How to Start Listening to Your Body Again to Build Burnout Resilience
Entry #2 in the FLOURISH Series: Burnout Resilience Process.
Decades of “I’m fine!” were stored in my traps. To this day, when my kids are fighting in front of me and I get carried away by the stress, or I’m trying to be polite while contemplating an enormous to do list, I get a tingle of light electricity in a specific point in my left trap. “Breathe. You’re safe.” is all it takes to come out of the stress story.
Four years ago, I had never had a massage. Someone gave me a gift card, and I used it the way I use most things that are supposed to be good for me — eventually, somewhat reluctantly, after running out of reasons not to.
I told the massage therapist, Syd, the things I thought she needed to know.
That I lifted heavy, so my muscles were dense.
That my shoulders were always tight, always, so maybe focus there.
That I didn't like light pressure — it just felt like someone standing near me. "As hard as you're legally allowed," I said.
I thought this was funny. They laughed politely in the way that meant she had heard a version of this before, and knew what I didn't.
What I didn't know — what I couldn't have predicted — was that Syd was not going to start with my shoulders, or with heavy pressure.
They started with my face.
The gentlest possible cradle. Both hands. The kind of touch that had no agenda, no efficiency, no outcome to produce. They weren’t trying to fix anything. They were just — holding. The weight of my head in their hands like it was something that deserved to be held.
And I burst into tears. Instantly, completely, like a sneeze.
I was mortified. I apologized, probably multiple times. Syd told me it happens often, especially with people who haven't received bodywork in a while, and their tone was so matter-of-fact that I understood I was not, in fact, a spectacle. I was just a person whose body had been waiting for an opening.
I've spent a lot of time since then understanding what actually happened in that moment.
The physiology is real — crying is one of the body's most direct mechanisms for completing a stress cycle, clearing cortisol, signaling to the nervous system that the threat has passed. Bodywork, when you stop bracing long enough to receive it, can move through stored emotional residue that the mind has carefully managed around. This is documented. This is not woo-woo.
But that's not the whole story. The whole story is that I was someone who gave care — outward care, only. Constantly, fluently, as a matter of identity. I was the person others leaned on. The reliable one. The one who asked, sincerely, how are you, and meant it, and remembered the answer. What I was not — what I had quietly, thoroughly trained myself out of being — was someone who received it.
I always joked that I didn't know what my love language was, but it was definitely not Acts of Service, because receiving those made me deeply uncomfortable. (Turns out that's a clue.)
And then here was Syd, a stranger, holding my face with both hands like it was the only thing in this world that could possibly happen in this moment. Like I was required to be tended to, as a matter of course. Not because I had earned it or performed well enough or taken care of everyone first.
Just because I was there. Just because I was a person who might benefit from care.
My body understood something in that moment that my brain was years away from articulating: I had built an entire identity around being needed — and had slowly, quietly starved myself of the experience of being cared for. The armor I wore so well had kept out the hard things, yes. And also everything else.
The tears were not just grief. They were relief, release, recognition. Oh. This. I forgot this existed. I forgot how much I need this.
I've since learned I'm also an acupuncture crier. A relaxation yoga crier. I've stopped apologizing for it. It's just what happens when my body finally gets enough quiet to say what it's been trying to say. I think of it as the body completing its sentences.
Living in Your Head While Your Body Files a Complaint
If you've been through the first step of the FLOURISH burnout recovery process —Face Reality with Compassion — you've already done the hard work of honestly naming what isn't working. The second step, L: Listen to Your Body, is where the work gets more personal. And more physical.
Most of the people I coach are not ignoring their bodies out of carelessness. They're doing it because they got really, really good at it. Years of practice. The athlete who learned to tell pain to shut up because the team needed her. The oldest daughter who figured out early that having needs made things worse. The high-achiever who ran so efficiently on adrenaline for so long that "tired" stopped feeling like information and started feeling like weakness.
Maybe there's a version of that in your story too.
Here's a pattern I see repeatedly in coaching. A client describes her physical state — the jaw that aches every morning, the stomach that won't settle before presentations, the shoulders that live somewhere near her ears. When I ask how long it's been like this, she pauses. Then: "Oh. Years, I guess."
Years. During which her body was reporting, consistently, and she had filed it under "just how I am."
