Burnout vs. Everyday Stress: How to Know the Difference

Burnout vs. Everyday Stress: How to Know the Difference

Stress is part of life. A deadline, a conflict, a week where everything lands at once. Your body tightens, your mind races, and then it passes. You rest, you recover, you move on.

Burnout is different. It's what happens when the stress never passes, when your nervous system has been in overdrive so long it starts to shut down instead.

The distinction matters

Stress is a response to pressure. Burnout is a response to depletion. With stress, rest helps. With burnout, rest doesn't touch it. You sleep and wake up tired. You take a vacation and come back just as exhausted. The usual recovery strategies stop working because your system isn't just tired. It's stalled.

Why capable people miss it

If you've always been the competent one, the one who handles things, burnout can be hard to recognize in yourself. You're still functioning. Still getting things done. Still holding it together on the outside.

But something has shifted. You feel distant from your own life, like you're going through the motions but not really there. The things that used to energize you feel flat. You're irritable in ways that don't make sense, or you've gone numb in ways that concern you.

This isn't weakness. It's your nervous system telling you it's been running on emergency reserves for too long.

What actually helps

Burnout doesn't resolve through willpower or better time management. It resolves when your nervous system learns it's safe to come out of survival mode.

This is where somatic work differs from talk therapy. Understanding why you're burned out is useful, but it doesn't reset your nervous system. Your body needs a different kind of attention, one that works below the level of insight.

If this resonates

I work with people who look fine on the outside and feel depleted underneath. Many of them dismissed what they were feeling for years because they were still technically managing. By the time they reach out, they're not looking for productivity hacks. They're looking for something that actually works.

If you've been wondering whether what you're feeling is just stress or something deeper, somatic therapy might offer a different path forward.

Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.