I’ve been doing a lot of reading on AI lately, and not the kind you might expect. I’m not talking about how to use AI to increase my efficiency or supercharge my output. What I’m actually thinking about is what AI is doing to us as a culture, as a society, and as humans who still have to live inside our own heads.

I’ve been sitting a lot at the intersection of psychology and AI use in the real world (I figured I should finally use my college degrees at some point), and I keep coming back to the same uneasy feeling.

There’s this pressure in tech right now, and honestly beyond tech, to do more, work faster, and get more done in less time. There’s an assumption underneath all of this that states if you’re using AI, you can absolutely increase your output. No excuses. For many companies, this has crossed a line. Using AI in your day-to-day is expected, and if you’re not using it, your job may be at risk. It’s not a hypothetical for a lot of people right now.

I understand the appeal of moving fast. Right now I have several different terminal tabs open, with each running a different agent: one reviewing SLO data, one planning my day, one investigating a bug. All different things, all running simultaneously. But I can’t actually focus on all of them at the same time, and neither can you, and neither can anyone.

Humans are not built to multitask. Think of your cognitive bandwidth as a plate. The plate doesn’t grow. You can’t create more room just by adding more items. You move things around, you allocate, you juggle, but you’re always working within the same fixed space. Adding AI to the mix doesn’t change that; it just gives us more things to pile on.

When you shift from writing code yourself to throwing four JIRA tickets at four different agent worktrees, you’re no longer doing the creative problem-solving. You’re orchestrating. You’re managing. Every agent is essentially pinging you, “I need attention, I need attention,” and all you’re doing is context switching between them. It ends up feeling less like being an engineer and more like managing a team of engineers you can’t fully trust yet. There’s real value in that kind of delegation, but AI still lacks nuance. It only knows what you’ve given it, and no matter how large its context window, it won't have everything it needs without you staying in the loop.

This has become a normal way of working in tech, and has actually shown to increase overall output. Most companies have small but annoying bugs that are super easy to throw at AI to identify the issue and resolve it with minimal involvement. Models are also becoming much better at breaking down a much more complex task and working through that as well. I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t productivity gains happening here.

But running multiple agents doesn’t mean you’re doing less work individually. You’re doing different work, and sometimes harder work. Reviewing, directing, correcting, and integrating AI output is a cognitive load in its own right, and in some cases, it’s heavier than just doing the thing yourself.

The Harvard Business Review article When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry” puts a finer point on this. They define AI brain fry as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity, basically that feeling of brain fog at the end of the day when you’ve spent so much energy just trying to keep up with everything running in parallel. And they found that the most mentally taxing form of AI engagement wasn’t using AI, it was overseeing it.

I was talking to one of my engineering managers about this recently and they shared their take on avoiding the cognitive load. It seems simple on the surface, but it’s something I think a lot of folks would struggle to adopt. The most helpful thing they’d found when managing multiple agents simultaneously was to stop watching them work.

Watching an agent in real time, waiting to catch a mistake, scanning every line it produces, is like standing over someone’s shoulder while they do a task. Their approach instead: let the agent work, and respond when it actually needs you. It’s a reasonable approach, but not without its own tension. People crave control, and stepping back requires a level of trust that the agent isn’t going to go off the rails without you catching it in time. But compulsive monitoring is a fast track to exactly the kind of brain fry the HBR article describes.

I believe one contributor to brain fry is skill atrophy through AI adoption. Think about how you navigate. If you’re like most people, you open Google Maps or Apple Maps before you’ve even started the car. You follow the directions, you arrive, and it works really well. But a lot of people will self-confess that somewhere along the way, they lost the ability to navigate without it, and I don’t mean it’s just faster with the app. They genuinely lost the ability to build a mental map, pick up landmarks, and understand where they are in relation to where they’re going. That internal GPS that humans have been developing for thousands of years quietly atrophied because we stopped using it.

That’s where I get nervous about AI. Are we going to lose the ability to write, to formulate our own thoughts without a model prompting us? Are we going to lose the ability to think critically, to challenge assumptions, to troubleshoot? And there’s a compounding problem: if you can’t do the thing yourself, you lose the ability to evaluate whether the AI did it well. You need the underlying knowledge to catch the mistakes, and when that knowledge erodes, you’re not just dependent, you’re blind to the errors you’re accepting. I keep coming back to Idiocracy. It’s a comedy, but not a subtle one, and it feels a little less funny every year.

