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Burnout: The Professor Who Starved to Death on Top of a Supermarket
Introduction
"Burnout is what happens when you try to avoid being human for too long." Michael Gungor
Let’s start with an image that should be impossible.
A highly educated man. A professional. Someone with two doctorates, enough income to live comfortably, and quite literally a supermarket beneath his feet. And yet the tests came back showing he had the biological profile of someone who had starved to death.
Not metaphorically. Not “he wasn’t nourishing his soul.” Severe malnutrition. Extreme dehydration. A body that had been running on empty for so long it finally did what bodies do when they have nothing left — it stopped.
That man was Dr. David Plans. And the reason his story matters isn’t just because it’s dramatic. It’s because it demolishes every excuse we use to explain burnout away. He wasn’t poor. He wasn’t uneducated. He wasn’t struggling to survive in any conventional sense. He had every resource available to a modern human being — and his body still couldn’t reach him.
That’s the point. That’s where we need to start.
How a Cardiac Arrest Became a Research Question
David’s path is worth knowing because it shapes everything he later understood. He started out studying music, fascinated by how humans improvise — how emotion moves through the body and becomes sound. His first doctorate explored music, emotion and improvisation. Then life, as it tends to do, had other ideas.
In 2009, he was running a company, attempting a European merger, and fighting a legislative change at the European Parliament in Brussels that threatened to unravel all of it. On the same day his investors pulled out, he was at Brussels airport — and collapsed at the security gates.
He was revived. And when he came round, a nurse said something he wasn’t expecting:
“You guys in suits usually stay dead. And I don’t get to tell you what I think happens to you — which is that you don’t die of disease, that there is nothing wrong with you. You just burn out.”
He didn’t believe her. He was too young. There must be something physically wrong. So he ran every test available — and only succeeded in proving her right. Severe malnutrition. Extreme dehydration. The profile of starvation.
Which led him to the question that became the rest of his career: how does someone living on top of a supermarket die of hunger in the middle of a working day?
It doesn’t make sense. Until you understand what burnout actually does to a body — and why intelligence, wealth, and professional success offer zero protection against it.
What Burnout Is — and What It Isn’t
Burnout and stress have only existed in our language since the 1960s, and didn’t enter common parlance until the 1980s. Many cultures around the world still have no word for either. That absence matters — because we can only attend to what we have language for. Language is part of the stories, culture and beliefs we live inside.
It helps to separate burnout from its relatives.
Fatigue is honest and direct. Row across the Atlantic and your body will tell you — loudly, clearly, without ambiguity — that it cannot continue. It demands rest. It stops. That’s the system working as it should.
Stress is more complicated, because so much of it is mediated by culture. At its root, stress is the autonomic nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do: react to threat. Your nervous system doesn’t think — it acts. If a predator walked into the room right now, adrenaline would flood your body before your conscious mind had formed a single word. Thinking, in that moment, is a liability. The system is designed to bypass it entirely.
The problem — and it is a serious one — is that your nervous system cannot reliably tell the difference between a stab wound and a toxic email. It responds to both the same way. You’ll soon understand exactly why that matters.
The Memory We Can’t Put Down
Here is something that separates us from every other animal on the planet — and not entirely to our benefit.
We are the only species that remembers useless things. Every other animal carries memory only of what has actually threatened its survival. Dogs are instinctively wary of snakes. They don’t need to be taught. That knowledge is epigenetically transferred — written into the body before the individual animal has ever encountered the threat.
We have that too. But ours has evolved into something far more complex — and far more burdensome. We don’t just carry inherited biological memory. We write things down. We paint on cave walls. We make depictions in clay. We tell each other stories about what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. David calls this epi-philo-genetic memory — memory that is no longer just biological, but cultural and philosophical, passed between people and across generations through language and art.
There are cultures that have not been touched by this accumulation in the same way. An anthropologist who went to live with one such group told them stories about God and great historical figures — and the people laughed at him. “You believe something,” they said, “that wasn’t told to you by the person?” These are cultures that live entirely in the present. We are a culture that lives almost entirely in the past.
That is an extraordinary capacity. It’s also a trap.
It means we can be threatened by things that happened to people we’ve never met, in times we’ve never lived through. It means the nervous system — which evolved to respond to immediate physical danger — is now processing centuries of accumulated human trauma. And crucially, it cannot always tell the difference between a memory and a present threat. Nor can it distinguish between patterns that were once necessary and patterns that have simply outlived their purpose.
There is a story I was told by an elderly lady when I was in my early twenties that illustrates this perfectly. Each Christmas, the whole family gathered across the generations, and each person had their role. One year, the youngest girl was finally old enough to help her grandmother prepare the Christmas turkey. She watched her grandmother carefully chop about five centimetres off the top of the bird, cast the meat aside, place the turkey in the dish, garnish it, and slide it into the oven. The girl looked up curiously. “Grandma, why did you cut the top of the turkey off?” The grandmother, quite puzzled, replied: “Child, it’s what we’ve always done.” The reason, it turned out, was simple — the turkey had never fit in the old oven, so it had to be trimmed to size. But by the time that young girl was standing in the kitchen, the ovens were bigger. The trimming was completely unnecessary. The meat was being thrown away for no reason at all — simply because no one had ever stopped to ask why.
