Dealing with Burnout
A colleague of mine — I won’t say her name, she might read this — told me last month she’d started crying in her car before work. Not every morning. Just Mondays and Wednesdays. Like her body had picked its own schedule for falling apart, completely separate from the one her calendar app had in mind. She mentioned it the way you’d mention a traffic jam. Matter-of-fact. Which honestly made it worse.
That’s the thing about dealing with burnout. By the time you actually notice it, you’ve been living inside it for months. The alarm goes off and your first thought isn’t about what’s ahead — it’s how many hours until you can lie down again. You answer emails but couldn’t tell anyone what they said. Someone asks how you’re doing and your mouth says “good, busy” while the rest of you is just… somewhere behind glass. Running on a battery that charges to maybe 12% overnight and you’re supposed to stretch that until six.
Here’s what caught me off guard when I started looking into this. We treat burnout like it’s a modern invention — open offices, Slack pinging at midnight, hustle culture, all that. But a Roman philosopher described this exact exhaustion two thousand years ago. A medieval nun wrote about your life force literally drying up. A Japanese poet walked away from his entire career in the 1680s because he couldn’t keep going. This isn’t new. Not even close.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
Four people. Four different centuries. A Roman statesman who worked for a tyrant. A German abbess who ran an entire monastery. A Japanese wanderer who left everything behind. And an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the worst thing the twentieth century did. All of them hit a wall — and all of them had something to say about dealing with burnout that still holds. What they found on the other side wasn’t a productivity hack or a morning routine. It was something older, and quieter, than that.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.”
Seneca — Roman Stoic philosopher, 4 BC – 65 AD
On the Shortness of Life
Seneca’s day job was chief advisor to Emperor Nero. Which sounds impressive until you remember that Nero was — how do I put this — completely unhinged. Dangerous, unpredictable, and demanding in ways that would make your worst manager look like a saint. Seneca spent years navigating that. Smiling when he had to. Writing speeches he didn’t believe in. Performing competence while his actual life was being chewed up from the inside.
Then he wrote this essay, “On the Shortness of Life,” which is basically a two-thousand-year-old burnout manifesto. His argument was simple: life isn’t short. We just spend most of it on things we never actually chose. Meetings that didn’t need to happen. Obligations we inherited from someone else’s expectations. And honestly? I think about that a lot. Dealing with burnout isn’t about finding more energy. It’s about noticing where all your energy has been going — and whether any of it was actually yours to begin with. Seneca would say the exhaustion isn’t the problem. That’s the symptom. The problem is you’ve been running someone else’s race.
“There is a power that has been since all eternity, and that force and potentiality is green.”
Hildegard von Bingen — Causae et Curae
OK so Hildegard. Benedictine nun. Born in 1098. She ran an abbey, composed music, wrote medical texts, had visions that she turned into sprawling theological works, and — I’m not making this up — she invented her own language. She was the twelfth century’s most determined overachiever. But here’s what makes her relevant.
She had this concept she called viriditas — roughly “greening power” or “life force.” She believed everything alive carries this green fire inside, and that it can dry out. Not as a metaphor. Literally. She wrote that pushing yourself past your limits doesn’t just make you tired — it makes something in you wilt. The way a plant withers when you forget to water it for weeks. And the cure wasn’t willpower, wasn’t prayer, wasn’t gritting your teeth harder. It was rest. Actual, physical, no-excuses rest. A nun in the twelfth century, telling other nuns: stop. Lie down. Let the green come back. I think about her on Sunday nights when I’m already dreading Monday and the week hasn’t even started yet. Nine hundred years ago and she already knew that dealing with burnout starts with giving yourself permission to stop.
“Days and months are the travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.”
