Phoenix Rising Family Medicine

01/30/2026

Try this for 10 minutes a day:

Do 10 minutes more of something you genuinely love.
Do 10 minutes less of something you hate.

This isn’t about productivity.
It’s about training your nervous system.

When you’ve been burned out for a long time, your body gets used to:
– pressure
– obligation
– low-grade misery

Joy, ease, and pleasure can actually feel unsafe.

So when people say, “Just make a big change,” the nervous system often panics.

Ten minutes is different.

It’s small enough that your system doesn’t go into guilt, threat, or shutdown.
But consistent enough to teach your body something new:

➡️ This feeling is safe.
➡️ I don’t have to earn this.
➡️ Nothing bad happens when I feel good.

Over time, this expands your window of tolerance for joy.

And that’s what makes bigger changes possible later.

You don’t leap into aligned decisions through willpower.
You grow into them as your nervous system learns it can tolerate ease.

This idea comes from Martha Beck, who talks about using small, body-based experiments instead of forcing massive overhauls.

Burnout isn’t a motivation problem.
It’s a capacity problem.

Ten minutes a day helps rebuild that capacity — gently, sustainably, and from the inside out.

01/28/2026

Why “vent → meaning” writing helps ADHD burnout (the brain science + the soul science)

ADHD burnout isn’t just about exhaustion.
It’s about a brain that never gets to finish processing experience.

Step 1: Venting calms the Default Mode Network (DMN)
The DMN is the brain network involved in:
• Self-referential thinking
• Memory, identity, and story-making
• “What does this say about me?”

In ADHD, the DMN is often louder, faster, and stickier, which means:
• Thoughts loop
• Emotions don’t resolve
• Stress stays active

When you write down everything that’s aggravating you—without censoring—you’re doing something powerful:
You’re off-loading DMN activity onto the page.

This reduces cognitive load and tells the nervous system:

“I don’t have to hold all of this at once.”

Step 2: Meaning-making organizes the DMN (instead of letting it spiral)
After venting, the brain is calmer—but it still wants to know:

“What does this mean?”

This is where meaning-making matters.

As Viktor Frankl taught, humans don’t need life to be easy—but we do need it to be meaningful.
Meaning restores agency when circumstances feel overwhelming.

Writing about:
• What this experience is clarifying
• What value or boundary is being revealed
• What matters more clearly now

helps the DMN shift from:
rumination → coherence
self-attack → self-understanding

Why this combination works for ADHD burnout
• Venting alone can trap the brain in threat loops
• Meaning without venting can feel fake or bypassy

Together, they:
• Complete the stress cycle
• Reduce shame
• Restore authorship over your own story

Bottom line
ADHD burnout isn’t healed by “thinking positive.”
It’s healed by:
• Letting the brain fully express what hurts
• Then helping it organize experience around meaning

Writing gives the DMN a job it’s actually good at:
making sense—without making you suffer.

01/28/2026

Most people in burnout already know what they need to do.

They know they need to slow down.
They know a boundary is overdue.
They know something has quietly stopped working.

The issue usually isn’t lack of insight.
It’s that they haven’t authorized their knowing.

Many of us were taught—explicitly or implicitly—not to trust how we know things.
We learned to privilege logic over intuition.
Productivity over signals.
External validation over internal truth.

So even when the knowing is there, we keep waiting for permission.

What often gets missed is this:
People access knowing in very different ways.

Some people find it in their body.
Fatigue, tension, illness, or restlessness becomes the message.

Some people find it in writing.
The truth shows up on the page before they’re ready to say it out loud.

Some people find it through religion or spirituality.
Prayer, meditation, ritual, or a sense of being guided by something larger.

Some people find it in conversation.
Saying something once, casually, and realizing—oh. That’s it.

Some people only access knowing after they’ve pushed too far.
The crash delivers the clarity.

None of these are better than the others.
They’re just different languages of wisdom.

Burnout recovery isn’t about learning what to do.
It’s about learning how you hear yourself.

So the real question isn’t “What should I do?”
It’s:
Where does my knowing tend to show up—and have I been taking it seriously?

01/27/2026

Many adults in burnout aren’t “bad at rest.”
They’re very good at control.

As kids, they learned that being responsible, competent, or emotionally attuned kept things from falling apart.

So they overfunctioned:
• managed emotions (their own + others’)
• stayed hyper-aware of risk
• took on adult roles too early
• learned that safety came from staying on top of things

Control wasn’t a personality trait.
It was a survival strategy.

That strategy works…until it doesn’t.

In adulthood, the nervous system stays in “on duty” mode:
• difficulty resting without guilt
• feeling responsible for outcomes that aren’t yours
• chronic tension, vigilance, or people-pleasing
• oscillating between pushing harder and total collapse

Burnout isn’t a failure of resilience.
It’s the cost of carrying childhood jobs into adult life.

Healing isn’t about “letting go of control” overnight.
It’s about teaching the body that safety no longer depends on overfunctioning.

Burnout recovery starts when responsibility becomes a choice, not a reflex.

01/26/2026

Burnout doesn’t look the same for everyone.

