{"id":7516,"date":"2026-06-05T11:41:30","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T11:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceinhealth.com\/?p=7516"},"modified":"2026-06-08T11:48:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T11:48:35","slug":"icu-nurse-survival-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceinhealth.com\/fr\/2026\/06\/05\/icu-nurse-survival-mode\/","title":{"rendered":"ICU Nurse: I Thought I Was Just Exhausted – Until I Realised My Nervous System Was Stuck in Survival Mode"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Working long hospital shifts where you carry more than just the work, feeling exhausted felt normal. What I didn\u2019t realise at the time was that it wasn\u2019t the kind of tiredness rest could fix.<\/i><\/h3>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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People assume the pressure ends when your shift ends. But the anxious thoughts and emotional exhaustion can stay with you much longer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

In intensive care, it doesn\u2019t really work like that.<\/span><\/p>

One day you\u2019re holding the hand of someone your own age while they die. The next morning you\u2019re in the gym trying to act normal, replying to messages, buying groceries, coaching classes, carrying on like your nervous system didn\u2019t just spend twelve hours in survival mode.<\/span><\/p>

That was probably the strangest part for me.<\/span><\/p>

Work would finish, but my body never seemed to believe the stressful part was actually over.<\/span><\/p>

And honestly, I do not think this only happens to people working in intensive care.<\/span><\/p>

The brain and nervous system are not always very good at distinguishing between physical danger and constant psychological pressure.<\/span><\/p>

Over time, deadlines, emotional pressure, notifications, lack of rest and never fully switching off can keep the body operating as if something is constantly wrong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Looking back now, I think the anxious thoughts and burnout symptoms were signs my nervous system had been stuck in survival mode for a very long time. <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I work in an ICU, and the environment is intense in a way that\u2019s difficult to explain unless you\u2019ve lived it. You are constantly around life and death. Around fear. Around grief. Around families having the worst day of their lives while you try to stay calm enough to do your job properly.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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People sometimes assume healthcare workers become immune to that.<\/span><\/p>

You don\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>

You learn how to function professionally inside it. But the body still absorbs what it\u2019s experiencing somewhere.<\/span><\/p>

And eventually, it catches up with you.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I Started Noticing It Outside Of Work<\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Outside the hospital, I train and coach CrossFit <\/span>at a high level<\/b>. Training has always been a release for me. If I felt stressed, overwhelmed or emotional, my instinct was always to move harder, train harder, push harder.<\/span><\/p>

For a while, I thought that was helping me cope.<\/span><\/p>

But looking back now, I think I was going from one intense environment straight into another without ever really allowing my body to recover in between.<\/span><\/p>

Some mornings I would wake up already anxious before the day had even started. Heavy. Puffy. Exhausted. Almost like my body was having some kind of allergic reaction to life.<\/span><\/p>

Other times I would suddenly feel emotional during training for no obvious reason. I\u2019d have to stop mid-session and try to pull myself together while everyone around me assumed I was just tired or moody.<\/span><\/p>

But how do you explain to people that yesterday you spent hours with a family saying goodbye to someone they love?<\/span><\/p>

A lot of healthcare professionals carry things like that silently.<\/span><\/p>

And the difficult part is that it rarely hits you while you\u2019re actually at work. It\u2019s afterwards. On the drive home. In bed at night. Randomly in the gym. Standing in a supermarket. Sitting with your thoughts for the first time all day. That was when the anxious thoughts would usually get louder. Not during the chaos, but when everything finally went quiet. <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I Thought I Was Just Burnt Out<\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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For a long time, I thought I was simply exhausted.<\/span><\/p>

And honestly, I tried to do all the \u201cright\u201d things.<\/span><\/p>

I trained. I ate well. I tried meditation. Breathwork. Journaling. Therapy after COVID. I started reading again because I realised I had completely lost the ability to sit quietly with my own brain for even twenty minutes.<\/span><\/p>

Some of those things genuinely helped.<\/span><\/p>

But the feeling kept creeping back in.<\/span><\/p>

And honestly, I think that\u2019s why so many people don\u2019t recognise burnout early enough. They keep functioning, even while anxious thoughts, exhaustion and emotional overload are building underneath.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Burnout does not always look dramatic at first. It looks like answering emails while eating lunch, rushing between responsibilities, carrying low-level anxious thoughts all day and never fully feeling mentally off-duty, even at home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

I could rest all day and still wake up feeling exhausted but strangely on edge the next morning.\u00a0 My body felt tired, but my mind still felt switched on all the time –\u00a0 like it had forgotten how to come out of <\/span>fight or flight mode<\/b> properly.<\/span><\/p>

If I was a button, you could hear static coming from me constantly.<\/span><\/p>

That\u2019s when I started realising this probably wasn\u2019t just about being \u201cbusy\u201d or \u201crun down\u201d anymore. It genuinely started feeling like a<\/span> nervous system issue<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What I Didn\u2019t Understand About Burnout And Anxious Thoughts<\/h2>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Before all this, I thought burnout and anxious thoughts were mostly mental.<\/span><\/p>

I didn\u2019t fully understand how physical they could become.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

For me, it showed up everywhere:<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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