Corporate culture rewards the person who never stops. Until they collapse. I was that person. This is what I wish someone had told me earlier.
I used to wear my exhaustion like a medal. Sixteen-hour days. No holidays. Always available. Always on. I thought this was what success looked like. I thought the tiredness was proof that I was serious.
Nobody told me I was building a fire inside myself. Nobody told me that the body keeps score. Nobody told me that the nervous system has a limit, and that when you hit it, the consequences are not a week off work — they are years of rebuilding.
Burnout is not tiredness. I want to be very clear about this because the word gets used so casually now that it's lost its weight. Burnout is a systemic collapse. It is the body and mind shutting down non-essential functions to survive. It is not fixed by a holiday or a spa weekend or a mindfulness app.
When I burned out — properly, completely — I couldn't read. I couldn't hold a conversation. I couldn't feel anything except a kind of grey static that sat behind my eyes and wouldn't lift. I had been a high-functioning professional for fifteen years. I became someone who couldn't get to the end of a sentence.
The recovery took years. Not weeks. Years. And the hardest part wasn't the recovery itself — it was accepting that I had done this to myself. That the culture I had bought into, the identity I had built around productivity and performance, had been slowly eating me alive.
Here's what I know now: burnout is not a badge. It is not evidence of how hard you work or how much you care. It is evidence of a system that has failed you — and that you have, in some ways, failed yourself by not listening to the signals your body was sending long before the collapse.
The signals are always there. The sleep that doesn't restore. The irritability that has no clear cause. The creeping sense that nothing means anything anymore. The way joy starts to feel like a memory rather than a present experience.
If you're reading this and recognising yourself — please don't wait for the collapse. The collapse is not the beginning of the story. It's the end of a chapter you could have closed earlier.
You are not a machine. You are not defined by your output. And the most productive thing you will ever do is learn to stop before the system breaks.