Back to using my psychology and social work degrees. If you’re feeling fried at the end of the day, the first and most useful thing you can do is sit with that feeling for a minute and ask yourself what actually drained you. Not in a vague, general sense, but specifically. Walk through your day. Which parts felt like you were doing something, and which parts felt like you were just managing things that were doing something?

Once you can see it clearly, the next step is asking yourself what’s one thing you could change, or bring back. Don’t aim for a complete overhaul, just choose one thing. Maybe it’s writing your own first draft before handing it to AI to clean up. Maybe it’s actually sitting down and working through a problem yourself before spinning up an agent. Maybe it’s closing a few of those tabs and doing one thing at a time, because you remember what it felt like to actually finish something.

The goal isn’t to reject AI or pretend it doesn’t have real value. Most of us are going to keep using it, and there are genuinely good reasons to do so. But there’s a version of using it that keeps you sharp and a version that slowly hollows you out, and the difference is usually whether you’re still the one doing the thinking. Hold onto the skills that bring a human flavor to your work. Outsource the mundane, the repetitive, the stuff that was never interesting to begin with. But don’t outsource your ability to reason, to write, to create, to troubleshoot, because those are a lot harder to get back once you’ve let them go.

I stumbled over my intro on an interview panel this week.

I wasn’t the candidate. I was one of the interviewers, and it was the very beginning when we were going around introducing ourselves. I started talking and could feel, in real time, that I wasn’t as crisp as I wanted to be. My sentences felt slightly tangled. I became aware of myself instead of just speaking, which only made it worse. It lasted maybe twenty seconds, and then we moved on. The interview continued. The candidate nodded. Everything was fine.

But I carried it with me.

The next day, in a different meeting, I forgot a team’s name. I corrected myself, and then two minutes later I called them by the wrong name again. The meeting didn’t stop. No one seemed confused or irritated. It was small.

Still, I registered it.

What’s been sitting with me isn’t the mistakes themselves. It’s how quickly my brain turned them into something larger than they were. The slightly awkward intro became evidence that I hadn’t prepared enough. The team name mix-up became evidence that I was getting sloppy. And somewhere in the background, almost imperceptibly, the narrative shifted toward something heavier: are you slipping?

Objectively, these were minor moments. If I had been the candidate in that interview and one of the panelists stumbled over their intro, I would not have thought twice about it. If a colleague mixed up a team name in a meeting, I would not have attached it to their overall competence.

But when it’s me, the standard shifts.

In therapy this week, I described the replaying, the internal commentary, the way these moments linger longer than they probably deserve to. My therapist asked, gently, whether I thought I might be blowing these things out of proportion.

I said yes.

And what struck me is that insight alone doesn’t immediately stop the spiral. You can recognize the distortion and still feel its pull. Awareness is not the same thing as relief.

For the past year, I’ve been practicing this in a different context. Working with my dietitian and therapist in eating disorder recovery, we talk often about the goal not being the complete absence of disordered thoughts. The thoughts will still show up. The goal is reducing the time spent with them. Shortening the spiral. Catching it earlier and letting it pass instead of building a case around it.

I’m realizing how transferable that skill is.

Because this is the same pattern. A small trigger with a fast, critical narrative. A widening spiral.

If part of your identity is being competent, prepared, articulate, reliable, then small deviations don’t feel small. They feel destabilizing. So you tighten up. You over-prepare. You replay the meeting while doing something else. You scan the next conversation for proof that you’re back on solid ground. It feels responsible. It feels like caring.

It’s also exhausting.

Burnout, at least for me, isn’t always about how much I’m doing. Sometimes it’s about how long I let my mind sit in distortion after something minor happens.

The cost rarely comes from the mistake itself. It comes from the amplification, from the meaning layered on top.

I’ve started experimenting with applying the same recovery principle here: the goal is not to eliminate the self-critical thought. It’s to shorten its residency. To notice when I’ve turned “I stumbled over an intro” into “I’m slipping,” and gently pull it back to its original size.

Most people are profoundly self-focused. They are thinking about how they came across, whether their question made sense, whether they sounded prepared. They are not building detailed case studies about my intro cadence or my recall of team names.

There is something deeply comforting about that.

I care about doing good work. I care about showing up prepared. I don’t want to become indifferent. What I’m trying to loosen is the reflex that turns a moment into a meaning and then sits with that meaning far longer than it deserves.

