Burnout Recovery: Because Smoke Isn’t a Skillset

A significant part of this piece draws from The HBR Guide to Beating Burnout – a genuinely useful collection of insights and practical tools from multiple contributors. The rest comes from personal experience: the things I’ve learned, ignored, and eventually had to face the hard way.

It feels especially relevant in the final quarter of any year, when you can see the finish line but it somehow keeps moving further away – when every small step forward feels like a full marathon.

You might not be dealing with full workplace burnout. You might just be tired. But if that tiredness has crossed the line into something heavier, the kind that makes you question your purpose, performance, or patience – this is for you. It’s about recognising the signs of burnout, understanding why burnout happens, and starting your own burnout recovery before the system crashes.

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The Reality Check

It’s that time of year when your brain feels like a Windows 95 desktop trying to run Adobe Premiere, Spotify, and your feelings – all at once, while the fan screams like a dying pigeon. Deadlines multiply, your inbox reproduces like bacteria, and even your caffeine has started asking for caffeine. You can see the finish line, but it keeps sprinting away like it owes you money.

It’s also, tragically, that time when everyone’s frantically chasing year-end targets and the mythical bonuses attached to them. You know the ones – those colleagues who’ve spent nine months in witness protection suddenly reappear in October, wide-eyed and spreadsheet-hungry. If they’re not panicking yet, they will be soon. And when they do, they’ll want to borrow your sanity to finish their work. Don’t let them. You don’t owe other people’s chaos your capacity.

Not everyone is dealing with burnout symptoms. Most people have simply worked hard all year and are, quite reasonably, getting tired. This isn’t about diagnosing a collective breakdown; it’s about recognising when tired has turned into something more serious – when emotional burnout has set in and your “I just need a holiday” has quietly become “I can’t do this anymore.”

That’s what this piece is really about – spotting the signs of burnout before they turn into sirens.

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Burnout: A Global Phenomenon

Back in May 2019 – that brief moment of calm before humanity collectively unhinged, started hoarding toilet paper, binge-watching documentaries about big cats, and baking like there was a global shortage of serotonin – the World Health Organisation decided to weigh in on what many of us already suspected: burnout isn’t laziness, it’s an occupational phenomenon.

Not a disease, not a diagnosis – more like the world’s driest way of saying, “Collectively, you’ve been working like caffeinated hamsters in a blender – and you’re all surprised it’s getting a bit messy.”

And workplace burnout shows up in three ways:

1. Energy depletion or exhaustion – the kind where you’re running Windows 95 on a solar panel in the rain, and even your motivational quotes have started sighing at you.
2. Increased mental distance or cynicism – that creeping phase where enthusiasm quietly retires, and every meeting makes you fantasise about moving to Portugal to open a coffee truck with no Wi-Fi.
3. Reduced professional efficacy – the unnerving moment when your once razor-sharp brain now struggles to remember your own login password or why you opened this tab in the first place.

Even after the chaos that followed – the Great Banana Bread Bake-Off, the sourdough arms race, those “marathons” people ran in their bathrooms, and the cultural fever dream known as Tiger King – the WHO hasn’t changed a word. Because they were right. Burnout recovery isn’t about curing a disease, it’s about unlearning a culture that celebrates exhaustion.

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Sustained Growth vs Quick Burn

The goal isn’t to burn brighter, it’s to burn sustainably. Because somewhere along the way, “high performance” got rebranded as “slow self-destruction with an Outlook calendar.”

So before you heroically sprint into another all-nighter fuelled by anxiety and leftover conference muffins, ask yourself three uncomfortable questions:

1. Does your job help you be your best, or just keep you busy? Working below your potential is like driving a Ferrari in first gear – noisy, painful, and guaranteed to attract the wrong kind of attention.
2. Do your values and interests still align with what you do every day? Cambridge taught me that high-impact leadership depends on alignment – if your values and your company’s values are on different planets, you’ll spend all your energy trying to breathe.
3. What does your future look like here? Be brutally honest. Are you climbing, coasting, or clinging? Is your five-year plan actually your dream – or just something you keep saying because HR keeps asking?

Even meaningful work isn’t immune. The people who care most often burn out fastest – the NGO heroes, the teachers, the nurses, the “I just want to make a difference” types. Passion is an accelerant: it burns hot and bright until you forget to refill the tank. You start off changing the world, and somewhere along the line you’re just changing the printer cartridge for the third time that week while whispering motivational quotes to the photocopier.

Working sustainably isn’t about caring less, it’s about caring longer. You don’t need to dim the fire; you just need to stop setting yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm.

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The Six Causes of Burnout

According to HBR, workplace burnout usually grows from six root causes – a sort of corporate six-pack, except instead of abs you get anxiety and an ulcer that hums show tunes.

1. Workload – The people-pleaser trap. If you can’t say no, your calendar will eventually do it for you, usually at 11:43 p.m.
2. Perceived Lack of Control – The creeping sense that no matter how hard you work, someone else is flying the plane, and they’ve just gone to lunch.
3. Reward – When the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Or worse, when you realise you’ve been squeezing a lemon into someone else’s margarita.
4. Community – When trust fractures and the office starts to feel like a polite hostage situation.
5. Fairness – When you’re doing the heavy lifting and someone else gets the credit.
6. Values Mismatch – Authenticity isn’t a luxury; it’s insulation.

