I’ve written about burnout before. And then, in a twist nobody saw coming, it got worse. The past four years have been one hurdle after another – job stress, life admin, the general chaos of being a person in the world who feels everything at full volume. Girl. My legs are tired.
A few weeks ago I had a week off. An actual, calendar-blocked, no-meetings week off. And I had plans. I had a whole beautiful list. I was going to cook proper meals and read the books that have been staring at me judgementally from the shelf. I was going to go on little adventures, maybe do a matcha walk, be the kind of woman who uses her free time intentionally and posts about it tastefully.
I did none of it. Genuinely none. I watched television I barely remember. I slept at weird hours. I patted Lulu while he regarded me with the specific contempt of a creature who has never once felt tired in his life. And after a few days of shame spiralling about the wasted week, something shifted. Not realisation, I already knew rest was valid, I’ve read the wellness content, I’ve written the wellness content. It was acceptance. That the crumbling was the recovery. That my body had simply refused to perform healing on a schedule.
So if you’re burnt out, properly, bone-deep, one-more-thing-away-from-crying-in-the-carpark burnt out, here’s what actually helped. Not sheet masks. Not a 5am yoga routine. Actual, unglamorous, slightly embarrassing advice.
Lower the Floor, Not Just the Bar
The first thing nobody tells you about burnout recovery is that the list has to go. Not be condensed. Not be reorganised into a cuter format with a nice font. Gone. Because the problem with burnout is that even your recovery becomes a task, and then you fail at resting and feel terrible about that too, and now you’re burnt out and self-critical, which is genuinely worse.
Your job, in the early stage of recovery, is not to be productive. It’s not even to be well. It’s to just still be here tomorrow. That’s it. That’s the whole brief. If you ate something today that wasn’t just caffeine and stress, that’s a win. If you got outside for ten minutes even though nothing about it felt restorative, that counts. If you had a shower, put on something that isn’t activewear, and managed to make a phone call without your voice shaking, excellent. Outstanding performance. Gold star.
The floor is the only goal when you’re this depleted. Not the bar. Not the ceiling. We’re not aspirational right now. We’re surviving, and survival has its own kind of grace if you’re willing to stop penalising yourself for it.
Stop Explaining Your Exhaustion
Somewhere along the way, burnt out people got the idea that exhaustion needs to be justified. That you have to list your stressors in a convincing enough order that someone will finally agree you’ve earnt a break. You haven’t slept properly in months, your nervous system is cooked, and you’re still presenting evidence like you’re in a courtroom hoping the jury lands on your side.
You don’t owe anyone a comprehensible reason for being tired. Life is tiring. Four years of continuous difficulty is tiring. The cumulative weight of small things is tiring in ways that are incredibly hard to articulate, and you will exhaust yourself further trying to make other people understand it. Some people won’t. That’s their limitation, not your failure to communicate.
Tell the people who need to know that you’re not available at full capacity. Cancel the things that can be cancelled. Say no to the things that are optional. You don’t have to frame it dramatically or explain the backstory. “I’m not up for it right now” is a complete sentence, and it doesn’t need footnotes.
Do the Smallest Possible Version of Normal
There’s a specific kind of despair that settles in when you’ve been burnt out long enough to start losing the shape of your regular life. Your routines dissolve. The things that used to feel automatic start requiring effort you don’t have. And then the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be looks so enormous that you don’t even try to cross it, which makes the gap feel bigger, which is a genuinely miserable cycle.
The way out isn’t to restore everything at once. It’s to pick one small, ordinary thing and do a miniature version of it. Not a walk, five minutes outside. Not cooking, making toast without burning it and considering that a domestic achievement. Not a full skincare routine, just washing your face before bed because it’s the kind of thing a person does and you are still, technically, a person. The smallest possible version of normal is a thread back to yourself. Pull gently.
I just kept doing my skincare routine before bed. No sheet masks. No red light therapy. Just slapping product on my face and hoping for the best. Not because it fixed me. It didn’t. But because it was a ritual I could manage, cleanser, serum, moisturiser, done, while Lulu supervised from the sink with the judgemental energy of a creature who has never once had to maintain a collagen routine, and it gave the day a small, quiet ending instead of just dissolving into sleep unmarked.
Accept That Rest Looks Ugly
Nobody is posting their real burnout recovery. They’re posting the aesthetically acceptable version, the soft morning light, the linen sheets*, the steaming mug held in a way that suggests peace has been achieved. Real recovery looks like watching the same show for the fourth time because choosing something new requires more brain than you currently have. It looks like falling asleep at eight thirty and waking up at two and lying there in the dark feeling vaguely confused. It looks like crying at an ad, or at nothing, or at a text message that was actually perfectly fine.
It looks like the week I just had. Where I had a whole plan and did none of it and slowly, reluctantly, accepted that my nervous system had its own agenda and it wasn’t going to negotiate. The doing nothing wasn’t laziness. It was the most honest thing I’d done in months. My body finally got to stop performing okayness and just stop.
If your recovery doesn’t look like the content, that’s correct. The content isn’t real. Rest is rarely photogenic. Let it be ugly. Let it be quiet and slow and a bit boring and a bit sad. That’s what it actually is, and it works regardless of whether it looks good.
*And by now, we all know how I feel about linen.
Trust the Slow Rebuild
Here’s what I’ve learnt about coming back from burnout: you don’t wake up one day and feel fine. There’s no threshold you cross, no moment where the credits roll and you emerge healed and newly purposeful with a capsule wardrobe* and a sustainable morning routine. It’s slower than that. And less linear. You’ll have a good day and then a bad week and then a medium stretch where you can’t tell if you’re recovering or just coping, and the answer is probably both.
What I can tell you is that it does shift. Not all at once, and not on a schedule, but it does. The matcha starts tasting like something again instead of just hot liquid to get through the morning. The things you used to enjoy start looking interesting from a distance, even if you’re not ready to do them yet. Lulu will do something so chaotically unhinged that you laugh, genuinely laugh, and then feel surprised by the laugh, because you’d forgotten you still had it in you.
Trust the small signs. Don’t demand big ones. Recovery from real, serious burnout is not a glow up. It’s more like a slow thaw, gradual, uneven, and completely impossible to rush. Be patient with yourself in the way you’d be patient with someone you actually love. That’s not a nice idea. It’s the only strategy that works.
*Which, as dopamine dressing maximalists we will certainly not be doing.
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