Burnout and the Radical Path of Non-Abandonment of Self
By Jessica Conway, RN, MSN, RYTT
Burnout. Ooof…a bodily state that is so very primal, complex, nuanced, and human in its nature. Society often creates a lot of judgment, shame, and drama around burnout. For instance, one might feel like they aren’t “strong enough”. One may look at other co-workers in the same situation who are thriving and feel too sensitive, that something is inherently wrong with them, or that they should toughen up and be able to handle this. Burnout, in this instance, often gets blamed on the individual, leaving a residue of shame, blame, and self-judgment.
However, in truth, it takes an enormous amount of courage and vulnerability to talk about and get curious about burnout. At its core, burnout actually reflects a very important set of primal human needs and wishes - safety, belonging, and dignity. Burnout is simply a response to overwhelming life experiences. An adaptive strategy to the underlying need for safety, slowing down, and a holding environment where all parts of oneself are welcome, seen, heard, and acknowledged. Labeling someone as “burned out” is far too simplistic and stops further healing, connection, and clarity from transpiring.
The Complexity of Burnout
From an evolutionary perspective, burnout protects our natural healing rhythm of the nervous system. Burnout can stem from an environment that is too much and too fast for the nervous system, without enough safety and resourcing on board. Burnout also gives us information on what one’s unique window of capacity is and when one has fallen out of their capacity. Burnout is self-defined, not defined by the environment or event, but by the individual response. Every nervous system is different and responds differently to its environment; however, something that is universal to all humans suffering from burnout is a bodily state and physiology that has been under threat and has been trying to survive for far too long. Burnout hits at the root of safety, and a need for containment, support from trusting others, and a holding environment where one’s natural healing nervous system rhythm can come back online.
How To Be With Burnout
When addressing the root causes of burnout and opening pathways to healing, we have to begin to build a few new muscles and neural pathways.
1. The first muscle we need to strengthen is our curiosity and compassion for self during these times, our “Empathic Witness Self” muscle. This “Empathic Witness Self” is our capacity to be with the feelings and sensations of burnout with openness, lightness, curiosity, and warmth.
2. The second muscle we need to strengthen is our “Wise Discerning Self” muscle. We need to discern if our nervous system response is “needed” at this moment or not. Notice I used the word “needed” and not appropriate. Our nervous system does not assign meaning of good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate. Our nervous system has one goal in mind, and that is survival and defense. If this response is needed, honor your nervous system in all the ways it is protecting you, AND take a sober look at your unique window of capacity to discern if it's wise to stay and work on building a wider window of capacity, or if it is an act of kindness and wisdom to find an environment more attuned to your unique nervous system.
Bodily states, such as burnout, are good messengers and show us trailheads leading down paths of healing. However, the version of us in this state of burnout - with our emerging emotions, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs - is not a good guide along this path! Your “Empathic Witness Self” and “Wise Discerning Self” need to be the guides here. We need to cultivate our awareness, curiosity, compassion, empathy, attunement to self, and capacity to hold ourselves in this state of burnout.
Tools and Resources to Becoming Your “Empathic Witness Self” and “Wise Discerning Self”
One tool to help build the muscle towards becoming your “Empathic Witness Self” and “Wise Discerning Self”, to guide you down the trailhead of healing burnout, is to follow the 5-step N.U.R.S.E. Resiliency Protocol. More than understanding and insight, this 5-step map supports us in embodying new ways of being, aligned with a broader vision.
The acronym N.U.R.S.E. stands for:
N. Notice and Name
U. Understanding
R. Resource and Regulate
S. Somatic Explorations
E. Empower, Embody, Expand
Step 1 - Notice and name the autonomic nervous system state and bodily signals of activation and unrest during times of stress. Are you in a fight, flight, freeze, collapse, or appease response? Maybe you feel muscle tension, changes in your breathing and heart rate, shakiness, dissociation, or posture changes.
Step 2 - Understanding. This is where we bring in the heart-part of compassion and understanding. In this moment, offer yourself compassion in the form of slowing down, bringing curiosity to what is activating and triggering you. Knowing this event is a protective, adaptive strategy created from an underlying unmet need for connection, safety, and belonging. Understanding your bodily state and its emergent properties is not necessarily agreeing. Rather, understanding is a way to be with ourselves, with this contraction, this emotion, this belief, or even action to look for what is at the heart and center of it all. How does this response tell me something about safety, belonging, dignity, my values, and the orientation I hold towards life? Understanding asks what and how, not why... How is my body protecting me in this moment? What are this bodily state and its emergent properties trying to take care of? What is it afraid might happen if it doesn't protect me in this way? In this step of understanding, we begin to create a path for healing and change. A key step to release contractions and unconscious ways we orient and organize to protect ourselves.
Step 3 - Resource and regulate using a somatic resource practice that feels supportive in your body at this moment. Somatic resourcing is anything that brings the body into a felt sense of safety and connection. The body has to FEEL safe and FEEL connected to heal. Healing is in the biology of our body and not just in the biography or narrative of the mind. It's an experientially embodied healing that gets to the roots of transformational change. Try exploring different practices and combining them to find what works for you and your unique nervous system. I have included a short list of other somatic resources below. But, beyond self-resourcing with various practices, humans have a biological imperative to co-regulate their nervous system with trusting, safe, benevolent others. I may even go as far as to say that healing relationships are the container most needed for nervous system healing. That and Mother Earth.
