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After 20+ years of teaching yoga full-time, Brea Johnson knows burnout intimately. She’s experienced it herself – the kind where cortisol levels crash and you lose patience with students asking the same question for the third time. But she’s also learned how to come back from it and build a sustainable teaching practice.
In a recent OfferingTree webinar, Brea shared practical strategies for yoga teachers to prevent burnout and stay inspired in their work. She’s not here to tell you to take more baths or buy another candle. Instead, she digs into the mental and emotional patterns that drain you before your schedule ever does.
What Actually Causes Yoga Teacher Burnout
Burnout doesn’t just come from teaching too many classes.
What causes yoga teacher burnout? Yoga teacher burnout comes from both external pressures (class planning, marketing, finances) and internal patterns (perfectionism, imposter syndrome, comparison). The combination creates a mental load that rest alone won’t fix.
Burnout doesn’t just come from teaching too many classes. Brea sees two layers of stress at play:
External stressors include:
- Class planning and sequencing
- Managing studio relationships and class dynamics
- Marketing and social media
- Getting students to show up (especially for online classes)
- Financial pressures
Internal stressors run deeper:
- Worries, doubts, and fears about your teaching
- Imposter syndrome
- Perfectionism
- Comparison with other teachers
- Feeling like you never know enough
As one webinar participant noted, there’s often “fear of not giving your best” or “resentment that I’m guiding people through movement, but I have no time for my own.” These internal pressures can be just as draining as a packed teaching schedule.
Warning Signs of Yoga Teacher Burnout
Before you can address burnout, you need to recognize its warning signs. Brea emphasizes tuning into physical sensations rather than staying in your head about stress.
During the webinar, she guided participants through an exercise: notice how your body feels when you’re worried about a class, experiencing imposter syndrome, or feeling exhausted. Common responses included:
- Tension in shoulders, jaw, and throat
- Clenched stomach
- Shallow breathing
- Feeling cold or shaky
- Loss of focus and mental clarity
“The body is in the present moment,” Brea explains, quoting mindfulness teacher Kat. “So when we tune into our body, we’re back in the present moment and we’re not in the worries and fears, future, past doubts, all that stuff.”
Learn to identify your personal warning signs—your “pink flags” before you hit the “red flags” of full burnout. Maybe it’s irritability, resentment, or that hamster wheel feeling where you’re in go-go-go mode but can’t focus. Once you recognize these signals, you can take action before reaching complete exhaustion.
How to Reset Before Teaching
Here’s where yoga practice becomes practical medicine for teachers: you can actually shift your mental state by changing your physical position.
Brea led participants through a revealing experiment. First, embody how you feel when experiencing imposter syndrome—shoulders hunched, arms wrapped protectively around yourself, everything contracted. Then shift: stand like you’re confident, like you know what you’re doing and love teaching.
The difference is immediate. Participants reported feeling “warm and grounded,” “standing tall with an open heart,” and “calm and relaxed” in the confident posture.
“One of the magical things about us as humans is that we are storytellers,” Brea notes. “Your body doesn’t know that that’s not a tiger about to eat you” when you’re stressed about whether students liked your class. By consciously shifting your posture and breathing before teaching, you can activate the part of yourself that has capacity and isn’t burnt out—even when you’re tired.
Her pro tip: start classes lying down.
“Giving yourself and everybody that moment to ground before you really do the breathing and centering…everybody else is feeling a little bit more calm and then the class can roll out really nice.”
Learning to Care a Little Less (Really)
Perhaps the most counterintuitive advice Brea offers: give yourself permission to care less about being perfect.
Yoga teachers, in her experience, care deeply—maybe too deeply. “We wanna do a really good job. We wanna be the best teacher ever. We wanna teach the best classes ever. We want everybody to feel amazing every single class,” she explains. “That’s a lot of mental load.”
She shared a favorite image: an action movie hero walking away from a burning building in slow motion, not looking back. That’s what she wants you to do after class. Teach it. Walk away. Don’t replay every student’s facial expression in your head for the next three hours.
“How glorious…that you leave a class and you don’t look back. And you don’t overthink it and you don’t second guess it,” Brea says. That’s the goal.
This doesn’t mean not caring about your students—it means trusting yourself, trusting the yoga practice, and trusting your students to take what they need from class.
“You won’t be the best teacher for everybody. You’re not always ever necessarily gonna teach the best class ever, because there’s no such thing.”
Boundaries for Yoga Teachers: Why They’re Non-Negotiable
Boundaries emerged as a critical theme throughout the webinar. As Brené Brown says, “Nothing is sustainable without boundaries”—and Brea applies this to both the physical body and teaching relationships.
The challenge? Boundaries are nebulous. You don’t always know until your boundary has been crossed. That’s why practicing physical boundaries in your yoga practice can help you recognize when you need emotional or professional boundaries.
Notice when you need to contain your energy. Are students staying after class to unload on you? Are you saying yes to every sub request and feeling resentful? Are you leaking energy through people-pleasing?
“Get comfortable with boundaries. They will be confronting and that is okay,” Brea advises. “You might lose a class, you might lose a relationship…but if it was the right boundary for you, it the right fallout.”
