Will Jones
You don’t have to push harder to keep your life afloat. Most high-capacity people aren’t struggling because they’re not doing enough; it’s because they’re overextending, overthinking, and over-functioning. With a neuroscience lens, Barbara Gustavson and her team at Discover Next Step can explain why overwhelm happens, why it’s not a personal flaw, and how small resets restore clarity, energy, and capacity.
Barbara, a brain health educator, speaker, and leadership facilitator holding a master’s degree in Psychology, is known for her approachable style and calming demeanor. She provides community leaders, caregivers, and health professionals with practical, science-based tools to recover, rewire, and lead with clarity. Her work combines neuroscience, psychology, and human connection to help others avoid burnout, develop resilience, and lead sustainably. She manages Dr. Daniel Amen’s brain health certification programs and is the author of REGROUP, Permission to Be Bold, and co-author of Breaking Average.
Supporting Those Who Assist Others
Barbara’s work focuses on supporting those who assist others: health professionals, community leaders, and caregivers who often carry more than people realize. She aims to educate them on practical brain health and resilience strategies they can implement immediately.
Her background includes psychology, leadership development, neuroscience education, and years of personal experience as a caregiver facing heavy stress, emotional challenges, and periods of burnout. As she says, “Those experiences reshaped how I live and how I guide others to regroup long before they reach their breaking point.”
Taking on Too Much
Many leaders and helping professionals live amid a constant whirlwind of responsibility; they are the ones people rely on, often without realizing how much they carry themselves. Much of their emotional burden is unseen, even to them, and the toll shows in their energy, clarity, and overall health. As Barbara explains, “Even anchors need something to hold onto.”
Burnout isn’t a personal shortcoming; it’s a brain and nervous system issue. Waiting until you’re depleted only makes things harder. Support and small resets can protect your capacity long before you reach a breaking point. Fortunately, Barbara and her team aim to provide precisely that. Through her book, REGROUP: How to Reset Your Mind so You Can Unlock Hidden Energy, Enjoy Productive Peace, and Feel Like Yourself Again, she highlights the emotional demands of life and how to find a place of alignment, focus, and deep connection.
The Team’s Expertise: Stress Relief
The team specializes in translating brain health into something people can actually feel and use immediately in their lives. These are people who have lived the realities of caregiving, loss, leadership pressure, and burnout, so they don’t speak about overdoing as a concept, but rather as an empathetic reality.
Barbara’s approach combines neuroscience, psychology, and practical tools in a grounded, human way that helps people recognize what’s happening both in their brain and in their emotional life. Most of all, she focuses on prevention and doable resets that support people who have a lot on their plates but have a big calling to help others.
In the modern world, many people can feel as if they live in the middle of an unending vortex of stress, anxiety, and pressure. This feeling often triggers a fight or flight response, and for those who have made it their profession to help others in need, the response is often to fight.
This can lead people to push further and further, doing more and more, ultimately to their own detriment. Fortunately, though, Barbara Gustavson and her team offer support and advocate that moderation is healthier for everyone involved.