There’s a difference between a thought appearing and a thought taking up residence. I’m getting better at shortening the stay.

I’m 12 days post-op from the first of three surgeries I’m having this year. Each one comes with close to two weeks of recovery, which in practice means about eight days of sick leave at a time.

I’ve done the math more than once. Three surgeries. Roughly 24 days away from work purely for medical leave between now and the end of April.

The number itself isn’t the problem. I don’t work somewhere that discourages time off, and no one has suggested I shouldn’t take it. Still, every time I tally it up, I feel a familiar tightening. Not panic, exactly. More like a reflexive need to double-check that I’m not miscalculating something, that I’m not overstepping.

I’m surprised by how often I ask myself if this is okay.

That question has been looping in my head since before the first surgery, usually surfacing when I’m otherwise feeling fine. When the pain is manageable, when recovery is progressing normally, when there’s no obvious reason to feel uneasy. That’s almost what makes it more noticeable.

This, I think, is part of life after burnout.

Before, I would have treated recovery like a logistical problem to solve around work. I would have minimized it, shortened it, found ways to stay plugged in just enough to feel useful. Now I know better, at least intellectually. I know that healing doesn’t work on productivity timelines, and that rest only counts if you actually take it.

And yet.

I find myself justifying it anyway, if only internally. I compare my time off to other kinds of leave, reminding myself that my company offers 14 weeks of parental leave without hesitation or side-eye. I remind myself that entire seasons of life are understood to require pause, and that we don’t demand proof of dedication from people during those stretches.

Still, medical recovery feels different. Less visible. Easier to downplay. Easier to treat as negotiable.

What I’m afraid of isn’t missing out in the obvious sense. It’s not FOMO so much as a quieter concern that something important will shift while I’m gone, that I’ll return slightly out of sync. That I’ll need longer than expected to get my footing again, not because I’m incapable, but because momentum has a way of continuing without you.

I don’t think this fear is unique to me. It feels culturally reinforced, especially in environments where being responsive and available has long been treated as a proxy for commitment. Where rest is encouraged in theory but still carries an undercurrent of guilt in practice. (Somewhere a European just laughed. I know this is a very American thing.)

Burnout didn’t teach me that rest matters. I already knew that. What it taught me was how deeply uncomfortable it feels to actually believe I’m allowed to take it without consequences.

So I’m sitting in that discomfort now, both physically and mentally. I’m doing the slower work of letting recovery be what it is. Not productive. Not optimized. Just necessary.

I’m up to 16 books read so far this year. I’ve watched Heated Rivalry and enough clips to watch it three times over. (“Reheated Rivalry”, as they say.) I’m caught up on The Traitors. I’m not doing any work whatsoever.

I’m taking the time, even when part of me wants to bargain with it. Even when the old instincts flare up and tell me I should be doing more. For now, that’s enough.

I have no idea what day it is. I had to check my phone to confirm it’s Saturday afternoon.

That feels like the defining feature of the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Time loosens. Calendars stop mattering. Work is technically open but socially closed. Everyone is offline in a way that doesn’t feel restful so much as disorienting.

Nothing is urgent, nothing is required, and my brain refuses to shut up anyway.

I keep thinking this would be a good time to do something meaningful, and then immediately running into the reality that there’s nothing I can actually act on. It’s too late to start anything real and too early to fully disengage. The people I’d normally collaborate with are gone, and the systems that usually create momentum aren’t running. So instead, my brain spins.

I rewrite lists that don’t need rewriting. I open notes apps and outline plans I can’t execute yet. I feel busy without actually doing anything. It looks like thinking, but it feels more like agitation.

Our brains are wired to avoid discomfort, and the liminal space is pretty much the purest definition of it. But there’s an important distinction worth naming. There’s discomfort that comes from real harm, instability, or unmet basic needs. And then there’s this kind of discomfort. The kind that shows up when you don’t know how to fill your time and can’t turn your brain off work. They’re not the same thing, and pretending they are does no one any favors. Still, this discomfort is real.

This is also the week where I do my best planning.

I start thinking about 2026. Side projects I could finally commit to. Ways to expand the newsletter. Ideas for sharing my writing more widely. What it would look like to accomplish more at work, to build momentum instead of just maintaining it. On paper, it all looks reasonable. Even exciting.

But there’s a problem I can’t plan around. I have three surgeries scheduled for the first half of 2026. Which means that while I’m sketching out ambitious versions of the year ahead, I’m also planning for a future I can’t actually predict.

