The Slow Erosion

Burnout does not happen overnight. It is not a sudden collapse but a gradual erosion — like a riverbank wearing away one grain of sand at a time. By the time you notice the damage, months or years of undermining have already happened.

Understanding how you got here matters for recovery, because the factors that brought you here are likely still at work. If you recover without addressing them, you will burn out again.

Most people cannot pinpoint when burnout began, because it has no clear start date. Instead, there was a series of small compromises, each one reasonable on its own: staying late one more night, taking on one more project, saying yes to one more request.