04/17/2026
3-Step Trauma and Burnout Relief Exercises
Good Afternoon!
We often think of burnout as simply the result of too much work and too much stress. But in a recent “Vital Signs” interview, psychiatrist and founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Dr. James Gordon, offers a more nuanced perspective suggesting burnout often stems from a mismatch between the daily stresses we face and who we are as a person.
He points to health care as an example. Many people enter medicine wanting to help, connect, and make a difference. Over time, though, they can find themselves buried in paperwork, short on time, and pulled away from patients. That gap—between why they started and what the job has become—creates a kind of inner friction. Even without punishing hours, the loss of meaning can lead to frustration, disengagement, and a slow, creeping depletion.
Misalignment is one path to burnout; the other is more familiar: overload. Too many demands, too little rest, and not enough support. In this case, the body absorbs the strain. The nervous system stays switched “on,” stress hormones rise, sleep suffers, and eventually exhaustion sets in.
These take different roads, but over time, they tend to arrive at the same place in the body.
Gordon describes burnout as a form of cumulative trauma—a slow, repeated strain that becomes “a wound” to one’s sense of self. When stress is constant and unresolved, the body locks into a low-grade fight-or-flight state: heart rate stays elevated, cortisol remains high, and the system loses its ability to fully recover. This can lead to inflammation, anxiety, withdrawal, and a cycle that becomes harder to break.
In reality, many people experience some combination of overload and misalignment. In both cases, the nervous system plays a central role.
The encouraging part is that the same tools used to support trauma recovery may also help with burnout. At the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Gordon and his team use simple, practical approaches—slow, deep breathing to calm the nervous system, gentle movement to release tension, and small-group connection to rebuild a sense of safety and belonging.
These methods have been used in some of the most challenging environments—from post-9/11 recovery efforts to war zones. It raises an interesting question: If they can help people recover from trauma, could they also change the way we approach burnout—not just as something to escape, but something to better understand, address, and realign with who we are?
Chrissy Trudeau