It’s going to be a year where my capacity changes. Where recovery, not output, dictates the pace. Where the most responsible thing I can do for myself is slow down, let go, and learn how to be patient in ways I’m historically bad at.

That’s the tension this week surfaces for me.

Planning feels like control. Like progress. Like I’m doing something useful with the quiet. But some of that planning is really just me reaching for certainty in a year that’s going to require flexibility instead. It’s not that the ideas are bad. It’s that the timing is imaginary.

For high performers especially, productivity does more than move work forward. It regulates anxiety. It gives structure to days and proof of forward motion. When all of that disappears at once, the nervous system doesn’t quite know what to do with the quiet.

This week quietly removes urgency as a coping mechanism.

There’s plenty of time to think, but very little permission to act. Planning becomes a stand-in for motion, even though it doesn’t actually relieve anything. It just keeps the mind occupied enough to avoid sitting with the unease underneath.

Burnout recovery makes this sharper. The old patterns don’t work anymore, but the new ones aren’t fully built yet either. You can’t just fill the quiet with more output, but you also don’t yet trust whatever comes after. So you end up here, in the in-between, aware of the discomfort without a clean way to resolve it.

Nothing is wrong, and nothing is allowed to happen yet. That’s what makes this week hard. Not because it’s empty, but because it’s unstructured quiet without a release valve.

I’m trying not to fix that feeling this year. Not to optimize it away or turn it into insight too quickly. Just to notice it. The urge to plan endlessly. The low-grade anxiety without a clear source. The persistent sense that I should be doing something, even when nothing is required.

This doesn’t feel like a failure of rest anymore. It feels like a transition. And transitions are uncomfortable by definition.

If this week feels strange or unsettling, it doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful or broken. It means you’re sitting in a liminal space where the old rules don’t apply anymore and the new ones haven’t fully formed. That’s not an emergency. It’s just where you are.

I have a favorite late-December ritual. I take myself to a coffee shop, order something I don’t normally drink, and spend a few hours looking back before I look ahead.

I review the goals I set the year before. I notice what I stuck with, what I abandoned, and what quietly fell away. Then I set goals for the following year, usually feeling optimistic and very reasonable about all of it.

I like this ritual. It feels grounding. Intentional. Like I’m doing my part.

This year was… humbling.

I accomplished exactly one of the goals I set last December: joining a Pilates studio. I’m about 120 classes in, so that one stuck.

The rest? Not a single one.

I didn’t hit my reading goal for the first time in years. I gave up on “one race per month” once it became incompatible with marathon training. And I didn’t end up running a marathon at all, largely because I learned more about what my body couldn’t handle in its current state.

I also totally fell behind on learning French. C’est comme ça.

December 2024 me would probably look at that list and conclude I failed the year.

But December 2024 me also couldn’t have predicted what I actually did accomplish.

• This year, I strengthened my relationship with food after getting an eating disorder diagnosis. I finally understood why my body has felt different for so long and why it hasn’t responded to diet and exercise the way I expected. I was diagnosed with lipedema, and I have the first of three surgeries scheduled for January 7.

• I also came to terms with the fact that my previous working situation was untenable. I left, and I started a new job where I feel seen, valued, and empowered to do my best work without feeling like I need to do everything myself.

• And I created this outlet. A place to write honestly about what I’m thinking and feeling, even when it’s messy or unresolved. I didn’t plan for how much this would resonate with others, but it has. I’m deeply grateful for every free and paid subscriber who’s here.

None of that was on my goals list.

That’s the realization I can’t shake as I look toward 2026. The things that mattered most this year weren’t the things I set out to optimize. They emerged as the year unfolded, often in response to constraints I didn’t know were coming.

So I’ll still spend a day at a coffee shop setting goals. I like the ritual too much to give it up. But I’m holding those goals more lightly now.

The year is going to move on its own timeline. All I can do is meet it where I actually am, not where I thought I’d be twelve months earlier.

One of the most exhausting beliefs I carried before burnout was that success was almost entirely a function of effort.

If I worked harder, I’d get better outcomes. If I stalled, I just hadn’t pushed enough. If something didn’t work, that was a signal to try again, but louder this time.

That belief is seductive because it feels empowering. It suggests control. It tells you that with enough discipline, sacrifice, and persistence, you can manufacture the outcome you want.

It’s also a fast track to burnout.

After burnout, I started seeing my career differently. Not in a cynical way. In a more honest one.

