best advice. It’s January, she points out, we are still in the thick of winter. We should be hibernating, conserving our resources, not putting pressure on ourselves to set and achieve goals.

“You're still in that very dark, deep phase within yourself,” she explains. “It's like the seed underground hasn't germinated yet; it's not ready to spring into life. That doesn't happen till February.”

BRING IT TO THE BREATH

Hilary Rose: “We're under that spell of, if you haven't achieved or haven't reached the goal that day, then that day was a failure.” Picture: Miki Barlok

January, she reiterates, is a time to be gentle with ourselves, “to get back in touch with that nature clock, and go with it. If you're feeling tired, don't set massive goals. Don't do it.” It's Rose all over – refreshingly realistic. She’s a fan of the fundamentals, and time and again, brings it all back to the power and accessibility of the breath.

“The breath is so important. It's so simple. And you don't need anything for that. It's within you.” She has a way of blasting through the wellness woo-woo to hone in on easy-to-incorporate, effective practices that, crucially, don’t involve expensive gadgets or gear. The big message I’m getting — and it’s such a blessed relief in the January bleakness — is that it is OK to just be. And in just being, you’ll find the magic, and the answers, and, if you don’t, that’s OK too.

“We're under that spell of, if you haven't achieved or haven't reached the goal that day, then that day was a failure. It's not. It's absolutely not,” Rose says. The takeaway, actually, she says, is to “go with the flow. Everything happens for a reason”.

It’s such a gentle approach and a perspective shift that’s as easy as it is empowering.

She’s a big fan of meditation, too. I can’t do it, I wail. I end up thinking about that dress I saw on Depop or the NCT that’s due.

“Actually, the realisation that you are thinking of those things is meditation,” she says, changing my perspective once again.

“And the more that you can gently encourage yourself to sit and be with that, the more it becomes like muscle memory, and your self-awareness grows from that point. It's a practice of self-awareness. It doesn't have to be big and insightful and transcendent. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. I think if you start to develop that little practice of self-awareness, it can be brought into everyday actions. And your whole day can eventually become like a walking meditation.

"Go with the flow. Do what's easy, and eventually it will sit with you.”

Rose has a gift for bringing clarity to the abstract. She’s living the wisdom she’s found in the last few years and is open to more of it, to collecting tools for life along the way, and, through her podcast, hearing how others have found their way through their own challenges and gleaning lessons from what’s shared.

“Everyone’s going through it in some shape or form. It's really helpful to know that,” Rose says of the adversities we all encounter. “And that's our life journey. It's about self-awareness. Know thyself. And how do you know yourself? Only by experiencing yourself in many different ways.

"I'm 45 now. I'm not the person I was when I was 20. I'm not the person I was at 30. I look back at her with great compassion and gratitude for all that she did to get me where I am today. Again, that's part of the journey of self-awareness.”

And that journey begins with a breath. Simple as that.