Burnout Isn’t About How Much You Do, It’s About How Much You Carry

by Sharn Somasiri
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Burnout is often described as a workload issue, working too hard, too fast, for too long.

But if that were true, everyone working a demanding job would burn out, and they don’t. Burnout is far more complex, and far more deeply rooted in the emotional body.

Burnout isn’t about tasks.
Burnout is about emotional load.

The nervous system is designed to handle busyness. What it cannot sustain is prolonged emotional pressure without relief. This includes constant self-criticism, overthinking, fear of failure, people-pleasing, emotional labour, keeping the peace, holding everything together, and living in survival mode.

When the body is stuck in long-term sympathetic activation, fight or flight, the system eventually exhausts. It’s not that you stop caring. It’s that your system collapses under the weight of unmet emotional needs and chronic internal stress.

This collapse often pushes people into a dorsal vagal shutdown state, a freeze response described extensively in polyvagal theory. Symptoms can include exhaustion, emptiness, emotional numbness, brain fog, detachment and a profound sense of depletion.

If you’ve ever felt like rest doesn’t restore you, that’s why.

When your nervous system doesn’t feel safe, it cannot shift into true relaxation.
It stays braced, even when you’re lying in bed.
It stays vigilant, even when you stop working.
It stays overloaded, even when you try to rest.

This is why holidays, breaks and time off often feel useless. You can remove yourself from stress temporarily, but if your internal world remains overwhelmed, your system can’t reset.

Recovery requires more than rest, it requires emotional repair.

The most effective burnout recovery involves:
Stabilising the nervous system
Healing the part of you that feels responsible for everything
Building internal safety
Releasing emotional tension stored in the body
Creating boundaries that actually protect your energy
Rebuilding your sense of self outside of productivity

Through trauma-informed coaching, we work directly with the emotional root of burnout, not the symptoms. Clients often discover that burnout isn’t caused by what they do externally, but by what they carry internally: unmet emotional needs, chronic self-pressure, relational conditioning, unresolved trauma, and a lifetime of putting themselves last.

Burnout isn’t a failure.
It’s a message.
A sign that your body is begging for a different way of existing.

When you address the emotional load rather than just the busy schedule, burnout becomes fully recoverable. And not only do you heal, you rebuild a life that is sustainable, balanced and aligned with who you truly are.