Burnout - far more than just stress - its your mind and body setting the boundaries that you haven't!

There is a moment I hear again and again in therapy rooms, and I have felt versions of it myself.  It is the moment someone realises they are no longer simply tired or stressed.  They may still be able to do the job. They may still show up. They can still “perform” in the ways the world can measure, maybe not so well. But inside, something has changed. Their brain feels slower. Their patience is thinner. Their emotions are either right on the surface or oddly absent. They have that strange combination of being wired and exhausted, as if the body is running on emergency power while the mind is quietly dimming the lights.  They are burnt out.

Burnout rarely arrives with a dramatic announcement. It is more like a slow leak in the tyre. You can still drive for quite a while, especially if you are capable, conscientious, and used to pushing hard. You adjust your route. You grip the steering wheel harder. You tell yourself you will sort it soon. And because you are still moving, everyone assumes you are fine, including you.

Until one day you realise you are not just tired. You are thinner on the inside. It isn’t about the slow leak anymore.  The wheels have come off!

People describe it in beautifully ordinary ways: feeling oddly tearful at the smallest thing or feeling nothing at all. Dreading emails. Struggling to start tasks that used to be easy. Reading the same paragraph three times. Being snappy with people you love. Having that sensation of being wired at night and exhausted in the morning. Losing your sense of humour. Losing your ability to care. Or, perhaps more quietly, losing that feeling of being yourself.

What makes burnout particularly confusing is that it often happens to the people who look least like they “should” burn out, people who are deeply capable and conscientious. The high achievers. The steady reliable ones. The ones who do not drop balls. The ones who organise, anticipate, support, deliver. The ones who are good in a crisis. The ones who keep going when others stop. Burnout can then feel like betrayal: by your body, by your brain, by your identity. 

I find people that come to see me with burnout, struggle at first to even acknowledge it and its impact, very often because they are executives, highly intelligent, high functioning and high flying and they can’t understand why working harder, which previously worked as a way out of stress, no longer does.  Just know you cannot work your way harder out of burnout, in fact that is the worst thing you can do for burnout.

If any of that is landing, I want to reframe that.

Burnout is not you failing. It is your system trying to protect you. It is the point where your nervous system stops offering you extra fuel that normally lets you ‘power through’, because it has learnt that the demand will not let up, that you just keep going no matter what, and the cost has become too high.

There is also a reason you cannot simply think your way out of it. When the brain is under chronic strain, the parts responsible for planning, perspective, and self-regulation become less accessible as you go into survival mode. That does not mean you are weak. It means you are human.

So, let’s slow it down and make it make sense.

What burnout actually is

The World Health Organization includes burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, and describes it as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about work, and reduced professional efficacy.

That definition matters for two reasons.

I like this definition because it legitimises what so many people feel but struggle to name. It anchors burnout where it belongs: not in your character, but in the relationship between you and the conditions you are living and working in. It is not a personality defect.

Second, it highlights three features that are often present even when someone is still achieving on paper. You can be delivering and still feel exhausted, detached, and less effective. High functioning burnout is one of the most common patterns I see clinically, because competence can mask the cost for a long time. Many people burn out while still doing everything. They burn out quietly, professionally, and privately. They burn out while still being praised.

Stress versus burnout, and why a holiday does not fix it

Stress and burnout can look similar on the surface. Both can involve sleep disruption, irritability, reduced concentration, tension in the body, and that sense of never quite switching off. But they are not the same beast.  Stress is often too much. Burnout is often not enough.  Not enough energy. Not enough emotional bandwidth. Not enough cognitive flexibility. Not enough space to feel like yourself.

Stress tends to push the system into mobilisation. You might feel urgent, restless, revved, driven, tense. You might be doing more to try to get safe. There can even be a grim kind of productivity in this phase, because adrenaline is powerful.  And that often works when a job is stressful for periods of time.

