Highly Functional

First interview episode!! Sarah talks to Kyla de Clifford, host of The Canna Curious Podcast and founder of Ruby Mary Botanicals, about pleasure and rest as resistance in a burnt-out world, how stigma around the plant overlaps with the policing of women's bodies, and what it costs to hold space for others. The episode closes with the Burnout Book Club: Abolition. Feminism. Now. , and a conversatio...

What happens when the reward for good work is more work? Sarah looks at performance punishment, why reliable people end up carrying more than their share, and whether quiet quitting is really the answer. What we cover 🌿 What “performance punishment” and “quiet promotion” actually mean, and why it’s a popular term, not an academic one 🌿 Four studies on gender, helping behaviour, citizenship press...

For a show that runs on evidence, this week is about the person behind the microphone. Sarah chills out on the couch, puts the kettle on and answers the question nobody asks high-functioning people: how are you, actually? What we cover: 🌿 What’s been going on: the website , the merch, and the first interview episodes 🌿 The quieter stuff: energy, rest and what’s really going on under “I’m fine”...

Medicinal cannabis is now a huge commercial market in Australia, but the people who risked everything to supply it first were often women giving it away for free. So who is this system built for, and who paid for it to exist? 🌿 What we cover Jenny Hallam , Brownie Mary and Valerie Corral: the legacy healers who came before the legal market The Women’s Co-operative Guild, and what “basket power” h...

What happens when advocacy stops being a choice and becomes the price of admission for care? This week: advocacy burnout, the hidden administrative load on people with disability and patients, what Tasmania's medicinal cannabis driving defence shows about unpaid advocacy, why mutual aid isn't charity, and a Burnout Book Club pick. 🌿 A name for the unpaid labour of self-advocacy 🌿 Activis...

Part One is why so many women and gender-diverse people carry a late ADHD or autism diagnosis, the "Masking Tax" that comes with decades of performing fine, and how eerily similar trauma symptoms can look to neurodivergence on paper — hypervigilance, scanning a room, the lot. Part Two picks up where that leaves a lot of us: reaching for medicinal cannabis to cope, often years before any diagnosis,...

What we cover: 🧠 The (contested) neuroscience of empathic overactivation — what mirror neurons can and can't explain 📖 Untangling three terms that get used interchangeably: secondary traumatic stress, vicarious traumatization, and compassion fatigue 🏛️ Why burnout research actually started in caregiving professions — and why the modern conversation centres corporate burnout instead 👩‍👧‍👦...

Episode 20: Baduizm & The Botanical Ritual Nearly thirty years after Baduizm, Erykah Badu is still writing the rulebook on her own terms — from the ritual she built her debut around, to That Badu (her own cannabis strain), to Before the World Blows, her brand-new album with the Alchemist. This is the full-portrait episode: the endocannabinoid science behind why ritual matters, the exact geneti...

Episode 19: F*ck Optimisation, I Want to Live (The Case Against Being the Best Version of Yourself) We've turned rest into a deliverable. This week: why busyness became a status symbol, what the research actually says about time, money, and happiness, and why lying on the couch doing absolutely nothing might be the most radical thing you do all week. What we cover: 🌿 "Productivity orientation" —...

A fifty-year lineage from a 1973 arts festival in a dying dairy town to the reason medicinal cannabis is legal in Australia today. This week we trace the throughline from the Nimbin Aquarius Festival including its roots as an environmental movement and the landmark 1979 Terania Creek forest blockade, through the founding of the HEMP Embassy and MardiGrass, to the families including Dan and Lucy Ha...

Hope isn't a mood — it's a practice. This week: a global survey putting women's voices at the centre of cannabis research, an honest lap of Australian cannabis law reform, and the case for building our future homes out of hemp and a hopeful book recommendation too. What we cover: Doomscrolling, AI slop, and choosing hope as a practice, not a mood Pearle Global Women's Health &...

Grief isn't just sadness; neuroscience shows it activates the same reward circuitry as craving, and complex grief overlaps heavily with trauma responses like PTSD. This episode widens the lens to include climate grief and "lost future" mourning for millennials, digs into what the actual cannabinoid research on PTSD and nightmares shows, and gets personal about the different shapes grief can take i...

