A Body Working Overtime
Maybe it's not burn out. We were never given permission to stop.
I’ve previously written and spoken about exhaustion.
This exhaustion is partly sleep deprivation but mostly a heaviness from being a consumer and constantly plugged in, uploading and producing the basics of what’s required to simply survive these days.
Our collective exhaustion lives somewhere underneath the doing: in the connective tissue, the held breath, and the way everyones shoulders live up high near the ears.
Most of us name this “stress”.
A few of us call it “burnout”.
But neither word captures what’s actually happening: the body has been running a background program for so long that we have failed to notice it’s running us, continuously.
This is not a personal failure.
It is what happens when a nervous system designed for short bursts of threat response is asked to operate in a permanent state of low-grade alarm.
The system, the pace, the noise, the relentless demand for productivity and performance is not broken.
It is working exactly as designed.
The question is whether it’s working for you.
The body is not behind. It is ahead of you. It has already registered what the mind is still rationalising.
Most of us learned early that the way to survive a demanding environment is to comply with it.
To match its pace.
To internalise the logic until it feels like our own.
We stop noticing when we’re tired because tiredness stopped being a signal, and became a condition.
The body, however, keeps the receipts.
Every time you override the impulse to rest, every meeting you sat through while your system screamed to move, every evening you spent performing recovery instead of actually recovering: it’s all stored.
Not as memory.
As posture. As breath pattern. As tension in the jaw.
As an irritated response to your child. A harsh word to your partner. An impatience with a receptionist. A moment of road rage.
Some somatic practitioners call this body armour, the accumulated physical holding that develops when the nervous system has been in protective mode for too long.
It’s not metaphor.
Rather, a literal muscular and fascial tension reorganises the body around the need to manage (think tightness, discomfort, atrophy ~ leading to injury or chronic pain ~ and a body unable to move, express, exercise or enjoy).
Most wellness advice addresses the symptoms while leaving the pattern intact.
A massage relaxes the muscle (temporarily - for a week, a month if we’re lucky), but doesn’t touch the nervous system that is contracting everything.
A holiday interrupts the pace but doesn’t change the relationship to it. We return to exactly the same system, temporarily more rested, and the whole process begins again.
I’ve come to realise embodiment is the pathway to freedom and we can not lead ourselves there intellectually, despite all good intentions.
I’m in the early stages of structuring a global retreat schedule: 5 days in various locations to unravel the tangle of life.
If you want to restructure and permanently shift lifestyle choices join the mailing list for early updates.
Deep recovery is one that restructures something and it requires more than a ‘time-out’ from the system.
It requires enough distance from it to see it clearly, and enough embodied experience of a different way of being to have something to return to.
Not a feeling to remember.
A body memory.
You cannot think your way out of a pattern the body is holding.
You have to move through it.
When I was holding a business and parenting two young children I was forced to work through the hustle and grind stage until I had no other option but to retreat. Over time, I found systems and strategies that helped unlock freedom in the body and therefore allowed me some space in the mind.
This took years, and a lot of experimenting.
The somatic approach is not to try to fix what’s broken.
It is based on the understanding that the body already knows how to regulate itself, and that it has simply been overridden so consistently that we no longer trust our own signals.
The work is not adding new tools.
It is removing the interference so the body’s existing intelligence can function.
Breathwork.
Movement.
The acute attention that comes when you stop managing experiences and start inhabiting them.
It is slower than we want it to be.
And it requires time and space, plus a willingness to feel things that the compliance strategy was designed to prevent us from feeling.
And, what it produces is not rest.
It is restructuring.
Rest returns you to where you were.
Restructuring changes what you’re returning to; and opens possibilities to where to move next.
Thanks for reading! I drink a lot of coffee. One a day, but it’s a triple espresso (seriously), and I live in Australia, so coffee is spirituality here. If its your vibe, I appreciate the support.
I found myself rereading "the body keeps the receipts". It's a memorable way to describe something most of us have probably experienced without having words for it.