Recognizing Burnout

Naming the Pain

Maybe you recognize this: It's 2am (or 4am, if you’re like my sister) and you're still awake, your mind won't stop, your chest feels tight. Another news alert made your stomach drop hours ago, and now you can't stop thinking about everything: the state of the world, whether your work matters, the bills that need to be paid, the bone-tiredness you’re body’s experiencing, the family or loved ones you’re caring for, general worry about the future, and panicking if you're doing enough.

Another night where you lie awake, your mind cycling through it all. Your relationships, your career, your creative practice (if that’s still there). You wonder if any of this makes a difference.

If this feels familiar, please know what you're experiencing isn't personal failing. It's not evidence that you're "too sensitive" or "not resilient enough."

Drawing from research, years of sitting with people navigating these same struggles, and from my own lived experience as a first-generation, neurodivergent, queer therapist, I've come to understand that what looks like individual burnout is often a deeply human response to collective circumstances that would overwhelm anyone paying attention.

In our increasingly fast-paced world, some essential experiences often go unnoticed, particularly the cost of caring deeply. If you're someone who balances a demanding career, relationships, creative work, family, and a commitment to being informed and engaged, you're likely carrying more than you realize. The weight isn't just personal anymore, if it ever was. It's collective.

And if you're someone whose nervous system leans towards noticing more, feeling more, processing differently (if you're neurodivergent, highly sensitive, or simply built with finer antennae for the world's frequency) this moment is asking even more of you.

This is the first in a series exploring burnout in a more complex and nuanced way that takes into account the current moment and why it's affecting so many thoughtful, caring people right now. This post begins with recognition: learning to see and validate what's happening in your body and nervous system before we explore “solutions.”

It can be hard to heal something we haven't even begun to acknowledge in the first place.

when we listen to our body

This exhaustion you're feeling, this bone-deep depletion that sleep doesn't fix, that vacations don't resolve, that willpower can't overcome, it has a name. And understanding what's really happening in your body, in your life right now might be the first step toward something different.

Not because naming it fixes anything. But because recognition creates space for what comes next: responding with curiosity, creativity, and compassion rather than judgment and force.

Burnout isn't just feeling tired after a long week. Research in organizational psychology and trauma studies shows it's a state of chronic depletion that manifests across multiple systems: physical, emotional, cognitive, and relational. Drawing from both clinical observation and lived experience, here's what often goes unseen:

What Lives in Your Body

Your body has been speaking, perhaps for months now, though we've become remarkably skilled at ignoring and translating its messages into something more manageable. "I'm just tired," we tell ourselves, even when sleep stopped restoring us weeks ago. "Everyone feels this way. I can handle it," we reason, even as tension takes up permanent residence in our jaw, our shoulders, our chest. It’s that particular kind of clenching you only notice hours after it began.

And yet the exhaustion can be persistent. The kind where you wake up already depleted, move through your day heavy-limbed as though through water, and collapse into bed wondering how you'll possibly do it again tomorrow. Changes in appetite arrive without explanation. Either you're not hungry at all, or you're seeking comfort in food that doesn't actually comfort. Sleep, when it comes, doesn't refresh. Or it doesn't come at all.

For some of us, the body's messages become more insistent: increased illness, longer recovery times, an immune system waving its white flag. Sensory input that once felt manageable now overwhelms: sounds too loud, lights too bright, textures suddenly unbearable. Your nervous system has lost its buffer, and everything registers as just "too much."

Sometimes the body speaks in pain without clear medical cause: headaches that won't respond to usual remedies, migraines that arrive with increasing daily stressors, muscle aches that migrate, digestive distress that confounds the specialists. The body knows what the mind hasn't yet admitted: this isn't sustainable.

When Your Inner Landscape Shifts

Burnout researcher Christina Maslach identified three core dimensions through her work: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. And for those of us who are deeply sensitive and/or neurodivergent, it may be helpful to go a bit further and describe what you may also be experiencing:

Emotional numbness that alternates with sudden overwhelm. You feel nothing for weeks, then the feelings rush to the surface when you finally slow down long enough to notice how much you've been carrying. The projects and relationships that once lit you up now feel distant, pointless. You're…just…going through motions.

Simple decisions like what to eat, which task to start with, whether to respond to that message all feel overwhelming. Your executive function, that internal system that helps you plan and initiate and follow through, has become compromised in ways that feel both frustrating and frightening.

Creativity, that spark that once felt essential to who you are, seems to have gone dormant. The ideas don't come. The motivation that used to carry you forward has evaporated. And beneath it all runs a pervasive sense of helplessness, a voice asking "what's the point?" that you can't quite silence.

You find yourself more irritable with the people you care about most, snapping at your partner or loved ones over things that wouldn't have bothered you before. Your patience, like everything else, has been depleted. The strategies that used to help you navigate life, your routines, your practices, your ways of moving through the world suddenly aren't working anymore.

For some, particularly those of us who are neurodivergent, this can show up as increased meltdowns or shutdowns.

How You Might Be Adapting

(Or Trying To)

Often, the clearest signs of what's happening inside show up in how we move through the world.

You might notice yourself withdrawing from relationships and social connection, canceling plans, letting messages go unanswered, choosing isolation even when some part of you knows it's not what you need.

When you’re with others, your body might be present but your mind is elsewhere, unable to fully land in the conversation happening in front of you. Tasks that used to feel manageable now trigger procrastination…not because you don't care, but because you can't seem to access the energy required to begin.

Some of us turn to numbing behaviors more frequently: substances, scrolling through our phones for hours, anything that offers relief from the constant overwhelm. (And if this is you: I get it. The impulse to find relief makes complete sense.) Saying yes to new commitments feels impossible when you're already drowning. Your emotions might be flooding or frozen. You might cry unexpectedly over “small things,” or want to cry but find yourself unable to access tears at all.

