I knew something was wrong. I just did not know it was me.
Or rather — I knew it was not me, not really, not in the fundamental way the exhaustion kept suggesting. I was a yoga teacher and therapist. I understood the nervous system. I knew exactly what chronic stress does to the body and the brain and the sense of self. I knew the signs. I knew the pathways. I knew, intellectually and professionally, that what I was experiencing had a name and a physiological explanation and was not evidence of some deep and unfixable flaw in my character.
And yet.
There was a part of me that ignored what I knew and strived to push through. Afterall, we are taught to get through the hard stuff with enough effort, enough discipline, enough not-giving-in-to-it, that everything will get better. But It didn’t.
I kept pushing for longer than I want to admit. Fact is, you can know all the biological and scientific theory, but until you are bone deep in burnout yourself, you cannot completely understand it. Because knowing something and being able to receive it as true about yourself are completely different experiences. And if you are here — if the title of this post made something in your chest loosen slightly, if you clicked because some quiet part of you has been waiting for someone to say this out loud — then you probably already know that.
The Story We Tell Ourselves
There is a particular kind of shame that comes with burnout that does not get talked about enough. It is the shame of the high-functioning, high-achieving, deeply capable person who looks at their inability to do basic things — reply to an email, make a decision, get off the sofa, feel something — and concludes that they must have always been secretly lazy. That the competence was a performance and now the curtain has been pulled back to reveal the truth.
I used to be able to do so much more than this.
I cannot even manage the basics.
Other people are busier than me and they are managing fine.
What is wrong with me?
If you have thought any version of these thoughts, you are in very large company. And you deserve to know that the story you are telling yourself is not the truth. It is the symptom.
Because here is what burnout does — quietly, insidiously, and with devastating effectiveness. It depletes the very cognitive and emotional resources you need to understand that you are depleted. It takes away the energy required to recognise that you are out of energy. It is, in this way, rather like trying to read a map when someone has switched off all the lights. The map is not the problem. The conditions are.
What Your Nervous System Is Actually Doing
To understand why you feel the way you feel, we need to spend a moment with your nervous system — because this is where everything is happening, and because once you understand it, the shame tends to loosen its grip considerably.
Your autonomic nervous system has two primary operating modes. The first is the sympathetic nervous system — your fight-or-flight response, designed to mobilise your resources in the face of threat. Heart rate increases. Blood flow redirects to the muscles. Digestion slows. Thinking narrows to the immediate. This system was designed for short-term emergencies. It is brilliant for escaping danger. It is very poorly suited to being on for years at a time.
The second is the parasympathetic nervous system — your rest-and-digest response, where repair, recovery, creativity, connection, and higher-order thinking all live. This is the mode in which you heal. This is the mode in which you feel like yourself.
Burnout happens when the sympathetic system has been activated for so long — by chronic stress, by overwork, by unrelenting demands, by trauma, by the accumulated weight of too much without enough — that the nervous system loses its ability to return to parasympathetic rest. It becomes stuck in a state of low-grade emergency. Not acutely panicked. Just permanently, exhaustingly braced.
And here is what that feels like from the inside.
The Real Reason You Cannot Do The Things
When your nervous system is stuck in chronic stress activation, a series of things happen that have nothing to do with your character, your work ethic, or your worth as a human being.
Your prefrontal cortex goes partially offline.
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive function — planning, decision-making, prioritising, initiating tasks, regulating emotions. It is, essentially, the part of your brain that makes you feel capable and competent and in control of your life. Under chronic stress, blood flow is redirected away from the prefrontal cortex and toward the parts of the brain that manage survival. This is why, when you are burnt out, you cannot seem to start things. Why decisions that should be simple feel overwhelming. Why you stand in the kitchen and cannot remember why you came in, and feel a disproportionate wave of despair about it.
You have not become less intelligent. Your brain is running a different programme. One designed for survival, not for flourishing.
Your dopamine system becomes dysregulated.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter most closely associated with motivation, anticipation, and the feeling of reward. Under chronic stress, dopamine function is disrupted — meaning that the things that used to excite you stop generating the same pull. Starting a task, finishing a project, looking forward to something — all of these require dopamine. When the system is depleted, nothing feels worth beginning. Nothing generates the spark. You are not unmotivated because you are lazy. You are unmotivated because the biological machinery of motivation has been running on empty for too long.
Your window of tolerance narrows to almost nothing.
The window of tolerance is the zone within which you can function — where stimulation is manageable, where you can think and feel and respond without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. In a healthy nervous system this window is reasonably wide. In a chronically stressed one it shrinks. Small things topple you. A difficult email, a change of plan, an unexpected noise — things that once would have barely registered now land like emergencies. This is not you becoming a worse person. This is your nervous system protecting you the only way it knows how, with whatever it has left.
Think of a garden in the grip of a drought. When water is scarce, a healthy plant draws its resources inward — away from the outer leaves and flowers and fruit, toward the root system. The plant looks diminished. From the outside it appears to be failing, struggling, barely surviving. But it is not failing. It is responding intelligently to its conditions. It is protecting what matters most so that it can survive until the rains come.
