One of the saddest things about being exhausted for a long time is how normal it starts to feel.
I don’t mean total burnout necessarily. Although sometimes it becomes that too.
I mean the quieter version, which is kind of sneaky.
You stop laughing as much.
Everything becomes a bit more functional.
You move through the day sort of managing it rather than properly living it. And after a while you stop questioning it because… well… adulthood is tiring, isn’t it? Work is stressful. Life is full. Maybe this is just what happens.
I think a lot of us quietly arrive there without fanfare or drama.
And then start building an identity around a nervous system state that was never supposed to be permanent.
I notice versions of this in practice all the time.
Signs Your Nervous System Is Exhausted
It’s interesting actually. Sometimes it shows up most clearly when people come across a posture they haven’t done for a while. Or something unfamiliar. You can almost feel the system tighten around the experience.
The curiosity disappears and suddenly the whole thing becomes very operational. Like we’re trying to complete the sequence correctly instead of experiencing it.
I joke sometimes that the ancient sages were probably yanking our chains with some of these poses on purpose.
Because the useful moment often isn’t the pose itself. It’s the noticing.
Noticing how quickly we become irritated with ourselves.
How fast we lose humour.
How uncomfortable we are with not immediately being good at something.
And of course I recognise all of this in myself too.
There are periods where I become very efficient but not especially connected to life. That’s usually the sign for me.
Everything starts feeling slightly narrowed somehow. I stop noticing what’s good properly. I stop enjoying ordinary things. There’s less spaciousness in me.
And because I’m also human, there’s usually a part of me that then tries to aggressively “solve” the problem.
Maybe I need a different practice. Maybe I need to sort myself out somehow. Maybe I’ve just not found the right thing yet…”
Meanwhile the teacher in me is quietly looking at the student in me thinking, “Josie… honestly.” 🙄
Because I already know it doesn’t work like that.
Why Life Starts Feeling Flat When You’re Overstimulated
Traditional yoga understands something I think modern life has become very bad at recognising.
Human beings perceive differently depending on the state their nervous system is in.
When attention is scattered all over the place and the mind is constantly stimulated, something in us becomes harder to hear.
Not in a mystical way necessarily. You don’t have to believe in a higher self you’ve lost touch with.
I just mean life starts feeling flatter. You stop noticing things properly. Or responding to life in the same way. Everything gets a bit dulled somehow. By noise, pressure, speed, comparison, mental clutter… all of it.
And I think modern life is making this much worse now.
Something I genuinely find a bit disturbing lately is how good technology has become at keeping us emotionally hooked. Especially social media. The algorithms are incredibly sophisticated now. They learn what keeps your attention and then feed you more of it.
If you’re worried you’re falling behind in life, you’ll be shown people who seem to be doing better than you.
If you’re feeling not enough, there’ll be somebody ready to tell you how to become more enough.
And the thing is… attention is your life force really. Or at least deeply connected to it. Where attention goes, energy follows. The yogis understood that thousands of years ago.
So if your attention is constantly being pulled outward all day long, eventually it becomes very difficult to hear the quieter, steadier part of yourself underneath all that noise.
Which I know risks sounding a bit dramatic, but honestly I think we should be more concerned about this than we are.
Exhaustion Changes More Than Your Energy
People say they don’t have time anymore, but then spend four hours a day inside platforms specifically designed to keep them emotionally activated and slightly disconnected from themselves.
And again, I’m including myself in this. I’m not floating above modern life on a meditation cushion immune to any of it.
I catch myself too.
That’s partly why I care so much about practice.
Not because I think yoga turns people into spiritually superior humans. Some people are just using yoga the same way they use everything else — to perform, improve themselves endlessly, optimise, get somewhere.
But good practice… steady practice… changes something much more subtle.
You start hearing yourself again.
Or maybe feeling yourself more accurately.
There’s more humour.
More perspective.
More enjoyment of ordinary life.
Decision-making becomes clearer. You stop getting pulled around quite so easily by every emotion, every trend, every panic, every external opinion.
Honestly, it makes you less fuckable with.
As my teacher, Octavio, would say.
Crude? Slightly. But he means it, and honestly, so do I.
You become harder to manipulate because you’re more connected to your own discernment.
I was talking to a woman at Zumba recently who said she hadn’t been coming much because work had become so stressful. And when she did make it to class she spent most of it worrying about needing to leave quickly afterwards and get back to work.
Which felt incredibly sad to me.
This thing that should have been helping her reconnect with herself had become another source of pressure.
I asked her what she did and she said finance. Main breadwinner. Deadlines. Responsibility. Lots of pressure.
And I remember asking her, “Who made the deadlines?”
She laughed immediately because of course she understood what I meant.
Not that life is simple. Or that people can just opt out of responsibility and live in a field somewhere drinking ceremonial cacao.
But we do slowly create lives where there’s almost no space left to actually experience being alive inside them.
And then one day people look around and wonder why everything feels so flat.
That’s partly why I care about this work.
Because I don’t think most people need reinventing.
Why You Don’t Feel Like Yourself Anymore
I think many people are exhausted. Overstimulated. Pulled in too many directions for too long.
And underneath all that noise there’s still a person there who is probably far more alive, creative, warm, intuitive and responsive than they’ve been able to feel recently.
Practice helps clear some of the static.
Not all at once. And not permanently either. Life keeps happening. The mind keeps doing what minds do.
But gradually things become more perceptible again.
You start laughing more.
Breathing differently.
Feeling genuine pleasure in small things.
Feeling more here for your own life.
Which now I think about it… is probably why the yogis cared so much about repetition in the first place.
J X