Matsuo Bashō — The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Basho was successful. I mean really successful, by the standards of 1680s Japan. He had students, patrons, a comfortable setup in Edo. The kind of life people work their entire careers toward. And at forty-one he just left. Locked his house, gave away his things, started walking. Not a holiday. He walked for years, through mountain passes and rainstorms, sleeping in temples and sometimes under trees, writing these tiny seventeen-syllable poems along the way.
Why? The official version is artistic calling. But read the opening of his travel journal and it reads like a man who was done. Done with the social obligations, the teaching of students who wanted credentials not wisdom, the performing. He was burned out. And his answer wasn’t to optimise his schedule or take a long weekend. His answer was to walk until the noise stopped. I’m not suggesting you quit your job and disappear into the mountains. But Basho understood something about dealing with burnout that most productivity gurus don’t: sometimes the system isn’t broken. You’ve just outgrown it. And that’s allowed.
Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna who got sent to Auschwitz. I know — we just went from Japanese poetry to the Holocaust. But stay with me. What Frankl did in the camps, besides surviving, was watch people. He noticed something. Under identical conditions of horror, some people held together and others collapsed. The difference wasn’t physical strength or luck. It was meaning. People who had something to return to — a child, a manuscript, a promise — those people lasted longer. Not always. But enough.
After the war he wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning” and here’s why it belongs in a conversation about burnout. Frankl never compared office fatigue to what happened in the camps. He wasn’t that person. But his central insight — that people can endure almost anything when they know why they’re enduring it — cuts right to what burnout actually is. Because most burnout isn’t really about the hours. The real weight comes from doing hard things that don’t feel like yours. The weight of meaninglessness is heavier than any workload. And yeah, I know that’s an uncomfortable thought. Because it means dealing with burnout might mean asking questions you’ve been putting off for a while now.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Viktor Frankl — Austrian psychiatrist, 1905–1997
Man’s Search for Meaning
What connects them all
What They All Understood
So Seneca says you’re spent because you’ve been pouring your life into the wrong containers. Hildegard says something green in you has dried out and needs rain. Basho says sometimes the bravest thing you can do is walk away. And Frankl says the deepest burnout comes not from overwork but from meaninglessness. Four people, four centuries apart, circling the same thing: burnout isn’t laziness. It isn’t weakness. It’s what happens when the life you’re living and the life that actually matters to you stop overlapping.
My colleague — the one crying on Mondays and Wednesdays — she went to Portugal for two weeks. Came back rested. The crying started again on the first Wednesday. Because the trip changed nothing about the thing causing the exhaustion. What she needed, and what these four voices in their very different ways all point toward about dealing with burnout, wasn’t more rest. It was more honesty. About what she actually wanted. About what the tiredness was actually trying to say. I keep coming back to that.
Science confirms
What Science Now Confirms
What Seneca, Hildegard von Bingen, Viktor Frankl and Matsuo Bashō understood centuries ago about exhaustion and meaning is now confirmed by modern research. According to the Gallup (2025): Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, with managers experiencing the sharpest decline. 34% of female managers report burnout compared to 27% of male managers. Daily stress levels remain above pre-pandemic levels, costing the global economy $10 trillion in lost productivity The American Psychological Association confirms this pattern: 67% of U.S. workers reported experiencing at least one outcome associated with burnout in the past month, including lack of motivation, low energy, and feelings of isolation. 43% of workers typically feel tense or stressed during their workday The solution isn’t working harder or taking another vacation, but what these voices through time all understood: dealing with burnout requires addressing root causes, not just managing symptoms.
Sources: Gallup (2025), American Psychological Association (2024)
Before you go
A Moment for You
If you’re reading this at the end of a day where everything took too long and nothing felt worth the effort — you don’t have to fix that tonight. A Roman philosopher, a medieval nun, a wandering poet, and a psychiatrist who witnessed the worst of it all agreed on one thing: the exhaustion is trying to tell you something. You don’t have to listen right now. But maybe don’t drown it out either.
If you want a place to sit with this a while longer — InnerCalm+ is there. No advice. Just space.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.
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