What If Everything You Know About Burnout Is Making It Worse?
The myths we keep believing — and what recovery actually looks like, from someone who wrote the book on it
👋 Hej,
This edition is a little different.
I am sharing it with someone whose work stopped me in my tracks: Sarah Oelschig, the author of Unburned: A Slightly Messy, Mostly Honest Guide to Life After Burnout.
Sarah did not write a clinical guide. She wrote the book she wished someone had handed her when she was sitting on a video call, staring at her own tired face on screen, unable to remember what she was supposed to do next.
I loved the honesty of the book and the deeply human account of what burnout actually looks like and what getting out of it actually requires.
I asked Sarah five questions about the myths that keep people stuck. Her answers are below.
But first, my take on burnout.
What Nobody Warned Me About Burnout
by Ivan Palomino
I want to be honest with you about something.
When I burned out, I did not write a book about it.
I did not have a framework. I did not have a recovery plan. I had a Tuesday morning where I could not remember what I was supposed to do next — and a growing suspicion that the people around me could see it too.
What followed was not what anyone had prepared me for. Not the wellness articles. Not the management training. Not the well-meaning friends.
Because the reality of burnout is messier, lonelier, and frankly more politically dangerous than anyone tells you out loud.
Here are the two things I learned the hard way.
Your colleagues do not understand. Some of them are waiting.
There is a comfortable story we tell about burnout: that the people around you will rally, give you space, cover for you while you recover.
That is not always what happens.
What I noticed, and I say this without bitterness, because it taught me something important about human nature, is that some colleagues do not see burnout. They see a competitor slowing down.
The political reality of organisations is that someone else’s visible struggle is, consciously or not, an opportunity. The person who used to be fast, sharp, and reliable is now hesitating. Missing things. Quieter in meetings. And in organisations where visibility equals survival, that gap gets filled — quickly, and not always by people who wish you well.
Nobody will say it. It will just happen around you, while you are too exhausted to notice.
I am not saying your colleagues are bad people. I am saying that burnout makes you vulnerable in an environment that was not designed to protect vulnerable people. And knowing that (before it happens) is the only real protection you have.
HR knows. And that is exactly why they will manage it carefully.
This one took me longest to accept.
I genuinely believed that human resources existed to help humans. And to be fair, many HR professionals are decent people trying to do a difficult job inside a broken system.
But here is the structural reality: your burnout, when it surfaces visibly, represents a failure of something. A failure of workload management. Of leadership. Of culture. Of the very systems HR is paid to protect.
You are not just a person who is struggling. You are, institutionally speaking, evidence of a problem nobody wants documented.
So what happens? It gets managed. Quietly. Carefully. With language designed to protect the organisation first. You may be offered support that keeps you contained. You may be moved sideways. You may be encouraged back to full capacity before you are ready — by people who genuinely believe they are helping you.
The shame that comes with this is real. And I want to say something about shame directly — because Sarah addresses the myth that burnout is nothing to be ashamed of. That everyone goes through it. That the stigma is lifting. That your people will show up.
Sometimes they do.
But sometimes the person who encourages you most loudly to go back and fight — to take a new role, restart the engine, prove you are still in the game — is the person who has the least to lose from watching you try. And occasionally, they are the person who has the most to gain.
The friend who tells you to get back in the ring is not always your corner man.
That is not cynicism. That is pattern recognition.
Burnout does not just cost you energy. It costs you clarity — at the exact moment you need it most.
What Sarah knows, and what she writes about with more honesty than most, is that recovery starts with naming what is actually happening. Not the sanitised version. The real one.
Here is her take.
The Myths That Keep You Burned Out
Five questions with Sarah Oelschig — author of Unburned
The burnout badge. Why do we wear exhaustion like a trophy — and what does that say about how broken our work culture really is?
My mother wore her burnout like a badge of honor. She was a teacher, and I grew up watching the culture around her celebrate the staying, the grinding, the never quite having enough left at the end of the day. I absorbed that without realizing it.
We celebrate exhaustion because we conflate suffering with seriousness. The meeting that could have been an email becomes proof of dedication. The person answering Slack at 10 p.m. becomes the office rockstar, not because of better work, but because their suffering is visible. What that tells us about work culture is something most of us already know, and nobody says out loud: we built systems that require humans to operate like machines and then rebranded the breakdown as ambition.
