Ashley Arata went from advertising work at Amazon to starting her own functional medicine company after experiencing burnout.
This story is Part 2 in a three-part series on women’s hormone health. Tomorrow, we’ll share integrative health practitioner Ashley Arata’s advice on why prioritizing hormone health is a crucial pillar for overall wellness. Catch up on the first story here.
Ashley Arata spent a decade climbing the corporate ladder at Amazon, managing millions of dollars in contracts with high-value advertising partners until health issues forced her to stop. A precancerous thyroid tumor led to surgery in late 2023. She took just two weeks off of work before returning to the grind.
The following year, her health progressively declined. That, compounded by multiple family losses and burnout, led Arata to walk away from the career she’d built and embark on a journey of personal health discovery and transformation. What she learned along the way kick-started her second career.
At what point did you recognize that chronic stress and burnout from years in a high-stakes corporate role were contributing to your health issues? It took a little bit of time because we are so accustomed as high-functioning women to just assume that this is how it is and this is how you are, and this is how the modern world is, and you just exist this way … So I had to kind of rewire that a little bit and make it less about mindset and being tired and more about OK, there's science to this.
After you left Amazon, what came next? I took a year off, traveled, recovered from burnout … and during that time as well, I went back to school very slowly, very passively to learn about functional medicine, which is basically root-cause medicine and compliments what Western medicine does. And I completely figured out what was going on with my body, what was causing my thyroid issues to begin with, and I basically used myself as a guinea pig to heal.
At the end of the year, after I had these great results and I had access to all the functional medicine testing. Friends and family started asking me for help with stuff they had going on … In January, I stood up a website (Ashley Cruz Arata Wellness) and decided to launch my own practice and do this full time and work with women.
What was the single most valuable lesson you learned during that time in your life? I think in hindsight, I realized once things slowed down and calmed down, that my body had actually been sending me signals for a really long time that things were not right, that things were off. And you know, it's like our bodies will whisper until they're forced to shout. And the shouting's going to turn into a scream if you keep not listening. So I think the biggest lesson for me is … listen to your body, trust your intuition. If you suspect something is off with your body, it probably is.
I get women who come to me and they're so frustrated and upset with how they're feeling and you know what's going on in their body. And I'm like, ‘No, this is great. This is communication. This is information. Your body is trusting you enough to listen, right? That something is wrong. So let's listen and let's do something about it.’