This isn't a personal failing. It's an adaptation. For many people — especially those navigating neurodivergence, trauma histories, or environments that required sustained self-monitoring just to feel safe — the skill of not-feeling was genuinely useful. It kept things moving. The problem is that the body doesn't stop sending signals just because we stop receiving them. It just gets louder.
Your Body Has Been Sending Signals. Here's What They Might Sound Like.
Before we talk about how to listen, it helps to know what you're listening for.
Burnout is a whole-body condition.Exhaustion that doesn't lift with sleep, cynicism, reduced effectiveness — those are the psychological markers. But the body has its own vocabulary, and most people don't recognize it as burnout-related until they're already deep in.
Below are the physical signals that come up most consistently in client work. Not all of them will be yours. Some you'll read and think, yes, obviously. Others might surprise you.
In your muscles and skeleton:
Jaw clenching, grinding teeth at night, TMJ
Shoulders that migrate toward your ears and live there
A general bracing — like you're perpetually bracing for impact
Muscle tension that doesn't release no matter how much you stretch
Headaches that start at the base of your skull and travel forward
Lower back pain with no structural explanation
In your gut and digestion:
A stomach that won't settle — constipation, loose stools, bloating, heartburn
Nausea before difficult conversations or meetings
Appetite that swings between ravenous and absent
The sense that your gut is "tight" or "knotted" even when nothing is wrong
In your skin and immune system:
Itchy, reactive, or flaring skin — eczema, hives, rashes, acne that tracks with stress
Autoimmune conditions that flare when you're under pressure
Getting sick more than feels normal; slow recovery
A general sense of physical fragility
In your sleep and energy:
Tired-but-wired: body depleted, brain still running
Waking at 3am with racing thoughts and no ability to return to sleep
Sleeping long but waking unrestored
The resurgence at 9pm when you've been dragging all day (cortisol's last hurrah)
Difficulty going from "on" to "off" — needing a long runway to wind down
In your nervous system and circulation:
Cold hands and feet even in warm rooms
Difficulty regulating body temperature
A heart that races for no obvious reason
The sensation of fizzing, buzzing, or vibrating under the skin
Shakiness or lightheadedness when you haven't eaten — or when you have
In your behavior and movement:
Fidgeting, leg-bouncing, restlessness — or the opposite: a kind of deadened stillness
A sense that you might explode if you have to sit still
Reaching for your phone the moment there's a gap in stimulation
The inability to receive physical affection or touch without pulling away
Crying without knowing why, or being unable to cry when you feel like you should
In your breath and voice:
Shallow breathing that never fully reaches your belly
Having to clear your throat or finding your voice sticks when you're nervous
Holding your breath without realizing it — noticing only when you finally exhale
A tight or slightly strangled quality in your voice when you're stressed
This is not a checklist to diagnose yourself with. It's more like a field guide. One or two of these might be constant companions you've named and accepted. Others might be new since things got harder. A cluster of them across multiple categories is the body's way of saying: I've been trying to get your attention.
Why We Stopped Listening (It's Normal — And Expensive)
Before we had language, we had nervous systems. Before we had prefrontal cortices capable of long-term planning, we had bodies that could detect threat and move — fight, flee, freeze — in milliseconds. That wiring is still there. Still running.
Researchers call the process of reading internal body signals interoception — the brain's continuous, moment-by-moment mapping of what's happening inside us. Recent research published in PLOS Biology describes these signals as coming from the heart, gut, lungs, and immune system, influencing everything from mood and motivation to decision-making and self-regulation. A racing heart, a tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat — these aren't just reactions. They're information. The body's version of a text message, arriving before you've consciously registered the situation.
Research reported in Scientific American links interoceptive ability directly to mental health outcomes. Problems with reading internal signals show up across anxiety, depression, eating disorders, PTSD, and other conditions. The logic holds: if you can't accurately read your own body, you can't respond to what it needs. And if you can't respond to what it needs, the signals accumulate.
The emotion-body connection also moves fast. Research on emotional processing suggests that bodily responses — the gut clench, the tension spike — arrive tens to hundreds of milliseconds before conscious thought catches up. Your body is, in the most literal sense, ahead of you. It has already formed an opinion about the meeting, the relationship, the decision, before you've finished reading the room.
Over time, a stress response that fires repeatedly without resolution leaves a mark — not metaphorically, but biologically. The concept of allostatic load describes the cumulative wear-and-tear that accumulates when the body adapts to chronic stress. Brad Stulberg, in Master of Change, writes about allostasis as distinct from homeostasis: we don't simply return to baseline after disruption. We arrive somewhere new — for better or worse, depending on how we navigated the disruption.