Episode 15: Manifesting in the End Times — Millennials, the Lion's Gate, and Why We're All Suddenly "Into" Astrology Again It's the 8/8 Lion's Gate, and millennial astrology culture is having a moment — but the research suggests this isn't random. We unpack why belief in astrology and "magical thinking" reliably spikes during periods of collective uncertainty, and what that says about living throu...

"Rest is resistance" shows up on tote bags and therapist Instagram stories — but where does it actually come from, and why does choosing to stop feel so hard when you're high-functioning and professionally exhausted? This week: the real origins of the phrase, what burnout research says about why guilt shows up the second you sit still, a very undignified Overland Track story involvin...

Burnout is chronic for millennials but what does the research say about the medicine we use to help us? Today we deep dive into the real research around CBD and the psychological sabotage of optimisation, wellness routines as another contributor to the burnout cycle and more. Buy the Highly Functional Medicine Journal 10% off with the listener code 'HIGHLYFUNCTIONAL10' SHOW NOTES Curran, T., &...

Chronically Curious: Tailoring Your Endocannabinoid System Everyone's endocannabinoid system is different — which means the strain that works wonders for me might do nothing for you (or the opposite). In this episode, I break down why terpenes, THC ratios, and CBD matter way more than "sativa vs indica," and why millennial burnout and anxiety need a personalized approach, not a one-s...

The "munchies" is real neuroscience, not just a stoner cliché — THC hijacks the brain's hunger and reward circuitry, and this episode breaks down exactly how. But we take it further than the joke usually goes: how synthetic THC became an FDA-approved lifeline for AIDS-related wasting in the 1980s, why appetite loss is a common (and normal) side effect of ADHD stimulant meds, and whether a lesser-k...

Mid-year is hitting, the sensory overload is real, and we are officially breaking up with hustle culture. In this episode, we’re ditching the #girlboss pipeline for radical compassion, anti-burnout boundaries, and a little bit of mind expansion. In this episode, we tackle: The Power of Language: Why we need to change the narrative from "using" cannabis to taking or consuming a daily bota...

Have you ever walked out of a doctor's appointment feeling entirely dismissed, misheard, or told that your chronic stress was "just hormones"? In this episode of Highly Functional , we explore "The Green Ceiling"—the systemic barriers and medical gaslighting that women and gender-diverse individuals often experience when seeking alternative healthcare pathways. We share practical, ground-level str...

Have you ever noticed a point where your routines seem to hit a wall, or what used to bring you instant calm starts feeling a little less effective? In this solo episode, we are going Beyond Baseline . We explore the science of how our bodies adapt, why an all-or-nothing approach doesn't work for high-functioning individuals, and how to mindfully plan a restorative tolerance break without trig...

In this solo episode of Highly Functional , we explore the rapidly expanding cultural phenomenon of the sober curious movement , driven heavily by high-performing millennials. We dismantle the deeply ingrained corporate and social stigmas surrounding alcohol abstinence, examine the systemic neurotoxic damage alcohol causes by effortlessly breaching the blood-brain barrier , and run a comparative b...

Did you know your body produces its own cannabis-like compounds to keep your biology in a state of balance? Welcome to the Endocannabinoid System (ECS)—the master regulatory network you were likely never taught in school. In this episode of Highly Functional , we are stripping away the stigma and diving straight into the hard science of the ECS. We map out its discovery, break down the critical ro...

EPISODE 05: The Professional Silence: Workplace, Stigma, and Your Rights What does it actually cost your career to keep your medical life entirely off-book? In this episode of Highly Functional , Sarah steps into the glass-walled conference rooms of corporate Australia to tackle the quiet elephant in the room: navigating the professional landscape as a legal medicinal cannabis patient. While your...

Welcome to the cultural episode. This is the one about why high-achieving, Type A, care-giving women are among the most likely to live with unmanaged conditions and the least likely to seek help. Funny, warm, and deeply recognisable, this episode is an exploration of what happens when the pressure to perform finally catches up with our biology. Consider this your official permission slip to stop h...

Welcome to Highly Functional — the podcast for the quietly prescribed, professionally exhausted, and chronically curious. This is the trailer. Less than Five minutes. Who this show is for, why it exists, and what I actually mean when I say I'm fine. Hosted by a TGA-approved medicinal cannabis patient in Australia. Real conversations about a legal, prescribed medication — and the people who ho...