For Those of Us Who Process Deeply

I’d like to name something that can go unspoken in conversations about burnout, something I've observed both in my practice and in my own lived experience: some of us process the world differently. Not deficiently…differently.

Research in neurodiversity studies and sensory processing helps us understand why: certain nervous systems process information more deeply, notice subtleties others might miss, respond more intensely to what's happening around us.

When collective stress increases, as it has dramatically in recent years, the gap between what the world expects us to provide and what we can sustainably offer widens exponentially.

If this describes your experience, again please know: your nervous system isn't wrong or flawed. The world wasn't designed with nervous systems like ours in mind, but that doesn't make us deficient or inferior. It makes the design inadequate.

The Particular Weight of This Moment

This is a long read, I get it. And thank you for bearing with me, but I can’t end without the following. Folks tell me about lying awake being haunted by atrocities unfolding in real-time on their phones, haunted by worries and anxieties of all kinds. About the dissonance of showing up for work while processing news of genocide, loss of rights, separation of families, increasing costs of living, existing in a hyperconnected world yet absolutely isolated. About the hard question that keeps them awake: how do you be a decent person in times like these without destroying yourself in the process?

This isn't abstract burnout. This is what researchers studying combat veterans and healthcare workers have named as moral injury, the specific psychological (and even spiritual) distress that comes from witnessing violations of your deepest values while feeling unable and incapable of preventing, addressing, or repairing the harm. While this isn’t a diagnosis, it's a meaningful response to meaningful violations. And if you're someone who pays attention, who feels deeply, who refuses to look away even when it costs you: of course you're existentially and spiritually depleted.

You're not just burning out from your job or personal responsibilities. You're navigating something more complex in these times: genocides unfolding while you watch in real-time. Democracy feeling increasingly like it's disappearing. Climate catastrophe accelerating. You or your communities losing hard-won rights. Systems failing the most vulnerable people in ways that violate everything you believe about how we should care for each other.

And through it all, you're still expected to show up for work, pay bills, make small talk, and function as if everything is normal. That survival response creates a particular kind of exhaustion. Especially when we don't have adequate spaces to process and name what's happening right in front of us. It can make us feel like we're in the Twilight Zone. Is this really happening? Am I the only one seeing this, feeling this?

No. You're not alone.

What Recognition Makes Possible

That was probably a lot. What do I do with this, Sandy? Well, this first post in our series focuses entirely on seeing and naming what's happening because as I mentioned, it's hard to heal something we haven't acknowledged or named first.

If you've recognized yourself in these descriptions, if you've been pushing through symptoms and telling yourself "everyone's tired," if you've been minimizing your experience because "others have it worse," I would like to offer you this: What you're experiencing is real. It makes sense. And it deserves attention and presence.

Your exhaustion isn't a character flaw. Your overwhelm isn't weakness. Your body's signals aren't inconveniences to override. They're information about what's sustainable and what isn't. Your inability to "just power through" isn't lack of willpower. It's maybe your body's wisdom trying to reach you with increasingly urgent messages.

Recognizing burnout as a result of all we're carrying and navigating in truly unprecedented times, coming together to really see this, naming this, allowing this pain and exhaustion to be real…this might be the first step toward recovery.

Not because recognition fixes anything, but because it creates the possibility of responding in more aligned, expansive ways that include compassion and curiosity rather than criticism and force.

Perhaps the most quietly revolutionary act available to you right now isn't pushing harder or caring “better” according to some external source who knows nothing about your life or finding the “perfect solution.” Perhaps it's simply this: pausing long enough to acknowledge what's true.

I'm hurting. My body is speaking. I'm burned out and overwhelmed. I need support in these times. I need help.

And then, rather than rushing to rectify or dismiss these truths, staying with them long enough to add:

This isn't personal failure. This is my body's wisdom telling me what I've been carrying, what remains sustainable, and what needs to shift.

In Part 2 of this series, we'll explore the dimensions of burnout that conventional approaches often miss: the spiritual, existential, and collective aspects that make this more than just personal exhaustion. We'll examine why depth-oriented approaches don't rush to solutions, and what ancient wisdom traditions understood about bearing witness to suffering.

Because understanding that your burnout has roots deeper than poor time management, deeper even than the specific circumstances of your life right now, changes everything about how we approach recovery.

If this post resonated, I invite you to notice: What did your body respond to? Where did you feel recognition (or not)? These sensations are information.

To those of you who feel everything, who notice what others miss, who carry the weight of caring in times like these: your exhaustion isn't evidence of weakness. It's evidence of your profound attunement to what's happening around you. And learning to listen to what your body has been trying to tell you? That's where genuine recovery begins.

About the therapist

Sandy Gordon, LMFT is a depth-oriented psychotherapist in Pasadena, California, working with artists, creatives, and established professionals seeking greater alignment, connection, and authenticity.

Her practice is designed for intellectually curious individuals who are ready to feel, not just think their way through. These are people navigating relationship patterns rooted in childhood trauma, burnout that's forcing deeper questions, or disconnection despite external success. They're ready for therapy that integrates rather than just copes: work that transforms how they show up in their relationships and their lives.

Sandy's approach draws from Emotionally Focused Therapy, EMDR, somatic work, and parts work modalities, but her practice is grounded in something older: the understanding that real healing happens in relationship, over time, with patience and presence.

As a Black queer therapist of Ghanaian and Mexican heritage, she holds the human need to be witnessed, held, and seen in our fullness. She creates space for clients to slow down, feel deeply, and explore the complexity of their inner worlds without needing easy answers. If you're ready for this kind of depth work, she'd be honored to work with you.