Is Yoga the Answer to Burnout?

Yoga is not just about relaxation, flexibility, or sitting cross-legged.

It teaches you how to stay calm and connected—to yourself and others—while doing physically, emotionally, and mentally hard things, and making that process meaningful. To me, this is what spirituality really is.

We think of yoga as a physical practice. But really, it’s the experience of being in a process that is physical, emotional, mental—and yes, dare I say it—spiritual.

Spirituality

For a long time during my science career, I found that word... icky. Loaded. Awkward. And yet, it has become a profoundly important part of my own healing process. 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 the self, with others, with the world around us—brings a feeling of connection, peace, 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.

But we are wired to connect. To nature. To each other. To our own bodies. We’ve just forgotten how.

Yoga helps us remember

It 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. It has everything to do with coming home to yourself—and everything else.

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 pursue something difficult and worthwhile, while staying present and whole in the process.

Burnout Isn’t Just in Your Head

Burnout is often regarded as a mental problem. But in truth, it is full body, and can therefore only be resolved by integrating the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual experience.

In the West, burnout is often treated as a mindset problem. 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.

But burnout is not just in your head. It lives in your body. It shakes your emotions. It clouds your thinking. It can even make you question your sense of purpose, your direction, and who you are.

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. And your heart hasn’t learned how to stay steady when the air gets thin. That’s what’s missing from most burnout recovery programs: a way to work with your whole self—not just your mind.

And this whole-self 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.

But 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. 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.

Let’s start by clearing up a few misconceptions:

“Yoga is

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

If you’re looking for balance or recovering from burnout, chances are someone’s already thrown one of those lines at you. I’ve been there too. I came to yoga because I wanted to be fit 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—not just as movement, but as integration—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, spiritual, can it even a little weird sometimes? 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, forme

r 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 not needing to hide, of being fully, unapologetically yourself and still belonging to something bigger—might be what keeps the next burnout at bay.