There was a season of my life where my body stopped feeling like mine. I was completely outside of myself, numb, disconnected, dissociated to the point that memories of 2022 are genuinely blurry. Entire stretches of time feel inaccessible now, like my brain archived them somewhere my body doesn’t want to revisit. At the time, I was balancing a new corporate job, a scaling business, and a separation that had turned into legal proceedings. Court fees. Payroll. Living between Airbnb’s. Rebuilding my life while simultaneously trying to maintain the appearance that nothing was falling apart.
From the outside, I probably looked productive. Inside, my nervous system was on fire. I was sleeping two or three hours a night. Forgetting to eat. Living off adrenaline. My shoulders were permanently tense, practically touching my ears. My eyes twitched constantly. I was irritable, exhausted, emotionally volatile, and somehow still finding ways to take on more work so I could appear as though I was thriving.
That’s the thing about high-functioning burnout. People applaud you while you’re deteriorating. And the scariest part is that eventually your body starts normalizing the dysfunction too. The ringing ears. The migraines. The fatigue. The anxiety. The pain in your back. The pressure in your joints. You start treating symptoms like personality traits instead of warning signs. Until your body forces you to listen.
Mine did. Tinnitus came first. Then the burnout became physical. One morning, I woke up so fatigued I could barely move my hands. Doctors told me my body was physically healthy, but my nervous system had essentially short-circuited from prolonged stress and exhaustion. I had become so disconnected from my body that I didn’t even recognize myself physically anymore. I was overweight, emotionally eating, binge eating after long stretches of forgetting to eat entirely, and speaking to myself in ways I would never speak to another human being. Even standing felt uncomfortable.
Around that same time, I received my neurodivergence diagnosis. And suddenly, everything made sense. Not in a cinematic, life-changing moment kind of way. More like finally finding the missing manual to a machine you’ve been operating your entire life without instructions.
I realized I had spent years overriding myself.
Overriding exhaustion.
Overriding overstimulation.
Overriding intuition.
Overriding pain.
I knew I needed something.
Not another productivity hack.
Not another self-help podcast.
Not another way to push harder.
I needed regulation.
Wellness has always been threaded into my life. I grew up around spiritual practices, rituals, intentionality. In 2016, someone put May Cause Miracles by Gabrielle Bernstein in my hands, and something cracked open. Mindfulness. Intentionality. The idea that how you move through a day is a choice you make again and again. That book sent me down a long road of exploration; what practices work in my body, not in theory, not on someone else’s Instagram, in mine.
I tried yoga, and while it helped with meditation, I didn’t feel the physical shift I was looking for. Then I walked into a Studio Pilates class. The moves were challenging in a way that felt right, not punishing, not overwhelming. After the first class, I felt taller. My feet felt stretched out in a way I hadn’t felt in years. I took two more classes over the next two weeks. I am not exaggerating when I say I saw definition in my stomach in two weeks. I had done years of other movement. Nothing had produced that.
But the physical results are not the story. They were the door. The real story is what happened when I was forced to slow down.
Pilates demands breath. Not as a cue you can ignore as the mechanism. The movement doesn’t work without it. For someone whose nervous system had been running in emergency mode for years, being told to breathe and be present wasn’t a wellness tip. It was almost radical. It was the opposite of everything I had been doing.
Slowing down revealed something I wasn’t expecting that transformation happens in the breath. That the same move done with intention lands completely differently in your body than the same move done on autopilot. Intentional movement changed my body. It also changed how I thought. I started using Pilates the way other people use meditation; to clear my mind, to go inward, to come back to myself.
My AuDHD brain had always struggled with intense workouts. The sensory overload was immediate and would trigger a tinnitus episode before I even got warmed up. Pilates gave me enough to focus on without overwhelming me. It felt like exercise for my brain and my body at the same time. That’s exactly what my nervous system needed.
The physical changes came gradually and then all at once. My flat feet had caused me pain for most of my life, pain I had learned to normalize, the way you normalize things that have just always been there. Pilates changed how I stand. How I walk. My ankles got stronger. My back pain disappeared. I wasn’t leaning into my feet the same way anymore. I was carrying myself differently.
The moment I really knew something had shifted was shopping for a bathing suit. I reached for a two-piece. I hadn’t done that in years. I felt safe in my body. Confident in it. Not because it was perfect but because it was mine again, and I was no longer at war with it.
What came up as my body got stronger surprised me. Not pride, exactly, though that came too. The loudest thing was the voice. The way I had been talking to myself for years. Getting stronger made the cruelty of that voice impossible to ignore. So I went deeper into affirmation practice. Mirror work. Learning to say things to myself that I actually believed. My emotions had been living in my gut my whole life. Pilates helped me feel that, literally, and start to work with it instead of against it.
Six years in, I am still not bored. I haven’t explored every apparatus. I haven’t reached every level. For my AuDHD brain, that matters, a practice with no ceiling is a practice I will keep returning to. There is always more to discover. That’s exactly the kind of thing my brain was built for.
I want to say something about burnout, because I think it gets mischaracterized.
People call it laziness. Tiredness. A productivity problem. Burnout is a complete shutdown of the nervous system. It is trauma that expresses itself physically. Stress is a killer, not metaphorically, literally and it puts enormous strain on the body. What I experienced was real, and it required real intervention, not a vacation and a face mask.
Healing, in practice, looks like this: a daily ritual that grounds you, gives your mind a rest, and moves your body with intention and with love. That’s it. That is the whole thing. It is not complicated, but it requires showing up for yourself in the smallest ways, every single day, when every instinct says there is something more urgent that needs your attention first.
My body has taught me something simple that took years to learn: if I am good to her, she will be good to me.
And if my nervous system could say one thing to me now after everything, I think it would say that it’s proud of me for not giving up. For refusing to stop looking for ways to regulate, to come back, to land in myself again. It would say: I feel prepared now. For whatever comes, the hard things and the good things both. As long as we keep breathing.
That’s what Pilates gave me. Not a body. A way back in.
Wynne Dakers is the founder of Wynne Daily and Somma; platforms that explore transformation through movement, wellness, and intentional living. Through reflections on Pilates, neurodivergence life, identity, and building with purpose, she documents what it looks like to create a life that actually fits you.
