Burn-out is actually a burn-in and highly sensitive people are prone to this

Since my burn-out experience in 2016, I’ve spent most of my time researching, and trying to figure out
what actually happened with my body and mind. Even if I knew lots of things about the highly sensitive
trait that I have, I couldn’t connect all the dots to have a complete picture. It wasn’t easy, because I
didn’t have enough energy to analyse the things as I used to. I had to do everything very slowly or
struggle with the scary sensations of brain shut down.

After putting a lot of pieces together, my research path got me to study the neuro-mechanisms of stress
response. And all started to make sense. So, I will try to synthetize and structure the information, so you
can turn on a new light of awareness about what is happening in our inner functioning.

First of all, the stress response isn’t about the “stress” as we know it. Our stress response is not only
triggered by threat, and danger, but also by novelty in our environment, by different challenges, tasks
and problems to solve. The stress response starts as the activation of our energy in order to deal with a
challenge, or accomplish a task whatever it might be.

When the stress response starts it generates a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters in our
bodies in order to keep us active and energetic. However, this response is designed to last for a short
period of time, because otherwise our biological system can begin suffering due to loss of energy.

So, after being fully activated for a while, we should return to our base line, in a medium alert and
relaxed state. And this can happen only when our relaxation response comes into play to end the stress
response. The relaxation response lets your system to recover and restore its energy.

The relaxation response is initiated under two conditions: either our brain or nervous system gets the
message of finishing the assignment, or overcoming the danger, or we experience a great sense of
safety from our social environment that can calm us and make us to slow down.

If neither of these conditions happens, then we remain trapped in a stress reaction that becomes
chronic. If we don’t have a clear finish line for our tasks, if we have too many successive problems to
solve, if we are continuously stimulated, or if we can’t get to a feeling of safety, we keep our system
excessively activated, and prone to exhaustion.