There's a specific memory I keep coming back to. I was sitting at my desk in Hong Kong (this was maybe 2019, 2020) running a campaign for a client, managing three stakeholders across two time zones, eating lunch over my keyboard. My shoulders were somewhere near my ears. I knew this because someone mentioned it in a meeting once, casually, the way you'd comment on the weather. I laughed it off. I didn't put them down.
I thought that was just what working felt like.
For a long time, my days were organised proof that I was okay. A full calendar meant I was contributing. Metrics going up meant I was competent. The faster I moved, the less room there was for anything to catch up with me, though I didn't frame it that way at the time. I would have called it ambition. Dedication. Being someone who got things done.
And I genuinely believed it. I was functioning. I showed up, I delivered, I kept the plates spinning. Nobody would have looked at me and seen a problem. That's the thing about running on fumes. You can do it for years without anyone noticing, including yourself.
At some point I thought a change of scene would help. I spent time in Bali, which is where people go when they want to feel better, supposedly. The air was different. The pace was different. My body wasn't. I was still wired. Still waking at 3am with a mind that wouldn't shut down. Still bracing before phone calls. Still feeling like there was something I needed to do but couldn't quite locate. The problem I'd been trying to outrun had, unremarkably, come with me.
That's when I started to understand that the issue wasn't the environment or the workload. It was the pattern. And patterns don't care where you live.
My body had been trying to tell me something for years. Not in a dramatic way. No single crisis, no breakdown. Just a persistent low signal. Tension that never fully released. A kind of bracing that had become so habitual I'd stopped registering it as anything other than normal. The headaches I attributed to screen time. The shallow breathing I never even noticed until someone pointed it out. The sense of moving through days slightly disconnected from them, like I was watching myself from a slight distance.
I had strategies for all of it. Good ones, even. I exercised. I had a therapist. I knew my triggers and could articulate them clearly. I was doing the work: the cognitive kind, the linguistic kind, the kind where you understand your patterns well enough to describe them at a dinner party. And it helped, to a point. But understanding something and shifting it are not the same thing, and for a while I didn't know the difference.
What I came to eventually, slowly and reluctantly, through my own training and my own body, is that some things live below the level of language. The way I braced before conflict. The way my chest went tight before I asked for something. The way I'd learned to keep moving as a substitute for feeling. You can talk about those patterns indefinitely without touching them. The body holds them somewhere that conversation doesn't quite reach.
I'm not saying this as a practitioner. I'm saying this as someone who spent a very long time being extremely productive and quietly not okay, and who had to find that out the hard way.
I'm also not saying I have it figured out. I have two boys, a husband, a ferry commute to Central, and days that still sometimes run away with me. I still catch myself scheduling rest instead of actually resting. I still have moments where motion feels safer than stillness. The difference is I notice now. And noticing earlier means the cost is lower.
What I keep coming back to is how normal I looked. How fine everything seemed from the outside, and how far that was from what was actually happening underneath. I think about that a lot with the people I work with, because so many of them are the same: high-functioning, self-aware, managing everything beautifully, and exhausted in a way that a holiday doesn't fix.
If any of that sounds familiar (not the dramatic version, not the burnout you read about in articles, but the quiet persistent version, the one you've gotten good at carrying), I'm not here to tell you what to do with that. I just want you to know that the body often knows before the mind does. Mine did. For years.
You don't have to be in crisis to take that seriously.
