We’re in a burnout economy. Search trends consistently show that work-related burnout is among the highest-searched topics in wellness and if you’re reading this, chances are you already know why.
The Hidden Cost of Being a Highly Sensitive High-Achiever
For me, this was a personal pattern I knew well. As a highly sensitive person and a high-achiever, there is a delicate balance to be struck one that often fails to happen in our ever-evolving, fast-paced world.
Throughout much of my twenties, I danced with burnout, navigating between periods of high productivity that would always lead to weeks of sadness, sickness, and a kind of numbness towards life. While some of these are characteristics of depression and doctors at the time did suggest this I now realise that what I was experiencing was highly sensitive person burnout, stemmed from being an ardent perfectionist with a finely tuned nervous system. What a combination.
Your Nervous System Was Already Running on Empty
When you’re living in cycles of high productivity followed by crashing, your nervous system never has a chance to stabilise. Many sensitive people may not have realised until later in life that they carry these qualities or perhaps you’re reading this now and only just beginning to identify with them.
When the nervous system has little time for repair, operating this way simply becomes the default it starts to feel like just who you are. This is why I believe that truly knowing yourself as a sensitive person, understanding how you work and how you function in a work environment, is key to living a productive, successful, and peaceful life.
People-Pleasing, Perfectionism and the Slow Road to Collapse
As a highly sensitive perfectionist, the two Ps of people-pleasing and perfectionism have been my Achilles heel. Highly sensitive people already have an innate desire to please and help others and when you pair this with perfectionism, the standards we place on ourselves become intolerably high.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the workplace, where office culture teaches us to stay later, do more, and prove our worth — with little consideration for individual personality types.
I also speak from personal experience when I say that as a highly sensitive person, I cannot simply do my job and leave it at the door. I would often internalise my work long after hours, replaying conversations, worrying about changes in routine, or carrying the emotional weight of the environment home with me each evening.
It sounds like a lot — because it is. But I want to emphasise that it does not have to define you. You just need to learn to work with yourself rather than against yourself.
Your Body Knows Best
Before I started doing the inner work and learning the tools, my body and mind were in a constant battle. I’d learnt a great deal about myself and my past — but no matter how much I tried, I kept repeating the same patterns. This was because my body was still operating from a place of dissonance. We cannot believe in the mind what we can’t first experience in the body.
If I wanted to feel safe and combat burnout, I would need to learn to build capacity within the body. According to somatic practice and IFS, the body holds identities and experiences that have become trapped over time. We can also observe this in the fascia — the connective tissue that surrounds our muscles and joints which contracts and tightens in response to trauma and difficult lived experience.
This is why it’s essential that sensitive people experiencing burnout learn to integrate body-based healing into their lives.
If burnout is leaving you wired but exhausted and unable to sleep, my Somatic Sleep Track on Insight Timer was made for exactly this. [link]
Burnout as a Values Crisis, Not Just Exhaustion
Burnout is a crisis of self, not just physical exhaustion.
When I look back at the times I was truly burnt out, it was because I was stuck in a version of life that didn’t match my inner beliefs. I was burnt out in corporate PR in my early twenties, loathing going into work — because I knew that making rich people richer went against everything I valued. I later became burnt out as a teacher, watching an education system that prioritised performance over childhood. When there is a fundamental disagreement between your beliefs and your daily work, life starts to feel empty and pointless. That internal conflict gnaws at you quietly, continuously — until eventually, the body gives way.
That’s why it’s so important to be true to yourself as a highly sensitive person. When you are living in alignment with your values, you naturally avoid the patterns of overgiving and over-committing that lead to burnout. Over time, you begin to make choices that allow you to live in alignment with your soul and your nervous system.
Of course, not everyone has the privilege of simply walking away from a job — we have bills to pay, and that reality matters. But we can take small, daily aligned actions that move us in the right direction. That might mean learning a new skill that opens the door to a career change, working with a coach to reconnect with who you really are, or simply putting firmer boundaries around your work and personal life so that you stop haemorrhaging energy where it isn’t being honoured.
If this resonated and you want to go deeper, sign up to my free Awaken Your More Challenge — a five-day experience designed to help you uncover what’s been keeping you from your potential. [link]
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