I was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, at my very first yoga class. It was at the old Sheraton in Abu Dhabi. I remember almost nothing about the poses. What I remember is the end, when the teacher had us lie down in shavasana and asked us to be still. Just breathe, she said. Let your mind go quiet.
I lay there on the floor and waited. The stillness stretched on, longer than felt comfortable. And somewhere in it, a thought arrived with total certainty: I don’t know how to turn my brain off. I can’t stop thinking.
I did not say it as a problem to solve. I said it as a fact about myself (…) a verdict. This is who I am. Don’t expect me to sit quietly. And then I got up, and I never went back to that class.
It would take me almost twenty-five years to understand that the sentence I handed myself on that floor was not a truth. It was a curse I had agreed to. And that meditation (…) the very thing I had just decided I was constitutionally incapable of (…) was one of the few things that could actually reach the stress I would spend the next two decades drowning in.
This is not another article telling you to relax. If you are a high-achieving woman carrying more than anyone around you realises, “just relax” is almost insulting. This is about what chronic stress and burnout do inside the body, why meditation for burnout is one of the few things that reaches them, and why it took me until my late forties to stop believing the verdict I gave myself at twenty-one.
Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash
What Chronic Stress Actually Does to Your Body
Here is the part most wellness advice skips. Stress isn’t just something you feel. It is a physiological event that takes over the whole body.
When your brain perceives a threat (a deadline, a difficult conversation, an inbox, an old memory), it triggers your sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight branch. Your adrenal glands release cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate climbs, your muscles brace, your digestion slows, your attention narrows. This system is brilliant in short bursts. It is designed to save your life and then switch off.
The problem, for women like the ones I work with, is that it never switches off. The threat is no longer a predator. It is a low, constant hum of demand that never fully resolves. So the body stays in sympathetic dominance for months, then years. Cortisol stays elevated. Sleep turns shallow. The nervous system slowly forgets how to come down. This is the “wired but exhausted” state at the heart of burnout, and no amount of sleeping in on Saturday touches it, because the wiring itself is stuck.
Why Burnout Hits High-Achieving Women Hardest
The women I work with are not falling apart in obvious ways. They are succeeding. That is exactly the trap.
When you are capable, the world keeps handing you more, and your nervous system keeps saying yes long after your body has started saying no. You learn to run on autopilot. You become so good at overriding your own signals that you stop hearing them. By the time the body forces the conversation (an illness, a wave of panic that comes from nowhere, a flatness where joy used to be), the stress has been running underground for years.
High intelligence does not protect you from this. Often it makes it worse, because you can out-think your own exhaustion and explain away every symptom (…) until you can’t. If you have ever felt a strange gap open between how composed you look and how frayed you feel, you already know the terrain. (You can read more on this topic here.)
The Morning That Changed Everything
The thing that finally changed me was not insight. It was repetition, and I did not even choose it on purpose.
Around 2017, I signed up for a month-long yoga teacher training in Thailand. If I am honest, the training was partly an excuse to stay in that place for a whole month. What I had not read closely was that every single day began the same way: one hour of Vipassana meditation at seven in the morning, before breakfast, before anything. It was not optional.
So there I was (…) the woman who had decided at twenty-one that she could not stop thinking (…) sitting in silence for an hour a day, thirty days in a row. I struggled. But I was surrounded by people doing it alongside me, in a place that made stillness feel less like a punishment, and somewhere in those thirty days the thing I had avoided my entire adult life quietly became a habit. When I left, I decided I would not give it up. I didn’t.
The proof did not arrive quickly, and it did not arrive as a feeling. It came about six months later, as behaviour. Things that had reliably set me off (…) old, specific triggers I knew intimately (…) stopped landing the way they used to. There was a gap now between the trigger and my reaction, a small space where there had never been one before. I do a great deal of self-reflection, it is the nature of my work, and when I traced the change back, only one variable had moved: I was starting every day with meditation. Beginning the day in stillness was setting the tone for everything that came after it.
That was the turn.
