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You did everything right. You built the career, hit the goals, kept all the plates spinning. And then your body said no.
The Burnout Edit Podcast is for high-achieving women (and the men who get it) who are done white-knuckling their way through life and ready to actually recover. Hosted by Kristin Rees, a former Big Tech executive with decades spent at companies like AWS, Meta, and Microsoft, and now an iPEC-certified coach, nervous system science practitioner and founder of theburnoutedit.com.
Each episode breaks down what burnout actually does to your body and brain, why the advice to "just take a vacation" never works, and what real, sustainable recovery looks like. This isn't productivity tips dressed up as wellness. This is the science of your nervous system, the wisdom your body has been trying to get your attention with, and the practical tools that help you come back to yourself.
Expect honest conversations about somatic recovery, regulation practices, the patterns that got you here, and the identity shifts that get you out. No toxic positivity. No "just think positive." Just grounded, warm, evidence-informed guidance from someone who has been in the trenches and built a platform to help you find your way back.
New episodes drop weekly. Wherever you listen, your nervous system is welcome here.
Learn more at theburnoutedit.com
So I want to start with something that might sound a little dramatic, but I promise it's not. Burnout is not a mindset problem. It's a biological operating system crash. Like your body literally changes how it produces energy, how it holds tension, how it processes the world around you. And once I understood that, everything about recovery made more sense.
Speaker 2:Okay. I love that framing because I think most people, myself included, spent a long time thinking burnout was just being really, really tired. Like, if I could just sleep enough or take a vacation, I'd be fine.
Speaker 1:Right. And you weren't fine?
Speaker 2:I was not fine.
Speaker 1:So today we're going to talk about why that is, what's actually happening in your body when you're burned out, why the usual advice doesn't work, and what the science says about what does.
Speaker 2:So where do we even start with this? Because I feel like the burnout conversation has been going on forever, but it's mostly been, you know, better boundaries and practice self care.
Speaker 1:Which, to be fair, aren't bad advice. They're just incomplete advice. They're treating the symptoms. The World Health Organization actually classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon now. Gallup's latest numbers show burnout rates past fifty percent across knowledge workers, and the economic impact in The US alone is over $522,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1:Wait. Billion with a b? Billion with a very big b. And yet, the dominant advice is still take a vacation. You know what that does for a dysregulated nervous system?
Speaker 2:I'm guessing not much.
Speaker 1:Almost nothing. Because you can't vacation away a nervous system that's been stuck in survival mode for months or years. That's like telling someone with a broken leg to just walk it off.
Speaker 2:So what is actually happening inside the body? Like biologically, what's going on?
Speaker 1:Okay. So this is where it gets really interesting. Most people grew up learning about two modes, fight or flight and rest and digest. That's it. Two gears.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:That's what I learned.
Speaker 1:But there's actually a third. And this comes from something called polyvagal theory, which was developed by doctor Steven Porges. He showed that your autonomic nervous system actually has three distinct states. The first is ventral vagal. That's your safe and social state.
Speaker 1:When you're here, you can connect with people. You can think clearly. You can be creative. You can actually recover. This is where we want to be most of the time.
Speaker 2:That sounds like the good place.
Speaker 1:It is the good place. Then there's sympathetic activation, which is your mobilized state. Fight, flight, push, protect. And here's the thing. This is where most high achievers live, not visit, live.
Speaker 2:Oh, that hits Because I thought that was just being ambitious.
Speaker 1:Everyone does. And it works for a while. Your body can sustain that for a surprisingly long time. But eventually, the system says, I can't do this anymore. And that's when you drop into the third state.
Speaker 2:Which is?
Speaker 1:Dorsal vagal, shutdown, collapse, numbness, dissociation. This is where chronic burnout eventually lands and it feels completely different from the exhaustion of the sympathetic state. It's not, I'm tired from running. It's I can't move. I can't feel.
Speaker 1:I can't engage.
Speaker 2:That's the thing nobody talks about. Because from the outside, it can look like laziness or depression, but it's actually your nervous system doing what it thinks it needs to do to survive.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's a protective response. Your body is not broken. It's doing what it was designed to do under extreme sustained pressure. The problem is that it gets stuck there.
Speaker 2:And you can't think your way out of it. Right? Like, positive affirmations aren't going to unstick your nervous system.
Speaker 1:No. You can't think your way out of a nervous system state. This is why so much of the standard burnout advice falls flat. It's all top down, all cognitive. But what the research shows, and this has been confirmed in studies published in Frontiers in Psychology and PLOS one, is that you need bottom up, body first approaches to actually shift the system.
Speaker 2:Okay. So body first. And this connects to something I found absolutely wild when I was reading about this. Your fascia. Can we talk about fascia?
Speaker 1:Oh, we have to talk about fascia. This is one of the most exciting areas of burnout science right now.
Speaker 2:So for anyone who doesn't know, fascia is the connective tissue that basically runs through your entire body like a web underneath everything.
Speaker 1:And it contains approximately 250,000,000 nerve endings. That makes it the most sensory rich system in the entire human body.
Speaker 2:250,000,000? That's wild.
Speaker 1:It really is. And research from the seventh International Fascia Congress in 2024 showed something incredible. Your fascia and your autonomic nervous system mirror each other. When your nervous system gets wound up, your fascia tightens. And when your fascia releases, your nervous system can follow.
Speaker 2:So it goes both ways.
Speaker 1:Both ways, which is why people who've been burned out for a long time often describe feeling locked or armored in their body. That's not metaphorical. Their fascia has literally stiffened in response to sustained stress. And this is backed by Schleip's research showing that sympathetic nerve fibers are embedded directly inside fascial tissue.