Burnout is what can happen when mobilisation has been running for too long. The system that has given you more to power through starts conserving what’s left. Motivation drops. Focus becomes unreliable. You may feel flat, foggy, cynical, avoidant, or emotionally brittle. A small request feels enormous. A normal setback feels catastrophic. Not because you have suddenly become dramatic, but because the reserves are gone and because your system is protecting itself from further depletion.

This is also why rest does not always work in the way people expect. If you take time off but your nervous system is still scanning for threat, still anticipating the return, still replaying what is waiting, your body does not experience rest as safe. It experiences rest as a brief pause before the next wave, my clients often tell me taking a break makes it worse, as they know what they are going back to.

If you have ever thought, I had a break and I still feel broken, I want you to hear this: the problem is not that you are doing rest wrong. It is that rest alone cannot fix a chronic mismatch between demand and recovery, especially when you return to the same load and the same expectations.

The nervous system explanation that makes burnout feel less mysterious

One of the most compassionate ways to understand burnout is as a state shift, rather than a personality problem. Burnout changes how the brain allocates resources, and once it has tipped into survival mode, you have limited control over how “reasonable” it feels.

When you are under pressure, your brain and body prioritise survival. The trouble is that modern life can keep the survival system switched on with no clear endpoint. Survival mode was meant to help us when there was a tiger on the prowl, and tigers move on. Deadlines, inboxes, performance pressure, interpersonal tension, financial responsibility, caregiving, constant context-switching, and the feeling of being evaluated can feel endless. The body does not distinguish between a tiger and a leadership meeting if your nervous system experiences both as threat.

When your nervous system perceives ongoing pressure, unpredictability, conflict, overload, or threat, your brain prioritises survival. That involves a network of regions that are brilliant in a crisis, but exhausting when switched on all the time.

The amygdala acts like an alarm system, scanning for danger and prioritising what needs attention. The hippocampus helps compare the present to the past, using memory and context to decide whether something is safe. Your prefrontal cortex supports planning, impulse control, perspective-taking, prioritising, and decision-making. Under chronic strain, access to the prefrontal cortex reduces and the brain becomes more reactive and less reflective.

Over time, you may find it harder to initiate, organise, hold perspective, regulate emotions, and remember things. That is why burnout can look like forgetfulness, procrastination, indecision, irritability, or tearfulness.

This is not a moral issue. It is a capacity issue.

Because the brain and body are linked, this shows up physically too. Sleep can become lighter or fragmented. Digestion can become sensitive. Muscle tension can become chronic. Immune function can dip. You might feel jittery, heavy, flat, or simply not restored by rest.

This is not drama. It is physiology.

Polyvagal theory as a useful lens

Polyvagal theory is one framework many people find helpful for making sense of stress states. It emphasises how the autonomic nervous system shapes our ability to feel safe, connect, mobilise, or shut down. It also introduces the idea that the body is constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger below conscious awareness.

In everyday language, it can be useful to think of three broad modes:

• Safety and connection: more access to curiosity, social ease, perspective, humour, creativity, and problem-solving. You can do hard things without being flooded.

• Mobilisation: geared for action. You might feel driven, vigilant, tense, impatient, over-focused, or anxious. You can be productive here, but it is costly.

• Shutdown: the system conserves energy. You might feel numb, foggy, flat, detached, or unable to initiate. From the outside it can look like apathy. From the inside it often feels like collapse.

Burnout often involves oscillating between mobilisation and shutdown. You push, then you crash. You rally, then you go quiet. Once you see it as a nervous system pattern, it becomes less personal and more workable. You stop asking what is wrong with me and start asking what state am I in, and what does my system need to move back towards safety.

The early signs of burnout are usually quiet, and we often ignore them

Burnout does not usually start with a breakdown. It starts with small betrayals of your own needs that feel reasonable in the moment.

It starts with working a little later because it is “just this week”. It starts with answering one more email in bed because it will help you relax, except it does the opposite. It starts with skipping lunch properly, not because you do not value eating, but because pausing feels like you will fall behind. It starts with your body becoming a little more braced, your breathing a little more shallow, your jaw a little more tight, and you do not even notice because you have been living like that for months.

Then the signs become clearer. Sleep no longer does what sleep is meant to do. You wake up tired, even after a full night. You feel a low-grade dread before the day has begun, even on days that are not objectively “bad”. Your attention becomes unreliable. Noise, requests, and interruptions irritate you more than they used to. You feel less generous, less patient, less like the version of you that people are used to.

Most people at this point do not call it burnout. They call it being busy. They call it winter. They call it hormones. They call it a lack of discipline. They call it “I just need to get through this month”.

This is where shame tends to creep in. You start negotiating with yourself in a harsh voice. You should be grateful. You should cope. Other people manage. What is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. Something is happening to you.

On top of the cognitive and emotional changes, you might notice physical symptoms too:

• constant fatigue, heavy limbs

• muscle tension, jaw clenching, headaches

• palpitations, chest tightness, shortness of breath (even without panic)

• gut issues, reflux, nausea, appetite changes

• frequent infections, slow healing

• sleep problems, early waking

• dizziness, shakiness, temperature dysregulation

• libido drop and hormonal cycle changes (for many women)

From a nervous system perspective, these signs are your body’s way of saying: the system is running too hot for too long. The threshold for stress is lowering. Your brain is starting to protect itself by narrowing what it can hold.

Burnout is usually easier to shift at this stage than after the system tips into more sustained shutdown. Prevention matters. Catching it early is far better than having your body enforce the boundaries you have not been able to set.

And to be clear, severe burnout can involve a sharp drop in functioning and may overlap with depression, panic, dissociation, or suicidal thinking. If that is where you are, it deserves timely support. You do not need to prove how bad it is before you take it seriously.

Working with someone with full burnout is a long road to recovery, I often give a ballpark figure of about six months, and that is being generous.  Burnout can mean your brain literally turns you off, where getting out of bed is an effort, I have seen functional impairment where the brain stops you by causing fatigue, limb issues, massive cognitive impairment and intense depression and suicidality.  It is why catching it early. or better still, setting the boundaries and strategies to prevent it, are so important.

Why burnout feels so emotional, even when you “know better”

One of the most disorientating features of burnout is that it changes your emotional range. A lot of people in burnout tell me they feel embarrassed by their reactions. They are used to being calm and competent. Suddenly they are tearful in the supermarket, furious at a minor inconvenience, or strangely detached in a meeting that used to matter.

Some people become tearful in ways that do not feel like them. Some people become snappy and impatient and then feel guilty about it. Some people feel oddly flat, as if the world is happening behind glass. Some people swing between the two, which can feel frightening, because it looks like mood instability, when in reality it is often nervous system instability.

This is the part I wish more people knew: emotional reactions in burnout are often less about what is happening, and more about the state your body is in when it happens.

This is also nervous system logic.

When you are running in chronic stress, your brain is biased towards threat. Your prefrontal cortex, the part that helps you hold perspective and respond thoughtfully, becomes less accessible. Your alarm system becomes quicker to fire. Your capacity for ambiguity drops. Your tolerance for extra demand shrinks.

So you can find yourself reacting strongly to a small email, not because the email is objectively catastrophic, but because your system is already operating near the edge.

It can also bring up grief. Not always obvious grief, but a quieter sense of loss: of energy, time, creativity, connection, softness. Sometimes burnout is the first time people notice how long they have been living in performance mode.

That is not a moral failing. It is a physiological consequence of chronic load.

This is often the point where people start to fear they are “losing it”. I prefer a kinder, truer frame: your system is doing what it does under prolonged strain. The goal is not to judge it. The goal is to change the conditions so the system can come back to baseline.

What actually causes burnout

Burnout is almost never caused by one dramatic thing. It is usually the slow accumulation of many smaller things that, on their own, seem manageable. Together, they become heavy.