Success isn’t luck or skill. It’s both. And pretending otherwise puts an impossible amount of pressure on effort.

Looking back, there were moments that clearly weren’t earned in the way I once framed them.

For one role, I was coached through the entire interview process because I happened to know the hiring manager. For my current role, I was connected with the hiring manager through a Slack community I was already part of. It was an easy foot in the door.

I still had to show up with the right skill set. I still had to interview well. I still had to do the job once I got it. But I also had help along the way, and pretending otherwise would be rewriting history.

At the time, I treated those moments as proof that my strategy was working. That if I just kept doing exactly what I was doing, the trajectory would continue.

When things later slowed down or shifted, I assumed the problem was me.

That’s the trap.

When you over-attribute success to skill, you also over-attribute setbacks to personal failure. You internalize things that were never fully within your control. You respond to changing circumstances by pushing harder instead of stepping back.

Burnout, for me, was the moment that belief finally collapsed.

I still catch myself comparing my career to others’, usually through titles.

When I left a Director of Engineering role and joined Zapier as a Senior Engineering Manager, it felt like moving backward. On paper, it looked like regression. A step down. A signal that something had gone wrong.

That story was hard to shake because I’d internalized the idea that progress is linear and always visible. Bigger title, bigger impact. Anything else felt like a miscalculation.

In reality, the move gave me broader scope and more influence than I had before. I now work inside a much larger organization, on more complex systems, and affect outcomes at a scale that simply wasn’t possible in my previous role.

Nothing about my capability decreased. The context changed.

But when success is framed as entirely skill-based, context disappears. Titles become shorthand for worth, and normal career shifts start to feel like personal failures instead of structural differences. That distortion doesn’t just affect how you view others. It quietly reshapes how you see yourself.

Post-burnout, my relationship with ambition looks different. Not smaller, but more realistic.

Effort still matters. Preparation still matters. Making thoughtful decisions still matters. What changed is that effort is no longer treated as a guarantee.

There is a quiet relief in acknowledging that context plays a role. Markets change. Teams change. Leadership changes. Life changes. You can do everything “right” and still find yourself stuck, sidelined, or starting over.

That doesn’t mean you weren’t capable. It means you were human, operating inside systems you don’t fully control.

This realization didn’t make me less motivated. It made me more discerning. I’m less interested in grinding myself down to prove something and more interested in noticing when conditions are right and deciding whether I want to step into them. I’m also more willing to walk away from environments where effort is endlessly demanded but rarely rewarded.

Luck, seen clearly, doesn’t cheapen success. It softens failure.

It allows you to say that something didn’t work without turning it into a referendum on your worth or work ethic. It creates space to stop punishing yourself for outcomes that were never fully yours to engineer.

Burnout forced me to give up the fantasy that I could control everything if I just tried hard enough. What I gained instead was a healthier sense of agency. I can prepare, choose, and follow through, while accepting that not every outcome is mine to own.

That shift has made ambition feel lighter. Not gone, but no longer carrying the weight of the world on its back.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much pressure we put on ourselves to only do things we’re already good at. Somewhere along the way, “trying something new” stopped sounding fun and started feeling like a reputational risk. Like if you can’t perform at a certain level instantly, you shouldn’t bother.

That mindset looks harmless from the outside. It feels responsible. Mature, even. But it quietly chokes off the part of you that’s curious, playful, and willing to be surprised. And it keeps you stuck in the same narrow corners of your life.

What I’ve been noticing in myself is this instinct to avoid anything where I can’t show up as the polished version of who I used to be. The competent one. The quick learner. The person who could pick something up and immediately “get it.”

(We’ve been unpacking this in therapy.)

Burnout has a way of shrinking your world like that. Even long after the exhaustion fades, the pressure to not mess up can linger. You don’t want to see yourself fall short again, so you avoid situations where you might.

I’ve accepted that I’ve been putting pressure on myself that nobody else is even giving a second thought to. Nobody is asking me to figure it out on the first try, to be immediately good at something. It’s a self-imposed requirement that sets me up to fail.

But recently, I’ve been letting myself be bad at things again. Truly bad. And there’s something surprisingly freeing about it.

Being bad lowers the stakes

Take learning French. I have all the apps. All the books. All the good intentions. And yet: my pronunciation? Rough. My verb conjugations? In progress. My confidence? Depends on the hour. Generally low. I’m still terrified to speak French in public, but I did say one sentence in French out loud today. Please clap.