The researcher who has done the most important work on what allostatic load actually does to human bodies is Arline Geronimus, whose weathering hypothesis was developed to explain why Black women in America show accelerated biological aging — and why that gap cannot be explained by socioeconomic differences alone. Her work demonstrates that the sustained stress of navigating a society built on racial hierarchy — the hypervigilance, the high-effort coping, the chronic threat detection — registers in the body as measurable biological aging. By middle age, the allostatic burden is visible in biomarkers, telomere length, and cardiovascular health.
As someone trained in public health, this research matters to me beyond the clinical. Because what Geronimus's work reveals — and what broader stress research confirms — is that stress isn't neutral in the body. It accumulates. It ages us. And the stressors most likely to accumulate are the ones we can't put down: sustained social threat, chronic self-monitoring, the ongoing work of trying to belong somewhere that wasn't designed with us in mind. The felt sense of not being enough is not a soft stressor. It's a physiological one.
This extends well beyond race, though race is the starkest example the research documents. Any form of sustained othering — navigating non-inclusive environments, masking who you are to fit in, operating in spaces where your presence is tolerated rather than welcomed — activates the same stress physiology. The body keeps going because it has to, and then one day it stops.
Neurodivergence and Body Awareness — a Complicated Story
For people who are neurodivergent — whether diagnosed or simply living with a nervous system that works differently — the relationship with interoception often gets complicated early.
Some ND folks have extremely acute body awareness. They feel every heartbeat, notice every hormonal shift, pick up on subtle environmental changes that neurotypical people filter out automatically. This can be a genuine superpower for body literacy. It can also be overwhelming — the sensory input that never fully quiets.
Others have almost the opposite experience: interoception gaps that make it genuinely hard to know when they're hungry, exhausted, or in physical pain until those signals become urgent. The person who doesn't need to use the bathroom until they absolutely do. The child who seems fine while running a fever. The adult who works through serious discomfort without registering it as a problem — until the body simply stops cooperating.
Research on autism and interoception suggests that difficulty reading internal signals is one mechanism behind emotional dysregulation — if you can't catch the early signals of building anxiety, by the time you register it, you're already flooded. This doesn't mean ND people are worse at navigating their bodies. It means the task of building body literacy may look different, require different tools, and need to account for a nervous system that wasn't running on default settings to begin with.
The burnout risk for people who've spent years masking — performing neurotypicality, suppressing their actual responses, managing how they appear in environments that weren't designed for them — is substantial. Masking is metabolically expensive. And the body tracks the cost.
This shows up vividly in coaching. One client — a high-performing leader who considered herself physically capable and self-aware — said something early in our work that I've thought about since. She said she thought she had a good sense of her body, "but the emotion-body connection is something that feels like what I'm building, as opposed to this logical body connection."
She already understood how her body worked. She just hadn't yet learned what it was feeling. For someone who'd been using exercise, productivity, skill-building, and relentless generosity toward others to avoid sitting with what was actually happening internally — the body connection was always one remove away. When she finally started paying attention to the quieter signals, the ones that arrived before the breakdown, she described it as finding a cheat code. She realized she'd been waiting until things were already terrible to acknowledge them. The earlier signals had been there all along.
How to Start Noticing: A Practical Field Guide
This is where most body literacy content gets vague. "Just tune in to your body." Okay, but what does that actually mean if you've spent years, or decades, tuning out?
Here's the honest answer: you build it through trial and error. Slowly, imperfectly, with a lot of moments of I have no idea what I'm feeling right now. The goal isn't mastery. The goal is to start collecting data.
Your body signals are, in important ways, your own. The tight left trap that tells me I'm too far in emotionally — that's mine. My "bat signal," as I think of it. The warm, settled feeling a client called "hot chocolate in my body" when she landed on a true decision — that was hers. Another client's hands went numb at the start of a panic episode, the sensation traveling up her arms, and over time that became reliable early-warning data. None of these translate directly. You'll develop your own lexicon.
What follows is how to start building it.
1. Start with the obvious signals, not the subtle ones
If you're new to this — or if you've been significantly disconnected from your body — begin with the physical signals that are already legible to you. The shoulders at your ears. The jaw you're clenching right now. The held breath you didn't notice until this sentence.
