I want to start by telling you what burnout actually felt like in my body, because I think we've been describing it wrong.
We talk about burnout like it's a moment. Like there's a before & an after. Like one day you're fine & the next day you're not, & you can point to the exact thing that tipped you over.
That's not how it felt for me.
For me, burnout wasn't one place or one season. It followed me. It showed up in different rooms, different circumstances, different chapters of my life wearing different clothes, but always feeling the same underneath. A particular kind of warmth that would rise in my chest the moment I entered a situation my body had already decided was wrong. A specific dread that lived in my stomach. Not butterflies. Not nerves. Something heavier than that. Something that said this is wrong in a language that had nothing to do with words.
It was the exhaustion that made no sense. Not tired like you need sleep. Tired like something was feeding on you. Like an energy vampire met me at the door & took everything I had the moment I walked in. I could arrive full, genuinely, actually full, & feel completely hollow within the hour.
& then there was the anger. The kind that felt irrational even to me. The low simmer of irritability I couldn't explain & couldn't shake & couldn't think my way out of no matter how many times I told myself to calm down.
It happened in more than one place. More than one relationship. More than one season of my life. & every single time, my body knew before I did. It always does.
Here is the part that still gets me when I think about it. I used to make myself physically ill at that job. Not metaphorically. Actually, genuinely, physically sick. Nausea that felt completely real, because it was completely real. Symptoms that had no medical explanation & every somatic one.
& here's the part that's almost impossible to explain until you've experienced it yourself. The moment I left, the symptoms vanished. Not gradually. Not over the course of an hour as I decompressed. Almost immediately. Like my body had been running an alarm & someone finally turned it off.
I didn't understand it then. I do now.
My nervous system had decided the environment was unsafe. Not dangerous in the way a car accident is dangerous. Threatening in the way that chronic stress, chronic dread, chronic this is not right for me is threatening. & so it did what nervous systems do. It sounded the alarm. It produced real, physical, undeniable symptoms to get my attention. & when I finally listened, when I actually left, it stood down.
No amount of thinking made those symptoms go away. I tried. I told myself I was fine. I told myself it was just a job. I told myself to be grateful, to push through, to stop being so sensitive. My mind said all the reasonable things. My body ignored every single one of them.
Here's what I've come to understand about burnout, & about the nervous system in general. Your body is not responding to your thoughts. It is responding to your experience. To the accumulation of everything it has felt, held, absorbed, & been asked to keep carrying. & it speaks in the only language it has. Sensation. Symptom. Signal.
When you try to think your way out of burnout, you are essentially trying to have a conversation with someone in a language they don't speak. You can be as articulate & logical & self-aware as you want. Your body will keep sending the same message until it feels heard.
This is why you can journal about your burnout & still feel burned out. Why you can talk about it in therapy & still feel it in your chest when you wake up on Monday morning. Why you can understand exactly what's happening to you intellectually & still feel completely powerless to change it. Understanding is not the same as healing. & real healing happens in the body, not the mind.
I want to tell you about the first time I did somatic work, because this is where the lesson actually landed in me.
I was skeptical. Deeply. I didn't fully believe it would do anything. But I cared about myself enough to try anyway, which is its own kind of turning point. Choosing to show up for something even when your mind is already writing it off.
I was doing a somatic exercise. Hip openers, as it turns out. & yes, everything people say about storing emotion in your hips is, apparently, very real. At least for me. Somewhere in the middle of the practice, without warning, without a single thought that preceded it, I started to cry. Not a little. Really cry.
I didn't even know what I was crying about. There was no narrative. No memory. No story my mind was telling me. Just this sudden, overwhelming release. Like something that had been held for a very long time finally had permission to move.
My mind had nothing to do with it. My mind was actually a little shocked. But my body knew exactly what it was doing.
That was the moment I understood, viscerally, not intellectually, why you cannot think your way out of burnout. Because no amount of thinking would have produced that release. No amount of journaling or analyzing or understanding would have opened whatever it was that opened on that floor.
Only my body could do that. & it had been waiting for me to let it.
If any of this sounds familiar, the dread, the exhaustion, the physical symptoms that seem to appear & disappear with your circumstances, the anger that lives just beneath the surface, I want you to hear this. Your body is not broken. It is not overreacting. It is not being dramatic. It is communicating, in the only language it has. & it has been waiting, patiently & sometimes not so patiently, for you to stop trying to think your way through it & start actually listening.
You don't need to understand everything that's stored in there. You don't need to have the right words or the right insight or the right therapist. You just need to be willing to drop out of your head & into your body. Even for five minutes. Even on your living room floor. Even when your mind is skeptical & your hips are tight & you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.
That willingness is enough to begin.
If you're curious about what it actually looks like to build a practice that meets you where you are, Remembrance is a free place to start. & The Soft Landing is a 7-day return that gives your nervous system a real structure to lean on.
Your body has been trying to tell you something. It's not too late to hear it.
Stay close,
Jess