This is what inherited pattern looks like. Behaviour that made sense once, carried forward without question, long after the original need has gone.
The dog, when the danger passes, shakes. Not from fear — the fear has already gone. The shaking is how the stress response leaves. The stress moves through the body and is discharged. The animal returns to baseline cleanly, completely.
We used to do something similar. When we lived in tighter communities, there was dancing, physical contact, hustling, people pressing close to one another, slapping each other’s backs — all of it serving the same neurological function as a dog shaking off a fright. The body was given a route through which stress could exit.
Then we stopped. And the stress stayed.
What Animals Know That We’ve Trained Ourselves Out Of
Look at how stress moves through a pack of gorillas and you’ll see something we’ve lost almost entirely.
The alpha male expresses aggression very rarely. When he does, it is monolithic and unrelenting. And then it stops. Completely. Immediately. And the male moves through the cohort showing affection to every single member. The message is clear and embodied: this is over. I am in control of my emotions. It will not affect our relationship.
Then consider the biology sitting underneath that. The male body — across species, and not withstanding individual variation — is in many ways built to produce and absorb violence. Upper body strength, resilience under physical stress, the capacity to move from stillness to explosive action in milliseconds. Things that are genuinely useful if you are defending a pack from physical threat. But those same capacities — that biological imperative towards action under stress, that wiring that makes emotional expression feel like a liability — also make the male body particularly prone to internalising what it cannot discharge.
We compound this further by the stories we tell boys from the very beginning: cowboys and shooting, strength and silence, but not how to name or show emotion. The same design that makes a man effective in danger makes him less able to ask for help, less likely to show that something is wrong, and more likely to stay in a state of chronic activation until the body simply gives out. Look at crime statistics, at rates of sudden cardiac death, at who is still in the suit when the nurse says “you guys usually stay dead” — and you’ll see that pattern everywhere.
We stopped resolving stress the way animals do — physically, communally, with clear endings — a long time ago. We developed shame instead. And pride. Things that are, from a social cognition perspective, somewhat useful to the protocols of our society — and almost entirely useless from an evolutionary one. Shame, David argues, serves literally no biological purpose. But because we attend to it so heavily, we’ve lost the ability to do what actually helps.
This is also deeply cultural. In an Italian boardroom, emotion is normal. In a British one, it is an aberration. The stiff upper lip isn’t just an aesthetic — it is a suppression mechanism with real physiological consequences. You cannot shake uncontrollably in a meeting. You cannot slap your own back or do anything that would allow the body to release what it’s been holding. And so it stays. And compounds.
This is why people who understand this find physical outlets — the gym, running, boxing. But very few of us have a genuine handle on it. Most of us are just holding it, not knowing that’s what we’re doing, or what the long-term cost of that holding will be. I often explain to people what this feels like in the body, helping them identify and release it through practical techniques of reconnection.
The Body Speaks in Three Languages
Our bodies communicate through three systems:
Proprioception — our sense of movement and position in physical space.
Perception — how we take in the external world: faces, colour, behaviour.
Interoception — our internal signals. Hunger. Thirst. The tightness in your chest. Bodily function. The sense that something is wrong before you can name what it is.
That third one. It’s the one we’re least taught to value.
We live in a culture where interoceptive signals are treated as inconveniences — interruptions to performance rather than information worth attending to. Over time, that framing doesn’t just shape behaviour; it rewires the connection itself. The signals get sent and consistently ignored, and eventually the body learns to stop sending them with any force. The part of you that would say enough has been turned down so gradually, over so long, that you’ve stopped noticing it was ever there.
And when those signals go quiet entirely, the connection breaks. The body stops sending messages it has learned won’t be received. We become, as David puts it, a walking zombie: present, operational, completely cut off from what’s happening inside us.
This is just a thought, but it’s one I keep returning to. When we switch off a human function through the way we live, we risk changing the blueprint for the next generation. When everyone worked in the fields, people had very large, strong hands — you still see this in cultures where physical labour defines daily life. We know that one of the recognised characteristics of autism is difficulty reading interoceptive signals. Could it be that through our methods of living, through chronic stress and the suppression of internal awareness, we are training future generations not to need that function? It takes approximately three generations for our physical structure to adapt — which means what we are experiencing now is most likely the adaptation from the war period still working its way through us.
This is how a professor starves to death on top of a supermarket. Not because the food wasn’t there. Because the signal that said eat had gone silent.
The Stab Wound
This is the example that stops you in your tracks, and I think it’s the clearest illustration of what the body is actually capable of — and what prolonged stress does to that capacity.
David recounts a trauma doctor he knew, working in an A&E in a conflict area. A child came in with multiple stab wounds to the abdomen. The child was lying there, holding his stomach — but he wasn’t bleeding, so the doctor thought the wounds were shallow, he’s going to be fine.
And then he placed his hand on the child’s and told him he was going to be okay.
That moment — he haemorrhaged. High-velocity blood splatter. The body had been holding itself together through the sheer biological force of the fight-or-flight response. Threat still present: contain, function, survive. Threat resolved: release.
