What I did when I was close to burning out — four weeks, one tapping round, no scroll.

Susana Carr

Today is the first Friday I have sat down at the MyTappyPlace desk in four weeks. I am writing this in part to mark the return, and in part because the four weeks were a deliberate decision I want to explain.

I did not take four weeks off work. I had one week of annual leave booked. What I did take, more deliberately, was three Fridays away from MyTappyPlace, and a full step away from LinkedIn, Instagram, and everything else that comes with building a business on the side.

The shape of it was this. On the Thursday before my leave, I decided the next morning would be the last day I worked on anything MTP until I came back. I gave that Friday back to myself. The next Friday I was in France. The one after that I had to swap to my day job because of my son's inset day. Today, the fourth Friday since that decision, is the first one I have spent at this desk.

This post is for anyone working in a caring or frontline profession (social workers, foster carers, NHS staff, teachers, paramedics, anyone whose work involves repeatedly turning up for other people's hardest days) who has been telling themselves they cannot stop, and is starting to suspect they may not have a choice.

What was on the system

I am the Registered Manager of an Independent Fostering Agency (IFA). On a normal week, that role holds multiple things at once: safeguarding, complaints, supervision of staff, the conditions of placements, the wellbeing of carers, the wellbeing of the staff team, the inspection regime that sits over all of it.

The months before my leave were not a normal week. Safeguarding concerns that needed full and detailed attention. Complaints to be answered. The Ofsted inspection that we know is due any time. A team that was short-staffed, with the staff who were in stretched thinly. Because of the staffing pressure, I have also been case-holding several complex cases myself, sitting in placement-related meetings, and doing foster carer supervisions that ordinarily I would not be doing as Registered Manager.

On the personal side, parenting was needing more of me than usual. My son is having a difficult time of his own, and he needed me in a way that mattered more than the work.

Stacked over the top of all of that was the additional pressure I had been putting on myself to keep building MyTappyPlace, with only Fridays carved out for it because I work a four-day week in the day job.

By the time the leave was a fortnight away, I was working overtime, sleeping less, and noticing the early signs in my own body. Frazzled. Brain like a sieve. The feeling that my head was about to pop from the volume of information I was holding, processing, and responding to all at once. A brick of sadness in the chest that did not seem to belong to any particular case. The thought that if I kept going I was going to be useful to no one.

The decision to pause before I had to

There was no single dramatic moment. There was a quieter realisation, on a Wednesday evening, that if I burnt out I would let down every single person currently relying on me to function. The team. The carers. The children. My son. The agency. The inspection prep. The people who have backed MyTappyPlace.

The strongest move available to me was to pause before I had to.

I decided that the Thursday at work would be my last day of any work, and that the Friday that should have been an MTP day would be the start of the pause. No content. No scheduling. No sessions recorded. No tweaking the website. No reading the analytics. The phone went off the apps as well as off MyTappyPlace itself: no LinkedIn, no Instagram, no checking what other EFT practitioners were posting, no opening the marketing newsletter I subscribe to. The whole orbit, off.

I took my work laptop and phone to France with me, because Ofsted could in theory have called at any point during my leave to announce inspection. The work bag stayed in the boot of the car for the full holiday. The phone was off. The laptop never came out of the bag. I did not doubt the decision.

A tapping round before a difficult meeting

During this period of pressure at work, I requested a consultation with a Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) about a safeguarding concern. The LADO team were reluctant to speak to me on a consultation basis and asked for a formal referral. I sent the referral. When it was acknowledged, I was told that our Ofsted inspector would be invited to the next meeting.

That sentence reorganised my body before my mind had caught up. I knew, professionally, that we had made our decisions in good faith on the basis of what we knew. What I did not yet know was what the LADO team knew. Their decision to bring Ofsted to the meeting suggested they were sitting on information I had not been given. The question that started running underneath everything else was: what is it they know that I do not, for them to feel this matter needed Ofsted in the room?

I requested a call with the LADO before the meeting. They declined. I would not find out until I walked into the room on the day whether the Ofsted inspector would actually be there. I would also not know what was about to be put on the table.

The week between the referral being acknowledged and the meeting itself is where the tapping round sits.

I closed my laptop one afternoon, sat for a minute, and tapped.

The set-up was honest about what was here: "Even though I am feeling nervous and my stomach has turned, I know my case, and I know our decisions were good decisions based on what we knew at the time."

Then through the points, naming what was present. The fear of walking into a meeting without information someone else had. The sadness at the possibility that a child had been at risk and I had not known. The learning I had already taken from working through the chronology. The fact that I am professional, eloquent, capable of being decisive and reflective at the same time, and capable of receiving difficult feedback and using it.

I did not try to talk myself out of any of it. I named it. I let the body process what the situation had put into it.

By the end of the round I could breathe. My stomach had settled. The meeting was still coming, and I still did not know what would be in it, but the activation was no longer running my system. I would walk in with it metabolised, and the meeting would have to do its own work.