For a while, that bothered me. I felt slow. Like I was failing. Like my brain should just “try harder.”

But then I realized the moment you admit you’re bad at something, the pressure to be perfect disappears. There’s nothing to protect. No expectations to uphold. You’re just a person learning a new thing, which is one of the most human experiences you can have.

It’s honestly kind of fun.

Being bad opens the door to creativity

There’s also this unexpected creativity that shows up when you stop needing to be good right away. When you’re allowed to make mistakes, you naturally experiment more. You explore. You follow impulses without evaluating whether they’re “right.”

That messy middle is where the good stuff hides.
It’s where play comes back.

And play is a muscle you lose when everything in your life has revolved around productivity, competence, or survival.

Being bad rebuilds your trust in yourself

The more I let myself be terrible at something, the more I notice how quickly “terrible” turns into “okay,” and how “okay” eventually turns into “not bad actually.”

It’s not about the skill. It’s about proving to yourself that you can start small, stay with it, and watch the world open a little because you were brave enough to begin.

That’s the quiet part of burnout recovery no one talks about. Your life expands again through the small, low-stakes attempts.

Not through a grand reinvention, but through tiny, unimpressive experiments that remind you you’re still capable of learning and creating.

Letting yourself be a beginner again

So here’s where I’ve landed:

You don’t need confidence before you try something. Confidence shows up after you’ve tried it enough times that you stop caring how you look doing it.

Letting yourself be bad at something isn’t a failure. It’s an act of self-trust. It’s choosing curiosity over ego. It’s giving yourself permission to exist outside the narrow confines of what you already know how to do.

Honestly, it feels good to grow again, even if the growth looks awkward at first.

If you’re in a season of rebuilding, or rediscovering parts of yourself, or letting your world widen after it’s felt small for a while, maybe give yourself the gift of being bad at something. You might enjoy who you become on the other side of it.

Every new role, routine, or even city starts with the same uncomfortable truth: you’ll be shaky before you’re steady.

Right now I’m in France, typing this from a little Airbnb with laundry drying across the room. I feel it here - the disorientation of being somewhere new. Grocery runs that take twice as long. Conversations where I fear saying something wrong or dumb. And at work, I feel it too.

At my last job, I had three years of context. Three years of comfort, credibility, and confidence. By year three, I knew where I fit. Four months into a new company, I’m rebuilding that foundation from scratch. Still proving myself. Still reminding myself I was hired for a reason. Still hoping my confidence eventually catches up to my competence.

And that’s the part that’s so frustrating after burnout: you want instant stability. You want to skip ahead to the part where you feel sure of yourself again. But you can’t. Impact isn’t instant, no matter how much you want it to be.

Why this feels so hard

There’s a reason the early months of something new feel so shaky, and it’s not just in your head:

• Adjustment takes longer than we think. Most research shows it takes at least two to three months to feel comfortable in a new workplace, and often up to six months before you really feel proficient.

• The “honeymoon-hangover effect” is real. At first, novelty makes everything feel exciting. Then reality sets in, satisfaction dips, and you feel like you’re sliding backwards before climbing out again. Psychologists have been studying this pattern long enough to give it a name.

• You’re on the wrong side of the learning curve. The classic “learning curve” shows performance lags before it accelerates. Early on, it feels like you’re doing everything wrong, but that plateau is the necessary friction before progress compounds.

• Imposter syndrome loves fresh starts. Up to 82% of people experience imposter feelings at some point, and they spike in new roles or situations. It’s not proof you don’t belong. It’s proof you’re human.

Burnout recovery makes it even trickier

When you’re recovering from burnout, the urge to skip ahead is even stronger. You don’t just want to feel steady—you want to feel steady yesterday. You want proof that this time, you’re doing things differently.

But burnout recovery doesn’t hand out shortcuts either. Rebuilding your identity, your routines, and your confidence is messy. Some days you’ll feel like you’ve made huge progress. Other days, you’ll wonder if you’re right back where you started. And that uncertainty? That’s part of the work.

What helps (at least a little)

Here’s what I’m practicing right now (emphasis on practicing, because I’m far from perfect at it):

1. Track small wins. The learning curve only feels like failure if you don’t notice the micro-progress. Keep a log of the tiny things you’ve figured out. It builds evidence against the “I’m not moving forward” narrative.

2. Stop comparing day 100 to day 1000. The colleague who looks unshakably confident today once spent thirty minutes panicking over their first Slack intro.

