The Trauma of Burnout: How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You by Dr. Claire Plumbly

Why burnout isn’t a resilience problem — it’s a nervous system injury

Burnout has become one of those words that feels both everywhere and strangely diluted. We use it to describe being tired, demotivated, or fed up with work. Claire Plumbly’s The Trauma of Burnout makes a much stronger claim: real burnout is not just exhaustion. It’s what happens when the nervous system becomes chronically stuck in survival mode.

When stress is unavoidable and prolonged, the body adapts. But adaptation comes at a cost. Over time, systems designed for short-term protection become overused, rigid, and eventually depleted. What looks like low motivation, irritability, or withdrawal is often a nervous system that has been trying to survive for too long without adequate safety, rest, or support.

This isn’t a book of productivity hacks. It’s a psychologically grounded, compassionate reframing of burnout as biological, emotional, relational, and cultural.

Stress vs Burnout: Energised vs Hollow

Plumbly draws a sharp distinction between healthy stress and burnout.

Healthy stress often feels energising. You’re stretched, but engaged. Motivated. Absorbed. Burnout feels different. It feels hollow. You might still be functioning — sometimes impressively — but the internal fuel is gone. You’re no longer pulled forward by meaning; you’re pushed forward by pressure.

Many people only realise they’re burned out when something forces awareness:

• A big mistake

• A physical “crash”

• A build-up of unhealthy coping behaviours

• Turning up to therapy for something seemingly unrelated

• A colleague or loved one naming what they see

By that point, burnout has usually been developing quietly for months or years.

The Dimensions and Patterns of Burnout

Plumbly builds on established research to describe three core dimensions of occupational burnout:

• Physical and emotional exhaustion

• Detachment (depersonalisation)

• Reduced sense of personal accomplishment or effectiveness

She also outlines three common burnout trajectories.

Frenetic burnout

The person who responds to stress by working harder. Often ambitious, conscientious, and committed — but the demands continually outweigh the resources. Boundaries erode. Work consumes everything. The harder you push, the worse it gets.

Underchallenged burnout

Rooted in monotony, lack of stimulation, and lack of growth. It’s marked by boredom, restlessness, and disengagement. Interestingly, Plumbly links this to our nervous system’s discomfort with understimulation — boredom itself can feel threatening, pushing us to seek stimulation again.

Worn-out burnout

Driven by misalignment between work and values, lack of recognition, and prolonged emotional depletion. Over time, people cope by emotionally withdrawing: caring less because caring hurts too much.

At the extreme end of this is moral injury — when someone is repeatedly expected to behave in ways that violate their values or witnesses things they fundamentally disagree with. The impact can include shame, loss of trust, and a shift in core beliefs about self and the world.

Green Mode, Amber Mode, and Red Mode: How the Nervous System Drives Burnout

One of the most useful frameworks in the book is Plumbly’s explanation of nervous system states. Instead of asking, “Why can’t I cope better?”, she encourages a different question:

What state is my nervous system in?

She describes three modes: Green, Amber, and Red. None are bad. All evolved to protect us. Burnout happens when we become stuck in the wrong one for too long.

Green mode: safety, connection, and clarity

Green mode is the state of safety.

In green mode:

• We feel calm and grounded

• We can connect emotionally with others

• Our bodies can rest, digest, and repair

• Our frontal lobes (high-level thinking) function fully

• We think flexibly rather than rigidly

This is where creativity, empathy, reflection, and perspective live. Importantly, green mode isn’t laziness. You can be active and productive here — but the effort feels sustainable, not draining.

A key principle in the book is simple but powerful:When the body feels safe, the brain stops scanning for threat.

Amber mode: mobilisation, drive, and chronic stress

Amber mode is activation. This is where the sympathetic nervous system takes charge.

In amber mode:

• We feel alert and driven

• Stress hormones rise

• Dopamine fuels motivation

• We become goal-focused and future-oriented

• We’re mobilised to act, solve, prepare

This state isn’t inherently negative. It’s where we meet deadlines, perform under pressure, and experience excitement. It’s also where flow can happen — when we’re absorbed in something meaningful, stimulating, and aligned with our values.

The problem is that modern life keeps us in amber almost constantly:

• Screen overload

• Endless notifications

• Excessive choice

• Multitasking

• “Resting” while still scrolling, planning, deciding

Even downtime often contains enough stimulation to keep the nervous system mobilised. The stress cycle never completes. Over time, this leads to allostatic load — cumulative wear and tear on the body and brain.

Red mode: shutdown, collapse, and dissociation

When amber becomes unsustainable, the system may shift into red.