Don't try to interpret them yet. Just begin to notice when they're present. When does the tension arrive? What's happening when it does? Is it particular people, particular topics, particular times of day? You're not trying to solve anything. You're just making the signal visible.
One client's first homework was simply to notice the first physical sensations before she could name an emotion — not interpret, not fix, just observe. She described being "not yet where she wanted to be" with this at first. The signal was faint. She wasn't sure she was doing it right. That's normal. You're learning a language you were never taught.
2. Use transitions as built-in check-in points
Most of us move through our days without pause — one meeting directly into another, one task immediately replacing the last, no gap between picking up the kids and starting dinner. These transitions are actually natural check-in moments, and most of us barrel through them.
Try this: before you shift from one thing to the next — before the next meeting, before you walk in your front door, before you respond to the difficult email — take five seconds. Just five. Notice what your body is carrying from the last thing. Is there residue? Tension? A held breath? Does your chest feel different than it did an hour ago?
You don't have to do anything with what you find. The noticing is the point.
3. Notice the urgency that has no object
One client described a feeling she regularly had in quiet moments — waiting in line, trailing behind her kid on a walk. Pressure in her chest and throat. She named it "urgency." When I asked what the urgency was warning her would happen if she didn't act on it, she said she genuinely didn't know. It was just loud.
That not-knowing was useful. It suggested the signal wasn't information about the present moment. It was a habit — her body had learned that stillness wasn't safe. When she started noticing that the urgency had no actual object, she could begin to separate the signal from the story. The feeling was real. The emergency it was announcing was not.
This is one of the most common presentations I see in burned-out, over-responsible people: a baseline hum of urgency that never fully quiets, even in rest, even on vacation, even in moments that should feel fine. If that resonates, the question worth sitting with isn't what do I need to do? It's: what has my body learned to expect that it's bracing for?
4. Learn to distinguish similar-feeling states
Early in body literacy work, a lot of sensations feel like undifferentiated noise. Stressed, anxious, excited, rushed, caffeinated — they can all feel like the same thing initially, especially if you've been moving fast for a long time.
One of the more useful shifts I see clients make is starting to differentiate between states that felt identical before. One client learned to distinguish between nervousness and excitement somatically — not just cognitively. She described an experience of "calm excitement" and could articulate what made it physically different from the frantic, grasping version she'd known before. Her words: warmth, not racing. Open, not clenched. That distinction took months to develop. Once she had it, she could make decisions from a different starting point.
Similarly: tired and depleted feel different if you pay attention. Hungry and anxious feel different. Grief and exhaustion feel different. The body is quite specific, once you start asking it to be.
5. Ask your body before you ask your brain
Martha Beck calls this the Body Compass — the idea that the body has a reliable internal signal for what's actually true for you, separate from what you've been told you should want or who you should be.
It doesn't always feel good. Sometimes the thing your body is signaling is the thing you've been most afraid to look at: that the role isn't right, that the relationship has become a performance, that you've been running on borrowed conviction for years. But here's the strange thing — when something is true, even an uncomfortable truth, the body often responds with a kind of release. Not relief necessarily, but a settling. A sense of: okay, there it is. The tension of carrying something unsaid is often heavier than the thing itself.
One client described making a major work decision and, rather than analyzing it further, sitting with it until something shifted physically. She described the tension "melting away" and being replaced by that "warm hot chocolate" feeling she named for herself. She wasn't certain the decision was risk-free. She was certain it was true. Her body made that distinction before her mind did.
6. Read the room — especially if you lead people
This one matters particularly for leaders, managers, or anyone in environments where body literacy has organizational implications.
Bodies in a room with genuine psychological safety look different than bodies without it. When people feel safe, their blinking slows, breathing deepens, they lean in, their faces settle. When they don't: crossed arms, a lot of face-touching and pen-fiddling, voices that go quiet or start catching. Darting eyes. The over-controlled body language of someone monitoring everyone else while also monitoring themselves.
If you're leading a team and your meetings feel stiff — if people are technically present but clearly somewhere else — your nervous system is probably already picking that up before you've processed it analytically. That pull to fill silence quickly, to move through the agenda faster than feels right, might itself be a body signal worth paying attention to.
