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By Cheryl Groskopf, LMFT, LPCC ·
Licensed Anxiety & Somatic Therapist in Los Angeles ·
About Cheryl
Last Updated April 2026
You finally have a free Sunday. No plans, no obligations, nowhere to be. You’ve been waiting for this all week.
And you still can’t relax.
You scroll your phone even though nothing’s interesting. You reorganize something that didn’t need reorganizing. You think about Monday. Your jaw is tight. Your chest feels weirdly tense. You snap at your partner for absolutely no reason, and then feel guilty about that for the next two hours.
This is supposed to be rest. Why does it feel like torture?
If you live in Los Angeles, you probably know this feeling intimately. This city doesn’t exactly reward slowing down. There’s always a hustle to maintain, a goal to chase, a version of yourself to perform. And if you’re someone who’s been running on high-functioning anxiety for years — the kind that looks like ambition and productivity from the outside — you may not even realize how burned out you actually are.
Here’s what’s actually happening: your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. Understanding that distinction changes everything about how you move forward.
Tired means your body needs sleep — rest restores it. Burned out means your nervous system has learned to stay activated, treating stillness as something to move through rather than settle into. Rest alone tends to fall short with burnout, because the nervous system needs something beyond recovery time — it needs to relearn safety.
These two states feel similar on the surface, and treating them the same way is exactly why “just rest more” leaves people frustrated.
When you’re tired, your body needs sleep and recovery. You rest, you feel better. Simple.
When you’re burned out, your nervous system is running in a state of chronic activation. Your body is carrying an alert system that stays switched on — even when the circumstances that originally switched it on are long gone. The American Psychological Association describes burnout as a state where ongoing stressors are no longer being managed by the normal rest found in breaks, weekends, or time off — which is exactly why a good night’s sleep often doesn’t touch it.
This is why so many burned out people feel more activated when they stop. More restless on vacation than at work. More wired at 11pm than they were at 2pm. Your body is doing exactly what it learned — it just learned to apply this in places where it’s no longer needed.
Burnout keeps your sympathetic nervous system — your fight-or-flight response — in a state of sustained activation. Over time, your body learns to associate calm with something unfamiliar, so even rest can trigger low-level alertness. Some people shift into freeze instead: numb, flat, and disconnected, but not actually resting.
Your autonomic nervous system has two main gears: the sympathetic system (your gas pedal — the one that mobilizes you for action) and the parasympathetic system (your brake — the one that brings you back to ease). In an ideal world, these two move in rhythm. Something activating happens, your sympathetic system responds, the moment passes, your parasympathetic system brings you home.
Burnout happens when that return-to-baseline stops happening reliably.
Here’s the evolutionary piece that makes this make sense: your nervous system didn’t evolve for back-to-back meetings, impossible standards, and the particular kind of low-grade threat that is LA traffic. It evolved for predators and famine — immediate, physical danger that eventually passed. After months or years of modern chronic stress, your nervous system does what it was designed to do in a prolonged threat environment: it stays alert. As Harvard Health describes, chronic stress keeps the sympathetic nervous system continuously activated, like a motor idling too high for too long — not because anything is malfunctioning, but because the system is doing its ancient job in a modern context.
So when stillness feels uncomfortable, or rest feels weirdly stressful, your nervous system isn’t overreacting. It’s running old, well-intentioned code that hasn’t gotten the update yet.
There’s also a third state worth knowing about: shutdown, or freeze. This is the dorsal vagal response — your system’s deepest conservation mode. You’re going through the motions, technically functioning, but feeling flat, foggy, or disconnected from most of it. Freeze can look like laziness from the outside. From the inside, it often feels like being behind glass. (If this one resonates more, my post on functional freeze and how to get unstuck goes deeper.)
Both sympathetic overdrive and dorsal shutdown are intelligent responses — they’re just responses that were built for a different kind of life than the one most of us are living. Working with them, rather than against them, is where the shift happens.
High-functioning anxiety disguises burnout as productivity. When the nervous system has learned that staying busy equals staying safe, slowing down can feel genuinely unsettling — not because something is wrong with you, but because your system is doing exactly what it learned to do. Productivity became a regulation strategy, and a convincing one.
This is where it gets specific to a lot of people I work with in Los Angeles.
High-functioning anxiety is subtle. It looks like a packed calendar, a spotless apartment, a promotion, a full social life, and an inbox at zero. From the outside, everything looks great. From the inside, you’re exhausted, tense, and running on fumes — and you feel weirdly guilty about it because you “don’t have a reason” to be burning out.
Here’s what’s actually happening: staying busy became a way to feel regulated.
If your nervous system learned early on that staying productive meant staying safe — maybe because stillness in your home growing up meant something unpredictable was coming, or because your worth was tied to your output — then slowing down will genuinely register as a signal to pay attention to. Your brain is doing its job, protecting you based on what it learned. The pattern made complete sense in the context it formed in.
Staying busy to feel okay isn’t a character flaw. It’s a regulation strategy that worked — until it stopped working, or until the cost of it became too high.
This is one of the core things I work on with clients who come to me for anxiety therapy in Los Angeles — understanding what the nervous system learned, and gently expanding what it knows. If you’re curious whether this is showing up for you, a free 15-minute consultation is a good place to start that conversation.
Signs include feeling wired and exhausted at the same time, increased alertness when you try to rest, emotional reactivity that feels out of proportion to the moment, physical tension that lingers even in calm situations, and sleep that doesn’t restore you. These are your nervous system communicating — not signs of weakness or failure.
