Breathwork for Burnout: When Thinking Harder Is Not the Answer
You are not lazy. You are not weak. You have not lost your drive. You are empty. There is a difference, and if you are burned out you probably already know it. Burnout does not feel like tiredness you can sleep off. It feels like the engine is still running but nothing is getting translated into forward motion. You can push harder. You have been pushing harder. It is not working.
Most of what gets recommended for burnout is more thinking. More planning. A new morning routine. A productivity system. Journaling prompts. Therapy. Time off. These things have value. But they all operate in the same space where the burnout is already living, which is your head. And that is the problem.
What Burnout Actually Is
Burnout is not a mindset problem. It is a nervous system problem.
When your body has been under sustained stress for long enough, your nervous system shifts into a kind of chronic survival mode. Your threat detection system stays elevated. Your body keeps producing stress hormones even when there is no immediate threat. Your sleep becomes lighter. Your digestion becomes disrupted. Your ability to feel pleasure flattens. Your capacity for patience drops. None of this is a character flaw. It is physiology.
The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for reasoning and planning, goes partially offline when you are chronically stressed. This is why the usual advice does not land. Your brain literally does not have the resources to process complex strategy or generate new perspectives when it is running survival protocols. You sit down to plan your way out of burnout and the plan falls apart within 48 hours. Not because you lack discipline. Because your nervous system is not in a state where that kind of cognition is possible.
What changes the nervous system is not more thinking. It is direct physiological intervention.
Why Breathwork Reaches What Thinking Cannot
Your breath is unique. It is the only autonomic function you can consciously control. Your heart rate, your digestion, your hormonal cycles: none of these respond directly to your intention. Your breath does. And because your breath directly communicates with your nervous system through the vagus nerve, consciously changing how you breathe changes your physiology in real time.
When you breathe in a specific pattern, sustained over 30 to 45 minutes, a few things happen. Carbon dioxide levels in your blood shift. Blood pH changes. Circulation patterns alter. Your nervous system begins to register safety signals instead of threat signals. And something else happens that is harder to describe in purely clinical terms: stored tension starts to surface and move through.
The body holds stress. Not metaphorically. Physically. Muscle tension, postural patterns, shallow breathing habits, all of these are the body's way of managing unresolved stress. Breathwork gives that stored charge somewhere to go. People cry. People shake. People laugh. People feel waves of emotion they cannot name. And afterward, something has shifted that was not reachable by thinking about it.
I have facilitated hundreds of sessions for people coming in burned out. The most common thing they say at the end is: I did not realise I was carrying that much. They are not being dramatic. They genuinely did not know. Because the cognitive mind had been compensating for years, working around the tension rather than through it.
What a Breathwork Session for Burnout Looks Like
You lie down. Eyes closed. There is music. I guide you through a specific breathing pattern: continuous circular breathing through the mouth, no pause between inhale and exhale. The pattern is deliberate. It is not meditation. It is active work.
For the first few minutes, your mind tries to stay in control. It narrates. It evaluates. It wonders if this is working. That is normal. The breath pattern gradually overrides the narration. Around the ten to fifteen minute mark, most people notice something shifting. The body takes over from the thinking mind. What happens next is different for every person and different in every session.
Some people cry without a specific reason. Some feel a profound physical release in the chest or belly. Some access memories or feelings that have been frozen under the surface. Some simply fall into a state of deep stillness that feels nothing like sleep and nothing like the constant vigilance of burnout. There is no wrong outcome. The breath finds what needs to move.
After the active breathing, there is a rest period. This is not filler. This is when the nervous system integrates what just happened. The shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic. The body settling into a different baseline than it had before the session.
What the Cold Exposure Adds
In UNTAMED, we add an ice bath after breathwork. This is not gratuitous. The cold does something specific that is relevant to burnout recovery.
When you get into cold water, your body floods with norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that plays a direct role in mood, focus, and stress resilience. Research from Dr. Andrew Huberman and others has documented elevations of 200 to 300 percent following cold water immersion. That is not a small effect. It is the kind of shift in neurochemistry that changes how you feel for hours afterward.
Beyond the chemistry, there is something about choosing to get into cold water that matters. Burnout often involves a feeling of helplessness, a sense that you are subject to forces you cannot manage. The ice bath is a microdose of agency. You decide to do something hard. You breathe through it. You get out the other side. That experience of deliberate, voluntary discomfort, and surviving it calmly, retrains the nervous system in a way that accumulates over time.
You also cannot think your way through an ice bath. You can only breathe. For someone whose mind has been running nonstop for years, two minutes where the body completely overrides the brain is not nothing. It is a practice in being present instead of perpetually ahead of yourself.
How Often Does It Need to Happen
One session matters. I have seen people describe a single breathwork session as more effective than months of trying to think their way out of the same state. But one session is a peak, not a practice. The nervous system returns to its habitual patterns. What you do after matters.
For people dealing with burnout, the most useful approach is:
A single intensive session to create the initial shift and show you what is possible. Followed by a shorter daily practice at home, 10 to 20 minutes of conscious breathing using a simple pattern you can sustain. Then periodic deeper sessions to clear what accumulates and reinforce the new baseline.
The daily practice does not need to be intense. It needs to be consistent. Even 10 minutes of coherent breathing, where your exhale is longer than your inhale, activates the parasympathetic system. Done every morning, that compounds. Your resting stress level drops over weeks. Your sleep improves. Your reactions become less hair trigger. The burnout does not vanish overnight. But the trajectory changes.
What This Is Not
Breathwork is not a replacement for addressing the conditions that caused the burnout. If the source of your stress is structural, a job that is genuinely unsustainable, a relationship that is chronically depleting, a lifestyle misaligned with what you actually need, breathwork will help you cope with the symptoms but it will not remove the cause.
What it can do is give you enough nervous system regulation to actually think clearly about those structural issues. Many people arrive burned out and unable to make any meaningful decisions. After a session, that changes. The prefrontal cortex comes back online. The options that looked identical before now feel distinguishable. Decisions that felt impossible feel manageable.
You cannot strategy your way out of a physiology problem. But when your physiology gets right, strategy becomes possible again.
Where to Start
If you are on Koh Samui, UNTAMED is the full version of this. A full day: guided breathwork, ice bath, time in nature, honest conversation, and the space to let things settle. Hotel pickup is included. The details are on the UNTAMED page.
If you want to build a daily practice before or after a session, the most effective simple pattern is box breathing or extended exhale breathing. Inhale for four counts, exhale for six or eight counts. Do this for 10 minutes before you look at your phone in the morning. The difference over four weeks is measurable.
Burnout is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that your system has been asked to run at a level that exceeds what your recovery can sustain. Getting out of it requires less pushing and more reset. Breathwork is one of the most direct ways to do that reset. Not because it solves the external situation. Because it gives you back the internal resource you need to deal with the external situation clearly.
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About Diego Pauel
I have lived in Koh Samui for 15 years. I discovered breathwork through freediving, which I have trained in for over a decade. When COVID hit and the island emptied out, I started offering breathwork and ice baths for free to help the local community feel better in their bodies. I was the first to offer this work on the island. Five years later, I have facilitated countless sessions for people from all over the world. No guru energy. No mystical language. Just the work.
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