When Burnout Sneaks In — And How We Heal

When Nadia first came to me, she didn’t use the word burnout. She just said, “I feel like I’ve lost myself.”

A high-performing executive, mother of two, and caretaker for her aging parents, she had spent years pushing through fatigue, suppressing anxiety, and telling herself she just needed to get more organized. But by the time we met, even small tasks felt overwhelming. She was tired all the time, quick to tears, and deeply disconnected from the joy she once felt in her life and work.

“I keep thinking if I just rest for a weekend, I’ll bounce back,” she told me. But the rest never seemed to be enough. Her body was waving a white flag.

Burnout Isn’t Just About Workload — It’s About Disconnection

Burnout isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s the quiet erosion of your spark — the slow fade of vitality, clarity, and connection. While we often associate it with work, burnout is a whole-system experience, one that can result from the accumulated stress of caregiving, perfectionism, internalized pressure to succeed, and a chronic lack of nourishment.

As author Emily Nagoski writes in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, “Burnout is what happens when we avoid being human for too long.”

With Nadia, our work started with helping her remember what it feels like to be human again — to listen to her body, hear her needs, and create space to feel.

Listening to the Signs

In our first few sessions, I gently guided Nadia into practices that brought her back into her body. We explored the physical sensations she was experiencing — tightness in her chest, a dull ache behind her eyes, a constant sense of urgency. I helped her identify the parts of her that were pushing her to keep going at all costs, as well as the parts that were starting to whisper, Please, let me rest.

Using an Internal Family Systems (IFS) lens, we honored all of those parts. The perfectionist who drove her success. The people-pleaser who feared being seen as selfish. The exhausted one who just wanted to lie down. All had wisdom. All needed to be heard.

As we created inner space for these parts to be acknowledged, something began to shift. “I didn’t realize how much I was carrying until I gave myself permission to put it down,” Nadia said.

Exploring the Root Causes

Burnout isn’t just the result of doing too much. Often, it’s about chronic disconnection from our own needs and values.

With Nadia, we mapped out the emotional and systemic patterns contributing to her burnout. Where did the over-responsibility begin? What messages had she internalized about worth and productivity? We uncovered a long history of being the “strong one” in her family — someone who held everything together at great cost to herself.

Together, we began the process of rewriting those stories.

Reclaiming Regulation and Rest

Nadia didn’t need another productivity hack. She needed to learn how to feel safe slowing down.

We practiced nervous system regulation tools — grounding, breathwork, and somatic tracking — to help her recognize when her system was in overdrive. We created “micro-moments” of rest in her day: five minutes of silence between meetings, walking barefoot in her yard, stretching before bed.

Gradually, she stopped seeing rest as something to earn, and started treating it as essential medicine.

Cultivating Boundaries and Compassion

One of the hardest parts of healing from burnout is learning to say no — not just to others, but to the inner voices that demand constant performance.

I helped Nadia identify where her boundaries had become porous, and we practiced compassionate boundary-setting that honored both her values and her capacity. We role-played hard conversations. We tracked how guilt and relief showed up in her body. And we named, again and again, that saying no to others is sometimes a way of saying yes to yourself.

Rebuilding from the Inside Out

Burnout isn’t just something to fix. It’s a signal — a wise, painful messenger that something needs to change.

As Nadia healed, she didn’t just return to her old life. She began to reimagine it. She shifted how she approached work, began asking for help at home, and — most importantly — reconnected to joy.

“I laugh more now,” she said in one of our final sessions. “I feel like myself again.”

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in Nadia’s story, know that burnout doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your system is asking for care. You don’t have to figure it out alone. Together, we can create the space you need to heal — and reconnect with the parts of you that have been waiting to breathe.

Burnout is not your identity. It’s a threshold. You get to choose what happens on the other side. Let’s explore your aligned path forward. Book a discovery call.