What Vietnam Veterans Taught Us About Burnout and Recovery
This post was published to a personal Substack educating subscribers about burnout in an effort to raise awareness.
Groundbreaking PTSD research revealed the true nature of exhaustion - and why healing happens in your body, not your mind
In the 1980s, researchers studying Vietnam veterans made a discovery that demonstrates the relationship between trauma, stress, and burnout recovery.
They expected to find soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) drowning in stress hormones. Instead, they found the opposite: the veterans with the most severe trauma symptoms had the lowest cortisol levels.
This was the key to understanding why so many people - from combat vets to burnt-out mothers couldn't positive-think or push their way out of exhaustion, no matter how hard they tried.
Dr. John Mason and his team were among the first researchers to measure stress hormones in Vietnam veterans with PTSD. What they found in 1986 shocked the scientific community. The veterans with the most severe PTSD symptoms weren't producing too much cortisol - they were producing significantly less than healthy people.
Follow-up studies confirmed it. The more severe the trauma symptoms, the lower the cortisol production. These men's stress response systems had essentially gone offline.
Soldiers who had survived unimaginable horrors, who should theoretically have hyperactive stress systems, instead had stress systems that barely functioned at all. They went dark mode, complete shut down.
The Body Keeps the Score. Literally.
The Vietnam veteran studies revealed something profound about how our bodies respond to overwhelming experiences:
Acute Response: During active trauma, the stress system floods with cortisol and adrenaline. This keeps you alive, alert, fighting or fleeing.
Chronic Activation: If the stress continues (like a year-long combat deployment or single mothering), your system stays activated. You're hypervigilant, can't sleep, always on edge.
System Collapse: Eventually, your stress response system becomes exhausted and it can't maintain the high output anymore.
Hypocortisolism: Your body can no longer produce adequate stress hormones. You're left with the bad of both worlds: you still feel threatened (hypervigilance, startle response) but lack the biological resources to respond effectively.
The veterans weren't "getting over it" because their bodies literally couldn't produce the hormones needed to feel safe and resilient. It creates an emotional pattern in the brain as well creating a feedback loop- as we explored in another post.
Different Battlefield, Same Biology
Here's where this gets relevant for every exhausted woman reading this: the same biological pattern shows up in severe burnout.
You don't need to be in a war zone to exhaust your stress response system. Modern life provides plenty of chronic, unrelenting stressors especially for women and especially for single mothers.
Workplace pressure- that never lets up
Caregiving responsibilities- with no backup
Financial stress -that keeps you awake at night
Relationship conflicts- that feel unsafe
Perfectionism -that makes every task seem like life-or-death
Trauma histories- that keep your system on high alert (not to mention how our children may consistently trigger our trauma patterns)
Add them up over months or years, and your stress system can collapse just like those Vietnam veterans' did.
Your Mind Can't Fix What Your Body Is Experiencing
This research revealed why traditional therapy approaches often fall short for severe PTSD and burnout:
The problem isn't in your thoughts, it isn’t about changing your mind or letting go - it's in your nervous system’s circuitry.
Those veterans knew rationally they were safe. They could talk about their experiences, understand their triggers, even develop coping strategies. But their bodies were still stuck in a state of threat and exhaustion.
The same is true for burnout. You can know intellectually that you're safe, understand your stress patterns, triggers and practice postive thinking. You can meditate and learn breathwork techniques even set boundaries and get a master’s degree in communication. But if your nervous system is stuck in a pattern of hypervigilance with insufficient cortisol, your body will continue to feel threatened and exhausted regardless of what your mind knows.
The Somatic Root of Recovery
This research pointed to a crucial truth about how healing happens in the body first and then the mind can follow. This is why recovery from burnout and PTSD is fundamentally a somatic (body-based) process. Some basic and fundamental assumptions I make in my work is that:
+ Your Body Holds the Memory
Trauma and chronic stress literally change your nervous system, the shape and function of your brain and how you see the world. Your body learns to expect threat and react accordingly, even when your cognitive mind knows you're not at war.
These aren't just "emotional memories" - they're physiological patterns embedded in your nervous system, muscle tension/posture, breathing patterns, and stress response.
+ Your Body Needs to LEARN Safety
Recovery means teaching your nervous system that it's ok to relax, safe to produce normal cortisol patterns, safe to let down its guard, safe to feel desire, excited and comfortable.
This can't happen through intellectual processes alone. Your body needs direct experiences of safety, regulation, and restoration.
+ Your Body Has Its Own Wisdom (and it’s sacred)
Your nervous system wants to heal. Given the right conditions, it will naturally move toward balance and resilience. The key is creating those conditions somatically, not only mentally.
Based on the understanding that emerged from this PTSD research, body based recovery includes:
Bottom-up approaches, like nervous system regulation that work directly with your physiology:
Breathwork- like exhaling longer than your inhale
Cold therapy- like ice on your face
Vagal tone exercises- like singing
Movement practices- like shaking qi gong
Titrated exposure that will rebuild your stress response capacity by gradually increasing your system’s ability to handle challenge. Starting with tiny amounts of positive stress when regulated and slowly expanding your window of tolerance, learning to move between activation and calm will rebuild resilience from the ground up.
Somatic experiencing is body based trauma processing through approaches that help complete interrupted responses:
Feeling sensations in your body without immediately trying to change them
Allowing natural movements that want to happen
Supporting your system's natural discharge mechanisms (trembling for example)
Working with the body's innate healing responses by understanding parasympathetic activation
Restoring Natural Rhythms like circadian and ultradian rhythm by
Supporting your body's natural cortisol patterns through light exposure
Eating in ways that support stable blood sugar and hormone production
Moving your body in sync with your natural energy cycles
AND Creating predictable rhythms that help your nervous system feel safe
This doesn't mean therapy and mental approaches are useless - quite the opposite. True and long-term healing can happen when we integrate the body and the mind- they have been seen as separate disciplines and ideologies, but they work synchronistically. Research shows us that cognitive work is most effective when your nervous system is included in each step.
When your body feels safe:
Your mind can think more clearly
You can access your adaptation and resilience
You can integrate new perspectives, insights and engage creatively
Healing accelerates dramatically
The most effective recovery approaches combine somatic work to regulate your nervous system and restore your stress response capacity, cognitive work to process experiences and develop new patterns in relationships and lifestyle changes.
Even the most exhausted nervous system can heal.
Many of those veterans, with proper somatic support, were able to restore their stress response systems and reclaim their lives. Not by forgetting their experiences or "getting over" their trauma. The same is true for burnout. Your exhaustion isn't permanent. Your nervous system's wisdom isn't lost. Your body's capacity for joy, energy, and resilience can be restored. It requires honoring that healing happens through your body first.
For your own somatic recovery consider these first steps:
Start noticing your body's signals without judgment
Create safety and predictability in your environment
Build practices that support your natural cortisol rhythms
Gradually expand your capacity for both challenge and rest
Remember that healing is not linear, health exists on a spectrum and it all happens at your body's pace
Your exhaustion/overwhelm/fatigue/stress/ptsd/burnout is your nervous system's way of saying "I need help." Your hypervigilance is your body's attempt to keep you safe. Your emotional numbness is a protective mechanism that served a purpose and it’s effective, am I right? Maybe it’s time to evolve the patterns toward peace.