What came out at the meeting belongs to the case, not to this post. What I will say is that the body work I had done in the week before meant I could take in what I was told without going under.

I am the person trying to make tapping mainstream in social work and frontline work. The tools have to earn their place on my own body first. They do. That is the only reason MyTappyPlace exists.

The week in France

Normandy, in late May. A caravan park directly on the coast. The sea was a two-minute walk from the door.

We went down to watch the sunset every evening. One Tuesday I spent five hours in the water with my son, teaching him how to catch waves. How to read a set. How to decide when to go under a wave and when to go over it. How to time the swim out so you still have energy left for the wave you have chosen.

I had not stood in the sea like that since my own childhood in Venezuela. The body remembered Cata Beach (the volcanic sand, the particular Caribbean sun, my big brother showing me how to catch the waves) before I had consciously registered the memory. The remembering was in the feet. I was teaching my son what my brother had taught me.

My son caught his first big wave. The look on his face when he stood up from it is the kind of thing I went on holiday to be present for. I was present for it. There was no phone in my hand. There was no camera. The phone was off, on the table in the caravan, and stayed there.

I had taken an instamatic camera on the trip. I have, in total, about ten physical photographs from the holiday. They are on the table in front of me as I write this. They were never meant to document the week. They were a deliberate choice to take a small number of physical objects out of the experience and to leave the rest of it in my body.

I did not think about Ofsted in the water. I did not think about the launch. I did not think about the website, or the next workshop, or the sessions I still have to record. I thought about the next wave, the depth under my feet, and the shape of my son's joy.

This is the kind of stretch that the phrase 'self-care Sunday' rarely reaches. The signal to the nervous system has to come through the body, on a scale and over a duration the system can actually register. Five hours in the sea, with the head fully out of the work, was enough to deliver it. Smaller daily practices do their own quieter work, but they are not the same thing. A holiday like this one does something different: it tells the body that the months before are genuinely finished.

The Fridays either side

The week of leave was the obvious part. The Fridays either side are the part I am more proud of.

The Friday before my leave should have been an MTP day. I gave it back to myself. I did nothing related to the business. The Friday after my leave should also have been an MTP day, but I had already swapped my non-working day to cover my son's inset day, so I worked the agency job instead. Today is the first Friday back at this desk.

The MTP-pause sits inside the bigger pause. One week of leave, three Fridays away from MyTappyPlace, four weeks off the apps. The hours away from the day job were not unusual. What made the difference in nervous system terms was the voluntary load coming off: the MTP work, the social media, the marketing reading, the comparing myself to other people doing similar work. My body stopped scanning for it.

What I notice now I am back

Four things, none of them surprising. All of them only credible because I have just done them.

The first is that pausing before you have to is the move with the most leverage. Pausing once you have burnt out costs months. Pausing because you can feel the early signs costs weeks. The leverage is in the timing.

The second is that the body comes first. The tapping round before the difficult meeting did more, in that moment, than any amount of additional preparation could have done. The body had to come down before the rest of the work was usable.

The third is that sensory specificity reaches the deeper layers of regulation. The sea was not 'restorative'. It was the sea. The sand was the sand. The depth under my feet was a specific depth. Naming what is actually present, in its specifics, is what changes the state.

The fourth is that connection over documentation is a real principle, and I had underestimated it. Ten physical photographs, taken with intention, hold more for me now than four weeks of camera roll would have done. The act of not photographing is the act of being present for the thing that would otherwise have been photographed.

None of these are new ideas. The point is that they only mean anything once they have been lived. The four weeks were the living.

A note on what makes this possible

It is worth being honest about the shape of the reset. It was not four weeks off work. It was one week of annual leave, three Fridays without MyTappyPlace, and a clean step away from the apps. The mechanism was scheduling and a decision, not enormous resource.

That matters, because the part of this most readers can replicate is not the week in France. It is the three Fridays. It is the apps being off. It is the work bag in the boot. It is the deliberate decision that the voluntary load (the side project, the scrolling, the marketing reading, the comparing yourself to other people doing similar work) gets paused while the body comes down.

Anyone with control over their own evenings, weekends, and the choice to put a phone down has some version of this available to them. What is harder to come by is the permission to actually do it. Most frontline workers I know carry the assumption that pausing is irresponsible. The pause that protects the work you have committed to is the most responsible thing you can do.

Today

Today is the first Friday I am back on MyTappyPlace. I am uploading sessions. I am writing this. I am working towards launch.

If you are reading this and recognising the version of yourself I was a month ago (working overtime, feeling needed by everyone, replenishing nothing), the first move is not to push harder. The first move is to give the body something it can recognise as the signal that the threat phase is over.

A guided EFT session is a short, portable way to do that. It takes two to five minutes. You can do it in the car between meetings, in the bathroom before bed, sitting on the edge of the bed before the alarm.

There is a free guided session at www.mytappyplace.co.uk/free-session.

The app is launching soon. If you would like to be one of the first to know when it goes live, the same sign-up will put you on the list.