5 Proven Ways Every High Performer Can Reduce Burnout
- Brainz Magazine
- Nov 24
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 25
Jara Dekker is a cognitive and emotional performance coach helping people rewire their nervous system for the success they’re seeking. She’s the founder of A Curious Catalyst and co-founder of both Logos, a personality assessment tool, and Unbound, a neuroscience-based well-being platform.
We often imagine burnout as the result of a calendar too full or a to-do list that expands faster than we can check things off. And yes, while workload matters, work volume isn’t actually what breaks people. There are millions of founders, executives, parents, and high performers who operate at extraordinary capacity daily, and some thrive while others quietly unravel.
So what is the difference?
If their schedules are almost identical, why is one struggling while the other seems to handle it with such grace?
The key lies in the difference between what’s happening internally and what resilience actually is, it’s far more emotional than we’ve given it credit for.
Why burnout happens
Before we get into building resilience, let’s understand what we’re building it against. You can’t win a battle if you don’t understand your enemy. In simple terms, burnout occurs when your nervous system has been running on high alert for too long without a break. Our autonomic nervous system runs on two core operating states:
Sympathetic activation (fight, flight, or perform) and our parasympathetic activation (rest, digest, restore).
We move between both sides to varying degrees throughout the day. The two systems work together to maintain homeostasis, a stable internal environment. Burnout occurs when your system stays in one of them, the high-performance, high-alert state, for too long.
When the sympathetic system remains switched on, the consequences are predictable:
Physiologically, you begin to feel:
Fogginess
Reduced focus
Emotional reactivity
Inconsistent motivation
Disrupted sleep
Lowered immunity and energy
Psychologically, it looks like:
Emotions accumulating inside you
Perfectionism or pressure is becoming louder
Irritability or detachment
A sense of helplessness or being stuck
Difficulty truly resting
Meaning slowly eroding
Over time, we’ve learned that prolonged activation suppresses the very parts of the brain needed for clarity, decision-making, and memory. These aren’t the result of being weak or failing, more often than not, we’ve been experiencing endless, repetitive events that keep us in a constant state of activation. These events need not be dramatic, they’re usually small, everyday things we barely think twice about, notifications, context-switching (i.e., multitasking), emotional suppression, unclear expectations, unresolved emotional residue, unfinished mental tasks, etc.
Endless drops in a bucket that can only carry so much water. The illusion is that you can expand your bucket’s capacity and handle more. Yet, when we truly dig into it, it comes down to emptying the bucket more regularly, not about trying to carry a bigger one.
So then, what is resilience really?
What resilience really means (it’s not what you think)
Resilience often gets framed as toughness, an ability to stay unshaken, unfazed, or emotionally unaffected. But when we look at it, that’s not quite how it works. I like the analogy of an elastic band. Daily activities, stress, and that person who doesn’t understand personal space, they all stretch the rubber band that is our nervous system. When resilience is high, it snaps back quickly, and we’re centred again. Sometimes this may happen so effortlessly that we barely notice it had stretched in the first place.
But when resilience is low, the band doesn’t snap back as fast, so when the next event occurs, we’re already still stretched from the previous experience. Now we’re stretching out again, maybe even further to the point where we can literally feel stretched thin.
Burnout is what happens when we’re constantly stretched. The myth is that resilience, as we mentioned, means we’re totally unaffected by events and can move forward. However, the truth is resilience is the ability to feel fully and return to the centre quickly.
The often overlooked key here is “the ability to feel fully”.
Why emotions matter more than you realise
While often seen as obstacles to productivity, emotions are simply data points. They serve as internal signals that shape every aspect of how we think, show up, and perform. In many ways, your emotional world functions like the internal COO of your nervous system, quietly monitoring your environment and guiding your responses long before your conscious mind is even aware of what’s happening.
Your brain is constantly scanning for three core questions, "Am I safe? Is this important? Do I need to react?" Every emotional shift is your system’s attempt to answer one of these questions. This is why emotions can feel so immediate and instinctive, the emotional centres of the brain activate faster than the rational ones. This, in itself, is not a problem, it’s what helps us respond quickly to situations, adjust to pressure, and rise to challenges. We create an issue when we decide we don’t want to or shouldn’t feel certain things, whether this be because we don’t think we have time for it, it’s uncomfortable, or it’s a distraction from “what’s important”. The catch is that when we push aside emotions, they won’t just fade away over time.
Think of it like a credit card balance, each time you choose not to feel something, a charge is made. But this comes at a cost when it accumulates. Your thinking narrows and creativity shrinks, decisions feel rushed, more reactive than intentional, ordinary tasks begin to feel heavier, more urgent, or inexplicably overwhelming. The emotional load builds unnoticed, one unacknowledged experience at a time, until eventually it comes out in an overreaction or the system shuts down.
To quote Dr. Marc Brackett, “If you don’t name your emotions, they will name you.” Without awareness, emotions will dictate how we respond, even when we’re convinced we’re being entirely logical. Eugene Gendlin described this dynamic beautifully when he wrote, “What is not felt remains the same. What is felt changes.” Emotions won’t disappear because we ignore them, they fester until they eventually demand acknowledgement.