Most people fall into three burnout types—and we often experience different types in different areas of life.

The 3 burnout types:
• Warrior – pushing harder, over-functioning, white-knuckling your way through
• Fortress – withdrawing, isolating, shutting down to stay safe
• Winging It – cycling between overdoing it and crashing, struggling with consistency

These patterns show up across 10 key domains:
• Nourishment
• Exercise
• Rest
• Relationships
• Boundaries
• Toxic exposures
• Vulnerability
• Core values
• Acceptance / equanimity
• Meaning & purpose

You might be a Warrior at work, a Fortress in relationships, and Winging It with rest.

Knowing which burnout type you lean toward matters—because the tools that help actually change depending on your type.

What helps a Warrior slow down can feel unbearable in Fortress burnout.
What supports Winging It can overwhelm a Warrior.

That’s why we don’t give one-size-fits-all advice.
The tools we offer shift based on the burnout type you click toward—so you’re working with your nervous system, not against it.

Want to know your burnout types across these domains?

Take our free burnout quiz at
https://dani-dupuis.mykajabi.com/burnoutclinic
Click “Quiz” at the top of the page.

Clarity first. Change gets easier from there.

01/25/2026

When burnout’s got you spiraling, I offer tools to help you settle your nervous system—because from a calmer state, you can make choices that truly match who you are. My STRONGER approach covers: S (Spiritual practice), T (Treat yourself), R (Relationships), O (Outlet for creativity), N (Nourishment), G (Guard your boundaries), E (Exercise), and R (Rest). Not a magic cure—but these help you recalibrate, so you choose from a place of alignment.

01/24/2026

01/23/2026

Intuition vs. Fear: Intuition is that quiet, patient guide inside you—it knows what you can actually handle and doesn’t rush. It’s calm, and it’s okay if you don’t listen right away. Fear, though, is loud and pushy—it wants attention now, whether or not you’ve got the energy. Fear might ask for big leaps when you’re burnt out. Intuition will wait until you’re ready.

01/22/2026

Why So Many People Repeat Burnout Cycles

Burnout isn’t usually a failure of willpower.
It’s often a learned survival pattern.

Many people who grew up in uncomfortable, chaotic, or emotionally unpredictable environments learned early that:
• Rest wasn’t safe
• Slowing down meant falling behind
• Being useful, productive, or “on” kept them connected and protected

So the nervous system adapted.

Hustling, over-functioning, pleasing, pushing through exhaustion — these weren’t personality traits. They were strategies.

And here’s the part most people miss:
The nervous system seeks familiar, not healthy.

If stress, urgency, or self-abandonment was familiar growing up, calm can feel unsettling.
Rest can feel lazy.
Ease can feel dangerous.

So even after burnout…
Once things stabilize…
The body unconsciously recreates the conditions it knows.

Not because you want to suffer.
But because your system is trying to return to what feels predictable.

Breaking the burnout cycle isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about teaching your nervous system that safety doesn’t have to be earned through exhaustion.

And that takes compassion, not discipline.

01/21/2026

Stage 7 ADHD Burnout: After the mic drop—what next?

Often, one of two things happens:

You leap into something new—another job, another relationship. In all likelihood, the burnout cycle will repeat—but it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. Sometimes, it’s the only option we know or have access to.

Or, you stop—take real pause, rest, and reorient. If you can, this can break the cycle and lead to more intentional choices.

No judgment—both are human responses.

Resources:
• Gabor Maté, “Scattered Minds”
• Sari Solden, “Women with ADHD”
• Ned Hallowell, “ADHD 2.0”

01/19/2026

Stage 6 ADHD Burnout: The Exit (“Burn It Down”) Phase

This stage comes after all compensation strategies have failed.
• Warrior pushing no longer works
• Fortress withdrawal no longer protects
• Winging-it improvisation collapses

At this point, the nervous system stops trying to cope and starts trying to escape.

What it looks like
• A sudden decision to quit, leave, or radically change something
• People around them are shocked: “I never saw that coming”
• There’s often calm or relief once the decision is made
• The core feeling: “I can’t do this another day”

What others say
• “You’re impulsive.”
• “You can’t commit.”
• “This is just your ADHD.”

But this isn’t flakiness.

What’s actually happening
• The person has been overriding body signals, limits, and values for a long time
• Shame already peaked earlier in burnout
• The body finally sets a hard boundary

As Gabor Maté describes, when we don’t listen to early signals, the body eventually says no for us.

This exit isn’t about avoidance or novelty.
It’s about ending something that has become biologically unsustainable.

Why it feels sudden
ADHD nervous systems often hold it together until they physically cannot anymore.
The distress is quiet, internal, and masked—until the only remaining option is exit.

Reframe
This isn’t quitting.
It’s the nervous system choosing self-preservation when adaptation is no longer possible.

⸻

Resources
• Freudenberger & North (1992) – Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement
• Maté, G. (2003) – When the Body Says No
• Porges, S. (2011) – The Polyvagal Theory
• Brown, B. (2012) – Daring Greatly (shame + disengagement)
• Dodson, W. (2017) – ADHD, emotional dysregulation & burnout

01/18/2026