Red mode is characterised by:

• Emotional numbness

• Physical heaviness

• Disconnection from others

• Loss of motivation

• Dissociation

• A sense of shutdown

This is where burnout often becomes visible.

Plumbly describes experiences such as:

• Autopilot — functioning externally while feeling absent internally

• Functional freeze — still working, still showing up, but disconnected from needs

• A deep sense of stuckness and helplessness

This isn’t laziness. It’s the nervous system conserving energy because it no longer believes mobilisation is safe or effective.

Burnout, Trauma, and the Body

Plumbly’s framing of trauma is compassionate and precise:

Trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.

She explores:

• Big-T trauma (major events)

• little-t trauma (chronic invalidation, relational wounds, prolonged stress)

• Trauma of omission — what never happened but should have (support, attunement, safety)

Trauma isn’t stored only in stories we can recall. It’s encoded as:

• Explicit memory (conscious narrative)

• Implicit memory (patterns held in the body and emotional brain)

This explains why burnout can feel confusing. The nervous system isn’t just responding to the present — it’s responding through a lifetime of learned cues about safety, worth, and threat.

Attachment Styles and Burnout

Plumbly links burnout vulnerability to attachment patterns shaped early in life.

Dismissive / Avoidant

Often developed when emotional needs weren’t reliably met. These individuals value independence and minimise vulnerability. In burnout, they may push through exhaustion, dismiss their own distress, and struggle to seek support.

Preoccupied / Anxious

Often shaped by inconsistent care. Self-worth becomes tied to approval. In burnout, this often looks like people-pleasing, overcommitment, fear of disappointing others, and difficulty setting boundaries.

Fearful / Disorganised

Often rooted in environments where closeness itself felt unsafe. These individuals both crave and fear connection. Support can feel destabilising rather than soothing, which makes recovery particularly complex.

Through this lens, burnout isn’t weakness — it’s the nervous system using strategies it learned long ago to stay safe.

Internal Pressures That Keep Burnout Going

Plumbly identifies three dominant internal drivers:

• Perfectionism

  • Rigid perfectionist

  • Self-critical perfectionist

  • Narcissistic perfectionist

• People-pleasing

  • Classic people-pleaser

  • Shadow people-pleaser

  • Pacifier

  • Resistor

• Avoidance of negative emotionsOften expressed as busyness, overwork, or emotional suppression.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re protective strategies that once helped us cope — but now keep us locked in threat mode.

Why Recovery Takes Time

Plumbly is clear: recovery isn’t quick. In severe cases, research suggests it can take one to three years to return to full functioning.

Burnout often involves:

• Learned helplessness

• Dissociation

• Autopilot functioning

• Loss of confidence in social connection

This is why “just take a break” rarely works. Recovery requires repeated experiences of safety.

She summarises this with the three Cs of safety:

• Context

• Connection

• Choice

Without these, the nervous system doesn’t believe it’s safe enough to heal.

Boundaries and the Courage to Disappoint

Plumbly defines a boundary as an internal wall that protects safety and agency. Anger when boundaries are crossed isn’t a problem — it’s information.

Two particularly practical points:

• Explain to people that you’re recovering from burnout and learning to communicate boundaries more clearly.

• Expect pushback. Some people benefited from your lack of boundaries. Their discomfort doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

Equally important: reinforce safety by thanking people who respect your boundaries.

Values Over Productivity

A central shift in the book is from goals to values.

You can check off a goal. You cannot check off a value.

Values — compassionate, curious, playful, connected — become a compass for post-burnout life. Plumbly offers structured steps for aligning goals with values rather than external expectations.

Burnout often brings shame about “lost time.” This reframes recovery as wisdom, not failure.

Rest, Play, and Rediscovering Joy

Rest isn’t just sleep. Plumbly outlines eight dimensions of rest, including solitude and connection, stimulation and stillness, emotional expression and emotional breaks.

She also makes a strong case for something many adults forget: play matters. Creativity, movement, laughter, music, and social joy aren’t indulgences. They’re signals of safety to the nervous system.

The Trauma of Burnout isn’t interested in helping you optimise your output. It’s interested in helping you understand why you’re struggling, why your symptoms make sense, and why recovery is possible — even if it’s slow.

It reframes burnout as information: about misalignment, unmet needs, unsafe environments, outdated coping strategies, and forgotten values. It offers language for experiences many people feel but can’t articulate. It validates the depth of exhaustion without pathologising it. And it consistently returns to compassion: for the body, for the nervous system, and for the parts of ourselves that were only ever trying to survive.

Burnout can make life feel stalled. Like you’ve fallen behind. Like you’ve failed at something everyone else seems to manage. This book pushes firmly against that narrative.

“If you start over, you aren’t starting from scratch; you’re just starting from experience.”