Run through this list and notice what lands:
These are your nervous system’s way of communicating that it’s carrying more than it has capacity for right now. There’s nothing to diagnose or fix — just a system asking for a different kind of attention. My post on signs of a dysregulated nervous system goes further if you want more context.
Sound familiar?
If that list landed harder than you expected — that recognition is real information. If you want to talk through what’s actually going on in your nervous system, I offer a free 15-minute consultation where we can figure out together whether working with me makes sense.
Burnout held in the body responds to bottom-up approaches — working with the nervous system directly rather than trying to think your way through it. Somatic therapy, IFS parts work, and nervous system tracking help the body relearn what safe feels like, which is where lasting change tends to come from.
The answer is working with your body, not just your brain.
Most of us are genuinely skilled at thinking about what’s going on. We journal, we talk it through, we read the books. All of that has real value. And — when the nervous system is running a deep survival pattern, the thinking brain and the body are often working on different timelines. It’s a little like trying to convince a sprinting dog to slow down by explaining the situation. The dog is not in a state to process that information. The dog is running.
This is where somatic therapy comes in — working from the body upward rather than from thought downward. We focus on what’s actually happening in your body: where you’re holding tension, what arises when you try to slow down, what your nervous system needs to genuinely feel settled. A randomized controlled study published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found somatic experiencing produced significant reductions in trauma symptoms, and a scoping literature review of somatic therapy research found positive effects across both traumatized and non-traumatized populations.
In practice, this looks like:
Learning to notice your activation levels throughout the day — not to judge them, but to get curious about them. When do you ramp up? What brings you back toward ease? Most people carrying burnout have been moving so fast for so long that this awareness has gone quiet. Bringing it back online is often where things start to shift.
When stillness feels activating, we start small. Two minutes of intentional pause rather than an hour. Small, sustainable doses of ease that help your nervous system build a new association — that slowing down is something it can move toward, not something to brace against.
The part of you that keeps going often has a very good reason — it learned that staying productive meant staying okay. In IFS therapy, we get genuinely curious about that part rather than trying to override it. What is it carrying? What does it need to know? When it feels heard, it often softens its grip on the drive to keep going.
Grounding techniques, breathwork, and orienting practices that speak directly to your nervous system in its own language. These are evidence-based tools that interrupt the activation cycle at the physiological level — body first, then mind. I put together a full guide to somatic exercises for nervous system regulation if you want somewhere to start right now.
The goal is a nervous system that knows the difference between a real threat and a Tuesday. One that can move into action when it’s needed, and actually rest when it’s not.
When lifestyle shifts like better sleep and clearer boundaries haven’t moved the needle — or when burnout has been present for months or years — the pattern is often wired deeper into the nervous system. That’s where somatic therapy and IFS tend to be most useful: working with the root, not just the surface.
Some burnout responds well to lifestyle changes — more boundaries, more sleep, less overcommitting. And for some people, that’s genuinely enough, especially early on.
When burnout has been present for a long time — when rest doesn’t restore you, when anxiety hums in the background of your whole life, when you’ve recognized yourself in lists like this one for years — the pattern tends to be more deeply rooted. That’s the nervous system wiring work, and it’s genuinely difficult to do in isolation, because the very system that needs to shift is the one doing the looking.
A lot of the people I work with in Los Angeles are highly self-aware. They know what’s happening. They’ve read the books, done the research, tried the things. What they’re looking for is someone to do the actual work with — not more information, but a different kind of support. That’s what this is.
If you’ve been carrying this for a while and you’re ready to actually work with it — book a free 15-minute consultation here. No pitch, no pressure. Just a real conversation about what your nervous system needs and whether working together makes sense.
They overlap, and often show up together — but they're distinct experiences. Anxiety tends to involve anticipatory activation: your brain scanning ahead, spinning on what might go wrong. Burnout tends to involve a kind of chronic depletion alongside that activation — your nervous system running, but running on very little. Most people I work with in my Los Angeles practice are navigating both at the same time, which is part of why it feels so relentless. Working with one while ignoring the other tends to stall things out.
Because your nervous system has learned to associate stillness with something to move through, rather than settle into. When activation has been the baseline for a long time, calm can actually feel foreign — even mildly alerting. That experience is your body communicating exactly where the work is: at the nervous system level, where the association between rest and safety can be rebuilt.
Yes — and it tends to be particularly well-suited to burnout because burnout lives in the body. Cognitive approaches are valuable for understanding what's happening. Somatic approaches help the body actually feel different. In my practice, I weave together somatic therapy, IFS, and attachment-based work to address both the physiological patterns and the relational ones underneath them.
It genuinely varies — it depends on how long the pattern has been running and how much of it is rooted in earlier experiences. Some people notice meaningful shifts within a few months. For others, especially when complex trauma or longstanding survival patterns are part of the picture, it's a longer arc. What stays consistent is that the nervous system is changeable. It learned this — and it can learn something else.
Cheryl Groskopf, LMFT, LPCC
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist #122530 · Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor #10096 · Los Angeles, CA
Cheryl specializes in anxiety, trauma, somatic therapy, and attachment for high-functioning adults in Los Angeles and throughout California via telehealth. She blends IFS, somatic, and holistic approaches to help clients understand why their nervous system works the way it does — and find their way back to ease. Her work has been featured in Time, Mindbodygreen, Parade, and HuffPost.