That is the system working with breathtaking precision.
Now here’s the uncomfortable parallel. If you work for someone who sends you conflicting, hostile emails — day after day, month after month — your nervous system responds to that person the way that child’s body responded to the stab wounds. The same mechanisms. The same suppression of pain and signal. The same holding-it-together.
Except there’s no moment of resolution. No hand placed on yours. No reassurance that it’s over. The threat just keeps coming. And so the body keeps holding. And over time, that holding expresses itself not as a single dramatic haemorrhage, but as chronic disease. As burnout. As the quiet, invisible collapse of a body that ran out of resources long before anyone noticed.
The Ghost in the Machinery: The Vagus Nerve
The physical structure behind all of this is the vagus nerve — the longest nerve in the body, running from the brainstem down through the spine and wrapping around the organs. It carries signals from the body to the brain — and here’s the extraordinary detail: 80% of its fibres are sensory. The vagus nerve spends the overwhelming majority of its time listening.
When you experience prolonged stress, that system gets disrupted. And with that disruption, interoception slides along a scale between two extremes.
Hypersensitivity — where the body’s signals become threatening in themselves. A heartbeat feels like a cardiac event. The sensations in your stomach register with such discomfort that you replace the thought of hunger with anxiety and stress. Your interoceptive register associates everything as danger.
Hyposensitivity — where the signals fade entirely. Numbness. Lethargy. A flattening of sensation and emotion. You stop feeling hungry. You stop feeling tired. You stop feeling much of anything. This is where burnout most often lives.
Both were useful once. Hyposensitivity in particular makes evolutionary sense in acute danger — a soldier running into battle doesn’t want to be distracted by hunger or emotion. A nurse in a critical situation needs to act without her nervous system asking how she feels. That shutdown is a feature, not a flaw — in the short term.
The trouble is the body wasn’t designed to hold that position indefinitely. It was built for short bursts of threat, followed by resolution and return. When the threat is a culture, or a job structure, or a relationship — something ongoing, without a clear end — the system never gets to resolve. It just keeps holding.
Until it can’t.
How We Got Here: Trauma Dressed as Productivity
David makes an observation that I think is genuinely important and almost never discussed.
He doesn’t believe people worked themselves to death before the Industrial Revolution — not unless they were enslaved, imprisoned, or forced to. The phenomenon of voluntary self-destruction through overwork is, historically, remarkably recent. Which raises a question worth sitting with: is it possible that we are now voluntarily doing to ourselves what people were once made to endure in the atrocities of the past?
David’s argument is that the twentieth century sent us two signals we have never recovered from. The First and Second World Wars made it undeniable that we are capable of ending our own species, capable of destroying the world our species lives in. That is not something a collective nervous system forgets.
And the response — played out through capitalism, through the technology industry, through the entire structure of modern achievement culture — was itself a trauma response. Build more. Build faster. Acquire more control. More capital. More safety through accumulation. The same biological engine that drives fight-or-flight, running at full throttle, pointed at a spreadsheet.
We are living in response to the trauma of our past. I often bring this realisation up, because where we are right now carries so much influence over where we are going. We can carry on being oblivious to it — or we can face it, allow it to move through us, and choose something different for the future.
Because the evidence is already there that more of the same isn’t working. Leaders at the top of Samsung, with everything the world says should make them feel safe and content — suffer more, not less. The harder we grasp for control, the more we are acting from fear rather than thinking. The trauma response dressed as ambition is still a trauma response.
Coming Back — and Why Anyone Can Do This
This is the part I want to sit with, because it matters who this is for.
The path back from burnout doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require education, status, or a psychology degree. A professor can find it, and so can a cleaner. Because what the body needs isn’t sophisticated — it needs to be heard.
The three things David identifies are disarmingly simple:
First — question your relationship with work. Not your output or your ambition, but the story underneath it. The one that says you are what you produce. That stopping is failing. Where did that story come from? Is it actually yours?
Second — understand that the culture that produced that story was itself built from fear. It didn’t come from wisdom. It came from trauma. That doesn’t make it your fault. But it does mean it isn’t fixed.
Third — come back into your body. Learn about your interoception. Understand that your body has been speaking to you your whole life and that you can rebuild that relationship. Practically, physically, without ceremony — a walk, someone’s hand on your shoulder, movement that isn’t optimised for anything, rest that isn’t earned. The simple, repeated practice of noticing what your body is telling you — and choosing not to override it. Rich or poor, professor or cleaner, this is available to everyone. The signals are already there.
You may be thinking this blog went far beyond what burnout usually covers. You’d be right. Because burnout isn’t just one thing. It sits inside a whole picture of where we are — biologically, culturally, historically — that needs to be seen in full if we’re going to do anything real about it. Most of what’s written about burnout addresses the surface. This goes to the root.
And when we really see it — when we genuinely face it and make the changes that follow from that — the difference will be larger than we expect. It starts right here.
The vagus nerve is 80% sensory. Your body has been trying to reach you.
Reconnecting with that signal is something I help people do — through practical, grounded techniques that rebuild interoceptive awareness. If you’re curious, let’s talk.