What Meditation Actually Is (and What It Isn’t)
Let me tell you what meditation is not. It is not emptying your mind. It is not reaching some blissful blankness that proves you are doing it right. If that were the bar, no one with a real life would qualify (…) and the twenty-one-year-old on that Sheraton floor would have been correct about herself.
Meditation is nervous-system training. It is the deliberate practice of moving your body out of fight-or-flight and into the parasympathetic state (rest, digest, repair) on purpose, instead of waiting for the body to crash you there. Over time, you are not only calmer in the moment. You are teaching the whole system a new baseline.
If you are the kind of woman who needs the evidence before she will try anything (I was), start here. For more than three decades, the HeartMath Institute has studied something called heart coherence. Your heart does not beat like a metronome. The time between one beat and the next is always changing, and the pattern of that variation is an honest readout of your nervous system. Under stress, the pattern is jagged and disordered. When you move into a calm, positive state, the rhythm smooths into an ordered, wave-like pattern, and the heart, brain, and nervous system begin to work in sync. That ordered state is coherence. It can be measured. It can be trained. And it is the physiological opposite of the survival chemistry we have been describing.
I came to the depth of this the long way around. In 2024, I picked up Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural for the first time, and it pulled me in enough that I wanted to stop reading about stillness and actually try it. So I did one of his meditations. It was daylight. I had a blindfold on. And behind the blindfold, I saw light. I was simply there, fully inside it, and for the first time I understood what those words meant in my body rather than my head: that the present moment is not a thin sliver of now. It is ongoing. Abundant. This moment, and somehow also forever. It was the most genuine stillness I had ever touched (…) the exact thing I had decided at twenty-one I was incapable of.
That is what the sceptic in me had missed for twenty-five years. I thought stillness meant a blank, switched-off mind. It does not. It means coming into coherence. And from there, the body finally receives the one message it cannot hear while it is bracing: that it is safe to come down.
How to Begin (Even If You Think You Can’t)
If you recognise yourself in this, here is what I would say to you as both a psychologist and a former sceptic.
First, if you once tried meditation and decided it was not for you, you may have simply met the wrong form of it. There are said to be hundreds of distinct meditation techniques, and they are not interchangeable. Sitting in silent Vipassana is a different universe from a guided meditation by someone like Dispenza, who works with sound, music, and a particular cadence in the voice that almost coaxes the nervous system into another state. The woman who decided at twenty-one that she could not meditate had met exactly one version of it, once. Do not write off the whole practice because one door did not open. Find the one that does.
Then start absurdly small. You are not trying to have some big experience. You are teaching a frightened system that it is allowed to come down. Here is the bare-bones version I give a brand-new client:
1. Land in the body. Sit, and feel your feet on the floor and the weight of you in the chair. You are not trying to think about your body. You are trying to feel it. This alone begins to pull your attention out of the spinning mind and into the present.
2. Lengthen the exhale. Breathe in for a slow count of four, and out for a slow count of six. Make the out-breath longer than the in-breath. This is not a metaphor. A long exhale is a direct, physical signal to the parasympathetic nervous system that you are safe.
3. Let the thoughts come, and let them go. When your mind wanders (it will, constantly), you have not failed. The practice is not stopping thought. It is noticing you have drifted and gently returning to the breath. That returning, over and over, is the entire exercise.
Five minutes. Ideally in the morning, before the day takes you. Do it daily, badly, for a while (…) consistency matters far more than depth at the start. You are not chasing a state. You are building a baseline.
You Are Not Broken. Your Nervous System Is Asking for Something.
I am not going to tell you that meditation fixed everything. I am going to tell you that it gave me back a relationship with my own body after years of treating it as an inconvenience. For a high-achieving woman running on cortisol and willpower, that is not a small thing. It may be the whole thing.
If you are exhausted in a way that rest does not touch, your nervous system isn’t failing. It is asking you for something you haven’t been giving it. That is not weakness. It is data your body is handing you.
Helping women come off autopilot and find solid ground from the inside out is the heart of the private work I do, one to one. (You can read more about here.) If something in this resonated, I would be glad to talk.
