How Many Of You Have To Override Your Own Nervous System Just To Make It Through The Day?

The Hidden Cost of Staying “Professional” All Day

I was scrolling through a therapy group the other day and somebody posted a question:

“If you were considering not being a therapist anymore, what would you do instead?”

What shocked me wasn’t the question. It was that there were almost 300 comments and it hadn’t even been 24 hours yet.

Everything from food trucks to house cleaning was on the list of things someone would rather do all day than be a therapist, and that told me a lot about how many of you are feeling.

It told me how fried so many therapists actually are right now.

It's also an indication of what's happening underneath that exhaustion. I think a lot of folks are disconnecting from their own nervous system just to make it through the day.

Carrying your clients through everything happening out in the wild is heavy right now. Especially if you’re also carrying your own life.

I think this is the hidden part of burnout nobody talks about enough: sometimes you’ve had to become slightly numb to your own body in order to function at the pace your day requires.

Many of my grads have told me they constantly override hunger or a pause to reset into their own embodiment because there are still three more sessions left.

And after a while, I think their nervous system starts adapting to that as normal, yet that adaptation has a cost.

One of the things I see happen over time is therapists slowly losing access to themselves outside the office too. You finally get home and you might not even want anyone touching you... one more person needing something. So you scroll or zone out. It's ok, we all need some mindless brain dump, yet then people wonder why they feel disconnected from their body.

Of course you feel that lack of embodiment or disconnection. You’ve been ignoring your own needs all day long just to keep functioning. And this is one of the reasons I care so deeply about somatic work and nervous system education for therapists.

Not because I think every therapist needs to become a yoga teacher, and definitely not because I think every session needs a full yoga sequence. But you and your client need some breathwork or movement everyday in order to stay healthy and connected. See our offerings

If you're already feeling some burnout, I'm concerned about the upcoming season, because according to Ayurveda, the Life Science of Yoga, summer is actually a really important time to pay attention to the tendency towards burnout.

In Ayurveda, we’re moving out of the heavier Kapha energy of spring and toward a hotter, faster season. It's the season that's hot, firey, and we burn the candle at both ends with the extra light we get during this time of year.

If you’re already depleted or burnout going into summer, you can end up pushing yourself even harder because the world around you speeds up too. Yet there are some small adjustments you can make now to help with that.

Sometimes that small self care adjustment looks like:

• walking outside between sessions instead of staying under fluorescent lights for 9 hours

• eating actual meals instead of surviving on caffeine

• learning how to exhale fully again

• noticing when your jaw is clenched before bedtime

• moving your body in ways that feel regulating instead of performative

Simple things. But your nervous system notices.

I think therapists are hungry for this conversation because deep down, many of you already know something has to change, because for most of you graduate school didn’t prepare you for this level of chronic nervous system output.

That’s part of why I created Clinical Yoga Institute in the first place. Not to turn therapists into performers or add one more thing to your plate.

But to help you understand what’s happening in your own system while you’re helping somebody else manage theirs.

Because if you constantly have to leave yourself in order to stay “professional,” eventually something inside you starts asking how much longer you can keep doing that.

And based on those 280 comments… I think a lot of therapists are asking themselves that right now.