The Truth About Burnout and How to Begin Healing with 1 Easy Practice

We’re nearing the end of the year (which feels wild to even say), and for so many of us, this time doesn’t just come with twinkle lights and holiday chaos. It comes with burnout, the kind that lives in your bones. Not just “I had a long week” tired. I’m talking about that heavy, foggy, wired-but-exhausted kind of tired. The kind where your body feels like it’s dragging through wet cement. The kind where even basic tasks feel like too much. The kind where everything (texts, chores, emails, small talk, even joy) feels like a weight.

You start wondering if this is just who you are now:

– Tired. Irritable. Uninspired.
– Going through the motions.
– Surviving, but not really living.

But hear this: This is not who you are. This is what happens when you’ve spent a lifetime abandoning yourself.

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Burnout Isn’t Just About Work

We’ve been taught to treat burnout like it’s only about the office. Too many hours. Not enough boundaries. Just take some PTO and you’ll bounce back, right? nBut here’s the truth that rarely gets named: Burnout doesn’t begin with your job.

– It begins long before you ever filled out a timesheet or stayed up late replying to emails.
– It begins with the quiet ways you learned to override your needs to be “good,” to be liked, to belong.
– It begins with the tiny moments of self-abandonment that piled up into a life that doesn’t feel like yours anymore.

Burnout is the body’s sacred “no more.” It’s not weakness. It’s not failure. It’s your nervous system throwing the emergency brake. So if burnout isn’t just about your job, your to-do list, or your workload… Then what is it really about?

The Hidden Cause of Burnout: Emotional Outsourcing

Let me introduce the term I use to describe the invisible engine behind so much burnout: Emotional outsourcing. Emotional outsourcing burnout happens when we chronically seek our sense of safety, worth, and belonging from outside ourselves.

It looks like:

– Needing others to be happy so you can finally relax

– Saying yes even when you mean no, just to avoid conflict

– Feeling deeply unsettled when someone’s disappointed in you

– Taking on everyone’s needs, moods, and comfort before your own

You might not even realize you’re doing it—until your body can’t anymore. When your nervous system believes that tending to others is the only way to stay safe, you cannot stop. You literally cannot rest until everyone around you is okay. So you caretake. You over-function. You anticipate needs before they’re spoken. You never feel done. Because the only way you’ve known to feel safe in the world is to disappear on yourself. That is emotional outsourcing. And it is what keeps burnout locked in place, even when you’re doing your best to “fix” it.

Emotional Outsourcing Burnout Is Not a Personality Flaw

Even when you want to rest, your nervous system won’t let you. You finally sit down on the couch, and your brain takes off:

– Should I check on them?

– Did I forget something?

– Maybe I should answer that text.

– What if they’re mad at me?

– Am I doing enough?

This kind of hyper-vigilance isn’t a character trait. It’s physiology. It’s what happens when your nervous system is stuck in a loop that says other people’s comfort = your survival. So even stillness feels unsafe. Even rest feels like failure. Even joy feels guilty. This is not because you’re broken. It’s because you were trained to survive through self-abandonment.

How to Begin Healing from Emotional Outsourcing Burnout

Now here’s where healing begins. Not with a vacation. Not with a bubble bath. Not with quitting your job overnight. With something much simpler and much more radical. You start by showing your nervous system that rest doesn’t equal exile. That you matter, even when you’re not producing. That your needs matter, even when they’re inconvenient to others. That you’re allowed to exist for you, not just for who you are to everyone else. And we begin that shift with a practice that seems deceptively simple.

The Practice: One Question to Interrupt Burnout

Once a day (ideally more) pause and ask yourself:

“What do I need right now?”

– Not what would make someone else happy.
– Not what would keep the peace.
– Not what would earn praise or avoid conflict.

What do you need?

If you don’t hear anything at first, that’s okay. This is not about the answer. It’s about the asking. About becoming someone who checks in with yourself as often as you check on others. This is how we interrupt the burnout pattern, by becoming self-referential again. And over time, something beautiful shifts.

– You start tolerating unanswered texts.
– You take a nap without guilt eating you alive.
– You walk through your day slower, and still feel like yourself.
– You stop reaching for performance as your proof of worth.

This is how emotional outsourcing burnout begins to heal. From the inside out.

Burnout Is a Sacred Invitation Back to Yourself

Burnout is not a diagnosis of dysfunction. It is your body’s wisdom. It is a sacred request for reconnection. It is your nervous system telling you: you get to come home to yourself now.

This is the heart of what we do in Anchored, my six-month community coaching program. We help you rebuild your internal sense of safety so that rest becomes real. So that saying no doesn’t feel like a threat. So that your worth stops being something you perform for. Because when you learn to source safety, worth, and belonging from within, burnout stops being your default.

If you’ve been living in the fog (tired but unable to rest, wired but unable to focus) come do this work. Not because there’s something wrong with you. But because you deserve to feel whole in your own body. You deserve to rest without guilt. You deserve to move through the world at your own pace.

Take a breath.
Drop your shoulders.
Let the air move through you like an apology you didn’t know you needed.

You’ve done enough for today.
You are enough for today.