The Thousand Tiny Surrenders of Burnout
Image: A woman with yellow-tinted glasses stands surrounded by white flags – each representing a boundary crossed, a need ignored, the thousand tiny surrenders that led to burnout.
Personal reflection: I woke to heart palpitations, worked with heart palpitations, exercised with heart palpitations, socialised with heart palpitations, and went to bed with heart palpitations. For years, this irregular drumbeat in my chest became so normal I stopped noticing it was there. Just background noise, like the hum of distant traffic. My body was sending desperate SOS signals, each flutter a small red flag waving frantically in the wind. But I'd become fluent in the language of “ignore it”: "It's just stress from the pandemic." "Everyone's tired." "I'll see to it once we've delivered." "This is what the big jobs feel like."
No one sets out to burn themselves to a crisp. Most don't realise they're on the highway to hell until they're already engulfed in flames, wondering how they got there and why nobody warned them about the smoke.
Burnout is the accumulation of a thousand tiny surrenders—all those moments when we swallowed our "no," ignored our intuition and pushed through to get things done. These little resistances compound silently until one regular Tuesday, your body and brain stage a coup so complete you can't remember your client's name and don't dial into that Zoom call.
What Exactly Is Burnout?
In 1975, psychologist Herbert Freudenberger sat among the wreckage of otherwise high-functioning lives and noticed a pattern. People who had once been passionate, committed, and driven were now shells of themselves—hollow-eyed and empty. He named this phenomenon "burnout" and identified three components that have become its fingerprint:
Emotional exhaustion: The fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long
Depersonalisation: The depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion
Decreased sense of accomplishment: An unconquerable sense of futility
Decades later, the World Health Organisation (WHO) caught up, defining burnout as "a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed."1 This definition frames burnout as a workplace problem with workplace solutions. How bloody convenient.
In reality, burnout doesn't consider the artificial boundaries between "work" and "life." My persistent heart palpitations weren't distinguishing between stress from workplace demands and stress from personal challenges. The body doesn't categorise suffering that way—it simply responds to the accumulation of all our unresolved stressors, whether they originate from boardrooms or living rooms.
Personal reflection: I kept going for years after I should have taken note. Twenty years of unresolved stressors piled up—from sexist quips at work to life-altering events like redundancy, divorce, and international moves. These stressors came from every domain of my life and my body was desperately trying to warn me - flashing lights and shouts of "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!" while I carried on with my PowerPoint presentation,
THE Sneaky Bastard CREEPS Up on Us
I'm furious that society taught me productivity was where fulfilment comes from. Work harder, do more, sleep when you're dead. Every message reinforced that rest was for the weak. I believed it. A shitty hustle culture demanding we ignore our body's warning signals. Headache? Drink more water. Exhaustion? More coffee. Anxiety? That's just what ambition feels like.
Burnout doesn't happen overnight. It creeps up silently, a slow erosion of resilience. According to Freudenberger and North's model, there are 12 progressive stages, beginning with "the compulsion to prove oneself" and ending with complete collapse.2
What does that look like, you ask?
Stage 3: "Neglecting self-care"? That's cancelling your therapy because a client wants an urgent meeting.
Stage 9: "Inner emptiness"? That's staring at a cinema screen and running through your to-do list.
We effectively normalise each stage, making the next seem like a natural progression rather than a warning sign.
Researcher Christina Maslach found that burnout occurs when we experience a persistent "mismatch" between our needs and our environment.3 But instead of creating humane environments, we're told to adjust our inconvenient human needs. So we promise ourselves, "I'll cook myself a nice meal after this deadline"—but that magical future time never arrives. The next 'crisis' emerges, and basic needs get postponed again.
The progression is silent because we've normalised the abnormal. We call exhaustion "dedication." We mistake stress for importance. We confuse depletion with achievement. And when our bodies finally revolt with devastating consequences—elevated cortisol, compromised immunity, cognitive fog4—we're genuinely surprised. How could this happen? I was managing just fine. No. You weren't. We were just taught to mistake our slow disappearance for success.
Women and Burnout: A Thousand Tiny Cuts
For women especially, burnout often results from an accumulation of gender-specific stressors that society expects us to endure with a smile.
Have we ever planned our diaries around our crippling period pain? No we haven't, because even though studies have shown this pain can be as severe as a heart attack,5 we are expected to pop a Panadol—because a woman's miraculous reproductive system should be an afterthought compared to a quarterly review.
Society's expectations create impossible contradictions: be nurturing but not needy, ambitious but not aggressive, beautiful but not vain, ageing gracefully but never actually looking old. Emily and Amelia Nagoski call this "Human Giver Syndrome"—the belief that women exist primarily to serve others' needs.6
Is it any wonder that perimenopause becomes the breaking point? What presents as burnout in midlife is often the culmination of decades of unprocessed stress and unmet needs from navigating these contradictions day after day. By the time we reach our 40s, we've spent approximately 9,745 hours apologising for things that weren't our fault and another 12,683 hours pretending someone else's idiotic idea was brilliant.
