It’s now recognized as a legitimate health crisis and has become part of our cultural vocabulary. As mental health conversations become more normalized, we're finally acknowledging what so many have quietly endured: the exhaustion that goes beyond fatigue, the overwhelm that doesn't lift after a good night's sleep.
That’s burnout.
We know more than ever about the importance of boundaries, rest, and sustainable work practices. But what's missing from most conversations about burnout is the acknowledgement that it's not just in your head.
Bria Brown, a licensed clinical social worker, learned this lesson the hard way. In 2022, after three years at a job that had grown increasingly toxic, her body began sending unmistakable signals. Her hair fell out. Her hands tremored. Sleep became elusive, replaced by a cycle of anxiety that seemed to have no off switch.
"I had to take medical leave," Bria recalls. "That was a huge wake up call for me that at the end of the day, businesses and corporations have their bottom line, and it's up to you to decide how you're going to engage with it."
States away, wellness entrepreneur Dominiece Clifton had the same wake up call. As a wellness coach teaching women how to manage stress and build sustainable lives, she was watching her clients transform while she herself was running on empty.
"I felt very hypocritical," she admits, "because I was teaching women how to care for themselves, and I was always burned out in pursuit of the journey."
What both women discovered through experience and professional expertise is that burnout isn't a badge of honor or an inevitable cost of ambition. It's a signal, and learning to read that signal before it becomes a crisis might be one of the most important skills we never learned.
The Disconnect Between Mind and Body
"Most people I've worked with are not connected to their bodies enough to even know that they're burned out,” Dominiece, who now works as Director of Major Gifts at United Way of Central Maryland while running her coaching practice, explains. Most of her clients don't realize the full extent of their burnout until they're invited to slow down. "The moment they begin to slow down, they begin to feel how burned out they are, how overwhelmed they are, how stressed out they are."
Bria sees the same pattern in her own life and therapy practice. "My body will tell me I'm burned out before my brain will," she says. The biggest commonality she observes among her clients? "A lack of boundaries. Not feeling like you can say no, people pleasing, feeling like if you don't show up, people are going to perceive you differently."
And the stakes are higher than most people realize. According to a stat referenced in “Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success” by Jessica Pryce-Jones, the average person will spend 90,000 hours of their lifetime working. That's more than a decade of continuous time. So here's the question that should wake us up: do you want to spend 90,000 hours miserable, burned out, in a toxic workplace, not doing what lights you up? Because here's the thing—we can always make more money, but we cannot get that time back.
The Science of Stress We're Not Taught
What changed everything for Dominiece was understanding the stress response cycle. In 2020 when she was working as a nutrition and wellness coach, she couldn't figure out why her clients weren't losing weight despite doing all the right things. The answer, she’d soon learn, was in their nervous systems.
"When our bodies are stressed in survival mode, they deprioritize things like weight loss and reproduction and sometimes digestion," she explains. "My clients' bodies, because they were in survival mode, weren't prioritizing weight loss."
The stress response cycle has three phases: homeostasis (balance), the alarm phase (fight or flight), and recovery. Most of us get stuck in the middle. "We keep getting stuck in the alarm phase," Dominiece says. "Most people are walking around with days, weeks, months, sometimes decades of unresolved stress."
Simply closing your laptop or leaving work doesn't complete the cycle. "We think that just because we've gotten away from the stressor, ‘oh, I'm fine.’ But your body isn't processing in that way," she notes. "We literally have to do things to tell our bodies that it is safe."
The Myth of Grand Gestures
If you're waiting for the perfect hour-long yoga class or a full spa day before you prioritize yourself, you've already fallen for one of burnout's biggest myths.
"There's this myth that you have to do the thing in an extreme way for it to count," Dominiece says. "Some days all I have is 20 minutes, and I'm going to make this 20 minutes count. It might be a quick yoga session, or a quick walk around my block. That still counts."
Bria agrees. The solution isn't necessarily a self-care day at the spa. "Those things can help, but burnout is much more than ‘I need a self-care day,’ she notes. Burnout means you need to address what's causing you to feel burned out."
The real shift is becoming proactive. "Instead of being reactive, be proactive with that," Bria advises. "Have scheduled time off that you can look forward to versus, oh, ‘I feel terrible now, let me take a couple of days off.’"
Building a Practice, Not a Performance
Both women have developed what Dominiece calls the "wholepreneur approach”; prioritizing mind, body, and spirit before anything else. For Dominiece, that means dedicating at least 30 minutes to an hour daily: consuming motivational content for the mind, prayer, meditation or journaling for the spirit, and movement for the body.
Bria’s practice is simpler but equally firm. "Before I'm for anyone or anything else, I'm for God and for myself," she shares. That means slow mornings when possible, 7-9 hours of sleep, movement, and clear boundaries. "When I'm off work, I'm off work. I'm not available when I'm not available, and I have very clear and firm boundaries about that."
The Window of Tolerance
Perhaps the most powerful concept Doniniece shares is the "window of tolerance", recognizing how much you can handle before you need to focus on self-care. "If you are beginning to notice that you're starting to get angry and agitated and cranky, that's a sign of your body saying, ‘I need you to take a break and prioritize self-care.’"
The body always tells the truth. It communicates through tension headaches, disrupted sleep, digestive issues, irritability. "The danger is that when we are disconnected from our bodies, we miss all of the signals," she warns. "Our bodies will eventually force us to stop. It will shut down if we don't listen."
The Practice of Honoring What You Need
Though they learned it differently, both women learned that your body is not the enemy. It's the most honest friend you have. It's telling you something important; if only you'll slow down long enough to listen.
"We don't have to, as a society, be overwhelmed and stressed out and exhausted and burned out,” Dominiece advocates. But prevention requires something we've been taught to resist: the radical act of putting ourselves first, not once in a while as a reward, but daily as a practice. Not because we've earned it, but because we're human.
And humans, unlike machines, need rest to run.
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