I had been struggling with why I had found it so hard to break free from my burn out, to the point where I was starting to feel guilty and overwhelmed at the fact I wasn’t ‘snapping out of it’.

After all, once you identify that you feel burned out you should be able to take a few days or a few weeks of resting or taking it easy and feel better?

I would do just that, then get back into my routine, and within a few days I would be struggling again.

This routine in and of itself is fatiguing, overwhelming and adds another layer to the burn out. It also adds to feeling like an outright failure in being able to feel like a normal functioning productive human being, which then makes you want to do even less, which of course feeds into the cycle.

Months had passed and I wasn’t getting better, in fact the more I tried to push through it or push past it, the worse I got.

So I did some research, I decided to use some AI assistance, I punched in to that chat box “why am I struggling so hard to shake free from my burn out” to get some clarity on what was wrong with me and this is the response I got.


Burnout is exceptionally hard to deal with mentally because it fundamentally alters your brain chemistry and function.

Prolonged stress shrinks the brain’s emotional regulation centers (like the prefrontal cortex) and floods your system with cortisol. This biological exhaustion makes it incredibly difficult to think clearly, manage emotions, or find motivation.

Understanding why burnout is a psychological challenge involves several core factors:

• Impaired Brain Function: Chronic stress causes executive dysfunction. You experience “brain fog,” reduced memory, and an inability to make simple decisions because your prefrontal cortex is essentially “offline”.
  
• The Brain’s Reward System Malfunctions: Burnout depletes dopamine—the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation and pleasure. This explains why even simple, previously enjoyable tasks feel pointless and exhausting.
  
• Stuck in a “Freeze” Response: Unlike standard stress (which is a state of “too much”), burnout is a physiological shutdown. Your body gets locked in a prolonged “freeze” response, leading to emotional numbness, cynicism, and detachment.
  
• Rest Alone Doesn’t Fix It: Psychological distress requires cognitive restructuring, emotional processing, and boundary-setting. Simply taking time off rarely undoes the deeply ingrained habits or systemic environmental pressures that caused the burnout in the first place.

Why You Feel Completely Trapped

• Zero escape routes: When burnout spills out of work and into your personal life, your brain perceives that there is no safe zone to rest, making the pressure feel constant.
  
• Learned helplessness: After enduring prolonged stress without relief, your brain stops looking for solutions because it assumes nothing you do will change the outcome.
  
• Tunnel vision: Chronic depletion narrows your cognitive focus. You literally lose the mental capacity to see choices, alternatives, or a way out.

Honestly, the above made so much sense. It nailed on the head exactly how I felt, and connected many of the dots of what had caused my burn out, let me to feeling this way and why I was unable to shake it.

Using this foundational information I was able to take a step back and stop blaming myself, and actually realise I needed to take a completely different approach to how I was going to handle my burn out.

The ‘simply push through or take a week or two off to rest or play catch up on my to do list’ simply wasn’t a strategy that was going to cut it.

So I created a year burn out recovery strategy.

A 12 month plan to slowly deal with each part of the burn out cycle.

I’ll post more about that on an upcoming blog post, but if any of you have had a similar struggle or have helpful tips on how to deal with burn out, let me know.

xxx Jane