During the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations about burnout and stress exploded, particularly among health care workers. Much of the advice centered on self-care practices: taking time off, scheduling massages and spa days, practicing mindfulness, protecting your evenings, using your PTO. While these strategies are valuable, they are not the full story.
Positioning self-care as the solution to stress oversimplifies a much deeper physiological process. For many patients (and clinicians) stress is not a time-management problem or a mindset issue. It is a nervous system issue.
When we talk about the nervous system in clinical practice, I explain it simply: It is the system in the body designed to keep us safe. It is constantly surveilling both the external environment and the internal environment for cues of safety or danger. This process happens automatically, without conscious thought.
Once someone understands the basic building blocks of the nervous system, their own behavior (and the behavior of others) starts to make sense. Fatigue, anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, lack of boundaries, chronic overwhelm: These are not character flaws. They are adaptive responses the nervous system uses to increase safety.
This perspective removes a tremendous amount of shame. When you understand the language of the nervous system, nothing is “wrong.” Everything makes sense.
Mislabeling dysregulation as stress
In women particularly, nervous system dysregulation is often mislabeled as stress. Common symptoms include persistent fatigue, anxiety (including waking up with anxiety), feeling overwhelmed, chronic tension, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, difficulty saying no, and people-pleasing behaviors.
From a nervous system perspective, these are survival strategies. The body is attempting to maintain safety by staying vigilant, productive, agreeable, or hyper-aware of potential threats.
Telling someone to “reduce stress” by taking a vacation or booking a massage can feel dismissive, not because those things are unhelpful, but because they do not address what is actually happening in the body. These strategies may offer temporary relief, but they function more like Band-Aids than solutions.
Why we cannot just “relax”
Our patients may feel like failures because they “can’t relax.” This belief is not only incorrect; it is harmful.
From an evolutionary standpoint, relaxation may not always be safe. Thousands of years ago, being alert and vigilant meant survival. Resting at the wrong moment could mean death. If the nervous system perceives threat, it will not allow rest, no matter how much someone wants it.
When someone is in a chronic state of fight-or-flight or hypervigilance, rest feels dangerous. Asking them to “slow down” or “calm down” without addressing this physiology is ineffective.
The nervous system is not working against them. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, based on the inputs it has received over a lifetime. Our role is not to override it with willpower, but to update those inputs, to teach the nervous system that rest, boundaries, and safety are possible now.
Moving beyond willpower
Nervous system regulation is not about forcing calm. It is an intentional process of first identifying the nervous system state someone is in, then using evidence-based tools to move toward safety.
Dysregulation tends to follow predictable patterns (such as fight-or-flight, shutdown, or freeze) and regulation also occurs in predictable sequences. Even moving from one dysregulated state to a slightly less dysregulated state is progress.
Willpower fails in chronic dysregulation because it asks the mind to override the body. Over time, this leads to burnout, not healing.
Clinical manifestations and treatment
Clinically, chronic nervous system dysregulation has wide-ranging effects: anxiety, depression, fatigue, pain, headaches, migraines, immune dysfunction, and generalized malaise.
This often shows up as treatment resistance. Patients have had extensive testing. Labs and imaging are “normal.” They are told everything looks fine and to “work on stress.”
This response is deeply invalidating. The symptoms are real and physiologically based; they simply are not captured on standard panels. While tools like heart rate variability and biofeedback can assess nervous system flexibility, they have not yet been integrated into routine clinical care.
Cognitive behavioral therapy and medications have an important role. However, they are cognitive approaches to a somatic problem.
When the issue lives in the body, healing requires bottom-up approaches that involve the nervous system directly. Mind and body are not separate systems, though medicine often treats them that way. When someone has spent years in therapy without meaningful improvement, it may be time to explore somatic approaches rather than assuming the patient is resistant or noncompliant.
A framework for physicians
As physicians, we all learned the nervous system in medical school. We know the sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways. What we were not taught is how to apply this knowledge clinically, how nervous system states shape behavior, symptoms, burnout, and healing.
Understanding nervous system regulation provides a practical framework that integrates what we already know. When viewed through this lens, many patient presentations (and physician burnout itself) suddenly make sense.
Burnout in clinicians is not a failure of resilience. It is a state of chronic dysregulation and survival mode. And when we are dysregulated, we cannot provide our best care.
Learning to regulate our own nervous systems is not self-indulgent; it is essential to effective, compassionate medicine.
The nervous system is not the enemy. It is our greatest ally.
When we understand it, we gain access to greater compassion, for ourselves and for our patients, and the ability to move forward with intention rather than force. Anything new will feel threatening to the nervous system at first. Healing comes not from pushing past that response, but from working with it.
And that may be the most important form of stress management we have overlooked.
Claudine Holt is an occupational medicine physician and life and embodiment coach.