The WHO calls burnout an “occupational phenomenon.” You think that definition is dangerously incomplete. Why — and what does burnout look like when it follows you home?
Burnout doesn’t clock out when you do. It creeps into your kitchen when you’re staring at a sink full of dishes and no dishwasher pods. It settles in during the tenth bedtime story when your child asks what happens when we die. It shows up in your marriage as pure logistics (”Who’s picking up the kids?”) until you and your partner are communicating like strangers in a bakery line, both politely insisting the other take the last scone.
The WHO gave burnout a seat at the table but forgot to invite the rest of our lives.
If we keep treating it as exclusively occupational, we keep missing most of the people actually drowning in it.
You tried journaling, meditation, mindfulness, walks. None of it worked. Why do we keep selling self-care as the cure — and what’s wrong with that prescription?
When I burned out, I did exactly what everyone told me to: journaling, meditation, mindfulness walks, a YouTube spiral that started with makeup tutorials and ended with ancient ER clips. None of it worked.
Self-care, as it’s currently sold, asks depleted people to add things — but depletion is precisely the condition in which adding things is least possible. There’s also something structurally dishonest about the prescription. It places the burden entirely on the individual and quietly lets the systems that produced the burnout off the hook. What actually helped was subtraction. Reducing my schedule. Removing pressure. Returning slowly to one thing that was purely mine.
You scored 35 on your own burnout assessment — after you thought you were through it. What is the biggest lie we tell ourselves about what recovery actually looks like?
I designed the burnout self-assessment in the book. One day, when I thought I was solidly on the other side and writing about burnout, building a body of work around it, I took my own assessment out of curiosity. I scored a 35. Solidly in “you’re in the thick of it, and something needs to shift” territory.
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that there’s a finish line. Recovery is a direction, not a destination.
I still slip. What’s different now is that I notice sooner and course-correct before things get feral. That’s not failure. That’s paying attention.
Most people don’t recognise burnout until they’re standing in a grocery store staring at a bag of baby carrots. Why is it so hard to see in ourselves, and what are the signals we keep misnaming?
You won’t. Or, you will, but you’ll call it something else first. Maybe it’s a rough patch, a busy season, or just stress.
The early signals don’t look like exhaustion. They look like behavior. Re-reading the same email four times. Sitting in your driveway for twenty minutes because walking inside feels like one thing too many. Having eight unread texts from your best friend that you’d rather fake your own death than answer. None of these things announces itself as burnout, and the renaming is exactly what makes it so hard to catch in time.
📕 Want to Go Deeper?
If any of this landed — if you recognised yourself in one of those signals, or in the shame that nobody warned you about — Sarah’s book is where to go next.
Unburned: A Slightly Messy, Mostly Honest Guide to Life After Burnout is the most honest thing I have read on this topic in years. Not because it has all the answers. Because it asks the right questions — and does not pretend recovery is tidy.
You can also find Sarah at sarahoelschigcoaching.com
🧠 Simply Human Micro-Challenge
Name the signal you have been renaming. The thing you have been calling stress, a rough patch, or just a busy season. Write it down — its real name, not the polite version. That is the only starting point that actually works.
Our commitment is to help grow human-centric workplaces — and human-centric lives. This is what the Simply Human Tribe is about.
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Stay Human, Made with 💚 by Ivan Palomino
 | A guest post by
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This feels important: the early signals of burnout often look like behavior before they look like exhaustion.
The unanswered texts. The email read four times. The driveway pause before walking inside. The inability to do one more small thing.
Every single behavior makes sense to the nervous system.
The body is responding to something.
And I think this is where burnout recovery has to go deeper than rest, self-care, or even subtraction.
Those may reduce demand. They may be necessary.
But if the nervous system is still predicting danger around stopping, disappointing people, needing less pressure, being unavailable, or becoming less useful, the body will keep organizing toward override.
That is not a mindset problem.
It is a nervous system imprint.
And if the pattern is being generated there, that is where it has to resolve.
Otherwise recovery becomes managing the consequences while the original alarm remains intact.