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 woman sets out to burn themselves to a crisp. Most don’t realise they’re burning until they’re ash—wondering how it happened and why nobody saw the smoke.
Burnout is the accumulation of a thousand tiny surrenders—all those moments when we didn't say "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 full of beans were now shells of themselves—hollow-eyed and empty. He named this phenomenon "burnout" and identified three core traits¹:
Emotional exhaustion – caring too much for too long
Depersonalisation – numbing out, detaching
Reduced accomplishment – the loss of meaning in what once mattered
The World Health Organization now calls it a “workplace phenomenon.”² How bloody convenient. My heart palpitations didn’t care if the stress came from deadlines or divorce. Burnout doesn't respect boundaries between boardrooms and bedrooms.
Personal reflection: I kept going long after I should have stopped. Decades of stress piled up—redundancy, sexism, divorce, international moves. My body screamed RED ALERT, and I kept presenting slides.
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.
Burnout doesn't happen overnight. It creeps up quietly in a slow erosion of resilience. Freudenberger’s model includes 12 progressive stages, from needing to prove yourself to complete collapse. But we normalise each one until collapse feels like a surprise.¹
Christina Maslach found burnout happens when there’s a persistent mismatch between your needs and your environment.³ But instead of changing the environment, we change ourselves. Again. And again.
We call exhaustion “dedication.” Mistake stress for importance. Celebrate depletion like it’s achievement.
Women and Burnout: A Thousand Tiny Cuts
Burnout hits women differently. Not merely the result of overwork—burnout for women is also the impossible expectations: nurturing but not needy, ambitious but not aggressive, ageing but never looking old. We’re taught to apologise for our needs. To serve before we rest.
No wonder perimenopause becomes the final straw. What looks like burnout in midlife is often the crash from decades of smiling through pain.
Recognising Burnout Before It's Too Late
Remember those three components of burnout identified by Freudenberger?¹ 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 when I needed to walk down the road to get a blood test—something I had done without a thought at least 10 times before.
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 (I'm sorry to all the people that I misspoke to, I really wasn't myself).
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 a moment—it was a pattern: rage and retreat. I raged at bullish gym bros and mansplaining colleagues. Then hid away, ashamed I couldn’t cope.
Your body gives early clues:
Headaches, digestion issues, constant colds
Poor sleep, even after “rest”
Brain fog, losing words mid-sentence
Self-medicating with caffeine, alcohol, isolation
The biggest red flag? The growing gap between the polished version of you and the one who cries on the kitchen floor.
When Burnout Finally Catches Up With You
When burnout finally catches up with you, 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 to stop and consider. So now I'm shutting down completely until you have no choice but to listen."⁷
First Steps Toward Recovery
Personal reflection: My first real step was therapy. Then came small acts: more rest, gentle movement, simple meals, sunlight, music.
Recovery isn’t linear. Or quick. There’s no 30-day plan. It begins with radical honesty—and the realisation that removing the stressor doesn’t remove the stress. Like turning off a bath tap, the tub’s still full.
To drain it, your body needs active recovery: movement, breath, expression, connection.⁸
Radical Self Respect
Recovery requires becoming someone new. Not the person who got you here.
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 reversing out of burnout 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. ↩
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Alfred A. Knopf Canada. This work explores how the body manifests illness when we continually override its signals and ignore stress, eventually forcing us to address unresolved issues through physical breakdown. ↩
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. ↩