Burnout, the Vagus Nerve & Coming Home to Yourself

Woman, burnout, hypopressives

A Breath-Led Path Through Hypopressives, TRE®, Strength & The Franklin Method**

There’s always a moment, sometimes it’s quiet and sometimes jarring, the moement when you realise that your tiredness isn’t just tiredness anymore.

Your breath sits high in your chest.
Your jaw clenches on its own at night and during the day.

Your mind races even when the room is still.
Your shoulders forget how to lower and seem to be permanently stuck up by your ears.
Your body feels like it’s bracing for something you can’t quite name.

This is burnout.
But not the dramatic kind we’re taught to expect.

Burnout, for most people, is the nervous system holding on for too long.

It’s the body whispering deep inside:
“I can’t keep living at this pace.”

And this isn’t a failure.
It’s a message.
One you were never ever meant to ignore.

Burnout Isn’t a Mindset — It’s a Nervous System Pattern

We often talk about burnout as if it’s an emotion or an attitude, but what’s really happening is physiological.

Your autonomic nervous system this is the part that controls your breath, digestion, heart rate, energy, safety that has shifted into protection.

It moves out of flow, flexibility, and ease.

It moves into survival.

This is where Polyvagal Theory gives us language that feels both scientific and deeply compassionate.

Your nervous system asks one question all day long:

“Am I safe?”

Not safe in the logical sense but safe in the felt sense.

Safe enough to breathe fully.
Safe enough to soften the jaw.
Safe enough to drop the shoulders.
Safe enough to rest.

When that answer is unclear or consistently “no,” your body adapts.
Not because you’re fragile, but because you and all of us are wired for survival.

How the Vagus Nerve Shapes Burnout

The vagus nerve is your body’s biggest communicator between brain and body.
It touches your lungs, heart, gut, diaphragm, throat, pelvis all the places burnout is most easily felt.

When the vagus nerve senses overwhelm, it shifts you into different states:

1. Sympathetic activation

The “wired” state.
Fast thoughts.
Shallow breath.
Jaw tension.
Pelvic gripping.
Feeling on edge but still functioning.

2. Dorsal vagal fatigue

The “shutdown” state.
Heavy limbs.
Foggy thinking.
Invisible sadness.
Struggling to start tasks.
A feeling of sinking.

Burnout is often the flip between both:
overwhelm, exhaustion, overwhelm again.

It feels like instability — not in your mind, but in your physiology.

How Burnout Lives in the Body

The body keeps the score through tiny patterns:

Shallow breathing
because deep breath requires safety.

A ribcage that won’t drop
because the diaphragm is guarding.

Pelvic tension
because the body is bracing from the inside out.

Tight shoulders
that rise with every thought, not just every movement.

A clenched stomach
because you’re living in anticipation.

An overactive mind
that loops because it doesn’t feel able to rest.

A tender heart
because everything touches you more deeply when you’re depleted.

In burnout, your body becomes something to manage instead of something you can inhabit.

But here is the truth your nervous system longs to hear:

Your body wants to feel safe.
Your breath wants to move.
You can come home to yourself again.

And you don’t do that by pushing, you do that by listening.

Why Hypopressives, TRE®, Strength & The Franklin Method Support Burnout So Deeply

These four modalities speak fluently to the nervous system.
Each one touches a different piece of the burnout puzzle.

Let’s breathe into each one.

✨ Hypopressives: Creating Space Where Burnout Creates Collapse

Burnout often shrinks your breath. Hypopressives gently reverse that.

They widen your ribs, lift your diaphragm, manage internal pressure, and create a sense of spaciousness inside the body.

What this does for the vagus nerve:

• Encourages deeper, calmer breathing

• Decompresses the core (pressure changes = safety signals)

• Softens pelvic and abdominal tension

• Settles the nervous system from the inside out

Hypopressives teach your body to feel safe again, not through effort, but through space.

✨ TRE®: Releasing What Your Body Has Been Holding

TRE® helps the body shake off chronic tension and stored stress patterns.

Physiologically, it:

• Discharges sympathetic activation

• Releases muscle guarding

• Reduces the “alertness” signals in the vagus nerve

• Restores natural rest–digest rhythms

• Brings a sense of deep internal quiet

People often say:
“My body finally exhaled.”

That exhale is the nervous system receiving permission to soften.

✨ Strength Training: Rebuilding Safety From the Ground Up

The right kind of strength training, gradual loading, functional, breath-aware, does more than build muscle.

It tells your nervous system:

“You are capable.
You are supported.
You are grounded.”

Strength work balances hormones, regulates energy, improves sleep, and provides structure, all of which burnout bodies crave.

This is strength as nourishment, not depletion.

✨ The Franklin Method: Ease Instead of Effort

The Franklin Method rewires how you move through imagery, natural biomechanics, and softness.

For the nervous system, this means:

• Moving without bracing

• Releasing old movement habits

• Letting the body find efficiency instead of effort

• Introducing playfulness (so healing in burnout)

• Creating gentle, sensory-based vagal stimulation

The body relaxes when movement feels like ease, not correction.

A Quiet Word on the Pelvic Floor

Burnout doesn’t necessarily cause pelvic floor issues, but it often amplifies them.

Why?

Because the pelvic floor listens closely to the nervous system.

When breath lifts, it lifts.
When the jaw clenches, it clenches.
When stress rises, it grips.
When the body feels unsafe, it protects.

As the nervous system softens through breath, release, imagery, and grounded strength, the pelvic floor often follows, without forcing, squeezing, or “doing.”

Healing happens through safety.

You Can Come Home to Yourself Again

Burnout can make you feel far from yourself almost like the version of you with softness, energy, and clarity is out of reach.

But she isn’t gone.
She’s waiting.

Waiting for breath.
Waiting for space.
Waiting for safety.
Waiting for you to stop pushing long enough to hear what your body has been saying:

“I just need a moment.
Let me exhale.”

If your body is whispering for help, I would love to walk with you, breath by breath, shake by shake, lift by lift.

Hypopressives • TRE® • Strength • Franklin Method
A path back to calm, clarity, and yourself.

DM me if you need a place to begin.
I’ll help you find the softest, gentlest and best starting point.