Insights

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and cognitive exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. It’s marked by depleted energy, reduced motivation, and a sense of detachment from work or life.

Most conversations about burnout circle the same three ideas:

• You’re no longer aligned with your work.
• The cult of productivity won’t let you rest.
• Your mindset needs a reset.

All true — but they miss the real point.

Burnout feels philosophical, even spiritual, but at its core, it’s biological (Ciobanu et al., 2021). Down-and-dirty, animal biology. It’s what happens when your body’s survival systems forget how to stand down.

Your stress response was built for short bursts of action. A chase. A threat. A deadline. When those bursts never end, the stress never stops — and your body forgets how to switch off, and it’s “all systems go” all the time (Alotiby, 2024.

At first, it’s just overdrive. Then, it becomes dysfunctional.

Cortisol floods your system. Your immune response activates. Low-grade inflammation spreads quietly through your tissues (Núñez et al., 2025). Your brain reads this chemical chatter as a sign of danger. Even when you’re sitting still, your body’s braced for attack.

That’s burnout: a body in fight-or-flight, running on fumes, trying to save energy for life-saving tasks that never come (Adebayo et al., 2023). Your mood drops, your focus fades, you start conserving — not because you’re weak, but because your body thinks it’s protecting you.

And because the stress keeps coming, the inflammation keeps burning (Ciobanu et al., 2021). The stress-inflammation-stress cycle loops and loops.

The good news? Low-grade inflammation is manageable — even reversible — when the nervous system is taught how to regulate again (Alotiby, 2024.

That’s what yōjō helps people do.

We use science-backed tools — vagus nerve stimulation, biofeedback, and personal coaching — to restore balance to your nervous system and help it remember how to rest, recover, and reset.

Chronic stress fuels inflammation. Inflammation fuels disease. And before you know it, you're caught in a cycle that wears down your body, ages you faster, and drains your energy. In short, stress is your enemy. The best way to deal with an enemy is to choose only those battles you can win.

There are the big stresses in life and the small stresses. We hardly need to explore the big stresses; we all know them. There’s no winning against them. They just are, and we do our best to accept them. The small stresses, however, we can conquer the minute they kick up a fuss.

These are the less remarkable, less noticeable stresses. Those dozen or so situations and happenings that tense up your mind just a smidge, like a person tightening a guitar string. Just a little at a time. The tardy bus, the broken shoelace, the spilled coffee, the rude coworker, the winding queue, the stolen seat, all piling on top of each other, turning that mind string until it is so tense your entire being develops a distinct, steely twang.

There may be many, and they may sometimes be hard to see, but one West African approach to life can help you thwart these little enemies and stop them from strumming your nerves with their fingers.

It’s called “itutu.” It is a way of seeing minor stresses and worries that takes the sting out of them. (uOkraSoupThrowaway, 2024)

As The School of Life explains in their video, A Philosophy of Calm, itutu “denotes a particular approach to life: unhurried, composed, assured, and unflappable.” (The School of Life, 2020a) Among the Yoruba people, to “have itutu” is to embody coolness — to meet frustration with poise and to remain untouched by the noise of small misfortunes. (The School of Life, 2020b)

This calm isn’t a divine gift; it can be learned. It’s the fruit of knowing, as the Yoruba say, that some things belong to “àṣẹ” — the natural order — and lie beyond our control.

Anger arises when we overestimate our power to change external reality. Itutu arises when we see the limits clearly and choose peace within them.

Modern science would call this emotional regulation, the ability of the prefrontal cortex to modulate limbic reactivity. When you practice the qualities embodied by itutu, you train your nervous system to stay out of fight-or-flight. (Ford et al., 2018)

Over time, this translates into measurable benefits: lower cortisol, steadier heart rate variability, reduced inflammation, and potentially improved longevity. (Ford et al., 2018)

Cultivating this mindset makes you resilient. You learn to save your energy for what truly matters, and your calm becomes your default setting.

