I want to talk about this because burnout is treated as a personal failure — something you could have avoided if you'd just been better at "self-care" or "work-life balance." I don't think that's the right frame, and I think the way we talk about it makes it harder for people going through it to get help.

What It Actually Felt Like

Not lazy. Not tired. The specific texture of burnout, for me, was: I could do the work, and I was doing it adequately, but it required so much more effort than it used to that everything started to feel impossible. Writing code that I'd been comfortable with for years felt like trying to think through cotton wool. I'd open a problem I would normally have found interesting and feel nothing. Not frustration — nothing.

The scary part was that the symptoms looked like incompetence from the outside. I was slower. I made more mistakes. I needed more time to think. If you were measuring my output, you'd have thought I'd gotten worse at my job. I hadn't. Something else was happening.

What Was Actually Causing It

Looking back, there were three things converging. First: 14 months of constant urgency. We were in growth mode, everything was a priority, every sprint was an emergency. The cortisol never had time to clear.

Second: I'd lost any sense of autonomy or craft. Every decision was handed down. Technical decisions I disagreed with were implemented without discussion. The work had become pure execution.

Third: I had no peers I could be honest with. The culture was performatively positive — admitting struggle was career risk. I'd been quietly struggling for months with nobody to talk to about it.

What I Actually Did

I took three weeks of leave. Not a vacation — actual leave where I made a genuine commitment not to think about work problems. The first week I mostly slept and felt guilty. By week three something started to loosen.

When I returned, I had a direct conversation with my manager that I'd been avoiding for months. Not a complaint session — a specific negotiation: I wanted fewer interruptions, more design input on features in my area, and a week every quarter with no meetings for focused technical work. The answer was yes to all three, which told me these things had been available all along and I'd just never asked.

The Thing I'd Tell Anyone Going Through This

Burnout is not a character flaw and it's not solved by better discipline. It's a mismatch between the demands placed on you and the resources you have — including autonomy, connection, and purpose. You don't fix that with a better morning routine. You fix it by changing the conditions, which usually means having conversations you've been avoiding.

If you're in it right now: you're not broken, you're depleted. Those are different problems with different solutions.