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A lot of replies here, like in most conversations about burnout, are offering advice about what you can specifically do. A more important question, I think, is to ask why you build a life where you worked so much that you burned yourself out. Burnout just means you depleted the stock of energy you have, and you did it persistently over time to the point where all the neat tricks you can use for motivation no longer work. And you did that, like we all do, for good reasons. It'll probably rhyme with all the reasons we get given socially – like how work is perceived as good, and you want to advance in your career. But there are also deeply personal reasons that you learned that make burnout a consequence you accept, even as you watch yourself deplete yourself. If you ask yourself where and how you learned to work so hard that you deplete yourself, then you can actually give yourself good answers about how to overcome burnout. Burnout, again, is just the end state of a life you learned you had to live. Fixing burnout means listening to what compels you to do that, so that you can stop doing it. And maybe more importantly, you'll also have to notice what on earth you would do other than following the path that leads you to burnout. It's those two things together that help stop burnout: stopping the things that burn you out, and finding out what actually gives you energy and makes your life fuller and more vibrant, alive. You don't have to just spend the rest of your life managing the former, where you may not end up in acute burnout but where you're still constantly managing an always shrinking reserve of energy in the service of things that always shrink it. You have to dream a little bigger, and ask: who am I, and what do I need that makes me and my life fuller? As others have pointed out, a good therapist is a great person to help you navigate this. Burnout is pernicious. It's a self-harming thing that you learned to do because it gave you good things, so you build up all sorts of protections that prevent you from noticing it's bad for you. A therapist is a person who helps you get to a more honest view of what is going on in that dynamic, and where it is rooted in you. |