The same energy a team spends on threat assessment — figuring out whether it's safe to speak, whether disagreement will land badly — is energy not available for creativity, strategy, or genuine problem-solving. Psychological safety, or the absence of it, registers in the body. Yours and everyone else's. A burnout-aware leader learns to read their own signals in the room and respond to what they're actually seeing, not just what the slide deck says is happening.
7. Let the body complete what the mind has resolved
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, make the case that stress is a biological process with a beginning, a middle, and an end — and the end has to happen in the body, not just the mind. You can resolve the stressor (the deadline met, the hard conversation had, the crisis navigated) and the stress cycle will stay open if the body never received the signal that the threat passed.
Physical movement is the most direct route — sustained, actual movement, not a stroll to the coffee machine. Genuine laughter. Crying. Physical affection. Creative expression. These are the body's built-in completion mechanisms. They communicate to the nervous system: you can stand down now. It's over.
Most high-functioning, high-achieving people have gotten extraordinarily good at managing the cognitive experience of stress while bypassing the physical completion entirely. The result is what I sometimes think of as a backlog: open loops the body is still tracking even after the mind has moved on. That baseline tension that never quite releases, even on weekends. That inability to really relax in a vacation until day four or five, when the body finally starts to believe you mean it.
You have likely solved a lot of problems without completing a lot of cycles. The body doesn't forget.
Building Your Own Signal Dictionary
Here's the part that most body literacy advice skips: your signals are yours. They're not universal. What tightness in the chest means for you may be different from what it means for someone else. Figuring that out takes time, attention, and a willingness to be wrong and revise.
Think of it as building a personal dictionary. Over time, you'll accumulate entries. This sensation in my throat means I'm about to say something I don't actually believe. This feeling in my stomach before a decision means I already know the answer and I don't like it. When my left shoulder blade locks up like this, I'm carrying something that isn't mine.
Some starting questions to work with:
Where in your body do you feel stress first? (Not where you feel it most — where it arrives.)
Is there a physical signal that consistently shows up before you know you're upset?
Does your body feel different when you're around certain people? Where, and how?
What does genuine tiredness feel like, versus depletion, versus dread?
When something feels right — even if it's hard — where do you feel that?
When you're performing or going through motions, does your body signal it? How?
You don't have to answer all of these at once. Some will take months to develop a reliable answer to. That's not failure — that's how this actually works. The dictionary builds itself through repetition and attention, not through sitting down and figuring it all out in an afternoon.
One thing I've found consistently: the body is most legible in the gap between stimulus and response. That half-second before you react. That moment when you almost said something and didn't. That pause in the middle of saying yes when something in you briefly, almost imperceptibly, hesitated.
That pause is data. Most of us learn to override it so efficiently that we stop noticing it exists. The goal is to start noticing it again.
Intuition, Anxiety, Fear, and Trauma Response in the Body: How To Tell Them Apart
Once you start collecting body signals, you'll run into a problem: several of the most important ones can be hard to tell apart. Anxiety, fear, intuition, and trauma response can all produce similar physical sensations — tightness, a racing heart, a sense of urgency, a pull toward action. Learning to distinguish among them is one of the more useful things you can develop, because they each call for a completely different response.
Here's a framework I use in coaching work.
Intuition speaks in declarative sentences.
It arrives as a quiet, settled knowing. This isn't right. That person can't be trusted. This is the one. Not a question — a statement. And it tends to be accompanied by a particular physical quality: warmth, or looseness, or a kind of calm that can coexist with excitement or even grief. Relief, sometimes. The sense of something clicking into place.
Intuition doesn't grip. It doesn't insist. It doesn't need you to act this second or catastrophize what happens if you don't. It states its case and waits.
Martha Beck describes the Body Compass as pointing toward this — the felt sense that something is true, distinct from whether it's easy or convenient. The body that relaxes, even slightly, around a hard truth. That's intuition. It can feel like warmth or a deep exhale or the release of something you'd been holding without realizing it. One client called it "hot chocolate in my chest." Another described it as "all the static going quiet." The content of the signal is yours. The quality — settling, openness, a sense of oh, there it is — tends to be recognizable once you've felt it a few times.
Fear speaks in NOW, and it points at something threatening in real time.
Fear is an essential biological response to an actual, present threat — something you can, in principle, point to. Another person in the room could see it or feel the same danger. Fear says: that car is swerving toward me. That person is escalating. This is not safe right now. It's specific. It's located in the present moment. And its signal is calibrated to the actual size of the threat.
