Most of us know burnout not as an abstract idea, but as an embodied experience. It’s the knot in your stomach before you check your emails. The fog in your mind when you try to make a simple decision. The heavy fatigue that doesn’t shift, even after a weekend off.
For years, people mainly viewed burnout as a workplace issue, something to solve with better time management or a few days of leave. But research now shows that burnout recovery requires more than surface-level fixes. Stress and trauma leave their marks not just in the mind, but also in the body.
And if the body is holding on, no amount of “thinking your way out of it” will bring lasting relief. Over time this can cause lasting heath issues as the fight flight system creates an “allostatic load” on the body. Basically this means that we literally burn too many of the body’s resources. This can compromise our physical and mental health in a variety of ways.
We can also collapse into a freeze response. Here the body is shutting down, reducing the heart rate an breathing and other vital functions. Put simply it means that we have no energy because our body is under-using its resources.
The body keeps the score in burnout
Burnout isn’t only about long hours or heavy workloads. It’s about the way stress shows up physiologically: disrupted sleep, shallow breathing, tense muscles, or that ever-present feeling of being “switched on.”
When we ignore these body-based symptoms of burnout, they tend to intensify. There can be a viscous cycle where the stress or fight / flight / freeze response switches off the digestive system, while burning the body’s resources. Then our gut health suffers.
We produce 70-80% of our dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin in our gut. These are brain chemicals which help to regulate our mood and our stress response. If our digestion isn’t functioning properly because of stress, we produce less of these chemicals!
So then we don’t have the brain chemicals to reduce our stress. We get more stressed, our digestive health suffers more and so on! The immune system also switches off when we are in fight and flight. The body sees digestion and immunity as less important if it feels we are in immediate danger.
This is why a whole-body approach to treating burnout is getting a lot of attention in psychology and wellness. Instead of just treating thoughts, it works with posture, breath, movement, and sensation: the very places stress takes root. Then we can learn to regulate our fight / flight / freeze response and our body starts repairing the damage done.
Body-based therapy for burnout
One of the most effective ways forward is body-based therapy for burnout, sometimes called somatic psychotherapy. Unlike traditional talk therapy, it invites you to notice what’s happening in your body in the present moment.
That might look like:
- Tracking how your breathing changes when you speak about work stress
- Noticing a tightening in the chest when you describe obligations
- Learning mindful ways to soften those patterns, rather than fighting them
- This isn’t about erasing stress. It’s about developing resilience: teaching your nervous system how to return to balance after challenge.
Mindfulness: not just in your head
Mindfulness has become a buzzword, but in therapy it’s a grounded, evidence-based practice. For burnout, mindfulness helps people slow down enough to feel what’s really going on; rather than pushing through until collapse.
- Simple mindfulness-based counselling techniques include:
- A two-minute body scan before a meeting
- Pausing to feel your feet on the floor when stress spikes
- Bringing attention to the breath as a way to reset
These small practices can interrupt the cycle of exhaustion and help clients reconnect with energy and purpose.
The role of counselling
Burnout often comes with a hidden layer of guilt or self-criticism: “I should be able to handle this.” Counselling provides a space where that story can be unpacked, and where compassion can take the place of judgement.
At its best, counselling integrates both body and mind: combining insight with embodied skills. You can learn tools to regulate your stress response. We can also work more deeply with underlying core beliefs that could be driving you to overwork. Over time, this holistic approach creates not just recovery, but a new way of relating to stress itself.
Takeaway
Burnout isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a signal from your body that something needs to change. Approaching recovery through somatic therapy, mindfulness, and counselling allows both body and mind to heal together.
Ajay Hawkes is a somatic therapist and counsellor based in Fremantle, WA. Through Uplift Counselling Fremantle, he offers mindfulness-based counselling and body-based approaches for trauma, stress, and burnout recovery. One of the ways we treat body trauma is through somatic approaches grounded in principles developed at the Hakomi Institute, which emphasises working mindfully with bodily sensation and awareness.