Setting boundaries might feel uncomfortable, especially for people-pleasers. But without them, you’ll continue draining yourself until there’s nothing left.
When Teaching Feels Heavy: Bringing Play Back
When teaching feels heavy and serious, play becomes medicine. “When we can be playful…life is better,” Brea says simply.
Play helps you:
- Take healthy risks without overthinking
- Think outside the box
- Stay in flow rather than worry about consequences
- Give yourself and students permission to make mistakes
Her favorite playful teaching moment? Asking students in tree pose to pick up their yoga block with their feet instead of bending down—instantly disrupting the serious, performative quality that balance poses often have.
“Everybody’s laughing and we’re having fun. And then we go into the balance with more ease and lightness.”
Off the mat, creativity is just as important.
“Go into the forest. Listen to a podcast that has nothing to do with yoga. Go hang out with people who don’t practice yoga,” she suggests. Give your mind a break from thinking about sequences and cues.
The Four Pillars of Sustainable Teaching
Brea teaches what she calls the “Four Pillars of Sustainable Yoga,” which apply both to movement practice and to building a teaching career:
- Frequency – How often are you teaching? How often are you thinking about teaching? Are you ruminating constantly?
- Variety and Diversity – Are you always doing the same thing? Try teaching at a different studio, taking a different class style, or changing your approach.
- Boundaries – As discussed above, containing your energy and knowing your limits.
- Restore and Support – What actually restores and supports you? (And lying on bolsters is wonderful, but it’s a band-aid if you’re not addressing the deeper patterns.)
When you’re feeling tired, check in with these pillars to identify what needs adjustment.
Why Yoga Teachers Need Community (and How to Build It)
Teaching yoga can be surprisingly isolating, especially if you teach online or at multiple studios without connecting with other teachers. Yet humans are wired for community and connection.
Brea’s solution? Start a “yoga teacher club”—even if it’s informal. Gather a few teachers from your studio once a month to talk about teaching. Structure it around themes like sequencing one month, class management the next, or whatever challenges you’re facing.
“If you’ve got the initiative…if you facilitate and start the ball rolling,” she encourages, this can be powerful. “Together we know a lot and together we heal and we learn.”
Other ways to build community:
- Attend other teachers’ classes and chat with them afterward
- Offer free workshops for local yoga teachers
- Create a teacher exchange where everyone teaches something they love
- Join online communities or teacher training programs that emphasize connection
The goal is collaboration over competition—sharing your struggles and normalizing the very human challenges of teaching.
The Deeper Work That Actually Prevents Burnout
Throughout the webinar, Brea kept returning to a central point: the real antidote to burnout isn’t just physical rest (though that matters). It’s doing the deeper yoga work.
“Learning how to build a container that you can be confident…and you trust yourself, you’re trusting the yoga…that will probably ease 85% of your burnout,” she estimates.
This means:
- Recognizing your thought patterns and how they show up in your body
- Working with your perfectionism and people-pleasing tendencies
- Building boundaries even when it’s uncomfortable
- Trusting that mistakes are okay and you’re still a good teacher
- Getting professional support through therapy when needed
“Lying around on bolsters is wonderful, but they’re band-aids if we’re not doing that deeper yoga work,” Brea emphasizes.
How to Build a Sustainable Yoga Teaching Career
Brea’s final reminder cuts through all the noise: “We’re not doing brain surgery, we’re not saving lives.” Yes, your teaching matters. Yes, students benefit from your care and attention. But the stress you’re carrying about whether you demonstrated a pose three times or whether everyone loved your sequence? Your body experiences that stress the same way it would experience a genuine threat.
The path forward means checking in with your body regularly, normalizing your fears and doubts (they’re universal), setting boundaries, playing more, and building community with other teachers who understand.
As Brea learned through her own burnout and recovery, sustainability isn’t about teaching less—it’s about teaching with more ease, trusting yourself more deeply, and remembering that you don’t have to be perfect to be effective.
“Trust yourself, trust the yoga and trust the people coming into your classes. It’s not your responsibility to take care of them all in all the ways.”
When the Admin Becomes Part of the Burnout
One thing Brea didn’t explicitly cover but that we see constantly: sometimes the administrative side of teaching like juggling scheduling apps, payment platforms, email lists, and your website, becomes its own source of exhaustion. If you’re context-switching between five different tools just to book a class, that mental load adds up.
Looking for tools to simplify your yoga teaching business? OfferingTree brings together website, booking, on-demand video, email, and more in one platform with automation features designed to reduce overwhelm so you can focus on what you love. Learn more about how we support yoga teachers.
Interested in Brea Johnson’s work? Check out Heart and Bones Yoga for online classes, teacher training, and the Yoga Teacher Podcast.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Yoga Teacher Burnout
What causes yoga teacher burnout?
What are the warning signs of yoga teacher burnout?
Your body often signals burnout before your mind catches up. Watch for tension in your shoulders, jaw, or throat. A clenched stomach. Shallow breathing. Feeling cold or shaky. Loss of focus. Emotionally, you might notice irritability, resentment toward students, or that hamster-wheel feeling where you’re in constant go-mode but can’t actually concentrate. These are your “pink flags” before you hit full burnout.
