Is Yoga the Answer to Burnout?

If you’re looking for balance or are recovering from burnout, chances are someone’s has told you to try yoga. I’ve been there too. I came to yoga because I wanted to be fit, increase my productivity, and avoid burnout. That was before my burnout, and it still happened. So. Going to yoga classes will not prevent your burnout. It can even add to it if you put it onto your neverending to do list.

It was only when I truly began to understand the meaning of yoga, that I could use it as a tool to come home to my body… and actually stay well. So is yoga relaxing? Is it movement? Is it athletic, and stretchy? Yes. It can be all of those things. But none of that is the point.

We think of yoga as a physical practice. But really, it’s the experience of becoming whole, in a practice that is physical, emotional, mental—and yes, dare I say it—spiritual. And no, spirituality is not about candles and spirits. Spirituality is first and formost, about connection.

Spirituality

For a long time during my science career, I found that word... icky. Loaded. Awkward. Non scientific. And therefore not me. And yet I was drawn to it, and it has become a profoundly important part of my own practice and healing. So it needs to be discussed, not just for me, but because I see this struggle in others too. I often come accross people in my yoga classes or coaching sessions (often men), who say: finally, you are discussing this in terms that makes me feel like I have permission to listen. So let's discuss it, because It think it would be such a gift if we can stop feeling so icky about spirituality and just embrace it.

So, what does spirituality really mean?

For me, and for many of the Eastern traditions I’ve studied, spirituality is about connecting to a deeper meaning. A bigger picture. Something beyond just yourself. This sense of union, with your body, your feelings, with others, with the world around us, brings a feeling of connection, peace, freedom, and joy.

And I believe this is something we’ve become deprived of in the West, where meaning is so often tied to individual success and productivity. When we focus so much on ourselves, when we hold on to the belief that everything is possible if we just work hard enough, then if things don't work out, we have a whole mountain of shame and guilt to deal with. The anxiety that comes from having to shoulder all that potential and responsibility on our own, while as a species we have ALWAYS relied on community and connection to survive, be creative, and innovative, is just so unnecesary.

We are wired to connect. As Esther Perel puts it: we excist within a system. It makes no sense trying to look at humans only from the perspective of what happens inside of our heads. We excist in connection. To nature. To each other. To our own bodies. We, and by that I mean people living in individualistic societies, have just forgotten how.

Yoga helps us remember

Yoga brings us back to a sense of meaning that arises not from achievement, but from our connection to something greater, and how we serve others through it.

That, to me, is spirituality. It has nothing to do with religion, or spirits, or the afterlife (although I respect people who do feel and see it that way). It has everything to do with coming home to yourself and everything else, and learning that you are not just your thoughts and achievements, but are actually part of something bigger. This both humbles and relaxes you at the same time.

Through mindful movement, breathwork, meditation, visualisation, and mental reframing, yoga gives you an integrated system to work with chronic stress, anxiety, and emotional disconnection. Not just to relax, but to surrender to whatever just is, while at the same time pursuing something difficult and worthwhile.

People often get this wrong. They either think that its all about relaxation (and thus never pursuing anything, or completely detaching yourself from responsibility or control or action), or its all about pushing your body to its limits (making the practice itself about achievement). The thing is to do both. Surrender to what is, and work diligently towards change and challenge, without attaching to your personal success.

Yoga teaches you how to stay calm and connected—to yourself, to others, and to something bigger than just you — while doing physically, emotionally, and mentally hard things. This makes the stretching, the physical challenge, the mental resillience you are building, meaningful. It makes you whole.

To me, this is what spirituality really is. Its about connection. Union. Yoking mind and body, thought and feeling, you and me, nature and man, together. Which is, literally, the meaning of the word yoga.

And burnout recovery also isn't just about ralaxation. Its about learning how to stay whole and connected in challenging situations. And for that, we need to include our bodies into the conversation.

Burnout Isn’t Just in Your Head

Burnout is often regarded as a mental, or a work problem. But in truth, it is full body, and can therefore only be resolved by integrating the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual experience. Thinking about it only in terms of the mind or your situation at work makes no sense.

In the West, burnout is often treated as a psychological problem that needs fixing. You talk about it in therapy. You analyze it. You try to “manage” it like it’s a project you can control or fix if you just understand it well enough. Recovery becomes another productivity task. Many people I coach initially try to plan their recovery. Its a very mental and mind-over-matter approach towards healing and it never works.

Trying to recover from burnout through talk therapy alone is like trying to climb Everest by reading a book about it. You might understand the theory, but your body hasn’t acclimatized.

Your muscles haven’t moved. Your lungs haven’t adjusted to the altitude. Your heart hasn’t learned how to stay steady when the air gets thin. And you certyainly haven't learned how to surrender yourself to the unpredicteable wheather on the mountain. You need to be ON the mountain to humble yourself to the power of nature. A plan helps, but in the end, you need to learn how to surrender yourself to the present moment, and what your body has to offer.

That’s what’s missing from most burnout recovery programs at work: a way to work with your whole self, not just your mind. And this whole-body experience is precisely what yoga focuses on, and why I find it such an amazing integrative practice in the pursuit of healing from chronic stress.

What Yoga Really Is

Yoga, as both an experience and an implementation, plays a powerful role in how I work with burnout and stress.

Yoga is Not a Quick-Fix for Stress

I also don’t want this to become just another blog telling you that yoga is the cure for everything, and that if you just do more of it, all will be well. First of all, this blog isn't about your work environment, but let me say this: if your environment makes you chronically stressed, you can't yoga your way out of that no matter how hard you try. Second, Yoga is not a cure for your stress if you don’t understand how it works. Just going to a yoga class might offer quick relief, but it won’t help you prevent burnout if you don’t understand what the practice is actually for.

So let’s start by clearing up a few misconceptions:

“Yoga is

• a relaxation practice
• a form of stretching
• athletics
• spiritual stuff
• Also: Have you tried yoga?

If you’re looking for balance or are recovering from burnout, chances are someone’s has thrown one of those lines at you. So is yoga relaxing? Is it movement? Is it athletic, spiritual, and stretchy? Yes. It can be all of those things. But none of that is the point.

The purpose of yoga is to reconnect the mind and body, and in doing so, loosen our attachment to goals, deadlines, status, and the illusion that we are only what we achieve. And something beautiful happens in that process. When we begin to reconnect to what truly matters, to our breath, our body, our values, when we sing together, move together, allow ourselves to be together, we also start to feel less alone. We begin to see that we are not separate, not isolated, not failing on our own. We are connected: to each other, to the earth, to the moment we are in.

Tim Peake,

former astronaut and author of Space: The Human Story, put it like this:

Yoga teaches us something similar. When we zoom out and feel the whole, when we soften the hard edges of separation between organs, disciplines, people, we find that health isn’t about fixing broken parts. It’s about becoming whole.

That’s what yoga has taught me. I came for fitness and stress relief. I stayed because I discovered something more profound: The quiet joy of coming home.

The home that is my body.

The home that is the world around me.

The home that is the people I belong to.

And that feeling: of not being alone, of being fully, unapologetically myself and still belonging to something bigger, will hopefully keep the next burnout at bay.