Why Relief Doesn’t Last for High-Functioning People
- Brainz Magazine
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Shale Maulana is a holistic mental health therapist who specializes in liberation-based healing. She integrates mindfulness, self-care, and cultural integrity to empower individuals and communities. She is passionate about fostering resilience and self-compassion in all her work.
Many high-functioning people experience brief relief after therapy, retreats, or time away, only to feel anxiety or overwhelm return days or weeks later. This cycle isn’t a failure of effort or insight. It’s a nervous system pattern that requires a different kind of support.
If relief doesn’t last, it doesn’t mean the work failed, it means the system needs more support for integration, not more intensity.
Why high-functioners struggle when relief fades
Sometimes after a vacation, a retreat, a powerful workshop, or an intensive therapy session, there’s a deep exhale. A feeling of finally being able to relax. The body settles into a parasympathetic state, rest, digestion, and repair, and it feels genuinely good.
And then, often within days or weeks, the anxiety creeps back in. The depression returns. The overwhelm resurfaces. Before long, you find yourself already looking forward to the next opportunity to get away, reset, or breathe again.
Emotionally, this can feel like a rollercoaster, the high intensity of a day-to-day life that doesn’t feel sustainable, and periodic experiences of relief that feel profound but don’t translate into everyday life for very long.
This pattern shows up especially often in high-functioning people.
One common way we adapt to trauma and pain is by over-functioning around it. There can be an unhealed part of us living alongside a strong capacity to perform and achieve, and we adapt by leaning into our strengths. That capacity can lead to great success, productivity, and external validation, sometimes even admiration.
But it can also mask pain or injury that never truly had the chance to heal.
From the outside, everything can look fine, even impressive. You got the job. The promotion. The partner. The family. The lifestyle. All the visible markers of “having it together.”
Meanwhile, inside, there may still be parts of you holding unprocessed pain, stress, or trauma, parts that haven’t received the care, safety, and support they need.
Over time, this pattern can quietly push someone toward burnout without them realizing it. What’s often missing isn’t insight or effort, but space for subtle experience, quiet, stillness, and nervous system settling.
We can’t live at a level ten all the time, not with stress, and not even with pleasure. Nervous system balance requires experiences where we are settled, calm, and able to notice life at a much subtler level.
The craving for intensity, moving from one demanding day to the next, from stress to stimulation, from one powerful experience to another, can actually distract from the pain underneath. It can look exciting, meaningful, or even spiritual on the surface.
And yet, beneath it all, there may be a deeper ache for relief, care, and support that hasn’t been met.
This is how many high-functioning people keep going and going, until they suddenly hit a wall they never saw coming. Not because they failed, but because they didn’t realize that a life built around cycles of intensity, even meaningful intensity, isn’t sustainable for the nervous system.
What’s happening in the nervous system
One of the most confusing parts of this cycle is that insight often comes faster than integration.
You may understand what’s happening. You may have language for your patterns. You may even experience moments of genuine relief or expansion. But if the nervous system hasn’t learned how to regulate and return to baseline consistently, those shifts won’t hold.
Trauma and chronic stress don’t live only in our thoughts. They live in the body. And when survival patterns remain online, when the nervous system is still organized around vigilance, over-responsibility, or performance, it will naturally reassert those patterns once the temporary conditions of safety are removed.
That’s why relief can feel real and profound in certain environments, on vacation, in retreat spaces, during intensive therapy, or inside immersive experiences. The nervous system finally gets a break from constant demand.
But when you return to everyday life, emails, responsibilities, caregiving, and decision-making, the system defaults back to what it knows.
Without ongoing regulation and integration, the body interprets “back to normal” as “back to threat,” even if nothing is overtly wrong.
This is not a failure of willpower or awareness. It’s biology.
And without space for quieter, subtler experiences, stillness, solitude, gentle presence, the nervous system never fully recalibrates. Oscillating between stress and stimulation keeps the system activated, even when some of that stimulation feels pleasurable or meaningful.
Over time, this pattern erodes resilience.
The assumptions that keep people stuck
When relief doesn’t last, many people turn inward with judgment. They assume they should be past this by now. They tell themselves they know too much, have done too much work, or have too many tools for this to still be happening. They believe that because they’ve been competent, capable, or successful in other areas of life, they should naturally be able to figure this out on their own.
This is where shame quietly enters the picture. The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s not that you’re doing it wrong. And it’s not that you’re broken. What’s often missing is the kind of support that helps the nervous system learn safety inside real life, not just during moments of escape or intensity.
What creates lasting change instead of temporary relief
This doesn’t mean retreats, vacations, or powerful experiences are bad or unnecessary. They can be meaningful, nourishing, and even transformative. But they can’t do the work alone.
Lasting change comes from consistency, safety, and repetition, not intensity. It comes from how you meet yourself at the end of a hard day. How you respond to stress you know is coming. How you care for yourself while you’re in the middle of overwhelm, responsibility, and demand. It’s built through small moments of regulation woven into daily life.
Pausing instead of pushing through. Settling the body before problem-solving. Creating moments of softness, ease, and attunement even when life is full.
Big experiences can feel like buckets of restoration. But nervous systems also need teaspoons, small, frequent doses of care that teach the body it can downshift without escaping. When this happens, something fundamental changes. The nervous system becomes more fluid. More flexible. More resilient.
You can mobilize when needed, meet challenges, responsibilities, and stress, and then return to calm without relying on substances, withdrawal, or constant stimulation to feel okay.
A healthy nervous system isn’t one that never gets activated. It’s one that can reliably come back to baseline once activation is no longer necessary.
Over time, these patterns become internalized. Regulation becomes more autonomic. Recovery happens within the flow of real life, not just outside of it.
A different way to understand yourself
If you’ve been craving intensity, relief, or escape, it doesn’t mean you’re reckless or avoidant. It may mean your system has been doing its best to cope with demands that exceeded its capacity for a long time. There is nothing defective about this.
And there is another way forward, one that doesn’t require pushing harder, performing better, or chasing the next breakthrough just to feel okay.
Where to begin
If this resonates, start gently.
Notice where relief shows up for you, and where it fades. Notice how you respond to stress, not just how you think about it. Notice whether your healing has been built around intensity or around safety.
You don’t have to overhaul your life to begin shifting this pattern. But you may need support that helps you work with your nervous system, not against it.
If you’re curious about what that kind of support looks like, explore my Anxiety Reset, a foundational experience designed to help you build regulation, safety, and nervous system flexibility in daily life.
Relief doesn’t have to be temporary. And healing doesn’t have to feel like another performance.
Read more from Shale Maulana
Shale Maulana, Liberation-Based Therapist and Coach
Shale Maulana is a licensed therapist and holistic mental health coach specializing in mindfulness and liberation-based psychotherapy. With a background in clinical research and nearly a decade of work addressing health equity in underserved communities, she brings a unique, integrative perspective to healing. Drawing from her expertise in mindfulness, self-care, and cultural integrity, she empowers individuals to navigate challenges with resilience and compassion. Her work emphasizes the connection between mind, body, soul, and community, offering a comprehensive approach to wellness.
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