Burnout isn’t something you can test for. There’s no blood result or scan that tells you when you’ve crossed the line. It’s a personal experience, often noticed too late. We compare ourselves to others or to our old selves and convince ourselves we should be coping better.
Burnout: The Personal Science of Knowing When Enough Is Enough
Burnout isn’t something you can test for. There’s no blood result or scan that tells you when you’ve crossed the line. It’s a personal experience, often noticed too late. We compare ourselves to others or to our old selves and convince ourselves we should be coping better.
So we keep going, long after the body has been asking us to stop.
Sometimes we even walk straight into burnout knowingly, hoping we can push through without changing anything. But that’s like sending an athlete into competition with an injury. In high performance sport, that would never happen.
Michael Phelps once trained with his goggles full of water so that when things went wrong, he knew exactly what to do. That’s called front-loading mental skills. He trained for the stress before it arrived.
In work and leadership, most of us do the opposite. We wait until we’re already flooded, until our thinking is blurred, and then try to find clarity or compassion.
Burnout is both an organisational and a personal issue. Systems matter. Culture matters. But real change begins on a personal level. That can be confronting to hear, because it asks us to shift the focus inward - to how we think, feel, and behave when the pressure builds.
In the not-for-profit world, where people care deeply and give endlessly, this is even more important. You cannot serve the cause if you lose your capacity to care for yourself. Self-compassion isn’t indulgence. It’s a survival skill.
A practical way to start is through regulation - working with your body to help your mind. When your system is overloaded, you can’t simply talk yourself into calm. You need to help the body feel safe again.
Here are three simple places to begin:
- Reclaim your baseline.
Pause through the day and notice your body. Are your shoulders tight? Is your breath shallow? Recovery happens in small moments of awareness, not only on weekends or holidays. - Change the stimulus.
Step outside, move, or slow your breathing. Shifting your environment or sensory input tells your nervous system it’s safe again. - Rebuild the feedback loop.
Pair small restorative actions - like finishing work on time or walking without your phone - with a moment of noticing that it feels good. That’s how your brain learns that rest is both safe and rewarding.
Burnout recovery begins with permission. The permission to stop, to listen, and to respond with care. But it also takes precision. The precision to know what works for your system and how to repeat it until it becomes your new normal.
Permission and precision - the permission to lead differently with empathy, health, and humanity, and the precision to still win.