Fear calls you to action because action is appropriate. Move. Speak. Get out. Address it directly.
The problem isn't fear — fear is functional and important. The problem is when we confuse fear with the other things on this list, and respond to anxiety or trauma response as if they're present-tense, legitimate emergencies. The body produces similar sensations. The situations are not the same.
Anxiety speaks in questions.
What if this goes wrong? What if they're angry? What if I can't handle it? What if I miss something? It's generative, in the worst way — it can spin out scenarios indefinitely, because it's not responding to a specific present threat. It's running probability calculations on futures that haven't happened.
Anxiety lives in the body as gripping, tightening, a sense of bracing for multiple possible impacts at once. Shallow breathing. Chest contraction. A scanning quality — eyes that dart, a mind that can't quite settle anywhere. The urgency my client felt on quiet walks — pressure with no object — was anxiety. The signal was real. The emergency it was announcing was not.
Anxiety does not operate from possibility, growth, warmth, or creativity. It operates from control and protection. Which makes sense — its job is to prevent bad outcomes, not to help you build good ones. It's not useless. Chronic anxiety, especially in the absence of genuine present threat, is metabolically and psychologically expensive, and it tends to shrink the world rather than open it.
When you're in an anxiety response, the question worth asking isn't what do I need to do right now? It's: is there an actual, present thing I can point to? Or is this about a future that hasn't happened yet?
Trauma response is your body thinking an overwhelming past experience is happening in the present.
This is the trickiest one, because it can feel exactly like fear — specific, urgent, located in the body — while actually responding to something that happened months or years ago. A smell, a tone of voice, a particular kind of silence in a room: the body pattern-matches to a previous threat and mobilizes as if that threat is happening again, right now. Your nervous system, doing exactly what it was designed to do, providing maximum protection from what it has learned to recognize as danger.
Bessel van der Kolk's work in The Body Keeps the Score documents this in detail: trauma reorganizes the nervous system's perception of threat. The body doesn't distinguish cleanly between memory and present experience. A threat that was once real remains filed as real, and the nervous system responds accordingly.
The practical implication is significant: trauma response will generally shut down evidence that right now might be different. It's not looking for new information. It's protecting you from what it already knows. Which means you have to ask yourself, deliberately, as a practice: Is right now actually like what I experienced before? What's the same? And what's different?
This is not a simple question. Sometimes there are genuine similarities and genuine risks. But often — maybe usually, in the everyday moments where trauma responses fire — right now is not actually the same. The person who raised their voice is not the person who hurt you. The conflict at work is not the childhood experience of chaos. The closed door is not abandonment.
The body won't volunteer that distinction. You have to introduce it.
This is one reason trauma-informed coaching and therapy overlap here: learning to ask is this now, or is this then? is a skill that takes repetition and, often, support. If you find that your body signals feel consistently disproportionate to what's actually happening in front of you — if the reactions are bigger than the situation seems to warrant, if certain triggers are pulling you into responses you can't quite explain — that's worth paying attention to, and probably worth working with someone on.
Gabor Maté writes in When the Body Says No that the body's stress response is shaped by what we've been permitted, and not permitted, to feel and express across our lifetimes. The accumulated cost of suppression — of learned not-feeling, of performing okay when we weren't — shows up physically. Often long after the original circumstances have changed.
A summary, since this can feel like a lot to make sense of:
You won't always be able to tell them apart in the moment. That's not failure. The goal is to develop enough familiarity with each that you can, over time, start asking the right question for the signal you're getting. Not how do I make this feeling stop? — but what is this actually responding to?
What Your Body Might Be Pointing To
There's a level of this work that goes deeper than signal identification, and it's worth naming.
Self-determination theory — the research framework developed by Deci and Ryan — identifies three core psychological needs that, when genuinely met, allow people to thrive: autonomy (the felt sense that you can choose), competence (the felt sense that you're growing and contributing), and connection (the felt sense of mattering to and being known by others). When these are chronically unmet, people don't thrive. Gradually, then suddenly, they don't function.
The body is tracking all three. The question is whether you're letting it report.
Because here's what I see repeatedly in coaching work: people who are technically meeting all three on paper — agency, achievement, relationships — and something still feels hollow. Frantic. Like a performance they can't quite step off.
