Escaping The Burnout Cycle

Burnout is…

Staying up glued to the screen late into night.

Hoping something will crack a smile.

Waking up dreading another day.

Having to do everything, wanting to do nothing.

Losing color in what you found to be beautiful.

Finding apathy where there was love.

Losing connection to your dream.

Falling into guilt, insecurity, powerlessness.

Above all, Burnout is insidious.

Slowly suffocating you until you realize, too late, that you can’t breathe.

That’s how I felt one morning. It wasn’t the fatigue of a bad night’s sleep. It was a deeper, more pervasive indifference.

I had lost my spark.

The irony cut like a knife. Here I was, a so-called mind map expert who helped others navigate the chaos of life and business, now lying here without purpose, going through daily motions like a hollow automaton.

For six months, I had been engulfed in a family crisis that uprooted me across the country, clocking 90-hour weeks in a relentless battle to keep my business afloat.

But in the end, I had let my own well-being fall apart.

This was a wake up call, as I still remembered how it’s like to be driven by a higher calling. The voice of my muse was muffled but not gone, yet.

The poet in me set out to find the right words to define this feeling. My scientist side was curious about its root cause. The turning point came when my research brought me to Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s book Burnout .

The Stress Cycle

Historically, stress triggers would plunge us into fight-or-flight mode, a survival instinct honed through our prehistoric ancestors’ need to run from lions. It’s a full mind-body reaction that not only raises our heart rate and alertness, but also makes us experience emotions like fear, anxiety, and anger. This naturally subsides once we escaped the source of danger, returning us to homeostasis.

The problem lies in how stressors have changed in modernity. The ping of an email, the overwhelm of global catastrophe, the frustration slow moving traffic. They’re not physical but psychological in nature.

Unlike cavemen, we don’t really have a clear resolution to these triggers. You can’t just run away from your boss’s emails and relax afterward. That just piles on more anxiety. Instead of closing the loop, the stress lingers and accumulates, leading to continuous tension without release.

Long term accumulation eventually leads to Burnout, a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion.

The first step to get unstuck is actually awareness and acceptance.

Awareness and Acceptance

Burnout is insidious because modern triggers are so subtle that until I was trained in Vipassana meditation, I never noticed how my breath grew choppy or palms turned sweaty when I got stressed. They’re like micro tears that never heal, so we slowly die from a thousand cuts.

That’s why stillness is key for recognizing burnout in the first place.

I first noticed something was wrong while on a family cruise vacation. Being on the calm ocean far away from Houston where everything went down was perfect for unwinding and reflecting on my mental health.

But putting a face to an invisible enemy isn’t the same as acceptance. As someone who’s usually so high energy and ambitious, I felt like a stranger in my own home. I didn’t want to think about how it would derail all my goals and disappoint the people who depended on me.

It wasn’t until after weeks of struggling with daily motivation that I finally accepted my fate and began putting together a recovery plan.

The Baseline Plan

In Burnout, the Nagoskis note that the modern resolution to the stress cycle are exercise, sleep, deep breathing, crying, and positive social interactions especially laughter and touch (aka cuddles). These practices tell our brains that it’s safe to release all the accumulated stress.

Using this insight, I mapped out how I would remove stressors from my daily life and add things that brought me relaxation, joy, and freedom. I called it the Baseline Plan as a reminder that I shouldn’t operate at my previous standard of productivity until I dug myself out of the burnout hole.

The plan had five parts:

1. Implementing “no agenda” days on the weekends and finishing work by 5pm so I could enjoy my evenings before going to bed by 10pm.
2. Putting my phone in the closet after 8pm. I could only read my Kindle before going to bed.
3. Reinstating my morning routine, which includes sunlight exposure, Wim Hof breathing, a high intensity 25 minute workout, and journaling before starting work.
4. Canceling Amazon Prime to curb the shopping habit that I developed as a stress coping mechanism.
5. Call up friends when I felt like it instead of scheduling beforehand. By this time, the guilt of ignoring people’s messages (another burnout symptom) was eating me alive.

The overall strategy was to turn have to-do’s into want to-do’s, while eliminating mental clutter. I also came clean to my team about my burnout and set strict boundaries on when I was available to my clients.

I executed this Baseline Plan as a 2-week sprint, which, contrary to popular belief, isn't just about speed and productivity so much as injecting intentionality and focus into whatever it is we want to achieve.

In my case, it was about getting back to loving life again.

Loving Life Again

Now six weeks on the burnout recovery path, the results have been astonishing.

First, things didn’t fall apart at work. The constraint of finishing by 5pm forced me to automate and trust my team more. I brought just as much value to my clients when I was available, and I was forced to be smarter with my time, focusing on quality over working more hours.

I wasn’t tied to a strict schedule either. Instead I did things based on what felt right, which resulted in some interesting choices like planning to move to Austin for a few months and jumping on a random flight to El Salvador.

I was washing away layer by layer the stress that was caked onto my mind and body.

The biggest epiphany is how underrated fun is in our modern hustle culture. Having my weekends and evenings freed up was huge in discovering what was missing. I finally had the space to enjoy things that made my life colorful.

Not only did it close the stress cycle, it made me feel aligned with my purpose again. That, my friends, is what supercharges everything we do - and why Burnout is one of our worst enemies.

The Stress Cycle is the most important concept from the book. It goes like this: