Burnout mostly gets talked about once it's over. People mention it in the past tense, usually with a little laugh, as if it was bad weather that passed through. Hardly anyone says "I think I'm burning out" while it's actually happening.
That stuck with me when I went back through the interviews from One Conversation Away, the online summit I ran in the summer of 2019. I spoke to 28 people about a single conversation that changed their life. A surprising number of those conversations were about someone else spotting the warning signs before they did.
One guest had spent years at a big corporate firm and was miserable under a new manager. A friend told him about losing a job she loved because a coworker had wronged her. Later she saw it as a sign she'd been on the wrong path, and she even went back to thank that person. Then she said the bit he never forgot. If you don't recognise these signals, they get louder and more painful. He started looking at his own year differently. The stress at work. The way he'd stopped bothering with the gym. He took a week off at Christmas and, a couple of days into January, told his partner he was leaving, even though he was up for promotion.
I like that idea of signals getting louder, because it means the quiet ones are a kind of gift. Another guest had spent years running a company that never switched off. One of her coaches noticed she was strangely calm in a situation that should have been really uncomfortable. A couple of hours later he asked her one question. How numb are you? She realised the stress had been wearing her body down and she hadn't been feeling it. After months of going back and forth, she sold the company.
That's the one I think about most. Pain at least gets your attention. Numbness feels like coping, and it's easy to mistake it for being tough.
A filmmaker I spoke to had gone about ten years building her business with no social life. Someone she worked with persuaded her to get tested, and the results showed her body was seriously run down. Her health got worse before it got better, and daily meditation was a big part of how she healed and started sleeping properly again. Her point was simple. If you don't look after yourself, burnout eventually makes the decision for you.
Sometimes the answer is to stop. A copywriter I interviewed was running an agency and working every waking hour, even working from the stands at her kids' games. Her husband sat her down and wrote "permission to fail" on a piece of paper. If she wouldn't give it to herself, he said, he would. What hit her was that she was already failing by carrying on as she was. She let her clients go, spent a year working inside an agency, and later went all in on her own business with him alongside her.
And sometimes the answer is to walk away. One guest was in a fitness business with partners and had stopped growing. He felt held back. Someone he respected told him to simply leave, because his future was worth far more than the time and equity he'd already put in. Within a few months he had the hard conversation and let his partners decide what was fair. I think that's harder than it sounds. Walking away from something you built can feel like admitting all that time was wasted. The point he was given was that the time had been spent either way, and his future counted for more.
What I noticed across all of these is that the people closest to them often saw it first. A friend or a partner, someone outside their own head, saying it out loud. I think that's partly why burnout gets talked about in the past tense. From the inside the early signals are easy to explain away, and it often takes another person to name them.
What I took from this one
- Losing interest in things you used to enjoy, like the gym, counts as a warning sign.
- Feeling numb is easy to mistake for coping, so ask yourself honestly how numb you are.
- A proper week off can give you the clarity to make a call you've been putting off.
- If you can't give yourself permission to fail, let someone close to you give it.
