What is high functioning burnout, and why won’t wellness fix it?

High functioning burnout is what happens when a nervous system that has been overloaded for years can no longer produce anything else, in a woman who still looks to everybody else like she is coping. Nicole Brûlé-Walker, somatic and bodywork clinician and founder of Still Body Studio in Yarm, explains why rest, magnesium and cold water can’t reach it.

You know the feeling already. It’s ten past four in the morning, you’re wide awake, and your jaw or your hands are clenched.

Your body has decided, without consulting you, that something is about to go badly, or that you have forgotten something vital.

You have already tried the obvious things. Magnesium spray. The meditation app. Noise cancelling earbuds. Possibly the cold water plunge, because half the North East seems to be in the sea by seven in the morning now.

None of it has touched the four o’clock wake up call.

Your body isn’t reacting, it’s forecasting

We are taught that stress happens to us. Something goes wrong, the body responds, cortisol floods in, and afterwards we try whichever breathwork technique is trending to bring it back down. Cause, then effect.

That isn’t how it works.

Why burnout comes for the most capable women first

Your body builds its forecast the way any sensible system would. From your track record, and from how you felt while you were living it.

So what happens when your track record is thirty years of getting through it?

Every time you pushed through, ignored the hunger, worked past the headache, took the call while your chest was tight, told the room you were fine, you filed another piece of evidence.

Demand arrived. She met it. No collapse.

The forecast updates accordingly. Capacity proven, load increased. Your body is not sentimental and it is not interested in your feelings. It simply prepares you for next time.

This is why burnout arrives so suddenly in the women everyone relies on, and why nobody sees it coming, including them. The forecast has quietly settled on a level of demand that no nervous system was built to sustain indefinitely.

Burnout is not what happens when you finally feel it all. It is what happens when a nervous system that has been overloaded for years can no longer produce anything else.

Four filters, four ways to disappear

The Performer is one of four inherited filters I work with. Here are the other three.

The Protector looks after everybody and gradually loses the thread of what she needs herself. Ask her what she wants for dinner and watch her hesitate.

The Adapter bends to fit the room. She is agreeable, well-liked, and quietly furious in a way she would never name.

The Achiever cannot stop at one summit. She is looking at the next one before she has taken her boots off. Success never lands.

Each one is intelligent. Each one kept somebody safe, at one time. And each one depletes a woman through a completely different pathway, none of which has anything to do with how full her calendar is.

You will know which one is yours. Most women do, immediately, and then spend a moment resisting it.

It asks you to relax. But relaxation isn’t a decision. It’s a conclusion your body reaches on its own, once the filter changes. You can no more decide to relax than you can decide to be persuaded.

It asks you to rest. Which is why you get ill on the second day of a holiday, begin to feel human on the fifth, and return to an identical pattern the week after. The rest was real, but it changed nothing at the root.

It asks you to feel into the body. In a body you have spent thirty years learning to override.

And then, quietly, it hands you one more thing to do well. The fitness routine. The quiet morning practice. It becomes another arena in which a capable woman can succeed, and therefore one more place her body learns never to let up.

Let me be clear that none of this is bad. Cold water is good for you. So are magnesium, and yoga, and eight hours of sleep. They are simply downstream of the nervous system. They correct a symptom while the filter

Before you finish your morning coffee

Put a hand flat on your lower ribs, at the side, where they flare out.

Don’t change your breathing. Don’t deepen it, or slow it, or try to fix it. There’s no need to turn this into a practice. Just find out whether anything moves under your hand.

Then, later today, when somebody asks how you are, notice the exact moment you answer. Was there a hesitation while you checked, or did you simply say ‘fine’?

If you didn’t notice movement in the ribcage, or feel for what the true answer was, you haven’t failed. You have read something accurate about yourself, possibly for the first time in a long while.

That’s where it starts. Not with how to correct it. Just with awareness.

And that opens up far more possibility than burnout ever allowed.