Let’s start with what doesn’t work.Telling a burned-out woman to have a bubble bath is a bit like telling someone with a broken leg to take the stairs. Technically possible. Completely missing the point.The advice is everywhere — rest more, do yoga, practise gratitude, light a candle. And maybe those things matter eventually. But when you’re deep in it — when your nervous system is so wired that sitting still feels like a threat and your idea of relaxing is switching from one screen to another — that advice doesn’t land. It just adds guilt to the pile.So here are five things that actually helped. Not from a textbook. From someone who has been in it, and knows what the way out actually looks like.
1. Start somewhere so small it feels almost pointless
Here’s what I did when I realised I couldn’t stay still.
I made myself a matcha.
That’s it. I sat down with it — not to meditate, not to journal, not to do anything in particular. Just to sit with a drink I liked. At first it was five minutes. Genuinely uncomfortable five minutes where my brain was running through everything I should be doing instead. But I kept coming back to it. Day after day. And slowly — very slowly — the five minutes became ten, then twenty, then something I actually looked forward to.
I wasn’t following a programme. I was learning to sit still in the only way my nervous system would allow — one small, unthreatening thing at a time.
This is actually how nervous system regulation works. You can’t force calm. You can’t decide to relax and have it happen. But you can create tiny, consistent moments of safety that your body starts to recognise and trust. The matcha was mine. Yours might be something else entirely. The size doesn’t matter. The consistency does.
2. Stop treating rest as a reward
Rest isn’t something you earn when the list is done. The list is never done. If you’re waiting for a quiet moment to appear before you allow yourself to stop, you will be waiting for a very long time.
This was one of the hardest things to unlearn — that rest was built into a productive day, not bolted on at the end of one. Your nervous system needs regular signals that it’s safe to slow down, not a single long holiday once a year that it spends the first three days being too wired to enjoy.
Small and often beats long and occasional every single time. Ten minutes of genuine stillness three times a day does more than a weekend away that you spend half of checking your emails anyway.
3. Find your version of meditation (which probably doesn’t look like meditation)
I want to be honest about something: I don’t sit cross-legged with my eyes closed and an empty mind. That has never happened and I suspect it never will.
What I do is lie on my bed sometimes and let myself not do anything. No phone. No podcast. No productive use of the time. Just lying there and seeing what comes up.
At first that was uncomfortable. My thoughts were loud and I didn’t particularly want to be alone with them. But I kept going — and gradually it got easier. The thoughts became less alarming. The quiet became less threatening. And at some point I realised I’d stopped hiding from my own mind.
That’s when I knew something had genuinely shifted.
Meditation doesn’t have to look like the app. It doesn’t have to involve a cushion or a timer or Sanskrit. It’s really just the practice of being present with yourself without immediately escaping. If that’s a walk without headphones, a drive in silence, or five minutes sitting with a drink you like — that counts. Your nervous system doesn’t care about the format. It cares about the signal.
4. Notice what your body is actually asking for
When you’re burned out, hunger and exhaustion start to feel like the same thing. Stress and sadness blur together. The body’s signals get harder to read because everything is running at such a high background hum that the quieter messages get lost.
Part of recovery is learning to hear those signals again — and that starts with slowing down enough to notice them.
Not in a grand, therapeutic sense. Practically. Before you reach for the biscuit tin at 3pm, pause for ten seconds and ask: am I actually hungry, or am I overwhelmed? Before you push through the afternoon on three hours of sleep, ask: what does my body actually need right now?
You don’t have to act on every answer immediately. But the noticing itself starts to rebuild something — a relationship between you and your body that chronic stress has quietly been eroding for years. This post on why you keep reaching for sugar when you’re stressed goes deeper into why that 3pm pull is rarely about food.
5. Understand what’s actually happening — because it changes everything
The most useful thing I ever did for my own recovery wasn’t a habit or a practice. It was understanding what had been happening in my body.
When I learned that my nervous system had been stuck in a chronic stress response — that the wired, can’t-switch-off, exhausted-but-unable-to-rest feeling wasn’t a character flaw but a biological adaptation — something shifted. The shame lifted. I stopped fighting myself and started working with myself instead.
That’s the piece most burnout advice misses. It tells you what to do without explaining why you can’t seem to do it. And for a woman who’s intelligent, self-aware, and has already tried the obvious things — that explanation is everything. It’s the difference between thinking you’re broken and understanding that you’re depleted. One has a way through. The other just generates more self-criticism to carry.
Your nervous system is the real boss — and once you understand that, the rest starts to make sense.
A note on timelines
Recovery from burnout isn’t linear and it isn’t quick. The matcha habit took weeks before it felt like anything other than sitting uncomfortably with a drink. The ability to lie still without hiding from my thoughts took months.
But it compounds. The small things build. And there comes a point — you won’t see it coming — where you realise you haven’t felt like that in a while. That the baseline has quietly shifted. That you’re not managing yourself through the day anymore, you’re just living it.
That’s what you’re working toward. Not a dramatic transformation. Just the gradual return to yourself.
About the Author
Mariko Broome is a trauma-informed health coach and women’s wellbeing specialist based in Keynsham, near Bath. She works with women who are exhausted in ways that don’t show up on blood tests — helping them understand what their nervous system has been trying to say, and what to do about it.