Step 4 - Somatic Inquiry. Once one has come back into their window of tolerance, and the “Witness Self” and “Wise Discerning Self” are online, one can begin to turn towards the cause of distress/burnout with somatic inquiry. Ask, “What is it that wants to be known, felt, and integrated now?" Ask, “How might I take care of myself in a new way?” Explore and see if there is a response or action that feels more aligned with your deeper truth, values, needs, and intentions.
Step 5 - Embody, Empower, Expand. The WHY of all of this is about embodied change and embodied healing. A journey of integration, wholeness, and root-level change. Empowered awareness with ourselves, others, and the world around us. When we lift the veil of shame and blame for our bodily state that arises when under threat and pressure, we can begin to relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us in a compassionate, wider way. Rinse and repeat the N.U.R.S.E. Resiliency Protocol to come back into your window of capacity and expand your window of capacity. To create new neural pathways. To ultimately have the capacity to step into the unknown and unsafe territory of this wild and full human life.
Somatic Resources
● Orient, look around your environment and find something soothing, such as a plant or piece of art, or a color you like.
● Ground, sense your feet connected to the earth.
● Breathe, lengthen your exhale, slow your breath.
● Place your hands on your heart or belly, or practice a touch-related containment exercise.
● Hum or bring in an intentional sigh of relief. Allow any innate sound to release through you.
● Move rhythmically, rock, sway, bounce, and let any innate movements release through you.
● Anything that brings you back into presence, connection to self, other, and the world around you and helps you find, feel, and absorb safety.
The Antidote and Medicine Needed
Once you have embodied your “Empathic Witness Self” and discerned if the bodily state of burnout is correctly matched and needed in response to the environment you are in, you can choose the correct medicine or antidote needed for the wound.
If your bodily state of burnout is a matched response to your environment, then the first step to take is to honor your nervous system and celebrate your body’s innate ability to protect you. The next step is to take a sober look at your unique body and window of capacity. Is it an act of kindness and wisdom to stay and work on widening your window of capacity, or is it an act of kindness and wisdom to leave and find an environment better attuned to the natural healing rhythm of your nervous system? Either way, it is an act of kindness to turn toward yourself in times of burnout and welcome its visit as a messenger from your body and soul. This “lost orphan of your soma and soul”, as my teacher, Matt Licata calls it, simply wants to be seen, heard, held and loved. To find a home within you where it is welcomed. What burden is this visitor holding? Can you love this part of you and provide him or her safety in a way that nobody else did? What is the corrective experience that you most need at this moment? How can you give that experience to yourself, and how can you enlist the help of a co-regulating other? When the need is met, you no longer need protection from burnout.
If you decide to stay and work on widening your window of tolerance, then the medicine most needed is to follow N.U.R.S.E. Resiliency Protocol to return to your window of capacity and widen your window of tolerance. To build capacity is to attune to internal states with compassionate awareness (the witness) and somatic or felt sense resourcing. As soon as you are back in a space that is safe enough, resource your nervous system towards safety, connection, and the here and now.
As for a mismatched response, meaning to say, if your response of burnout is a bit louder and stronger than what is currently needed in the moment the response arises, the antidote is also to follow the N.U.R.S.E. Resiliency Protocol, to return to your window of capacity. Once you have returned to your window of capacity, you can begin to turn towards yourself with somatic inquiry. Somatic Inquiry only happens inside one's window of tolerance. What do the parts of you that are scared and overwhelmed need? It is this turning towards oneself in times of burnout with curiosity, warmth, compassion, and attunement that is most vital on the radical path of non-abandonment of self. To seek support and attunement from a therapist, friend, coach, or partner one can trust. To be better equipped to rest into the reality of one’s experience and expand one’s capacity to be with this wild and full human life.
Final Thoughts
During moments of activation, relief, in the form of old patterned responses, becomes the priority over curiosity. Integration, healing, and paving new pathways for the nervous system and brain require being with our sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and what is arising in the body in a curious and new way. Trust that burnout is a trail marker that will lead one down a path of healing. Either the burnout is congruent to the situation and will lead to a healthy boundary for you, or the burnout response is not congruent to the present moment situation and will lead one down the path toward healing inner wounds around safety and containment.
Always meet yourself with compassion, forgiveness, and a whole lot of understanding for your HUMANNESS and the humanness of others! This is a lifelong journey, not a race.
"Opening to the possibility that lasting transformation and healing are not so much about changing our experience as retraining ourselves to meet it with new levels of curiosity, perspective, and warmth.” - Matthew Licata, PhD
Thank you for having this VULNERAGEOUS (vulnerable, courageous, and outrageous) conversation with me around burnout. It takes great courage to engage with these feelings and to embark on the radical path of non-abandonment of self. And remember…hold on to your center, for that is the only way.
Conway, Jessica. 2024. “Burnout and the Radical Path of Non-Abandonment of Self.” https://jessicaconwaysomatics.com/
About Jessica Conway
Somatic Practitioner, Registered Nurse, Safe and Sound Protocol Provider, yoga instructor, meditation guide, and cold-plunge lover, who unceasingly seeks to find truth and wisdom on every path of this wild and full human life.
After graduating with a Master’s Degree in Nursing from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009, Jessica worked as a Registered Nurse in the Critical Care setting for almost 15 years before shifting her focus to somatic trauma coaching, meditation, writing, and yoga.
She values empowerment, embodiment, integrity, truth, compassion, awareness, a connection to nature, and intentional living.
Her offerings (1-1 Somatic Coaching, Safe and Sound Protocol, and Mentorship) guide you to come back home to your center and to BE in your body - alive, awake, aware, and authentically YOU.
Hold on to your center, for that is the only way
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