And when we slow down enough to actually listen, something clarifying happens. The autonomy that felt real turns out to be hyper-independence in disguise: the only way to feel safe was to need no one. The connection that looked good from the outside turns out to be obligated connection — showing up, being dependable, never actually being seen. The purpose that drove everything turns out to be borrowed: what the world said you should want, not what you actually do.
The body knows the difference between these things. Between real rest and productive-looking collapse. Between chosen commitment and fear-based obligation. Between being genuinely seen and performing for an audience you've never stopped trying to impress.
This is why the L step in FLOURISH isn't just a stress management toolkit. It's an orientation — toward information you've been filtering out, toward a version of yourself that exists underneath the adaptations.
Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score that trauma — including the quiet, accumulated kind that doesn't look dramatic — is stored in the body and resolved through the body. The mind can construct many narratives about why we're fine. The body keeps a more accurate record.
Brad Stulberg's work on allostasis offers the hopeful side of this: the body doesn't just record damage. Given the right conditions, it can land somewhere new — a better, more sustainable baseline. Not back to who you were before, but somewhere more honest. That's what recovery can look like when it goes deep enough.
For readers navigating burnout alongside chronic illness, racial or social othering, or significant trauma history: Geronimus's weathering research suggests that healing the allostatic burden isn't only about stress management skills. It's about genuine community, genuine agency, and work that feels genuinely meaningful — held not as performance targets, but as actual lived conditions. The body knows when it's getting the real version of those things, and when it's getting the substitute.
A fuller look at the nervous system science behind burnout — and the Forest Fire Model and FLOURISH framework — is in this post if you want the bigger map.
On Being a Massage Crier
I'm a massage crier. I'm also an acupuncture crier and a yin yoga crier. It took me a while to stop apologizing for it and start treating it as data: my body, when given sufficient quiet and permission, has a lot to say.
I trained myself for years not to feel. As an athlete, pain was just the body being dramatic about the race. As someone whose identity was built on being steady and available for other people, having needs didn't fit the role. My nervous system got very good, very early, at filtering its own signals.
Getting back in touch — really back in touch, not just intellectually aware that I should be listening — was slower than I expected. It required me to stop being so impressed with my own efficiency and start being willing to be surprised. To sit in a yin yoga pose and let my quads scream, not because I was pushing through, but because I was finally staying still long enough to hear them. To notice that flexibility isn't about lengthening a tendon — it's what happens when the nervous system finally relaxes enough to let go.
That's been the ongoing discovery: the things I thought were fixed about my body were actually just things my nervous system was holding. My very efficient, very practiced, very well-intentioned nervous system, running a protection protocol that I hadn't consciously authorized in years.
What I can tell you is that the places I started to hear my body were the same places I started making better decisions. Stopped agreeing to things that weren't mine to carry. Stopped mistaking hypervigilance for intuition. Got quieter in a way that felt, eventually, more like coming home than like slowing down.
There's a particular electrical zing I get now in my left trap. I know it by name. It means: you've climbed on the runaway train. The platform is right there. Step off. I notice it, breathe, look around, identify the actual source of the stress — the to-do list that intruded on a conversation with my kid, the lingering anxiety from an interaction three hours ago, the way I started carrying someone else's problem as if it were mine. A little distance usually does it. The train keeps going. I don't have to.
That's the goal of this step. Not perfect body literacy. Not a final mastery of every signal. Just starting to listen — consistently, imperfectly, with genuine curiosity — so the body doesn't have to keep getting louder to be heard.
If You Want to Go Deeper
This kind of work — building genuine body literacy, not just stress awareness — is harder in practice than it sounds on a page. Especially if the disconnection is longstanding. Especially if the signals your body is sending are connected to things that feel too large to address alone.
That's not a reflection on your capacity. It's a reflection of how much you've been carrying, and for how long.
If you're curious what supported work through this step — and the full FLOURISH arc — could look like, Regenerate + Relaunch is the most comprehensive version of what I offer. It's designed for people who are done managing symptoms and ready to understand the pattern underneath.
If you know someone who could use this, the referral program is there too.
And if you're not ready for that yet — stay with the small practices. Notice one signal this week. Just one. Write it down if that helps. Note when it arrives and what else is happening. Your body has been sending messages for a while. It will keep sending them.
The question is whether you're ready to start receiving.
Next up in the FLOURISH series: O — Own Your Boundaries. Why limits without inner work collapse — and what it actually takes to make them stick.
