A somatic approach to burnout, deep exhaustion, and learning to put down the weight
You’re tired.
Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep fixes. Not the kind that a holiday sorts out. This is something deeper — a bone-deep exhaustion that lives in your body, that’s been building for months or years, that makes you feel like you’re running on empty even when you’ve technically had enough rest.
And here’s the confusing part: when you finally get a moment to stop — a weekend, a day off, even an evening with nothing scheduled — you can’t actually rest. Your body is exhausted but your mind won’t switch off. You feel guilty for sitting still. You scroll, you fidget, you find something to do. Or you collapse completely, only to wake up feeling just as drained.
If this sounds familiar, there’s nothing wrong with you. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was trained to do. And as a somatic therapist working with clients across Ireland — in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and online — I see this pattern constantly.
Let me explain what’s actually happening, and what can help.
The Tiredness That Sleep Doesn’t Fix
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that belongs to the nervous system rather than the body. You can sleep eight hours and wake up tired. You can take a week off and come back feeling worse. You can do all the “right things” — the baths, the early nights, the cutting back — and still feel like you’re dragging yourself through each day.
This is nervous system exhaustion. And it doesn’t respond to regular rest because the nervous system itself has forgotten how to rest.
In somatic therapy, we talk about the window of tolerance — the zone where your nervous system can handle stress, process emotions, and return to calm. When you’re regulated, your window is wide. You can deal with challenges and then recover.
But when you’ve been running on stress for too long — chronic work pressure, difficult relationships, financial worry, caring responsibilities, unprocessed grief, or simply the relentless pace of modern life — your window narrows. Eventually, it narrows so much that even rest doesn’t fit inside it anymore.
Rest itself starts to feel threatening.
Why Rest Feels Impossible (Or Dangerous)
For some people, the inability to rest is simply habit — a lifetime of busyness that’s hard to unlearn. But for others, it goes deeper than that.
If you grew up in an environment where letting your guard down wasn’t safe — where chaos could erupt at any moment, where you had to stay alert to manage other people’s emotions, where rest was interrupted or punished — your nervous system learned that stillness equals danger.
This is hypervigilance. Your body keeps the watch even when there’s nothing to watch for. It scans for threats even in safety. It maintains a low-level activation that you’ve probably normalised because you’ve never known anything different.
People with this pattern often describe themselves as “bad at relaxing” or “not the type to sit still.” They might even wear their busyness as a badge of honour. But underneath the productivity is a nervous system that doesn’t know how to switch off — not because it’s broken, but because switching off never felt safe.
As a somatic therapist in Ireland, I work with many high-functioning people — professionals in Dublin, parents in Kildare, business owners across the country — who’ve achieved a lot precisely because their nervous system kept them running. The problem is that same wiring that drove success is now driving exhaustion.
The Science of Why This Matters
This isn’t just about feeling tired. Chronic nervous system activation has real physiological consequences.
When you’re stuck in sympathetic (fight/flight) mode, your body diverts resources away from repair, digestion, and immune function. The parasympathetic nervous system — your “rest and digest” mode — doesn’t get enough airtime. You’re running on stress hormones instead of restoration.
There’s also something called allostatic load — the cumulative wear and tear on the body from chronic stress. It shows up as inflammation, hormonal disruption, digestive issues, chronic pain, and accelerated ageing. The body keeps a tab. Eventually, it presents the bill.
And here’s something fascinating: during genuine rest, your brain literally cleans itself. The glymphatic system — active primarily during deep rest and sleep — flushes out metabolic waste from brain tissue. Without proper rest, this cleaning process is compromised. You’re not just tired; your brain is congested.
Rest isn’t laziness. Rest is biology.
Rest vs. Collapse: They’re Not the Same Thing
Here’s something important that often gets missed: there’s a difference between rest and collapse.
In polyvagal terms, true rest happens in the ventral vagal state — you’re calm, present, connected, safe. Your nervous system is settled. This is restorative.