Yes, workload matters. But workload on its own is not the full story. Two ingredients tend to turn “busy” into burnout: control and meaning.

When demand is high but control is low, your nervous system stays switched on. You are constantly adapting, anticipating, firefighting, trying to keep up with moving goalposts, responding to urgency that you did not choose. The body reads that lack of agency as threat, and it does what it is designed to do under threat: it mobilises. That is why so many people in burnout feel permanently braced.

When effort is high but recognition is low, something else happens. The system begins to detach. Not in a dramatic, “I am quitting today” way, but in a quieter, protective way. Caring starts to feel expensive. You might notice cynicism creeping in, or a growing sense of emotional distance, because your mind is trying to reduce the cost of a role that is no longer giving back what it demands.

And when your values are repeatedly compromised, burnout can become almost inevitable. If you are constantly asked to deliver work that conflicts with your ethics, your standards, or your sense of what is right, the nervous system registers that as danger too. It creates internal conflict, and chronic internal conflict is exhausting. Cynicism often shows up here, not because you have become a negative person, but because cynicism is the mind’s way of numbing the pain of caring in an environment where caring feels unsafe or futile.

Culture matters as well. In psychologically unsafe workplaces, your body learns to stay on guard. You scan for criticism, blame, politics, unpredictable reactions, or the subtle sense that one mistake will cost you. Even if nothing explicitly “bad” happens on a given day, your system never fully stands down, because it cannot rely on safety.

Then there is the personal layer, and it is important to hold this without turning it into blame.  Burnout is not your fault, but your inner rules can keep you over-functioning long past the point where your body is begging you to stop.

Many high achievers have a powerful internal pressure system. It often sounds like:

·         If I do not do it, it will not be done properly.

·         If I rest, I will fall behind.

·         If I say no, I will disappoint people.

·         If I am not exceptional, I am at risk.

These are not random thoughts. They are learnt strategies, often shaped by early environments, professional cultures, and reinforcement. They may have helped you succeed. They may even have helped you feel safe.

Burnout is often the moment those strategies stop working. Not because you have become weaker, but because the load has outgrown the coping style. And the work of recovery is not to erase your ambition or your standards. It is to update the rules so you can keep living, leading, and caring without paying for it with your health.

The part people do not want to hear, but need to hear

If the load stays the same, if you keep doing the same thing, then burnout recovery is limited.

You can do therapy, journalling, breathwork, yoga, supplements, mindset work, and if you return to chronic overload with low control and constant urgency, the nervous system will keep doing what it has learnt to do.

So part of burnout recovery is an honest audit of demand versus resource.

Not an abstract audit. A real one.

How many hours you are working. How often you get uninterrupted focus. How many decisions you make a day. How many roles you are carrying. How often you feel you can switch off without consequences. How much emotional labour you are doing that nobody sees. How safe it feels to ask for help. 

And even after the audit, it’s working out what to do next, and finding the tolls and strategies to make real change.

This is where burnout becomes organisational and cultural, not just personal.

Executive women and the specific flavours of burnout

Executive women have the highest level of burnout, and there is a reason, and it isn't not being good enough. Once you reach senior roles, the demands often shift from tasks to complexity. You are holding strategy, risk, people, visibility, and decision-making, often with fewer places to put your own uncertainty.

And the data reflects that strain. Women in leadership have long reported higher burnout, and recent Women in the Workplace findings note that six in ten senior-level women report frequently feeling burned out, higher than men at the same level.

Beyond workload, there are patterns that show up repeatedly for executive women.

There is often a performance tax: being expected to be decisive and warm, ambitious and agreeable, strategic and endlessly available. That constant self-monitoring is cognitive load.

There is often invisible labour: mentoring, smoothing dynamics, carrying the culture, doing the emotional glue work that keeps teams functioning.

There is often a second shift at home, even in supportive households, because the mental load has a way of sticking.  There might be children, or family, or friends that have rightful demands on your time and resources.

And there can be an additional layer of pressure if you are navigating gender bias, microaggressions, or the sense that you have to be twice as good to be seen as equally credible. Research from Women in the Workplace highlights the toll microaggressions can take, including higher burnout and increased likelihood of considering leaving.

None of this is about individual fragility. It is about cumulative load, its about it all adding up, and the higher the climb, the bigger the load.

Boundary-setting is not a script or a buzz-word, it is nervous system retraining

People talk about boundaries as if they are purely cognitive and easy to set. As if you simply decide to set one, and then you do it and everyone accepts this and things are great. If it were that easy, many burned out people would be fine.

In reality, boundaries are embodied learning and often go against the environment in which they are needed most, and therefore really hard to implement, especially if you didn’t have them before.  New boundaries are much harder to initiate than ones you have from the start.  And with the same threat pulls of perfectionism or working hard, they can be set to fail if you don’t have the strategies.

If your nervous system has learnt that safety comes from pleasing, performing, being successful, being useful, or staying available, then holding a boundary will initially feel unsafe. You might feel guilt, anxiety, a tight chest, a surge of urgency to over-explain. That response is not proof the boundary is wrong. It is proof the boundary is new and needed.

This is why boundary work often resembles exposure work. You start small. You practise. You tolerate the discomfort without undoing the boundary. You let your body experience that nothing terrible happened. Over time, your system learns that clear limits can be safe.

A subtle but powerful skill here is the pause. Not the dramatic no, but the moment between request and response that gives your thinking brain time to come online.

·         Let me check my capacity and come back to you.

·         I can do X by Friday, or Y by Wednesday. Which is priority.

·         I am not able to take that on this week.

These are not rude. They are adult. They turn urgency into choices. They reduce the tendency to absorb everyone else’s pressure as your problem.  They actually improve functioning, they just feel scary.

Regulation is not a luxury, it is the foundation

If burnout is a state shift, recovery is partly about teaching your system to come back towards safety. That happens through change, repetition, and consistency not insight.

Regulation is just part of burnout recovery work, but it is an essential element. This is where people can get put off, because they assume regulation must look like a two-hour morning routine. In reality, regulation often looks boring.

It is small downshifts throughout the day that interrupt the stress loop: breathing that is slower than your stress breath, a brief walk where you let your eyes move, a deliberate unclenching of jaw and shoulders, stepping outside into daylight, eating without multitasking, having five minutes of quiet before you open your inbox.

These are cues of safety. They are not about forcing calm. They are about giving your nervous system repeated evidence that it can downshift without punishment.  If you are forcing a yoga class in between rushing about, then you are missing the point of yoga!

What recovery looks like when it is realistic

Burnout recovery is rarely a dramatic reinvention. It is usually a series of honest adjustments, repeated consistently.

It often starts with one meaningful reduction in pressure. Something concrete, not symbolic. A renegotiated deadline. A delegated responsibility. A boundary around meetings. A protected focus block. A clear limit on availability.

Then it builds through small daily cues of safety that train your nervous system to downshift, rather than waiting for a crisis to force rest.

Then it deepens through inner-rule work: noticing the beliefs that keep you over-functioning and practising new ways of measuring worth that are not tethered to output.

And, over time, it becomes about meaning. Not in a lofty way, but in a grounded one: what matters, what is sustainable, what you want your life to feel like, and what you are no longer willing to trade your wellbeing for.

Burnout recovery is not the same as “getting your energy back” and then returning to the same pace. Good recovery looks more like a nervous system and lifestyle recalibration.

A helpful way to think about it is in three layers:

• Symptom settling: sleep starts to stabilise, your body stops feeling permanently “wired”, you can concentrate for longer without crashing, and your emotional range returns (not just irritability or numbness).

• Capacity rebuilding: you can do ordinary tasks without needing huge effort, you can tolerate small stressors without tipping over, and you can recover from a demanding day within a day or two rather than a week.

