Quiet Burnout Is The Body Speaking and What It Is?
Here's something I see often: a person who has spent years in therapy or wellness work, who knows what is happening cognitively and doing all the things to support themselves and who still can't figure out why their body won’t relax or why they keep getting stuck. I tell them: Even though your mind has processed it, your body is still processing and it needs some support at doing so.
Why understanding the pattern doesn't release it
Thinking and understanding what we experience is cognitive, real and valuable. Most of the time, we exist in that cognitive space because predominantly, we are taught that thinking and staying logical is what is most safe and rational. However, the body, muscles, tissues and the information that water holds operates in a part of you that is opposite to the cognitive mind. Like what Candance Pert, ph.D writes in the book, Molecules of Emotion, emotion and the patterns that show up can be linked to specific peptides. Dr. Pert later writes a book called The Body Is the Subconscious Mind, where she links that the body holds patterns that the cognitive mind cannot process. It must be done through movement, presence, imagination, sensation, breath and primal instincts.
Let’s say you find yourself in a stressful situation, where a car cuts in front of you in traffic and it is a close call. For that moment, your body activates a stress response, which stimulates hormones and our instincts to fight, flight, move or freeze. If that stress response was interrupted, frozen mid-cycle, never allowed to complete or be processed, the body holds the unfinished response. You can think your way to a perfect explanation of why it happened, however the body might still waiting to be told it is safe and it it survived.
In combination with the cognitive work and therapy, we must also honor and give support to our physiology and all our bodies do.
The subconscious layer of quiet burnout
Quiet burnout is covert. It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but from the inside, it might look like ways of coping with something that has been chipping away at the deepest level. I felt like this many times, but what memory stands out to me the most was when I walked into my corporate job on a Wednesday morning and sat down at my desk to log into my computer. This routine was what I did every day for years at this company, doing the same thing, working on projects that didn’t fulfill me or light me up, and just performing through and still showing up because I had to. Even when I didn’t feel like it or if it was starting to weigh more on my soul.
Quiet burnout sometimes can look like showing up, performing, managing everything while inside things feel unsettled and dysregulated. It might show up as early hallmarks like: exhaustion even after a day of sleep or rest, feeling ‘soul-sucked’ or dimming of joy, going through the motions, disconnection to loss of what you want, and physical signals that are psychosomatic in nature.
Even though you are still functioning and your nervous system tank is running on E, you maybe still tell yourself that you’re not burned out.
How somatic mindfulness & hypnotherapy can support
I appreciate an integrative way of practice and supporting others through this. I find that the best of both hypnotherapy for the cognitive and mindset work, along with a body-based somatic mindfulness can be helpful for those who are feeling the quiet burnout.
Hypnotherapy works here because it involves the brain and accessing different brainwaves where it allows mindset work and conversation to land at the level of your subsconscious or the mind-body level.
By adding mindfulness to hypnotherapy, we are honoring that the nervous system has a key role in our transformation. That if we are feeling stressed and overactivated from our life experience, that our nervous system is what helps mitigate, process and respond to those experiences. So, we must bring attention to how our nervous system and bodies are feeling through sensations. When we do this with slow, gentle compassion, it can give an opportunity for your body to complete what was unfinished. Not what your mind understood, but what your body knows and needs.
This is bridging mind-body and bringing embodiment + transformation as key goals to doing this work for possible longer lasting transformation. What can change isn't your understanding of the trauma, but rather your body's relationship to it. From bracing or stuckness, to returning to more you.
Thank you for reading. I’m inviting you to…
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Dr. Linh is a Doctor of Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, licensed acupuncturist, hypnotherapist, and somatic practitioner. She works with women navigating psychosomatic health conditions, anxiety, burnout, and stress through a nervous system-informed, slow, gentle and nature centered approach.
