Recovering From Burnout: The Role of Somatic Awareness in Sustainable Business Practices
When I burned out in 2015, I had a lot of ideas about what would help me recover: changing jobs/careers, giving myself enough time to rest, giving myself an optimal “schedule” to my day, amongst other things.
I think these ideas of how to recover from burnout is what people tend to think they need.
The state I was in felt so awful that it felt like the only way to get back to feeling better was to completely blow up my life and start from scratch.
Even when I backpacked around the world by myself for four months, got plenty of rest, and changed careers, burnout still came knocking on my door again because no matter the career I was in, or even how much rest I got, the way I was working didn’t change, and I was still disconnected from my body and the cues that it was telling me when it was “done” or at capacity, so I consistently blew right through them.
As a HSP and neurodivergent person, burning out yet again after doing all the things that I knew to do to “help” produced a profound feeling of hopelessness in me.
If changing my career, taking an extended rest break, and creating an “optimal schedule” for myself didn’t “fix” the burnout, maybe something was just wrong with me and this was the way I’d feel about working forever?
It wasn’t until I learned how to support my highly sensitive, neurodivergent nervous system somatically and sense my own capacity that I began to heal.
The Importance of Somatic Awareness
First of all, what is somatic awareness? And why is it important when it comes to burnout, specifically?
Somatic awareness simply means being aware of the sensations our body is using to communicate to us.
Our bodies communicate to us in the language of sensation, not words. Words are the language of the mind, not the body.
And when we only tune into the language of the mind (words) we are missing 75–80% of the information that is available to us about something at any given moment.
Each person’s body communicates to them in a very specific way that if you are aware of and heed, then you can learn to work in congruence with the energetic capacity that you have available on any given day.
For example, my body communicates “I need a break” to me by a feeling of all over heaviness, fogginess in my thinking, and a tightness in my solar plexus area. I know these cues well at this point in time, and my body is incredibly consistent in communicating them.
When we are disconnected from our bodies and the sensations that it is using to communicate to us “I’m at capacity” or “I’m done/need a break”, we will work beyond our energetic capacity without even being aware of it.
This leads to cycles of immense fatigue, then rest breaks, then overworking again (because you’re still not aware of how your body communicates to you), then another crash, and on and on the cycle goes.
Without the somatic awareness of how your body communicates your energetic capacity to you specifically, even after an extended rest break or career change, you still won’t be able to sense when you’re at capacity, which will result in more cycles of overworking and crashing, just in a new career or business.
Once You Have Somatic Awareness, Then What?
Once you have somatic awareness, you can consciously choose business or work tasks that are congruent with your energetic capacity, and support yourself with your energy needs so that you don’t end up in burnout.
For me that looks like having a list of business tasks that take less energetic capacity so that when I have a day that my energetic capacity is low, I still have things that I can easily do to continue moving the needle forward in my business while simultaneously honoring my low capacity.
I also know what things give me energy in my business, as well as the tasks that require higher energetic capacity for me when I am higher energy.
Somatic awareness allows you to honor your body’s energetic capacity at any given time, as well as support your body to increase your capacity.
When you are able to honor your body’s energetic capacity, you’re able to take consistent action towards what you care about without burning yourself out to get there.
Ongoing Attunement
Somatic awareness is not a “one and done” thing; it’s an ongoing attunement process that continues to get more and more refined as you do it.
This is precisely why coming up with an “ideal schedule” for yourself, while a great exercise and starting point, at the very least is incomplete, and at worst doesn’t work, because your energetic capacity will be different from day-to-day.
Perhaps you had a tough conversation with a friend the day before and you’re feeling emotionally hungover. That will likely impact your energetic capacity the next day, and if you stick to your “ideal schedule” without modifying or supporting yourself, you’d work past your capacity.
But if you are attuned to your somatic capacity, and you’re able to choose a business activity that matches it, you’ll still be able to make progress without burning yourself out.
Somatic Awareness + How You Work
Another key element of somatic awareness that helps you recover from burnout is that it allows you to be aware of how you are working.
For example: when you are somatically attuned to yourself, maybe you recognize that you sense an urgency in your body when you are working, and you don’t feel OK to stop working when you sense that urgency, and these sensations are leading you to consistently work past your capacity.
Or perhaps you notice that you reflexively go into people-pleasing your clients because you have tremendous discomfort somatically in your body when you express your truth.
A perfect example of this may be going consistently over in your session time with clients because you’re concerned you’re not giving them enough value, and that raises so much somatic discomfort for you that you people-please in order to lessen that discomfort.
The ongoing process of somatic awareness helps you not only learn what your energetic capacity is, how to work in a way that is congruent with it, but also to become aware of your habits of working that are actually at the root of burnout and how to support yourself to shift those habits.
Without somatic awareness, anything that you try to do to recover from burnout is at best a band-aid fix, and at worst, simply kicking the can down the road to only start another episode of burnout in the future.
If you’re interested in recovering from burnout in your business and creating a unique-to-you blueprint that ensures it won’t happen again, I hope you’ll consider joining me in my upcoming live 8 week cohort based course, Burnout to Balance.
You can learn more about it here.