• Pattern change: you are no longer relying on adrenaline, people-pleasing, perfectionism, or fear to keep functioning. Your boundaries hold even when someone is disappointed. Your values lead more than your anxiety does.

If you are reading this and thinking, I cannot possibly change my workload, I want to be gentle and direct at the same time. Some situations genuinely need structural change: role redesign, support, a new team, a new organisation, a different way of working. Self-care is not enough when the system is impossible.  You WILL burnout.

But even within hard realities, there is usually a first lever you can pull. A single boundary. A single conversation about priorities. A single commitment to recovery time being real rather than theoretical. One small act of choosing yourself, repeated, until your nervous system begins to believe you.

Systems can change around you, but you have to know what changes are workable.

A practical strategy map for burnout recovery - Start with stabilisation

When the system is overloaded, strategies that require high discipline can backfire. The first goal is reducing threat and increasing safety cues.  Here is a roadmap to try.

• Lower stimulation on purpose: less multitasking, less scrolling, fewer meetings, fewer big decisions.

• Protect sleep like a medical prescription: consistent wake time, gentle wind-down, light exposure in the morning, caffeine cut-off.

• Eat for steadiness, not perfection: regular meals, protein early, hydration, fewer blood sugar crashes.

• Move, but do not train like you are proving something: walking, mobility, yoga, light strength, swimming. Your goal is regulation, not performance.

If you are in the “wired but tired” stage, the most effective interventions often look boring. Boring is a good sign. Boring means your body is leaving survival mode.

Work with your nervous system, not against it

Burnout is not only cognitive. It is physiological.

Helpful daily regulation practices include:

• Breath practices that downshift: longer exhales, paced breathing, gentle humming, or nasal breathing walks.

• Body-based grounding: feet on the floor, sensory scanning, progressive muscle relaxation, warm showers, weighted blankets.

• Safety cues: slower movement, softer lighting in the evening, nature, calm music, being around people who feel easy.

If your body has learned that “rest equals danger” (common in high achievers), you may need to retrain rest as a safe state. That is a psychological process as much as a physical one.

Name the rules that keep you over-functioning

Burnout often persists because the internal pressure system is still running. They are protective rules, often learnt early, reinforced by workplace culture, and rewarded by external success.

A key recovery task is updating those rules. Not by positive thinking, but by evidence.

• What actually happens when you say no?

• What is the cost of being the person who always copes?

• What would “good enough” look like if you believed you still mattered?

This is where psychology is often the difference between short-term relief and long-term change.

Rebuild boundaries in behaviour, not in theory

Burnout recovery requires behavioural boundaries, not just insight.

Examples that work in real life:

• Time boundaries: a clear finish time, a protected lunch, meetings capped, emails in a window.

• Role boundaries: being clear what is yours to own and what is not.

• Emotional boundaries: noticing when you are absorbing other people’s urgency, anxiety, or poor planning.

• Digital boundaries: no inbox as your nervous system’s alarm clock.

If boundaries feel terrifying, that is information. Fear often means the boundary is necessary, not optional.

Repair meaning and identity, not just energy

Burnout often includes a loss of self. You can end up functional but disconnected.

Recovery includes asking:

• What matters to me now?

• What parts of my life have become only “shoulds”?

• Where have I been living out of alignment with my values?

Values-based work (often from ACT) is powerful here because it helps you build a life you do not need to escape from. It is not about doing less forever. It is about doing what matters, at a pace that your body can sustain.

Use therapy to target the deeper drivers

Burnout is often maintained by deeper patterns.

Psychology can help with:

• Perfectionism and fear-based achievement: shifting from threat-driven performance to values-led excellence.

• People-pleasing and over-responsibility: unpicking the belief that you must earn safety through usefulness.

• Trauma and chronic hypervigilance: where your body has learned that calm is not safe.

• Moral injury: when you are working in a system that repeatedly violates your values.

• Shame-based identity: where rest and needs feel like weakness.

