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Ahh the Lore… (Feel free to skip)
In High school my first two jobs were working at sears on the weekday after school and Main Event on the weekend with my best friend at the time.
We were big ballers.
I bought all my friends Christmas gifts.
I got my dream car a 350Z and I saw work as an escape as I hated being at home. Prior to that I would stay at school until my last friend left to go home.
I was a workaholic.
It didn’t slow down. Money = Freedom.
I didn’t see it as work.
As my friends went off to college I worked at AT&T at 19 making great commission and remember hearing people in their early 30s and late 40s complain about being tired working 5 days a week.
I scoffed as I begged my manager for overtime.
Being a hard dedicated worker was what I wrapped my identity around.
Even after I went to jail and became hard for me to get a good job I still always strived to work hard.
But as my hours increased so did my crash outs.
When I worked construction, landscaping, porter and other odd jobs I worked 7 days. Non stop and made a short film on the side.
When I joined the service industry. I started as a busser, then server, then bar back and soon bartender.
Office job same thing. My manager just randomly made me interview for a position I never asked for.
At that very job I gotten written up for working to much. (lol)
I was able to add an extra 12 grand to my yearly income because of overtime. That extra money I invested in the stock market right before/during Covid.
Which then became 38 Grand.
Then something happened that I never thought would ever happen to me.
I became “Burned out”. Which I didn’t understand what was happing at the time. I thought that was weakness.
Little did I know that was the beginning of a long time spiral.
What is Burn Out? (Scientifically speaking)
Science says Burn out is not being tired or working to much.
It’s chronic stress that keeps the threat system working overtime.
A meta-analysis of 25 prospective studies linked chronic exhaustion with…
1. Unmanageable Workloads and Demands
Excessive volume: Having more work than is humanly or operationally sustainable over a long period.
Unreasonable deadlines: Constant time pressure and rapid-fire task shifting without adequate recovery time.
2. Lack of Control and Autonomy
Micromanagement: Being closely watched or dictated to instead of trusted to handle tasks.
No decision-making power: Having little say over your schedule, how tasks are executed, or which projects you take on.
3. Unclear Expectations and Role Confusion
Ambiguity: Not knowing what your core responsibilities are or how your performance will be evaluated.
4. Insufficient Reward and Recognition
Undervalued work: Putting in long hours and high effort without financial compensation, bonuses, or verbal appreciation.
5. Toxic Workplace Culture and Unfairness
Unfair treatment: Experiencing bias, favoritism, unequal pay, or arbitrary policies.
Poor relationships: Dealing with office politics, bullying, harassment, or lack of team support.
6. Values Mismatch and Work-Life Imbalance
Misaligned values: Working for an organization whose core principles or ethics clash with your own.
In one brain-imaging study of 40 people with burnout symptoms and 70 controls, the burnout group showed weaker communication between the amygdala important for detecting emotional significance and prefrontal regions involved in regulation.
They also had more difficulty calming their response to negativity.
Another small MRI study comparing 40 chronically stressed workers with 40 controls found larger amygdala volumes, thinner medial frontal cortex and smaller caudate volumes in the stressed group.
The cognitive fog is real, though. A meta-analysis of 17 studies found clinical burnout was associated with small to moderate difficulties in attention, processing speed, memory and executive function.
How to recover?
Besides all those symptoms the biggest one was the shame.
As someone who hated to admit it, I was burned out. Not only could I not work 2 jobs I could barely keep one.
I felt like the loser I once judged. I knew there had to be a better way.
See you have to recover.
Like working out, you need to let your muscles rest in between or they never grow.
6 recovery steps:
Reduce the load
Restore control
Protect offline mode
Repair sleep
Reconnect support
Rebuild gradually
That is why you can read the same sentence four times, forget why you opened a tab and need PTO after replying, “Sounds good.”
This is not permission to ignore every responsibility.
It is permission to stop treating a exhausted nervous system problem like a character defect.
Burnout recovery cannot be only “become better at surviving the conditions burning you.”
Rest/ Sleep matters.
Boundaries matter. But so does workload, control, support, fairness and recovery time.
Run a MIND OS scan:
What keeps draining me?
What can I reduce, renegotiate or refuse?
What support am I missing?
What must change—not just what must I endure?
Loser logging off.
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