Speaker 2:So your body isn't just responding to stress. It's actively participating in the stress cycle through the fascia.
Speaker 1:Yes. And the flip side is really hopeful. Modalities that target fascial release, things like myofascial release, the MELT method, structural integration, even certain types of yoga, they can directly modulate your nervous system state. Your fascia is literally a doorway into regulation.
Speaker 2:That reframes everything. It's not just stretch because it feels nice. It's release your fascia because it's actively holding your nervous system in a stress pattern.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:There's another piece of this that I think is really important for anyone who's been told to just push through. And it has to do with what's happening at the cellular level.
Speaker 1:The mitochondrial piece.
Speaker 2:Yes. Can you explain this? Because I think it's the thing that finally made me go, oh, this isn't in my head.
Speaker 1:So research by Picard and McEwen showed that prolonged stress actually changes how your mitochondria function. Mitochondria are the energy producers in every cell, right? Under chronic stress, they shift from efficient energy production into what's essentially a protective shutdown mode. Oxidative stress goes up, inflammation increases, your body starts rationing energy.
Speaker 2:Rationing, like a survival response.
Speaker 1:That's exactly what it is. And this is why burnout feels fundamentally different from being tired. You're not just low on sleep. Your energy production system has literally changed its operating parameters.
Speaker 2:So when someone says I slept all weekend and I still feel exhausted, that's not them being dramatic.
Speaker 1:Not even a little. Their mitochondria are running a different program. Recovery from that requires what we call biological pacing, predictable signals of safety, traded, meaning gradual, demands on the system, and nervous system first planning, not productivity first.
Speaker 2:Which is basically the opposite of how most of us are wired to approach things.
Speaker 1:It really is. The achiever in all of us wants to make a recovery plan with milestones and deadlines. But your nervous system doesn't respond to deadlines. It responds to safety.
Speaker 2:Okay. Here's the part that really got me.
Speaker 1:Neuroplasticity. Tell me what grabbed you.
Speaker 2:The fact that the same mechanism that got us stuck can get us unstuck. Like the same neuroplasticity that allowed chronic stress to rewire our nervous system toward hypervigilance or shutdown. It works in reverse.
Speaker 1:It does. And this isn't theoretical. It's measurable. With consistent, personalized body first practices, heart rate variability improves. Vagal tone increases.
Speaker 1:Inflammatory markers actually decrease. People report feeling less locked in their bodies, more capacity for connection, energy that doesn't crash by 2PM.
Speaker 2:So the nervous system isn't just modifiable. It's waiting to be modified in a sense.
Speaker 1:I love how you said that. Yes. Your nervous system learned these patterns of hypervigilance and shutdown. It can learn new patterns of regulation and resilience, but it needs the right input, personalized input, not a generic program that treats everyone the same.
Speaker 2:And that's a big deal because a 2025 meta analysis found that personalized pattern matched burnout interventions had a seventy six percent recovery rate compared to thirty one percent for generic approaches.
Speaker 1:And 3.2 times better sustained outcomes at three months. That's not a small difference. That's a completely different category of result.
Speaker 2:So this brings us to something I actually want to ask you about. Because all of this science is great, but the question is always, okay, so what do I do with this?
Speaker 1:Right. And that's the gap that existed for a long time. You could read the research. You could understand polyvagal theory, but there wasn't a way to apply it to your specific nervous system. That's actually what the Burnout Edit's operating system audit does.
Speaker 1:So tell me about that. So the OSA maps your patterns across 10 different dimensions. Your burnout type, your nervous system architecture, how you process cognitively, your energy dynamics, your social energy exchange,
Speaker 2:how
Speaker 1:you manage chaos. It's not a quiz. It's a genuine assessment that gives you what we call your soul print.
Speaker 2:Which is like your nervous system fingerprint.
Speaker 1:That's a great way to put it. And then everything that follows is shaped by that. Your content, your reset practices, your recovery pathway. It's built for who you actually are, not who a generic program assumes you should be.
Speaker 2:And then there's Sofia.
Speaker 1:Sofia, yes. She's the AI guide on the platform and she's I think she's really special. She's trauma informed. She adapts to your soul print. She uses nervous system language, not hustle culture jargon.
Speaker 1:She knows the difference between sympathetic overdrive and dorsal shutdown. And she remembers your patterns across conversations so it gets more personalized over time.
Speaker 2:That matters so much because burnout recovery isn't a one conversation thing. It's an ongoing relationship with your own regulation.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And for people who want to go deeper, there's the Refill Shop which has specific resources and tools for different stages of recovery. Things that actually match where you are instead of assuming everyone starts from the same place.
Speaker 2:I think what I appreciate is that none of this is about optimizing. It's about restoring.
Speaker 1:That distinction is everything. We're not trying to hack your way back to peak performance. We're trying to help your body remember what safe feels like. Before we wrap up, I want to do something a little different. I want to take just thirty seconds and check-in with your body because we've been talking about nervous systems and science for a while now and your body has been here the whole time listening.
Speaker 1:So wherever you are right now, just notice your shoulders. You don't have to change anything. Just notice. Notice your jaw. Is it clenched?
Speaker 1:Is there space between your teeth? And take one breath that's a little slower than the last one. Not a big deep breath. Just a slightly slower one.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's a micro moment of regulation. And those add up.
Speaker 1:They really do. Your nervous system has been keeping score, but it's also been waiting for permission to soften, and you just gave it a little bit of that. Thanks for being here with us. If anything we talked about today landed for you, take the operating system audit at theburnoutedit.com. It's free, and it'll show you things about your nervous system that you've probably been feeling but haven't had words for.
Speaker 2:And be gentle with yourself today.
Speaker 1:Always. We'll talk to you next time.