How to recover from burnout while you’re still working

Most advice about burnout starts with “take time off”. Sometimes that is exactly right, and if your doctor tells you to stop, listen.

But many of the women I work with can’t stop, or won’t. There is a mortgage. A team that depends on them. A role they spent fifteen years building. So the real question is a different one: how do you recover while life keeps going?

“I used to be able to handle so much more.”

That sentence usually comes with shame, as if you had lost some strength you used to have. You haven’t. What happened to you has a mechanism, and once you understand it, a lot of the shame has nowhere left to stand.

What burnout actually is

The World Health Organization describes burnout (in its ICD-11 classification, since 2019) as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It names three signs: exhaustion, a growing mental distance or cynicism about your work, and a feeling of being less effective than you were. It is classified as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition.

You can have all three and still show up every single day. That is one of the reasons it goes unnoticed for so long.

Surviving is not the same as proving you are strong

Sometimes we simply have to get through it. A child is ill, a parent needs you, the job is on the line, and stopping is not an option right now. Then the question is practical: where can I still find energy, and what can I drop so less of it drains away?

But often we keep going for a different reason. Not because we have no choice, but because we want to stay strong in our own eyes. Stopping would feel like admitting that we are not coping.

I have seen it with my clients, and I know it from my own life: pushing on like this doesn’t make burnout pass. It makes it deeper, and the way back longer and harder.

So it is worth being honest about which of the two you are doing. Getting through a hard season is sometimes necessary. Keeping going to prove something to yourself is the part you can change.

Stress is not the enemy

I want to say this clearly, because burnout articles often make stress sound like poison. It isn’t. Mobilisation is health. It is what lets us act, react, concentrate and get through hard moments. That muscle is worth having, and worth training.

In a very simplified picture, the nervous system has ways of speeding us up (faster heart, tighter muscles, narrower focus) and ways of calming us down (slower heart rate, deeper breathing, time for digestion, repair and rebuilding). Health is not about sitting in calm all the time. It is about moving smoothly between the two.

A healthy nervous system can go up to high revs and come back down. The problem starts when mobilisation happens too often, lasts too long, or it gets harder and harder to come back from it. As I put it in an interview for Onet: most of us practise only one of them every day. The accelerator is perfected. The brake hardly gets used. And the brake is a skill too, not a state you simply fall into.

You can see it on a Saturday. Nobody wants anything from you, there is no deadline, in theory you can rest. And after ten minutes you feel uneasy. You reach for your phone. You check your email. You remember five things that “could be done, actually”. That is not a lack of willpower. It is a body that has learned one gear. A bit like a hand that has been clenched for years: it won’t relax just because it is your day off. It has to learn to open again.

Why you often feel worst when it’s over

Three weeks before a big deadline. You sleep little, put out fires, you are completely focused, and you function brilliantly. On Friday the project ends. On Saturday you wake up and can’t get out of bed.

It is easy to think: what is wrong with me, the worst is over? Nothing is wrong with you. Mobilisation does not remove tiredness. It removes your access to it. While you have to act, the brain holds that information back, because in that moment it is useless. Nobody needs to know they are exhausted while putting out a fire.

So Saturday is not the day the cost appeared. It is the first day you are allowed to feel it.

Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the brain as running a “body budget”: it keeps predicting what the body will need and spends resources in advance. It is very good at it, which is why you can run for weeks at a level you would never have expected of yourself. That doesn’t mean it was free. It means your body financed it very efficiently. Stress researcher Bruce McEwen called the long-term cost allostatic load: the wear of constantly adjusting stress, sleep, metabolism and immunity to keep up. After a hard week, sleep repays it. After five years, it doesn’t.

Why it is so hard to stop doing what exhausts you

I am ambitious myself. I like achieving and I like growing, and I have no wish to cure women of ambition. The trouble starts elsewhere: when the result becomes the proof that everything is fine.

The brain’s reward system learns what worked. It does not ask what it cost. Dopamine is a key part of that system. It is less a pleasure chemical than a signal that says: go for that again. And it pushes hardest on the way to a goal, not at the moment you reach it.

Picture a woman under pressure doing what she always does: mobilising even more. There was a crisis, she solved it. An impossible deadline, she delivered. Everyone panicked, she took control. At the end there is a result, relief, sometimes “I don’t know what we would have done without you”. For the brain, that is a very convincing message: this worked, repeat it.