You don’t have to hit all six to qualify, two or three will do the job nicely. Four or more and you qualify for a free emotional-support coffee mug that says “It’s fine, I’m fine, this is fine.”

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Collaborative Overload

And then there’s the silent killer of modern work: collaboration.

HBR calls it “collaborative overload,” and it comes in two distinct flavours:

1. The Surge – sudden tsunami of “Can you just jump in on this?” requests.
2. The Slow Burn – when your reputation for competence slowly turns you into the office Swiss-Army knife: used constantly, cleaned never.

Every extra meeting, Slack ping, and “quick brainstorm” is a micro-withdrawal from your mental bank account. You think you’re being productive, but really you’re just running an emotional Ponzi scheme – borrowing energy from tomorrow to survive today.

It’s like turning up to the gym every day, maxing out on every machine, and wondering why your body now makes noises like an old fax machine. Growth doesn’t happen from constant lifting; it happens when you stop trying to bench-press the entire office.

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The Breaking Point

For me, it didn’t happen quietly or later. It happened right there – in front of her.

The VP of Marketing. Someone I respected and had worked hard to learn from. She was sharp, wildly smart, and strategically brilliant – the kind of person who could see the chessboard ten moves ahead.

That day I was brittle. Holding things together for months. Rallying teams. Pretending everything was fine while my brain felt like an overclocked laptop left in a sauna. Every deadline felt like an ambush. Every email a test.

She called: “Coffee area?”
I said: “Meeting room.”
She came up. She sat down. She said: “We’re moving you to another project.”

And that was it.

My throat went dry, my face went hot, and before my brain could intervene, my body made the executive decision to just… cry. Not a dignified tear – the full, silent, ugly cry of a man who has tried to been strong for too long.

She didn’t flinch. Just said quietly, “You need to go and get help.”

That sentence hit harder than any feedback I’ve ever received. It was the first time anyone had given me permission to start my own burnout recovery. It reminded me of what I later called my “Bohlingers Moment” – the realisation that something had to change.

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The Cost and Consequences

Workplace burnout doesn’t end when you stop working. It follows you home like a lost dog, except instead of wagging its tail, it eats your concentration, your patience, and your sense of humour.

It eats your confidence first. Then your creativity. Then your relationships. You become the background-noise version of yourself, still there, but dulled.

And then comes the shame.
Even when you know burnout isn’t weakness, it still feels like failure. Especially for those of us who built our identity on resilience.

The cruelest part? It disguises itself as normal. You start saying, “I’m just tired.” But seasons end. Burnout doesn’t.

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Reflection and Reconnection

Once the noise settles, what comes next isn’t recovery – it’s reckoning.
You start realising you don’t know what “better” looks like anymore. You just know you can’t go back.

The HBR Guide to Beating Burnout offers four practical reflection tools for anyone wondering how to recover from burnout:

1. Draw your lifeline – Plot the highs and lows of your life and look for where you felt alive, not just productive.
2. Define your principles for life – Decide what matters most and whether you’re living it or just liking the idea of it.
3. Extend the horizon – Write down what you want to experience before you die. Broaden your scope beyond work.
4. Envision your future – Picture your ideal life fifteen years from now. If your first thought is “more meetings,” start again.

These questions won’t fix burnout symptoms, but they’ll help you rebuild from emotional burnout – piece by piece, with honesty and intention.

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Recovery Through Reinvention

Burnout recovery isn’t a single act; it’s a rebuild. You don’t bounce back, you reconstruct around it.

When I stopped trying to “get back to normal,” things started to change. Because normal was the problem. Normal was the overpromising, the late nights, the quiet resentment of knowing that “no” had been deleted from my vocabulary.

When I work with teams now, I use a framework called the Titanic Diagnostic, which breaks change into three stages:

1. Anticipate – Recognise the early signs of burnout.
2. Design – Build for better, not just faster. Redesign how you work and measure success.
3. Implement – Small, consistent action beats dramatic overhauls every time.

The same framework that helps organisations reinvent themselves works just as well for people. You don’t need a fresh start; you need a new rhythm.

Recovery isn’t about becoming the old you again – it’s about building the version that knows better. The one who can see the iceberg early and has the humility to steer, not just the stamina to crash prettier.

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The Takeaway

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably tired – and that’s okay. You don’t need to be fixed; you just need to be realigned.

Burnout recovery isn’t a comeback story. It’s a quiet rebuilding of the things you neglected while trying to prove you could handle everything. It’s learning to rest without guilt, to say no without apology, and to recognise that resilience isn’t about taking more – it’s about letting go of what’s too much.

And if you’re still in it – hovering somewhere between “just tired” and “done” – remember: you’re not broken. You’re a human being trying to function in a system that rewards exhaustion and labels it commitment. Step out of the noise. Find a still point. Start there.

Because if burnout has taught me anything, it’s this: you can’t keep running an emotional Ponzi scheme forever. At some point, the energy auditors show up – and they don’t accept “coffee and optimism” as valid tender.

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If you feel like your brain’s about to file for bankruptcy, start with the Titanic Diagnostic. It’s cheaper than therapy, and if you want to talk it through, my inbox is open.