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I am going to be honest about something.
There have been stretches in my life where I could feel the fire dimming. Not dramatically — not a collapse, not a crisis — just a quiet dwindling. The ideas that used to come easily started taking longer to arrive. The things that usually sparked excitement began to feel more like obligation. I found myself moving through the motions of a life I had built with care, and feeling strangely distant from it.
I did not have a word for it at first. I said I was tired. I said I was overwhelmed. I said I just needed a break.
What I came to understand, over time, was that I had been moving through burnout — and the reason it took me a while to name it is the same reason I see it go unrecognised in so many of the people I work with: we tend to describe what we are feeling in the broadest possible terms, and burnout is remarkably good at hiding inside language that is just vague enough to be dismissed.
One of the first things I explore with clients is the practice of identifying feelings with more precision. This sounds simple. It is not easy.
When we are depleted, we reach for the most available word. Anxious. Stressed. Overwhelmed. Fine. These words are not wrong — but they are wide. They hold a lot of different experiences inside them, and when we stay at that level of description, we lose the nuance that could actually tell us something useful.
A feeling wheel is one tool I find genuinely helpful here — not as a diagnostic tool, but as an invitation to slow down and look more closely. If you are feeling "anxious," the wheel might help you notice whether what you actually mean is apprehensive, or overwhelmed, or dread, or something closer to hopeless or disconnected. Each of those has a different texture, a different weight, and points toward a different kind of support.
Burnout, specifically, tends to hide underneath the word tired. But it often feels more precisely like: depleted. Hollow. Indifferent. Going through the motions. Tapped out of ideas, motivation, and the particular spark that used to make things feel like yours.
I think of anxiety and excitement as somatic siblings.
They share a similar physiological signature — a certain activation in the body, a kind of aliveness. For me, a lot of my excitement sits right alongside anxiety, each amplifying the other. Think of a good extra-virgin olive oil and a quality balsamic vinegar: sometimes more oil, sometimes more vinegar, absorbed differently into whatever is in front of you. Both present, both real, changing in proportion depending on the moment.
Burnout disrupts that balance in a particular way. The activation is still there — the nervous system does not simply switch off — but what changes is the quality of it. The excitement drains out. What remains is the anxiety, the low-level hum of responsibility and pressure, running on a kind of empty.
In somatic work, we pay attention to this. Not because the body is a problem to be solved, but because it is often speaking a more specific language than our conscious vocabulary allows. The tension in the jaw. The shallow quality of the breath. The way certain tasks that once felt energising now produce a kind of internal flatness. These are not symptoms to diagnose — they are information. Your body has been carrying something, and it has been carrying it for a while.
I wrote about this from a slightly different angle in When Rest Doesn't Feel Restful — the way a depleted nervous system does not simply respond to rest the way we hope it will. And in Why Chasing Calm Can Sometimes Make Things Harder, the way pushing toward stillness when the body is still activated can sometimes make things feel worse before they feel better. Burnout sits inside all of that.
Burnout is not always visible from the outside.
I have worked with people who were, by every external measure, functioning well — meeting their commitments, showing up for others, maintaining the shape of a full life. This is something I notice particularly with women — the capacity to keep showing up fully for everyone else while quietly running on empty inside. And on the inside: hollow. Moving through the day at a remove, wondering why nothing felt like it used to, questioning whether something was wrong with them or whether this was simply what adulthood felt like now.
It is not what adulthood has to feel like. And nothing is going wrong with you.
What is happening, more often than not, is that the system has been running without adequate resourcing for long enough that the spark that makes things feel meaningful has dimmed. This is not a character flaw. It is physiology. It is what can happen when the output consistently outpaces the replenishment.
The first step is not to fix it. The first step is to name it — more precisely than tired, more specifically than stressed. In Balancing Rest and Responsibility, I explored some of what can get in the way of even allowing ourselves to acknowledge depletion, let alone address it. That piece might be a useful companion to this one.
Noticing is not nothing. It is often where everything begins.
When we slow down enough to ask — not why am I so tired but what exactly am I feeling right now, and where do I feel it — something small shifts. The experience becomes slightly more specific. Slightly more ours. And specific things can be worked with in a way that vague, broad things cannot.
In my practice, this is often where we start. Not with a plan, not with a strategy, but with curiosity. What does this actually feel like? Where does it live in the body? What does it most closely resemble, if you had to give it a more precise name?
That act of noticing — gentle, patient, without pressure to immediately do something about what you find — is itself a form of support. It is not a quick fix. But it is a real beginning.
If any of this feels familiar, I would be glad to explore it with you. I offer a free 20-minute consultation serving the Tri-Cities (Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Port Coquitlam) and online across BC — no pressure, just a conversation about what you are carrying and what support might look like.
This post is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individual counselling or professional mental health support.
