exploring stress, burnout & overwhelm in therapy

Support for “Hypersensitivity” & Reclaiming Your Capacity

Stress and burnout can feel relentless.

Overwhelm can creep in quietly, or surprise you by arriving all at once.

You might feel wired but exhausted.

Sensitive to noise, light, or social demands.

Easily overstimulated.

On edge.

Or completely depleted.

If you are bumping up against chronic stress, burnout, “hypersensitivity,” or overstimulation, I want you to consider something: your system - your moving sensing feeling thinking being - is responding perfectly to the cumulative demands from the environment, because of the ways you’ve learned to respond to the world.

Therapy can support you in slowing down, making sense of what’s happening, and your responses to what’s happening, and rebuilding sustainable capacity.

When Stress Becomes Burnout

Stress is a natural physiological response. It mobilizes energy and sharpens attention.

Burnout happens when stress becomes chronic, when there is no real recovery time between bursts of energy.

You may notice:

• Emotional exhaustion

• Irritability or numbness

• Difficulty concentrating or “brain fog”

• Sleep disruption

• Sensory overwhelm

• Anxiety or panic

• Feeling detached from your work or relationships

• Loss of joy or vitality

Burnout is not a personal failure, but it is a sign of something important. Burnout shows up as a teacher, letting us know what needs attention and rest. It is often a signal that your system has been adapting for too long without enough support.

Hypersensitivity & Overstimulation

Some people experience stress primarily through “hypersensitivity.”

In our work together, we might use the term “hypersensitivity” as a starting point for describing your experience.  

This might look like:

• Feeling overwhelmed in busy or noisy environments

• Strong emotional reactions

• Sensitivity to light, sound, texture, or social intensity

• Difficulty filtering stimuli

• A need for significant alone time to recover

Hypersensitivity may be your magnificence.  It may demonstrate that you are a finely tuned instrument of attunement and responsiveness.  Like a Sensitive Plant who closes in response to the demands of the environment in order to preserve stores.  When the perceived threat has passed, the plant knows how and when to reopen their leaves.  

You, too, have this inner knowing.

The challenge arises when there is not enough space or support to help you process what you are taking in, and it becomes difficult to know when/how to withdraw your leaves, let alone when/how to unfurl again.

Overwhelm in Your Body

In personal therapy, we develop our own language for talking about your particular experiences.  For now, I’m turning to generally-accepted and familiar terms such as “nervous system” and “regulation,” which you may describe as “my inner computer” or “the sea tides inside my body.”

When stress accumulates, your system may shift into:

• Hyperarousal or mega-alertness (anxiety, tension, racing thoughts)

• Hypoarousal or need-not-to-feel-ness (numbness, fatigue, shutdown)

• Rapid ping ponging or movement between/along the continuum of alert/not-feeling, very-here/not-here

Over time, you may feel disconnected from your body, your needs, or your sense of purpose in order to stay in then situation you are in as best you can.  It may be that this learned way becomes unsustainable or unpreferrable, and that’s where therapy may offer new perspective.  

In therapy, we may gently explore how your system - your moving sensing feeling thinking being - has adapted to the demands of your environment, and how your system might be asking for something different now.  It’s likely that you have some unexplored reserves of magnificence that we can tap into.

Therapy for Stress & Burnout: An Embodied Approach

In our work together, we do not aim to “optimize” you or push you back into productivity.  Remember the Sensitive Plant (Mimosa): moving too fast, too far, too soon can cause us to harden or close up, so it’s important that we move at a pace and depth that works for you and for your system (body, being, whole-self).

Instead, we take time to explore:

• What your stress is protecting

• Where you override your own signals

• How overwhelm shows up in your body

• What happens when you slow down (note: slow is not always better - sometimes slowing down can actually invite overwhelm because you are suddenly flooded with feeling/sensation, so that’s why we pay attention to pacing)

• The relational patterns that contribute to burnout

Working together, we pay attention to your present-moment experience, which includes your sensations, impulses, ideas, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and patterns of connecting.

This wide-lens approach can support:

• What our culture currently calls “Nervous system regulation” - our ability to be feel ourselves distinctly and clearly in the situation of this moment, and to notice when/how our capacity shifts

• Increased capacity for self-support

• What our culture calls “clearer boundaries” - our capacity to know our unequivocal“no” 

• Reduced overstimulation - knowing when we are approaching our limit, and what we need moment-to-moment

• Reconnection to vitality and meaning

We’re often taught that stress, burnout, overstimulation, etc. are problems that need to be solved.  In order to solve these problems, we are taught we need to do something, change something, add something, fix something about ourselves.

This work offers a different way.  Through paying attention to our embodied experiences are responses to our inner and outer environment, we are learning to listen differently.

With awareness comes possibility.

High Sensitivity, Over-Responsibility & Overwhelm

Many people who experience burnout are deeply responsible, heartfully caring, relationally attuned, and high-capacity humans.  [raises hand in solidarity]  

Hi, this is me.

Because we care deeply about our impact, we can sometimes cross our own lines without knowing it.

If you’re like me in this regard, you may:

• Take on more than your share

• Struggle to say no

• Feel responsible for others’ well-being

• Override exhaustion

• Push through discomfort

• Measure your worth through usefulness

These patterns often develop early in life and can be rooted in relational wounding or attachment adaptations.  Rooted in unspoken family rules that determined the conditions under which we were allowed to belong. We often found ways of staying in our early situations that we now see as survival tactics.  

Therapy can support you in shifting from chronic over-functioning and taking all the responsibility/blame onto yourself, and moving toward sustainable being.

Reclaiming Capacity & Aliveness

What might this work look like in therapy?

Working with stress, burnout, and overwhelm often includes:

• Building awareness of early signs of overload - paying attention to the signs and signals your system is showing you (there are our greatest teachers!)

• Practicing pausing rather than pushing (OR, if you’re prone to halting, you may want to practice moving and shaking to experience a contrast to what you’re used to!)

• Expanding your window of tolerance (a fancy way of saying, the space where you can still feel and think coherently with what’s happening around you, and feel present to yourself and the situation)

• Reconnecting with pleasure and vitality

• Strengthening boundaries and noticing if/when guilt, shame, etc. arises (important teachers!)

• Allowing yourself to receive support (oof!  this can be tricky, but we explore this together so you can take it in incrementally)

This is not about becoming less sensitive, but rather developing ways to become more lively, aware, and resourced.