Emotional awareness is a foundational performance skill, it determines how much cognitive bandwidth we have access to, whether we lead with clarity or reactivity, and how effectively we can return to centre when life stretches us thin. In the context of resilience, understanding our emotions is not optional.
The hidden cost of emotional suppression
Many professionals deal with stress by tightening up, staying composed, staying predictable, staying “fine.” We’re taught, explicitly or subtly, that composure equals competence and that feeling too much is a liability.
The real cost of suppression is two-fold. First, it forces the nervous system to carry an additional load. The body must work to keep that emotion contained, just as it continues trying to manage the demands of the moment. Second, suppression forces the brain into a form of cognitive multitasking, one part of the mind is focused on holding everything in, while the other part tries to perform. That split drains energy far faster than the emotional experience itself ever would. And as we know, multitasking, even when it’s happening internally, is one of the quickest routes to cognitive fatigue and burnout.
Over time, suppression teaches the nervous system that emotions are threats rather than signals. Instead of letting a feeling rise, peak, and pass, we brace against it, creating internal tension that becomes its own form of chronic stress, and slowly becomes the cause of our exhaustion.
But the good news is this, once we understand how emotions and the nervous system interact, we can gain access to simple, practical tools that help us return to the centre more quickly and process experiences before they accumulate.
5 research-backed tools to strengthen your resilience
Once we understand how emotions and the nervous system interact, the path forward becomes far more accessible than most people expect. What follows are five tools that consistently help people return to centre more easily and prevent emotional load from accumulating in the first place.
1. Naming your emotions
Naming an emotion may seem too simple, yet it’s one of the fastest ways to reduce emotional intensity. Research shows that putting a feeling into words lowers amygdala activation and brings the thinking brain back online. Simply naming what you feel creates internal space and regained clarity.
How to practise it:
Pause for a moment.
Silently label the emotion (“I feel overwhelmed/anxious/frustrated”).
Notice the shift in intensity.
2. Regulating through the breath
Emotions start in the body, not in the mind. Breathing is the most efficient way to quickly influence the nervous system. A longer exhale activates the parasympathetic system, the part responsible for calming and grounding, making room for clearer thinking.
How to practise it:
Inhale for 4 seconds.
Exhale for 6-8 seconds.
Repeat 3-5 rounds.
3. Working at the right level
Emotions operate at multiple levels, and each level requires a different intervention. Many people try to solve every emotional experience with thinking, but emotions move faster when you meet them at the level they arise.
How to work with the levels:
Emotion (Automatic response to something. They show up fast and shift quickly): e.g., ground, breathe, pause.
Feeling (Subjective interpretation of an emotion or internal experience. Where emotions are fast and physiological, feelings are slower and more personal.): e.g., journal about it.
Mood (Lingering emotional states that colour how you see the world for hours or even days): e.g., move your body, change your environment.
Disposition (Default patterns, the emotional tendencies shaped by temperament, belief systems, and accumulated life experiences.): e.g., deeper emotional or subconscious work.
4. Micro-completion
Unfinished tasks create a steady drain on our emotional and cognitive resources. The brain registers every open loop as a minor stressor. Completing even one tiny task reduces tension and increases internal spaciousness.
How to practise it:
Identify one to three small unfinished tasks (under 2 minutes).
Schedule a time in the short term to complete them.
Once done, take a moment.
Make a mental note of what (if anything) shifted.
5. Identifying your emotional trigger themes
Most emotional activation comes not from a moment itself, but from what the moment touches inside us. These internal “themes” drive intensity. When you recognise the theme beneath the reaction, the emotion softens and your sense of agency increases.
How to practise it:
At the end of the day, ask: “What did I feel today?”
Then: “What theme did it tap into? Not enough? Disappointing others? Losing control?”
Note the recurring ones: These are your patterns.
In the end
Resilience is built through the small, repeated choices that help us return to ourselves. While I’ve listed five tools above, this is a deeply personal process, and the tools that serve us may change over time. It comes down to learning to listen to and work with our inner world instead of against it.
Remember: Resilience isn’t about being unaffected, it isn’t a trait reserved for the naturally strong. Resilience is an emotional skill, the ability to notice, feel, regulate, and return. And that skill can be trained by all of us.
Read more from Jara Dekker
Jara Dekker, Cognitive and Emotional Performance Coach
Jara Dekker is a leader in emotional resilience, cognitive performance, and human transformation. After years of studying how personalities are shaped, Jara co-developed and co-founded the Logos assessment, which helps people understand themselves deeply and apply that awareness to how they live, lead, and connect. As founder of A Curious Catalyst, she works directly with individuals through a practical, proven approach to help them rewire the patterns that inhibit their goals, strengthening their inner foundation for lasting peace, strength, and prosperity. She is also the co-founder of Unbound, a neuroscience-based platform helping organisations strengthen employee wellbeing to improve performance, engagement, and culture.
