What Burnout Cost Me Not Just Financially - But in Identity, Health, and Joy.
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I reached the top — and felt nothing.
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I had just finished defending my PhD dissertation.
Years of work, sacrifice, pressure, and persistence had culminated in this moment — the moment I had been chasing for most of my adult life.
And yet, instead of relief or pride, I felt… empty.
I remember standing there thinking, this is it?
Because the truth was, I had trained myself to chase the next milestone so relentlessly that I had no idea how to exist without one.
Achievement had become my identity.
The pursuit had become my rhythm.
And I didn’t know how to be still.
The unraveling: early signs of burnout
For years, I operated at a pace that felt admirable from the outside.
I was productive. Driven. High-performing.
I was the one who could handle everything. The one who always said yes. The one who pushed through.
But under the surface, something was breaking down.
I was exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t fix.
I was irritable, anxious, and constantly on edge.
I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t stop.
I would open my laptop and stare at my inbox, unable to process even the simplest tasks.
I would ignore calls from people I loved because I didn’t have the energy to respond.
Meals became an afterthought. Days blurred together.
And still, I told myself to keep going.
Because that’s what I had always done.
Until my body and mind made it impossible to continue.
the collapse: burnout makes itself known
There wasn’t one dramatic breaking point.
It was a slow, quiet collapse.
A buildup of months — years — of overextension, pressure, and disconnection from myself.
And then one day, I just… couldn’t.
I couldn’t think clearly.
I couldn’t regulate my emotions.
I couldn’t show up as the person I had always been.
I cycled through intense anxiety, deep sadness, anger, numbness — sometimes all in the same day.
It felt like my mind had turned against me.
It was disorienting. Humbling. Scary.
Because I had always been the capable one.
The strong one.
The one who could handle it.
And suddenly, I couldn’t.
“I didn’t know how to rest anymore.”
the cost of constant motion
Burnout manifested for me in a way that felt more like crashing and burning than burning out.
Burnout didn’t just affect my productivity. It affected my moods, my clarity of mind, my relationships (with others and myself), and so much more.
It cost me opportunities I had worked years to build.
It cost me momentum in my career.
It cost me clarity, confidence, and trust in myself.
It cost me income — real, tangible financial opportunities that I had to step away from because I simply did not have the capacity.
But that wasn’t the deepest loss.
It cost me my health.
It cost me my sense of identity.
It cost me my joy.
The money was the easiest part to measure.
The rest wasn’t.
the stillness: stepping out of the burnout cycle
I spent nearly three months in what I can only describe as stillness (others would say unemployment!).
Not the curated, aesthetic version of rest you see online.
Not a retreat or reset.
Just… stillness.
Days where the most I could do was sit quietly.
Walk outside for a few minutes.
Let my nervous system settle.
It felt like stepping completely out of the cycle I had been running for years.
At first, that felt like failure.
Because when your identity is built around output, stillness feels like losing.
But slowly — very slowly — it began to feel like something else.
Space.
Signal.
Information I had been too busy to hear.
what real resilience actually looked like
For a long time, resilience felt like endurance.
Pushing through.
Carrying more.
Handling whatever came your way without breaking.
But resilience isn’t about how much you can tolerate.
Even systems designed to withstand stress — the kinds I once studied — don’t survive by pushing endlessly. They adapt. They recalibrate. They respond to strain before it becomes collapse.
Humans are no different.
Resilience is noticing the shift from energized to depleted.
When pressure becomes strain.
When effort turns into overextension.
It’s allowing yourself to pause when your body is asking for it.
It’s recognizing the signals before they become symptoms.
Even people who understand resilience conceptually still have to learn how to live it.
Because your body and mind are always communicating.
The work is learning how to listen.
“True resilience wasn’t about how much I could endure.”
rebuilding after burnout — differently
When I eventually began working again, I did it differently.
More intentionally.
More slowly.
More in alignment with what actually matters to me.
I started asking myself different questions:
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Is this sustainable for me right now?
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Does this give me energy or take it away?
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Am I responding from pressure or from clarity?
I began building my life around capacity instead of expectation.
Around rhythm instead of urgency.
Around awareness instead of autopilot.
recognizing yourself in the burnout cycle
If you’re in a place where everything feels heavy, overwhelming, or disconnected — you’re not alone.
If you’ve achieved the things you thought would fulfill you and still feel empty — you’re not broken.
If you recognize pieces of yourself in any part of this — the build, the overextension, the unraveling, the collapse — that awareness matters.
Because once you can see the pattern, you can start to change your relationship to it.
Sometimes, the most courageous thing you can do is stop long enough to listen.
“Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is stop.”
where I am now
I am still rebuilding.
Still learning.
Still practicing balance and boundaries in a way I never had to before.
But I feel more like myself now than I have in years.
More grounded.
More aware.
More connected to what actually matters.
This time, I’m building a life I don’t need to recover from.
If any part of this felt familiar, I’ve been mapping out the patterns that led me there — the subtle shifts, the warning signs, the points where things could have changed sooner.
I’ve started putting those reflections into something more tangible for myself, and I’ll share more of that here as it evolves.
You don’t have to go through it alone.
Hey There, I’m
Madison
full-time scientist, average writer, and founder of resilienSHE.
Around here, I share honest conversations, tools, and reflections for women who want to achieve boldly and rest essentially – redefining resilience on our own terms.
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