Will Anfeldt

A completely scientific guide to recognizing, treating, and preventing the workplace condition that makes you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck driven by your own ambition.

Step 1: Acknowledge the Signs

You might be experiencing burnout if:

• You’ve started having romantic feelings toward your bed that border on inappropriate
• The coffee machine at work has become your closest confidant and most reliable friend
• You catch yourself saying “I’m fine” while simultaneously googling “how to fake your own death and move to Belize”
• Your emotional range has narrowed to three settings: Mildly Annoyed, Moderately Caffeinated, and Dead Inside
• You’ve begun to suspect that your houseplants are judging your life choices (and honestly, they’re probably right)

Step 2: Accept That You’re Not Actually a Robot

Despite what your LinkedIn profile might suggest, you are not a productivity machine powered by hustle culture and existential dread. You’re a human being with limits, which is frankly inconvenient but biologically unavoidable.

The good news? Even smartphones need to be recharged, and they don’t even have to deal with passive-aggressive emails from Karen in accounting.

Step 3: Master the Art of Strategic Incompetence

Here’s a revolutionary concept: you don’t have to be amazing at everything. In fact, being mediocre at some things is a life skill that will serve you well. Can’t organize the office holiday party? Tragic. Terrible at small talk during video calls? What a shame.

Sometimes the best way to avoid extra work is to be so unremarkable at certain tasks that people stop asking you to do them. It’s like professional natural selection, but in reverse.

Step 4: Rediscover Your Hobbies (Remember Those?)

Remember when you used to do things for fun? Not for your personal brand, not for networking, not because it might look good on your resume – just because you enjoyed them?

Dig deep. What did you like before you became a professional human? Reading books that weren’t about productivity? Cooking meals that weren’t optimized for meal prep? Having conversations that didn’t end with “let’s circle back on this”?

Time to resurrect those hobbies like you’re conducting a séance for your former self.

Step 5: Practice the Revolutionary Act of Saying “No”

“No” is a complete sentence. It doesn’t need a PowerPoint presentation, a detailed explanation, or a formal apology. It’s not “No, but here’s a 47-point plan for how someone else could do it.” It’s just “No.”

Start small. Practice in the mirror. Say it to your reflection until it feels natural. Your bathroom mirror has heard worse things, trust me.

Step 6: Embrace Your Inner Sloth

Productivity culture wants you to believe that rest is laziness, but rest is actually a radical act of self-preservation. Your ancestors didn’t survive saber-toothed tigers and the invention of email just so you could burn out answering Slack messages at 11 PM.

Schedule rest like you schedule meetings. Put “Aggressively Doing Nothing” on your calendar. Make it a recurring appointment. Your future self will thank you, probably while wearing pajamas at 2 PM on a Tuesday.

Step 7: Develop a Healthy Relationship with Your Inbox

Your email inbox is not a demanding pet that will die if you don’t feed it attention every five minutes. It’s more like a houseplant – it can survive being ignored for a few hours, or even (gasp) overnight.

Try this revolutionary technique: close your email. Just close it. The world will not end. Your inbox will still be there when you return, probably with more messages, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Step 8: Remember Why You Started (And Whether That Reason Still Makes Sense)

Take a moment to remember why you chose your career path. Was it because you were passionate about spreadsheets? Did you dream of attending three-hour meetings about meeting efficiency?

If your current job bears no resemblance to your original goals, it might be time to reassess. Life’s too short to spend it doing things that make you question your will to live every Monday morning.

Step 9: Find Your Tribe

Surround yourself with people who understand that success isn’t measured solely by how many hours you work or how many buzzwords you can fit into a single sentence. Find friends who won’t judge you for wearing sweatpants to a video call or for admitting that you sometimes hide in your car during lunch breaks just to have five minutes of peace.

Step 10: Remember That You’re Not Saving Lives (Unless You Actually Are)

Unless you’re a doctor, firefighter, or someone whose job actually involves life-or-death decisions, your work emergency is probably not actually an emergency. That PowerPoint presentation doesn’t need to be perfect. The world will not end if you take a sick day when you’re actually sick.

Put things in perspective: in 100 years, will anyone remember that you replied to that email 30 minutes later than usual? Will your great-grandchildren tell stories about how you crushed that quarterly report? Probably not.

The Bottom Line

Burnout isn’t a badge of honor – it’s your body and mind’s way of staging an intervention. Listen to them. They’ve been keeping you alive this whole time, so they probably know what they’re talking about.

Take care of yourself with the same energy you put into taking care of your work responsibilities. You deserve rest, boundaries, and the occasional Tuesday afternoon nap. Your productivity will survive. Your sanity might not.

And remember: the graveyard is full of irreplaceable people. The office will figure it out without you for a few hours, days, or even weeks. You are not the lynchpin holding the entire economy together, despite what your anxiety tells you at 3 AM.

Now go take a break. Doctor’s orders. (I’m not a doctor, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express once, and I’ve been burned out enough times to consider myself an expert.)

Disclaimer: This post is not actual medical advice. If you’re experiencing serious burnout, please talk to a real healthcare professional, not a humorous blog post. Though this blog post does offer better health insurance than most jobs.