Your nervous system is doing the same thing. It has drawn its resources inward. What looks like laziness from the outside — and even, painfully, from the inside — is actually the intelligence of a living system doing what it must to survive what it is being asked to endure.
Why This Hits Hardest In The Highest Achievers
Here is the particular cruelty of burnout for the women who tend to experience it most acutely.
The same traits that made you good at everything — the conscientiousness, the high standards, the deep capacity for effort, the inability to let people down — are the same traits that make burnout both more likely and more agonising when it arrives. You pushed longer than most people would have. You accommodated more. You overrode more warning signals, rationalised more exhaustion, told yourself more firmly that you just needed to try harder.
And when you finally could not try any harder, you turned the full force of your high standards on yourself and found yourself wanting.
I have sat with this myself. As a yoga teacher and yoga therapist who spent years in post-secondary education — teaching students, supporting colleagues, holding systems together from the inside — I understood the science of the nervous system better than most. I could explain the physiology of chronic stress to a room of people without breaking a sweat. And still, when my own burnout arrived, my first and loudest response was shame.
I should have known better.
I teach this.
What kind of person burns out when they know all the signs?
The answer, it turns out, is a human one. Knowledge protects no one from the biology. The nervous system does not care about your qualifications. It responds to what it lives inside, not what it knows.
The Difference Between Lazy and Depleted
Let me draw this as clearly as I can, because I think it matters.
Laziness — in the way the word is actually meant — is a choice. It is the presence of resources and the absence of will. The garden that has good soil, adequate water, and full sun, but produces nothing because nothing has been planted.
Depletion is different. Depletion is the absence of resources. The garden that has given everything it had, season after season, without adequate rest or replenishment, until the soil is exhausted and the plants are struggling and the whole ecosystem is crying out for fallow time.
You are not an unplanted garden. You are an over-planted one. You have been producing and producing without a season to restore, without enough winter, without enough of the quiet dormant seasons that all living things need in order to sustain themselves over time.
And the remedy is not more effort. It is not a better morning routine or a tighter schedule or a firmer commitment to your goals. The remedy is the one thing that feels most impossible and most necessary at the same time.
Rest. Real rest. The kind that goes all the way down to the roots.
What Healing Actually Requires
When I finally stopped — when the layoff forced the pause that I had been refusing to give myself — what brought me back was not a programme. It was not a supplement or a productivity system or a reframe. It was my garden.
I started going outside because it was the only place that did not ask me to be anything. The garden did not need me to be functional. It did not require me to perform recovery. It simply received me as I was — depleted, confused, somewhat undone — and offered me soil and silence and the quietly radical example of things growing in their own time, without apology, without urgency.
The garden taught me that rest is not the enemy of growth. It is the condition of it.
Winter is not the garden failing. It is the garden doing exactly what it needs to do so that spring is possible. A garden that tried to bloom through winter — that pushed through frost and darkness because resting felt too much like giving up — would not produce more. It would die.
Your nervous system needs what the garden knows. It needs permission to go dormant. It needs inputs that signal safety rather than threat — slow breath, gentle movement, warmth, quiet, the feeling of being held rather than tested. It needs time. Not a weekend. Not a good night’s sleep. Time.
And it needs you to stop telling it — stop telling yourself — that the need for that time is a character flaw.
What You Can Do Right Now
If you are reading this in a moment of recognition — if something in here has named what you have been carrying — here are the most important things I want you to take with you.
The first is this: What you are experiencing is a physiological state, not a personality trait. It can change. It will change. But it changes through tending, not through force.
The second is this: Your nervous system heals through safety signals. Warmth, slow breath, gentle movement, rest without guilt, connection, beauty, nature. These are not indulgences. They are medicine. They are the conditions under which a depleted nervous system learns, slowly, that the emergency is over and it is safe to come back to rest.
The third is this: You are not starting over. You are tending. There is a difference. Starting over implies that what came before was wasted. Tending acknowledges that there are roots here — deep, capable, alive roots — and that with the right conditions, they will grow again.
A Place To Begin
If this post has found you at a moment when you are ready to stop fighting yourself and start tending instead — I would love to offer you a gentle next step.
The Quiet Season is a free PDF guide created for exactly this moment. It includes a self-assessment to help you understand where you are, a gentle practice designed specifically for a depleted nervous system, a slow morning ritual that takes fifteen minutes and asks almost nothing of you, and journal prompts to begin the quiet work of reconnecting with yourself.
It is not a fix. Nothing worth anything is. But it is a beginning — and sometimes a beginning is exactly what we need.
Download the free Quiet Season Guide
And if you want to continue this conversation — in your inbox, fortnightly, in the form of a letter that arrives like a quiet moment just for you — The Garden Letter is waiting.
Because you deserve to be tended. And so does your nervous system.
Rooted in the Garden is a wellness space for burnt-out women, built around the metaphor of the garden and the framework of Root, Tend, and Grow. Created by a yoga teacher and yoga therapist who has lived this journey herself.