And the brain is right. It did work. It just never asks the second question: will this still be good for you in five years?

So the strategy that overloads you is also the strategy you are rewarded for, three times over: by the result, by the people around you, and by your own reward system. Every time you deliver despite being exhausted, you get another piece of proof: see, you managed. And it becomes very easy to confuse “this works” with “this is good for me”.

Achievements also quickly become the new standard. What was once a huge success soon feels like something you simply should be able to do. If finishing something big brings mostly “phew, done” and three minutes later “right, what’s next?”, that is not your character. It is a sign the threshold has moved.

What recovery research shows

Research on recovery from work, led largely by Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz, points to four experiences that actually restore people: psychologically detaching from work, relaxation, “mastery” (learning or doing something absorbing that has nothing to do with your job), and a sense of control over your free time. Of these, detachment comes up again and again as one of the most important.

Detachment means your mind is off duty, not just your body. You can go on holiday and spend two weeks managing the whole family in your head. You can lie on a massage table and spend the hour planning tomorrow’s presentation. The body is in a place made for rest, and the responsibility system keeps working. Holidays don’t close open loops. They just move them somewhere prettier.

Be patient with the timeline too. Recovering from real burnout usually takes months rather than weeks, and it is rarely a straight line. Good weeks and flat weeks alternate. That is how recovery normally looks, not a sign that it isn’t working.

Don’t add anything. Start by removing.

This is truly the first rule. If you are overloaded, the last thing you need is a new routine, an app, a course or a project called “how to stop being overloaded”. Women who manage everything have a reflex to manage their own exhaustion too.

So a plan appears. From Monday: meditation, a walk, getting up earlier, no phone in bed. Monday goes brilliantly. Tuesday less so. By Wednesday the plan has collapsed, and a new item joins the long list: guilt that it didn’t work again.

So I don’t ask “what else could you do?” I ask: what can you stop doing?

And I give one tool that costs ten seconds. Someone asks you for something. You see a problem. You feel you have to react. Before you answer the way you always answer, give yourself ten seconds and ask: what will happen if, this time, I don’t do it?

Sometimes the answer is: there will be a real problem. Then you do it. Really.

But very often the answer sounds different: someone will be unhappy, someone will cope less well than I would, I’ll feel awkward, I’ll feel bad about it for an hour. And then you see something important. It wasn’t a duty. It was an attempt to avoid discomfort.

Those ten seconds are the whole change. They don’t change what you do. They change the fact that you start choosing it. (If that pause feels impossible, this may be why.)

To begin, one thing really is enough. Once not correcting. Once not reminding. Once not rescuing. Once saying: “I can’t take this on.”

It will feel like letting people down. At first.

I won’t pretend this is easy. For the first weeks you don’t feel like someone reclaiming her space. You feel like someone letting people down. That feeling passes, it really does, but you have to sit through it a few times so your brain can collect proof that the world didn’t fall apart.

I know it from my own life too. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with the simplest, spontaneous joy. Not success or satisfaction at work, just lightness: turning the music up, dancing in the kitchen, laughing, doing something for no reason. Only after I made changes did I see a clear before and after. My responsibilities hadn’t gone anywhere, and yet I had more energy, more joy, more of myself. I remember thinking: so it is possible to feel completely different.

Two different Kasias. I had almost forgotten the first one ever existed. Luckily, I got her back.

When to stop anyway

If you are not sleeping, if you cry in the car before work, if small decisions feel impossible, or your body is sending signals you can’t ignore any more, this is no longer something to manage next to your job. Talk to your doctor. Time off at that point is what makes coming back possible.

You can carry a lot. That was never the question. The point is not to do less. It is for more of what you do to be truly yours.

Further reading: World Health Organization, “Burn-out an occupational phenomenon”, ICD-11 (2019). Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz, “The Recovery Experience Questionnaire”, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (2007). Wolfram Schultz, “Predictive reward signal of dopamine neurons”, Journal of Neurophysiology (1998). Bruce S. McEwen, New England Journal of Medicine (1998), on allostatic load.

Kasia Biernacka is an organisational psychologist and leadership advisor based in Belgium, with more than 20 years in HR and leadership development. She has talked about the hidden cost of living in “I’ll manage” mode in interviews for Onet and iKobiece.pl (both in Polish).