Meet Your Invisible Coworker: Your Nervous System
Capacity: The Burnout Thread — Part 4
Every day you bring someone to work with you that no one else can see.
They ride your commute.
They sit in meetings alongside you.
They react to messages before you even have a chance to read the words.
They don’t have a job title.
They aren’t found on an org chart, but they shape how your entire day unfolds.
I want to re-introduce you to your invisible co-worker: your nervous system.
It’s been with you the whole time, but you weren’t taught to recognize it as part of your day.
Your nervous system experiences the world as your overprotective shadow. While you are observing the world happening in front of you through what you see, your nervous system is using a different lens.
Your nervous system’s number one job is to detect threats and react. It is in a constant state of tracking pressure, predictability, risk, and how much energy something will require.
That stressful commute on the highway registers as traffic to you. Your nervous system goes on high alert to be aware of the surrounding cars.
A chat message pops up at work, and before you’ve read a word, your nervous system is already scanning: Who is this? What could they want? How disruptive will this be?
The filter your nervous system uses to interpret all of this is safety. Not safety in the sense of danger versus no danger. Safety, to the nervous system, is about whether the body has the resources to handle what’s happening.
Do I have enough energy?
Have I experienced this before?
Will this pass quickly or do I need to tell the other parts of the body to prepare?
It is not designed to be fair or nuanced. Its whole purpose is to keep you alive and functioning, so naturally it has a protective bias.
That’s why the same email can land so differently depending on the day. It’s not about the message itself, it is about what the nervous system is already carrying when it arrives.
Most people understand stress at a basic level.
When the body encounters a threat, stress hormones rise, the system mobilizes, and when the stressor passes, the body settles again. That rise and fall is how the nervous system is meant to work.
A stress response is a healthy response. It means the system is alive and doing its job.
In our modern work and life, stress can lack a clear endpoint. This causes your nervous system to stay on high alert, postponing the much-needed recovery phase.
After an extended period of assessing that the body is not resourced enough for recovery, the nervous system makes a declaration: My person isn’t safe. I need to shift into high gear.
The entire body adapts to this heightened threat level. Staying in a stress response means it diverts energy away from other essential bodily processes and toward vigilance to keep you functioning at the pace your life requires.
It is in this survival state that burnout quietly begins.
Burnout is often described as an end-point destination. Something you eventually hit.
That framing makes burnout easy to miss.
When burnout is positioned in the future tense, you don’t recognize it while you’re still functioning. You assume you’re just tired, stressed, anxious, or unmotivated. You find ways to manage symptoms and push through. Often, we believe our body is the problem.
Burnout isn’t a place people suddenly land. It’s a road many travel for a long time without ever naming it.
In the U.S., burnout isn’t recognized as a standalone medical diagnosis. It’s narrowly defined and usually tied strictly to work. Even then, it comes with a specific image: too much responsibility, too much workload, and not enough work-life balance.
If you don’t see yourself in that image, you may never recognize what’s happening at all.
Despite my education and career in wellness, I missed my own burnout. My stress was quieter, more internal, and spread across life rather than neatly contained within my job. I felt the weight of the symptoms every day, but in trying to manage them individually, I missed the pattern underneath.
Many people have a similar experience.
They’re treated for anxiety. Or sleep issues. Or mood changes. Or hormonal shifts. Each concern addressed in isolation, creating a fragmented picture of health without naming the dysfunction driving it all.
While your nervous system is invisible, it is not quiet. It speaks through body sensations like a racing heart, tight muscles, tension headaches, and upset stomachs. We’re so accustomed to overriding these signals that it causes the nervous system to adapt by increasing the volume. This is not to punish you, but to keep you going.
A helpful way to understand this is by thinking about driving a car.
At first, the nervous system is the check engine light. It comes on, signaling that something needs attention. But the car still runs, so you keep driving. Days turn into weeks. The light stays on. Eventually the car begins to clank and sputter as it compensates for what hasn’t been addressed. The tires wear thin. The gas runs low.
You are running on fumes, but you have places to be. Responsibilities to meet. You don’t stop, so the system compensates, again and again, just to keep you functioning.
Burnout isn’t the moment the car finally breaks down.
It’s the long stretch of driving while everything inside is working overtime to keep you moving.
This is where capacity comes in.
Capacity isn’t a new idea. We already understand it in the body.
When lifting weights, motivation doesn’t change physics. If the weight exceeds your physical capacity, your muscles fail. It is not because you are weak, but because the load is too much to carry.
The nervous system has a capacity too. Its limits just aren’t as obvious.
Rather than one heavy lift, it carries layers. Each demand, interaction, interruption, or unresolved stress adds weight. Some days, layers come off. Other days, they only accumulate.
This is where this image of Joey from Friends becomes useful.
NBC via Getty Images
He walks into the room wearing every single piece of Chandler’s clothing and asks, “Could I be wearing any more clothes?”
It’s ridiculous, but it’s exactly how capacity works.
At first, the layers are manageable. Then movement becomes restricted. The weight grows heavier. By the end of the day, the exhaustion isn’t from effort, it is from holding everything up.
Now picture your own day.
You slept poorly the night before, so you start the day wearing three pairs of pants and four shirts.
You rush to get ready and out the door — add two sweaters.
It’s a beautiful day, and you step outside on your lunch break, so you actually take a layer off and regain a bit of capacity.
Then an afternoon of emails, meetings, conversations, and decisions adds layer after layer back on.
By the end of the day, you probably look like Joey. Each layer represents stress on your system.
It’s not about being able to handle stress or daily interactions. It’s your nervous system saying we haven’t had enough rest to release some of the layers.
Layers don’t just come from work. Capacity is shaped by life outside the office too.
Caretaking
Illness
Financial struggles
Relationship issues
The news
The state of the world
Work doesn’t meet a fresh nervous system every morning. It meets whatever is already being held.
How we unwind — or don’t — determines what we carry into tomorrow.
Tuesday wears Monday.
Wednesday wears both.
By Friday, exhaustion isn’t only a long week — it’s an overdrawn capacity.
Sometimes what overwhelms capacity isn’t what’s happening now.
It’s what the nervous system has been carrying unresolved from before.
This is where work can begin to feel unsafe, even when it isn’t the original source of strain.
When capacity is already weighed down by life, loss, or experiences that haven’t fully settled, the nervous system has less room once the workday begins. The familiar starts to feel heavier. Routine emails carry more weight. Meetings take more out of you than they used to. Being asked one more thing can spark irritation, panic, or a quiet urge to withdraw.
Not because the job suddenly changed, but because the system carrying it did.
When capacity stays low for too long, staying alert becomes the default. The body can sustain that for a while, but it does so by adapting. At first, those adaptations look familiar and easy to dismiss: tension, poor sleep, anxiety, digestive issues, or mood shifts. Over time, the cost rises as the body borrows from itself to keep going.
This is how longer-term health consequences can begin to take shape. Not suddenly or dramatically, but as the result of a nervous system that hasn’t had the chance to truly rest.
When burnout goes unnamed long enough, the body eventually creates its own pause. Sometimes that looks like stepping away. Sometimes it looks like symptoms that demand attention. Not because something is wrong with the person, but because the system ran out of ways to compensate.
Every single person has a nervous system that works this way.
Not just women.
Not just caregivers.
Not just people who identify as burned out.
The workaholic who never slows down isn’t immune to nervous system signals. They simply show up differently. Irritability, control, and a temper are expressions of a body carrying far more than it’s willing to acknowledge.
What changes isn’t whether the nervous system responds.
It’s how and where the cost shows up.
This is what I missed for a long time. The symptoms felt personal, but the nervous system response underneath them wasn’t. It was following the same protective logic that lives in all of us.
The nervous system became the lens.
Burnout became the long-term pattern.
Capacity explained how it was built, day by day.
It’s why the same workday lands so differently depending on who’s holding it.
Why someone with flexibility and resources ends the day tired, while someone without them ends the day depleted. Why two people can do the same job and walk away carrying very different experiences.
The hardest part is how we have been taught to blame ourselves for being tired, reactive, or unmotivated. These have always been logical responses to conditions that demand constant output to protect our livelihoods.
Most people can’t change the world they work in overnight.
But there is a quieter shift that’s available right now.
It starts with paying attention.
Befriending your invisible co-worker during the day.
Noticing when the body signals strain.
Recognizing when the day added more layers than it removed.
Responding with acknowledgment instead of override.
Your nervous system doesn’t demand perfection. It wants to know you heard it when it said, this is a lot.
When you start listening, even in small ways, how you feel stops feeling like a personal failure. You begin to see how your invisible co-worker is showing up for you — offering signals to rest, pause, connect, and find joy.
They become signals worth listening to.
This series is my attempt to tell the whole story of burnout — one I’ve been piecing together for more than a decade, at the intersection of how we’re built, how we live, and how we work.
Next in Capacity: The Burnout Thread — Part 5: Subject to Change.
