I’m Successful But Burnt Out. Can Somatic Therapy Actually Help?
If you’re asking this question, you probably already know how to describe your problem. You’re articulate about it, insightful even, and may even have your humor about the whole situation, which is its own kind of proof that you’re not falling apart. You’re still functioning. Still succeeding in most of the ways that matter to you.
And…you’re overwhelmed and frustrated anyway.
Maybe you can’t figure out how to actually slow down, afraid that if you change anything, the whole structure you’re juggling depends on you staying exactly as wound up as you are. Or maybe you’ve already tried. You’ve added the self care, the boundaries, the breathing app, and it still isn’t landing.
That gap, between knowing what’s wrong and actually feeling different, is where somatic depth therapy comes in. Here’s what that actually means, based on what I see in session every week.
What Burnout Actually Looks Like in High Achievers
High achievers rarely walk into my office in complete crisis. They walk in clear eyed, able to name the problem precisely, often with humor about it. (Humor is my favorite defense mechanism too.) That’s part of what makes this population tricky to spot, including for themselves. You don’t need to be collapsing to be burnt out.
What I see instead is a kind of stuck-ness. Either they can’t find a way to slow down without fearing everything they’ve built will fall apart, or they’ve already made the changes, added the self care, and it’s still not working.
The Misconception Most People Don’t Expect
I don’t think people come in expecting this work to be easy. Most people know something will have to change and that it will take effort. And high achievers aren’t intimidated by effort. What surprises them is something different.
A lot of the habits that got them to this point were never really choices. They were survival strategies built a long time ago, and it’s often the nervous system driving the show rather than pure will. When someone connects with the younger part of themselves that had to develop these strategies just to feel safe or seen by a caregiver, it gets tender fast. Slowing down enough to sit with that is disarming and uncomfortable, because vulnerability was exactly the experience those younger parts were trying to avoid.
That’s usually the real work underneath the burnout. Not learning one more productivity hack, but meeting the part of you that never felt safe enough to stop.
A Client Story: When Insight Wasn’t Enough
I worked with a highly successful client in the tech world who had already done a lot of ego and shadow work before coming to me. They understood and had integrated much of their childhood trauma. They had real compassion for their younger selves and real insight into their own defense patterns. On paper, they’d done the work, and yet, they were still having anxiety attacks tied to work, still unable to turn off the stress once it started.
What shifted things was teaching them to attune to themselves as a biological being, language I use to help people understand what it means to be human: a brain and nervous system running automatic processes we’re often not aware of. Building that dual awareness, the ability to notice what’s happening in the body and offer themselves real regulation and practical skills, changed things in a way insight alone hadn’t.
They now manage stress at a level where they rarely feel that old intensity, and when it shows up, they understand why almost immediately and adjust fast. It’s also opened up real space for the hobbies and interests that matter to them, because a highly driven person with a regulated nervous system has more capacity, not less.
Why I Believe In This Work
I came to this work partly through my own experience. In my youth and twenties, heck even into my early thirties, (before graduate school,) I didn’t yet understand that I wasn’t my thoughts or my feelings, the way so many of us believe we are our nervous system’s response in the moment.
Being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in my late twenties forced me to pay attention to the quality of my thoughts, my stress, my worries, and how directly that was affecting my physical and mental health. That was the crack that eventually led me toward the somatic training I pursued years later. Learning to separate myself from my experience gave me a real sense of agency, a healthy detachment from my own emotional fluctuations. I could observe and act from a place of consciousness instead of being pulled around by my nervous system’s triggers, the way so many of my clients describe before we start working together.
What Somatic Work Actually Looks Like In Session
The first skill I teach is dual awareness. I might ask a client, while they’re listening to me, to also notice the point of contact between their back and the couch cushion, the weight of their body in the seat. Almost every time, they can do it immediately. That’s the first window into realizing you can observe your own experience instead of being consumed by it, and it’s often the whole focus of our early weeks together: learning to notice, in session and outside of it, without needing to fix anything yet.
From there we move into regulation techniques, here are a few examples that are well known for good reason:
- The voo breath and other breathwork
- EFT1, also known as tapping
- Grounding through the five senses
I explain to clients that these are essentially a hack to help the brain return to the present moment, to the place where they’re most likely safe, even when their nervous system is convinced otherwise. A lot of what I do is psychoeducation, helping someone understand why their body is doing what it’s doing before we ask it to do something different.
Are High Achievers Actually Resistant to This?
Less than you’d think. Most of my clients come in curious and open, sometimes because they’ve already heard about somatic work and sensed it was exactly what they needed. Somatic therapy isn’t a fringe idea anymore.
If there’s a real challenge early on, it’s not skepticism, it’s slowing down. High achievers generally aren’t built to pace themselves, so the initial work is often just developing the capacity to make space for any of this.
The Body Signs High Achievers Tend to Miss
Everyone’s stress 2 shows up a little differently, but a few patterns come up often in this population:
- Rumination and anxious thinking that disrupts sleep, whether that’s trouble falling asleep or sleep that’s broken and unrestful
- A racing heart or tightness in the chest, especially for people who aren’t used to anxiety attacks and suddenly are having them
- Chronic tension held in the body, a tight jaw, tight shoulders, tension across the back that’s become the default rather than the exception
- Illness, either chronic or recurring health issues pop up and can’t be overridden
What Progress Actually Looks Like
This population is one of my favorites to work with, because the same qualities that make someone high achieving tend to serve them well in therapy. They take a suggestion and actually apply it!
Fairly quickly, clients start caring about their physical experience, not as an obligation but because they notice what it gives them. Presence with yourself brings clarity about what matters. And when you’re not stressed, you have full access to your prefrontal cortex, which is where emotional regulation, executive functioning, cognitive flexibility (among other things) live, which for this population is often their favorite place to be. That’s where they optimize.
Once someone has experienced that regulated clarity, they want more of it, because it gives them more access to the goals they actually care about and the relationships in their life. Progress looks like capacity: to be present with the people who matter, to pursue the goals and hobbies that make all the achievement feel worth it.
If You’re Afraid Slowing Down Will Cost You
Do the actual calculus. Even the most high achieving people I work with, the ones most worried about what stopping will cost them, tend to arrive in my office after a rude awakening: the cost of not getting support turned out to be higher than the cost of getting it.
For most people, and especially this group, the strategies that used to work stop working. Output gets affected. Relationships get affected. Once the cost of burnout outweighs the reward of pushing through, that imbalance is usually what finally gets someone to make the call.
My Approach
My foundation is graduate training in somatic work and polyvagal theory. Years of practice showed me that the relational and attachment side of my training is what lets us get to the root of the strategies driving someone toward burnout, not just the symptoms on the surface.
My own curiosity about people led me to additional training in the enneagram, which deepens how I understand each client. That curiosity is contagious, and it helps clients develop real interest in themselves, which builds the sensitivity and compassion I think is essential for deeper healing. You have to learn to give a damn about yourself! Nobody is coming to rescue you. If you’re looking for more fulfillment, more peace, more love, it starts with prioritizing yourself enough to get curious about what you actually like, need, and value. That self interest is what makes the somatic work stick.
If this sounds like where you are, I’d be glad to talk with you about what that could look like.
Sources:
- Bach, D., et al. (2019). “Clinical EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Improves Multiple Physiological Markers of Health.” Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine.
- American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Stress effects on the body. https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/body
- Some images accompanying this article may have been created with the assistance of AI and were thoughtfully curated to complement the ideas explored here.