My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Reconnected With My Body After Burnout at 36
By Lucia, 36 — Austin, TX
Reconnecting with my body after burnout was never something I planned. It started at a farmers market on a Saturday morning in March, standing in front of a table of peaches, and realizing I could not remember the last time I had actually smelled anything. Not perfume, not coffee, not rain on pavement. I had been alive for thirty-six years and somewhere in the last two of them, I had stopped being inside my own skin.
I should back up. I am a software engineer. I had spent the previous eighteen months on a product launch that consumed every part of me — weekends, sleep, meals I ate standing over my kitchen sink staring at Slack. I did not collapse dramatically. There was no hospital visit, no intervention. I just slowly became a person who existed only from the neck up. My body was the thing that carried my brain to meetings. That was all it was for.
My therapist had a word for it. She called it disembodiment. She said it was common in people who spend their lives in high-cognitive-demand work, especially during sustained stress. Your nervous system starts treating the body like background noise, she told me. You stop registering sensation. You eat but do not taste. You shower but do not feel the water. You are technically alive but sensorially offline.
That described me so precisely it scared me.
When I Stopped Feeling Anything at All
The signs had been there for months. I would burn my hand on a pan and not flinch until I saw the red mark. I stopped wanting to be touched — not out of aversion, just out of blankness. My partner would put his hand on my back while we were watching something and I would register it the way you register a coat hanger on your shoulder. Present, but meaningless.
I stopped sleeping well. Not insomnia exactly — more like my body forgot how to settle. I would lie in bed and feel like I was hovering half an inch above the mattress, never quite landing. My jaw was always clenched. My shoulders lived next to my ears. I started getting headaches that began at the base of my skull and wrapped around my forehead like a band.
A colleague at work told me I looked tired. I told her I was fine. She said, no, you look tired in your bones. She was right. I was tired in a place sleep could not reach.
My therapist suggested I try grounding exercises. Body scans, breathing techniques, cold water on my wrists. I tried them. They felt like reading instructions for a machine I no longer had access to. Close your eyes and notice where you feel tension. I could not feel anything. That was the whole problem.
She did not give up on me. She said sometimes the doorway back into the body is not meditation or therapy. Sometimes it is something simpler. Something sensory. She told me to go somewhere with textures and smells and temperatures. Somewhere my body could not be ignored.
I do not know why I chose the farmers market. Maybe because it was walking distance. Maybe because it required nothing of me — no reservation, no commitment, no social performance. I could just show up and stand among the fruit.
The Sensory Awakening I Did Not Expect
It was early, maybe eight in the morning. The air was still cool. I walked past a stand selling fresh herbs and the smell of basil hit me so hard I stopped moving. Not because it was unusual. Because I actually smelled it. For the first time in what felt like forever, a sensation had arrived inside me without me having to chase it.
I stood there like an idiot, holding a bunch of basil to my face, breathing. The woman behind the table asked if I was okay. I said yes. I was more than okay. I was having a private reunion with my own nose.
I moved through the market slowly after that. I touched the skin of tomatoes. I let a man selling honey put a sample on my wrist and I stood there watching the gold catch the light, tasting it, feeling the stickiness between my fingers. A woman was selling small soaps wrapped in cloth and I held one to my face — lavender and something woody — and my eyes burned. Not from the scent. From the relief of feeling it.
I bought peaches. Three of them. I sat on a bench at the edge of the market and bit into one, and the juice ran down my chin and onto my shirt, and I did not wipe it. I just sat there, tasting summer in March, and something inside me cracked open. Not broke. Cracked open, the way soil does when the first rain comes after a dry spell. Not damaged. Ready.
I cried a little. Quietly, on a bench, holding a peach. No one noticed or if they did, they left me alone. Austin is good like that.
Learning to Come Home to My Body Again
That Saturday changed something. Not everything, not all at once, but it changed the direction I was facing. I started making small, deliberate choices to be in my body instead of above it. I walked to work instead of driving and paid attention to the temperature shifts between sun and shade. I started cooking again — not meal prepping, not optimizing, just cooking. Touching garlic skins and listening to oil pop in a pan.
I told my therapist about the farmers market and she smiled like she had been waiting for this. She said the body does not need you to understand it. It needs you to show up for it. She suggested I expand the practice. Not just external sensation but internal. What does it feel like to be in this body, right now, without judgment?
That was harder. External sensation — peaches, basil, warm water — came back relatively fast. Internal sensation was a slower negotiation. I had to relearn what hunger felt like versus what stress felt like. I had to notice when I was holding my breath during a code review. I had to stop treating every physical signal as noise.
One night, a few weeks after the market, I was home alone. My partner was traveling. I took a bath, which I had not done in maybe a year, and I just lay there. No phone. No podcast. No optimization. Just heat and quiet and my own heartbeat echoing off the water.
Afterward, I was lying in bed and I reached for the small device I had bought months earlier on a whim and never opened — a HiMoment I had ordered during one of those late-night scrolling sessions and then shoved in a drawer. I almost did not use it. But something about that evening — the openness of it, the fact that I was finally willing to feel things — made me curious.
It was not dramatic. It was quiet. It was me, alone, paying attention to a physical sensation for no reason other than it felt good. That last part is what got me. I had spent so long in a body that only existed to serve my brain that the idea of physical feeling as its own reward — not productive, not efficient, not useful — was almost radical. My body was not a vehicle. It was the whole place I lived.
I lay there afterward and I was not hovering above the mattress. I was in it. Settled. Heavy in the best way. I slept seven hours straight, which had not happened in months.
What Burnout Recovery Actually Looks Like
People think burnout recovery is about sleeping more or taking a vacation. And yes, those things help. But for me, the real recovery was sensory. It was about remembering that I had a body and that my body was not just a productivity tool. It was the thing that let me taste peaches and feel sunlight and notice when someone I loved touched my back.
It has been four months since that Saturday at the market. I still go most weekends. I do not always buy anything. Sometimes I just walk through and let my hands brush the tablecloths and smell whatever is blooming at the flower stand. My partner comes with me now. He noticed the change before I named it. He said I seemed more here. Like I had come back from somewhere far away.
He was not wrong.
I am not going to pretend I am fully healed. I still clench my jaw during sprint planning. I still sometimes eat lunch without tasting it. But the difference is that I notice now. I catch myself leaving my body and I come back. Sometimes through breath. Sometimes through touch. Sometimes by stepping outside and standing in the heat for thirty seconds, just to feel it.
My therapist says the nervous system remembers what you practice. I am practicing presence. I am practicing the radical act of being a person who lives in a body and lets that body feel things — good things, ordinary things, small things that do not need to be optimized or justified.
Last week I was at the market again. A little girl at the peach stand was biting into one the same way I had that first day, juice everywhere, completely unbothered. She was not thinking about productivity or deadlines or whether pleasure needed a reason. She was just in it. Body first. Brain later.
I want to be more like that. I am getting there.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and The Science of Sensory Wellness and Touch Therapy. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