Recognising Burnout Before It's Too Late
Remember those three components of burnout identified by Freudenberger? When theory becomes reality, they manifest in unmistakable ways.
Emotional exhaustion is feeling drained before your day begins. Small tasks become mountains. I got worked up one day about walking down the road to get a blood test.
Depersonalisation transforms your perspective from "this work is challenging" to "this work is pointless." You abandon conversations mid-sentence because suddenly, what's the point? The filter between your brain and mouth dissolves entirely.
Decreased accomplishment strikes when former sources of pride feel like exercises in futility, creating a downward spiral of inadequacy. That presentation you once would have smashed? Now feels like watering a garden of plastic plants.
Personal reflection: My rock bottom wasn't dramatic. Instead, two unmistakable patterns emerged: rage and withdrawal. My anger constantly overflowed. My fuse became dangerously short. The gym bro muscling me off the squat rack? Fury. The colleague treating me like his EA? Murderous thoughts. Meanwhile, I retreated from the world. Deeply ashamed of not coping, I built walls. My flat became both sanctuary and prison—the one place I didn't have to pretend I was fine, yet where I marinated in isolation.
Your body sends warning flares long before complete collapse:
Physical signs: Headaches, digestive troubles, endless minor illnesses
Sleep disruptions: Insomnia or hypersomnia, neither refreshing
Mental fog: Reading the same paragraph repeatedly
Behaviour changes: Self-medicating with caffeine or alcohol, avoiding social interaction
The most telling sign? The widening gap between your curated public self and your private reality. That gulf—between who you pretend to be and who you actually are—is where burnout flourishes in darkness.
When Burnout Finally Catches Up With You
When burnout finally catches up with you, it doesn't politely tap you on the shoulder. It slams into you at full speed. One day you're functioning—the next, you can't remember basic tasks, stare at your screen unable to write a basic email, wondering how you ever understood any of it.
This is when every cell in your body collectively decides: "Fuck this bullshit. I tried to warn you with headaches, with insomnia, with anxiety. You ignored every red flag, every distress signal, every plea for mercy. So now I'm shutting down completely until you have no choice but to listen."
Your body knows what your mind refuses to admit—sometimes crumbling is the only way to rebuild.
First Steps Toward Recovery
Personal reflection: I knew I needed therapy, and that became my first real step. The next six months were more of these small steps: expressing my deepest sadnesses, getting loads of rest, fuelling myself with simple meals and even simpler exercise routines, getting lots of natural light and basics like listening to music.
Recovery from burnout isn't linear or quick. No 30-day programme promising a "new you" exists. The journey back requires profound honesty about how you got here. For many, this means dismantling the belief that our worth equals our productivity. Learning to say no without guilt.
Understanding the difference between stressors and stress itself transformed my recovery.7 Removing the toxic job doesn't automatically remove the accumulated stress your body carries. Think about an overflowing bath—turning off the tap stops more water coming in, but the tub is still full. Your body needs specific actions to drain the built-up stress hormones through things like movement, deep breathing, creative expression, or meaningful connection.
Moving Toward Wellness: Radical Self Respect
Wellness lives in action, not state of being. It's the freedom to flow through human cycles—from effort to rest, connection to solitude, giving to receiving.
The person you were before burnout, with all her patterns and beliefs, is precisely who ran aground in the first place. Trying to become her again would only navigate you back to the same dark place.
This is where Radical Self Respect kicks in. Unlike fleeting self-care rituals, Radical Self Respect demands a fundamental reimagining of your relationship with yourself. It means becoming someone who values wellbeing as deeply as achievement, who sees rest as necessity rather than reward, who measures success by authenticity rather than endurance.
This transformation unfolds in small daily choices that honour your humanity. Leaving work on time. Taking a proper lunch away from your desk. Putting down your phone at night. Each tiny choice becomes an act of Radical Self Respect—creating ripples that gradually alter the current of your life, and your very understanding of what it means to live well.
True recovery begins when you start treating your own needs as valid and vital. In a world designed to extract your energy until nothing remains, setting boundaries becomes an act of revolution. Your healing journey starts the moment you realise burnout was never a badge of honour—just a predictable outcome of a broken system.
Footnotes
World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases ↩
Freudenberger, H. J., & North, G. (1985). Women's Burnout: How to Spot It, How to Reverse It, and How to Prevent It. Doubleday. ↩
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. ↩
Iacovides, A., Fountoulakis, K. N., Kaprinis, S., & Kaprinis, G. (2003). The relationship between job stress, burnout and clinical depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 75(3), 209-221. This research discusses the physiological effects of chronic stress including impacts on cortisol levels, immune function, and cognitive abilities. ↩
Iacona, J., & Fitzpatrick, J. J. (2019). Dysmenorrhea management: A review of the current literature. Journal of Nurse Practitioners, 15(10), 771-775. Research comparing severe menstrual pain to the intensity of heart attack pain. ↩
Nagoski, E., & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Ballantine Books. ↩
Nagoski, E., & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Ballantine Books. The authors introduce the concept of "completing the stress cycle" and explain how physical activity, deep breathing, and social connection can help process stress hormones that accumulate in the body. ↩