When Everyone Has a Burnout Story

“My story wasn’t just mine. It echoed something I saw all around me: women like me burning themselves down by degrees and calling it success.” Permission To, Inhale

---

Since my book came out, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and talk with many women of different ages, careers, and stages of life. Something similar kept happening in those conversations. Almost every time, at some point, the same sentence would appear: “I had a burnout too.”

When I first started hearing it, I felt a sense of connection, a recognition that someone else understands what burnout feels like from the inside. But the more I heard that sentence, the more I realized something unsettling: burnout has become incredibly common. And somehow, we’ve started to treat that as normal.

But it’s not.

It shouldn’t be normal for so many people to reach a point where their body and mind simply can’t carry the load anymore. It shouldn’t be normal to hear story after story of people pushing themselves past exhaustion before realizing something is wrong.

Something in the way we are living is not working.

Over the last fifty years, our society has evolved at an incredible speed. Technology. Productivity. Connectivity. Expectations. Everything has accelerated. But the human body hasn’t evolved at that same speed. We are still human beings who need rest, community, support, and time to recover. And yet the culture around us often pushes completely different messages:

• Be productive.

• Keep going.

• This is just the way it has to be.

• This is just a phase.

Social media adds another layer to this. Every day we are exposed to carefully curated images of success, balance, and accomplishment. Lives that appear effortless, organized, and endlessly productive. And even when we know those images are incomplete or straight up false, they still shape the narrative we carry in our heads.

We start comparing. We start wondering if we should be doing more. If we should be handling everything better.

In many ways, we’ve made progress in how we talk about mental health. Some workplaces now recognize burnout and offer mental health days. But if burnout is still showing up everywhere, maybe those changes are not enough. Maybe the real question is not simply how we recover from burnout once it happens. Maybe the deeper questions are these:

• How do we build a society where fewer people reach that point in the first place?

• How do we redefine performance so that it doesn’t require constant exhaustion?

• How do we challenge the idea that hustling harder is the only way to succeed?

• And how do we create lives that are sustainable for human beings, not just productive ones?

These are questions I find myself asking more and more for all the women who keep telling me the same story.

It’s why I’ve started offering workshops and conversations around these themes. They are meant to create spaces where we can pause, reflect, and rethink the way we define performance, success, and well-being in our lives and in our workplaces.

Change rarely starts with a solution. It starts with a conversation we are finally ready to have. And if you’re ready to have it. Reach out to me and let’s discuss how I can help.

Your voice belongs here. This space is for listening, together.