But many exhausted people don’t rest — they collapse. This is the dorsal vagal state — shutdown, numbness, disconnection, depression. You’re not resting; you’re checked out. Your body has hit the emergency brake because it couldn’t sustain the acceleration any longer.
Collapse might look like rest from the outside — you’re on the couch, you’re not doing anything — but it doesn’t feel restful. You come out of it feeling foggy, ashamed, more exhausted than before. That’s because collapse isn’t regulation. It’s the nervous system giving up.
In somatic therapy, one of the most important skills we build is the capacity for genuine rest — not collapse. Learning to settle into safety rather than shutting down from overwhelm.
The Productive Healing Trap
There’s another pattern I see frequently, especially among people who are already interested in wellness and self-improvement.
They know they need to heal. They know they need to rest. So they turn healing into another project. Meditation apps with streaks to maintain. Morning routines to optimise. Self-care rituals that require planning, purchasing, and performance.
This is the productive healing trap: self-care as another to-do list. Rest as something to achieve rather than receive.
I’m not criticising these practices — many of them are genuinely helpful. But when the underlying energy is still “I need to fix myself,” even good practices become another form of striving. The nervous system doesn’t get the memo that it’s okay to stop.
Real rest isn’t productive. It doesn’t have an outcome. It doesn’t prove anything. It just… is.
Permission as Medicine
So what actually helps?
In my somatic therapy practice — whether I’m working with someone in my Dublin clinic, my Naas treatment room, my Newbridge practice, or online anywhere in Ireland and beyond — one of the most powerful interventions is also the simplest:
Permission.
Permission to be tired. Permission to stop. Permission to not have healed yet. Permission to need help. Permission to put down the weight.
This might sound too simple to be therapeutic. But for a nervous system that learned to keep going no matter what, permission is radical. It interrupts the pattern. It challenges the belief that you have to earn rest through productivity or suffering.
When someone finally hears — and more importantly, feels in their body — “you’ve done enough, you can rest now,” something shifts. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But something.
What Somatic Therapy Offers
Somatic therapy works with the body directly because that’s where the exhaustion lives. We’re not just talking about burnout; we’re feeling where it sits in your chest, your shoulders, your jaw, your gut.
In a somatic session, we might:
• Map your nervous system patterns — understanding your unique window of tolerance and what pushes you out of it
• Build capacity for rest — gradually teaching your nervous system that stillness is safe
• Work with hypervigilance — releasing the chronic tension that keeps you scanning for threat
• Differentiate rest from collapse — helping you find genuine restoration rather than shutdown
• Release what the body has been holding — the accumulated weight of too much for too long
This isn’t about fixing you. It’s about creating conditions where your nervous system can finally do what it’s been trying to do: settle.
A Practice to Try
If you’re reading this and recognising yourself, here’s something small you can try:
Find somewhere to sit or lie down. Place a hand on your chest. And say — out loud if possible, or silently if not — “I’ve done enough for today. I can rest now.”
Notice what happens in your body when you say it. Resistance? Relief? Tears? Nothing?
Whatever happens is information. Your nervous system is telling you something about its relationship with rest.
You might also try my guided somatic meditation “You Can Rest Now” — designed for this pattern. The first half explores everything we’ve discussed here; the second half is a gentle guided journey into actually putting down the weight.
Working Together
If the exhaustion has been going on too long, if you’re recognising patterns here that go back years or decades, working with a somatic therapist can help you shift what self-help practices alone can’t reach.
I offer somatic therapy sessions in person in Dublin, Naas and Newbridge, and online throughout Ireland and internationally. Whether you’re dealing with burnout, chronic exhaustion, anxiety, trauma, or simply a nervous system that’s forgotten how to rest — this work meets you where you are.
You’ve been carrying a lot. You’ve been running for a long time. And I want you to know:
You’ve done enough. You can rest now.
