The Trauma of Burnout by Dr Claire Plumbly

For much of my life, burnout did not look like falling apart. It looked like competence and achievement.  On the outside, it appeared that I was performing well in demanding professional environments, taking responsibility, solving problems and remaining capable even when my body and nervous system were telling a very different story.

This is why The Trauma of Burnout by Dr Claire Plumbly resonates so strongly with me. It offers a compassionate way of understanding burnout—not simply as the consequence of working too hard or failing to practise enough self-care, but as something that can be connected to trauma, anxiety and a nervous system that has spent too long preparing for, managing or recovering from threat.

In my own experience, capability became more than a strength. It became a source of safety, identity and worth. Staying busy, productive and useful helped me avoid what might surface if I stopped. Even during periods of significant distress, trauma and substance dependence, I could continue to appear highly functional from the outside.

Recovery has required me to reconsider the belief that my value depends on how much I can carry. It has involved learning that rest is not weakness, boundaries are not failure and slowing down does not mean losing my purpose.

This book is particularly valuable for people who are accustomed to coping well, caring for others and pushing through discomfort—until those strategies no longer work. It helps explain why burnout cannot always be resolved through a holiday, a productivity system or a few superficial lifestyle changes. Sometimes recovery requires us to understand what our nervous system has been protecting us from and why constant capability once felt necessary.

I recommend this book to anyone seeking a more compassionate and trauma-informed understanding of burnout, particularly professionals, carers and high-functioning individuals who may be outwardly succeeding while quietly becoming depleted.

We do not need to become less capable. We may need to become less dependent on capability as our only source of safety, identity and worth.

For a long time, I thought recovery meant learning how to control my thoughts and my mind.

I believed that if I could understand myself better, challenge the negative thoughts, become more disciplined, practice gratitude, meditate properly, go to therapy, and work hard enough at recovery, surely I would eventually be able to stop the anxiety, the depression and the trauma responses that seemed to arrive without warning.

The problem was that my body had not received the memo.

I could know intellectually that I was safe and still feel anything but safe.

My heart would race. My thoughts would speed up. I felt an overwhelming need to keep moving, as though stopping would somehow be dangerous. At other times, I could go in the opposite direction — disconnected, exhausted, flat, distant from myself and the world around me.

And because I did not understand what was happening, I often added another layer on top of the experience: fear of the experience itself.

Why am I feeling like this? What is wrong with me? Why can't I just calm down?

Deb Dana's Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory helped me begin asking a very different question:

What is my nervous system trying to tell me?

That shift has been one of the most important changes in my recovery from complex PTSD, anxiety and depression.

Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr Stephen Porges and translated into an accessible therapeutic framework by Deb Dana, gave me language for experiences that previously felt confusing and sometimes frightening.

Dana describes the different states of the autonomic nervous system: the place of safety and connection associated with the ventral vagal system; the mobilisation of fight or flight; and the shutdown, collapse or disconnection associated with dorsal vagal states.

Reading about these states was not simply an academic exercise for me.

I recognised myself in them.

I recognised the times when my nervous system seemed to be scanning constantly for danger. I recognised the anxiety and urgency of mobilisation. I recognised the moments when my body seemed to know something was wrong before my conscious mind did.

And I recognised the other side too — the times when everything seemed to become too much and my system responded by pulling away.

Perhaps most importantly, I began to understand that these responses were not evidence that I was weak, irrational or somehow doing recovery badly.

They were protective responses.

My nervous system had learned to keep me safe.

The difficulty was that sometimes it was still responding to the present as though it were the past.

That understanding brought a level of compassion into my recovery that had often been missing.

Before learning about trauma and the nervous system, I tended to approach difficult emotional states as problems to solve. If anxiety appeared, I wanted it gone. If depression appeared, I worried that I was going backwards. If I became overwhelmed or disconnected, I could easily interpret that as failure.

Polyvagal theory helped me become more curious.

Instead of immediately trying to force myself out of a state, I can now sometimes recognise it:

I am activated.

My nervous system thinks something is dangerous.

My body is trying to protect me.

And then comes perhaps the most important reminder:

I am here. This is now.

That does not magically make every difficult feeling disappear.

But it changes my relationship with it.

One of the greatest lessons I have taken from Anchored is that regulation does not mean being calm all the time.

For someone who has lived with anxiety, that idea alone can be liberating.

A healthy nervous system moves.

We become activated when something requires our attention. We settle. We connect. We withdraw. We rest. We mobilise again.

The goal is not permanent serenity.

The goal is flexibility — developing the capacity to move through different nervous-system states without becoming trapped in them, and gradually increasing our ability to find our way back to safety and connection.

That understanding has complemented the deeper trauma work I have done in my own recovery.

EMDR has been particularly important in helping me process trauma. But nervous-system awareness has given me something slightly different: a way of understanding what is happening in ordinary life, between therapy sessions, when my body suddenly reacts.

Sometimes what helps is movement.

Sometimes it is breathing.

Sometimes I need to orient myself to where I actually am — looking around the room, noticing what I can see, reminding my brain and body that I am in the present.

Sometimes it is another person.

And sometimes the most useful thing I can do is simply stop fighting myself.

Dana's discussion of “glimmers” has also stayed with me.

Recovery can make us extraordinarily good at looking for danger.

We notice triggers. Warning signs. Changes in mood. Changes in sleep. Anxiety. Intrusive thoughts. The possibility that something might be going wrong.

It is understandable. In many ways, vigilance becomes part of survival.

But glimmers ask us to practise noticing something else.

The moment the sun feels warm on your skin.

A conversation in which you suddenly feel understood.

Walking outside and noticing the trees.

Laughing unexpectedly.

The comfort of a familiar voice.

A moment when you realise your shoulders have dropped and, without consciously trying, you have taken a deeper breath.

A moment when your body whispers, rather than shouts:

This is okay.

You are safe here.

I have come to appreciate how important those moments are.

Recovery is not only found in dramatic breakthroughs.

Sometimes it is found in tiny moments of safety that we learn to notice, and then slowly learn to trust.

That may be what I value most about Anchored.

The book helped me stop seeing my nervous system as an enemy.

For years, I had been frustrated by a body and brain that did not always seem to respond logically. I wanted them to behave differently.

Now I am learning something much more difficult and much more compassionate: to listen.

My nervous system has spent a very long time trying to protect me.

Recovery is not about punishing it for doing its job too well.

It is about patiently showing it that life is different now.

That danger is not everywhere.

That activation can pass.

That connection is possible.

That rest can be safe.

And that my body does not always have to be preparing for what might happen next.

Polyvagal theory is not a complete explanation for trauma, depression or anxiety, and I don't believe any single theory should be treated as one. But it has given me an invaluable framework for understanding myself.

Anchored did something even more important.

It helped turn something I once feared — my own nervous system — into something I could begin to know.

And, eventually, something I could begin to befriend.

For me, that has become an important part of what healing looks like.