If burnout has tipped into depression, panic, dissociation, or ongoing shutdown, it is worth getting support early rather than trying to push through with self-help alone.

Why retreats can help, and what to look for if you choose one

A psychological retreat is not a holiday with pretty views and inspirational quotes, not if it is done properly. Done well, it is an environment designed to create the conditions your nervous system rarely gets in ordinary life: reduced demand, fewer cues of threat, genuine recovery space, and structured relearning.

There are two mechanisms that make retreats potentially powerful for burnout.

The first is deactivation. When you are removed from the constant triggers that keep your system activated, the body can finally downshift. Sleep can deepen. Breathing can slow. Appetite can normalise. Your mind can stop rehearsing. You remember what it feels like to not be on guard.

The second is relearning. Burnout recovery is not only about feeling better for a few days. It is about building new patterns that survive contact with real life. A retreat can give you enough bandwidth to practise boundaries, emotional regulation, values-based decision-making, and the kind of nervous system resets that actually fit into your working day. It can also help you map your own burnout pattern: what your early warning signs are, what you do when you start sliding, and what you need to change before your system forces a crash.

A retreat is most helpful when it offers:

• Nervous-system-first structure: regulation practices built into the day, not optional extras.

• Psychological depth with skilled support: therapy, coaching, or structured reflection, not just “wellness inspiration”.

• A realistic integration plan: the retreat should end with an aftercare plan, boundaries, and a transition back to real life.

A retreat is less helpful if it functions like an escape and then you return to the same life with the same rules. The goal is not a week of relief. The goal is a lasting shift in capacity, boundaries, and self-leadership. The clever part is not the escape. The clever part is the transfer: taking what you learnt and turning it into a realistic operating system for Monday morning.

Conclusion

Burnout is not a weakness, and it is not a personal failure. It is what happens when a human nervous system is asked to run on high demand, low recovery, and often low emotional safety for too long. Sometimes it is the workload. Often it is the combination of workload with low control, compromised values, relentless responsibility, and an inner rulebook that keeps you over-functioning even when your body is clearly asking you to stop.

Good recovery is not just “rest and get back to it”. It is stabilising your system, rebuilding capacity, and changing the patterns that made burnout possible in the first place. That can look like learning how to downshift physiologically, setting boundaries you actually keep, and unpicking the pressure-driven beliefs that equate rest with risk. It can also mean taking an honest look at culture, leadership, and expectations, and being willing to redesign how you work rather than simply trying to cope better inside a broken setup.

Burnout can become a turning point. Not because it is a good thing, but because it forces a truth to the surface: the way you have been living might be impressive, but it has not been sustainable.

Final thoughts

If you are reading this and recognising yourself, do not wait until you fully collapse to take it seriously. The earlier you intervene, the quicker recovery tends to be. Start small, start practical, and start with your body. You do not need to overhaul your entire life in one week, but you do need to stop negotiating with, or ignoring the signals your system is giving you.

A simple question to hold is this: what would change if you treated recovery as a responsibility, not a reward?

Not something you earn after you have achieved enough, but something you protect because your health, clarity, relationships, and sense of self depend on it.  Learning to avid burnout is far better than trying to recover from it.

If the pace you have been running at has become normal, you might need support to reset what “normal” should be. For some people that looks like therapy or coaching. For others it looks like stepping away long enough to hear themselves again, with structure around sleep, nervous-system regulation, and psychological work that goes deeper than surface-level stress tips. The goal is the same either way: not just to feel better, but to build a life you do not have to recover from.

I talk in the blog about how psychology or retreats can help, not because I am a psychologist and run retreats Lumeah | Luxury psychology retreat) but because I work with people with burnout or heading that way and know that just working harder doesn't work. There has to be real understanding, and real change to recover. I write this with an understanding, as someone who can have the tendency to push hard and to know that we can be just one step away. If you want to discuss your situation than get in touch.

As always until next time

Carla