Burnout: How Embers Become Flames
I've come to realize I know very well what the experience of burnout is like. And in retrospect—if I'm being fully honest—I have very likely been there many times, and did not realize it at the time. The anger that would surface out of nowhere. The isolation. Pulling away from people I loved. The gnawing anxiety that kept me awake at 2 AM. The imposter syndrome. Dreading the next day. Thinking about leaving the work.
Burnout can be cruel and slippery. It doesn't announce itself. It erodes you slowly from the inside. By the time you notice that something feels "off," you realize you've been struggling in silence for a while. Perhaps you didn't yet know that this is burnout, because you're just in it—day-in and day-out.
Now I am deliberately and defiantly not in that burnt out place anymore. And perhaps because I am no longer burnt out, one thing I know for certain is:
Burnout is never a failure of the individual. The burnt out professional is the canary in the coalmine of a large systemic problem.
The Dominant Story We Tell About Burnout is Wrong
The dominant narrative surrounding burnout places the blame squarely on the individual. "You burned out because you couldn't handle it . . . you didn't use the right coping skills . . . you didn't do enough yoga or take enough bubble baths . . . you need better sleep, better self-care."
This narrative is not only wrong. It's harmful. It takes a systemic problem, hands the weight of that back to a depleted individual, and engenders shame. This process often creates a feedback loop that gridlocks the person from reaching any resolution—compounded by barriers to access and a lack of appropriate support to actually help them through it.
Burnout is what happens when a person who gives everything meets a system that takes everything and gives very little back. It's an equation that never balances.
Three Things I Believe Are Making This Worse
When I look at what I see in my work and trends happening in the world, there are three things stand out to me that are perpetuating and accelerating rates of burnout.
We Have Gotten Worse at Caring For the Ones Who Care.
Healers and helpers seem to be publicly celebrated, but behind the scenes are ground down. Doctors working 60-hour weeks, seeing a dizzying number of patients back-to-back, expected to stay calm and collected under unrealistic expectations—and to operate with warmth and precision with every single person. Nurses absorbing trauma with nowhere to place it. Therapists holding everyone else's pain, expected to somehow discharge it on their own time.
We talk about self-care as if it's a personal responsibility, and consequently, a personal failure when a helper struggles. We should be asking: What does a system owe the people inside it? The people who are holding that society together and keeping it running?
We Are More Connected Than Ever. And More Isolated Than Ever.
Something profound has shifted in how we navigate life alongside each other, and it has real consequences for burnout. In theory, we are all available to each other around the clock. In theory, we can check in on the friend who lives five miles away from the couch, by scrolling through their feed. We have the illusion of community, connection, and support—while what's actually delivered is something far less substantive. And through this perpetual hyperconnectedness, our ability to really see each other, to actually show up for each other, is quietly eroded.
This matters for burnout. Isolation is gasoline to the embers of burnout. The early signs can be caught and managed within genuine, steady connection. The shame of struggling, unwitnessed and unsupported, compounds the weight.
For medical professionals especially, there’s a certain vulnerability that comes with openly admitting you are struggling. And that vulnerability often feels dangerous, resulting in deeper isolation.
I don't think society is anywhere near ready to structurally resolve this. But my own response to it has been something like a quiet rebellion: relentlessly pursuing in-person connection, and helping to create community where it didn't exist before. With a lot of help from friends, I helped build a community of therapists and mental health workers that didn't exist even a year ago. It was deliberate and necessary.
I believe that for people in high-stakes careers, this kind of defiant community-building—actively choosing real, present, embodied connection even when the culture pulls us toward screens and isolation—is part of the antidote.
The Systems That House Healers Are Increasingly Run Like Businesses.
This is a complex, nuanced issue. As a business owner myself, I understand the very real difficulty of balancing the finances to keep the lights on. There are legitimate economic and structural reasons why medical facilities have evolved in the manner they have. I’m not here to vilify administrators or reduce this to a greed issue. I think this too points to a macro-systemic problem.
The impact is hard to deny. When a system increasingly values financial performance and efficiency, the humans inside it—and the care implied in it—stop being the point. Physicians needing to be thorough get ten minutes. Mental health professionals shrink meaningful work into a five-session insurance limit. The quality of care becomes compromised. It’s a double-bind that no amount of individual resilience could fully resolve.
These are not individual problems. They are systemic problems. And at the end of the day, we all pay the price.
What I Believe About Recovery and Prevention
If burnout is a systemic problem, what does that mean for its resolution?
It means healing from burnout can’t be entirely an individual, isolated effort. The burned out person needs support. A place to grieve and be angry at the injustice of a broken system. Space and time to return to themselves, and potentially rebuild themselves. They need people who get the weight of the career and the exhaustion of giving within a system that takes and gives little in return.
In my own life, my path out of burnout took me to other people. Real ones I meet with in person in real rooms. And in my work, I try to help professionals see the bigger picture and stop internalizing the failures of a system that are failing them. To make deliberate, somewhat rebellious choices about how they want to re-engage with the work and their own life.
You didn’t fail your career. You were failed by the structures around you that should have been caring for you.
Acknowledging that is where the work begins.
If you are a medical professional, healthcare worker, or someone in a high-stakes career, and you recognized yourself in this blog about burnout—I’d be glad to talk. Reach out here.