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A steel table, metal probes, and life-giving lightning are the images accompanying the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a glimpse into very real scientific pursuits of the 18th century that formed the foundations of our understanding of nerves and muscle tissue, including the vagus nerve (Crowson, 2023).

While 8-foot human scrapbooks weren’t plaguing Europe, scientists in the 17th and 18th centuries were experimenting with animal reanimation, using electricity. Shelley spent years studying these scientific breakthroughs and took inspiration from the findings when writing Frankenstein (Crowson, 2023).

Science seems to have a fascination with frogs, and the history of understanding nerves has amphibians to thank for their role in early experimentation.

Jan Swammerdam was a 17th-century naturalist and philosopher known for creating the Bybel der Natuure (Bible of Nature) — a collection of studies on insects which, at the time, included frogs. Swammerdam’s interest in frogs had theological and scientific goals: he wanted to prove that all creatures were created by God and governed by the same biological rules. Swammerdam used similar muscle experimentation methods on frogs as those used on larger animals like cats and dogs. He exposed the leg nerves and used sharp instruments to stimulate contractions, showing a closer link between frogs and humans than was previously thought (Verkhratsky & Parpura, 2006).

Luigi Galvani’s inquiry into reanimation started with a frog, a static electricity machine, and a scalpel. A frog’s leg nerves were exposed near a charged electrical machine when Galvani’s wife touched a nerve with a scalpel, causing the leg to spasm. Noting that the scalpel had been near the static electricity machine shortly before his wife had used it to touch the frog, Galvani formed and tested his theory that electrical force could travel along the nerves to the muscles, causing them to contract. He called this “animal electricity” (Britannica: Luigi Galvani).

Galvani also found that nerves from one frog could be attached to the muscles of another, and that the muscles from the second frog responded when the nerves were stimulated (Verkhratsky & Parpura, 2006).

Shortly after Galvani published his findings, another professor of physics named Allesandro Volta disputed the notion of “animal electricity”, causing controversy in the field. By repeating Galvani’s experiments with frogs, Volta concluded that the key to nerve stimulation was in agitating them with two differing types of metal. The more dissimilar the metals, the more intense the reaction. Galvani would later disprove this by using two rods made of the same type of metal to cause muscle contractions. The result of their scholarly dispute? Both were partially right and wrong: there is no “animal electricity”, but nerve stimulation doesn’t require two differing metals to achieve (Verkhratsky & Parpura, 2006).

Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, continued his uncle’s work by publicly animating the corpses of executed criminals. Aldini inserted metal rods into the corpses and stimulated muscle movement with electricity, demonstrating a macabre display of galvanism and leading to questions about bringing back the dead (Crowson, 2023).

These galvanist pursuits weren’t the only inspiration for Shelley — the author cites Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles Darwin) in two editions of her work (Britannica: Erasmus Darwin).

Erasmus Darwin was a physician, botanist, and poet, and amongst his publications on plants and evolution, he wrote on reanimation in dead microorganisms (Britannica: Erasmus Darwin).

Arguably, the most influential figure in crafting Frankenstein was Sir Humphry Davy, a friend of Shelley’s father who allegedly inspired the character Victor Frankenstein (Crowson, 2023).

Davy was a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution in London, with crowds overfilling his lecture hall to watch his experiments. Davy used Volta’s invention—the electric pile—to investigate and prove that electricity generation depends on a chemical reaction. Shelley used some of Davy’s lectures as dialogue for Victor Frankenstein and tried to capture the professor's passion for understanding nature and his drive to master it.

Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) is a form of mastery over nature. Short bursts of electrical energy are passed through the vagus nerve to relax the stress response, improve nervous system function, recalibrate certain regions in the brain, and control inflammation. What scientists learned about the effect of electrical impulses on nerves from their experiments hundreds of years ago, we use now to regulate the digestive system, improve mood, and manage chronic pain disorders via the vagus nerve (Cleveland Clinic, 2025; Picciotto et al., 2012).

Fortunately, nVNS can be done at home, sans steel table and metal probes.

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