3. Reframe imposter feelings as a signal. Instead of treating them as shame, I try to use them as a reminder to stay curious and keep learning. They’re uncomfortable, but they’re not useless.

4. Give it six months. Most people don’t feel settled until then. It’s not personal failure; it’s the timeline of human adjustment.

The reminder I need (and maybe you do too)

The hardest part of starting something new isn’t the logistics. It’s accepting that you won’t have year-three confidence in month four.

If you’re in the shaky stage, whether it’s a new job, a new city, or the long work of recovering from burnout, you’re not failing. You’re adapting.

You’ll steady out. Just not today. And that’s okay.

While Meta’s recent 5% workforce reduction targeting “low performers” dominated headlines, a quieter organizational earthquake may be inflicting deeper psychological damage on the teams that remain. Just weeks after those layoffs, Mark Zuckerberg announced yet another restructuring. This time he’s splitting Meta’s AI division into four groups, abandoning projects like the Behemoth model, and shifting the company’s open-source philosophy toward potentially closed models.

For thousands of employees who survived the cuts, this represents something psychologically distinct from layoff anxiety. Research in organizational psychology shows that restructuring creates a unique form of workplace stress that attacks professional identity in ways job loss fears don’t. As Zuckerberg declared 2025 would be “an intense year,” he may have understated just how intense—not because of workload, but because of what reorganizations do to the human psyche.

The science of “what am I supposed to do?”

At the heart of reorganization stress lies role ambiguity, or the lack of clarity about what actions employees should take to achieve their goals. Unlike the binary fear of layoffs, role ambiguity creates a more insidious uncertainty that erodes professional identity from within.

Research consistently shows that role ambiguity undermines employees’ understanding of what they’re expected to do, how to achieve it, and how their work will be assessed. It’s the difference between fearing you might lose your job and not knowing what your job even is anymore.

Meta’s AI restructuring exemplifies this. Researchers hired to advance the company’s open-source philosophy may now be asked to build closed models, fundamentally changing not just their daily tasks but the very reason they joined. And with reporting structures still “fluid” and projects scrapped after months of work, identity disruption becomes inevitable. Studies from the National Institute of Occupational Health confirm this: shortly after restructuring, employees consistently report lower role clarity and more uncertainty about their responsibilities.

Why reorgs hit different than layoffs

The psychological distinction matters more than most leaders realize. Both create stress, but they activate different systems in the brain.

• Layoffs create fear-based stress. Research on job insecurity shows the threat is binary—you either keep your job or you don’t. Anxiety here is painful, but clear, and is typically met with concrete steps like job searching or financial planning.

• Reorganizations create identity-based stress. A study in the Norwegian petroleum industry found restructuring was linked to the largest decline in psychosocial work environment quality—even more than layoffs. Why? Because it destabilizes professional identity. At Meta, the shift from open to closed AI development doesn’t just change workflows; it challenges the beliefs and values that drew many researchers there in the first place.

I’ve felt this personally. When Spot AI restructured, my role changed so much that I found myself questioning my entire purpose as an engineering leader. It wasn’t about job security or competence, it was about whether the mission still aligned with who I was professionally and if I still had a place in the next chapter of the company. I knew my job was secure, but my identity was not.

The contagion effect: when uncertainty spreads

Reorg stress doesn’t stop with individuals. Ambiguity spreads through teams via emotional contagion. One person’s role confusion amplifies everyone else’s stress, creating organizational vertigo.

Meta’s AI division is showing this in real time. The New York Times reported “old guard have chafed at new hires” and noted “internal tensions.” High-profile departures like Joelle Pineau and Angela Fan don’t just mean lost colleagues. They remove psychological anchors. Each exit forces others to wonder: “What do they know that I don’t?”

When leaders like Alexandr Wang start questioning employees about past work, the implicit message is that yesterday’s contributions may no longer matter. That’s how team-wide anxiety takes root, often triggering turnover even when no layoffs are planned.

What leaders can learn

Research points to clear strategies for minimizing damage during reorgs:

• Communicate clearly. Role ambiguity thrives in silence. Yet when asked about the AI restructuring, Meta’s spokesperson declined to comment. That’s a recipe for amplified anxiety.

• Explain the why, not just the what. Ambition is not enough. Employees need to see how the restructuring connects to broader goals.

• Acknowledge the identity challenge. Shifting from open to closed AI is more than operational. It’s philosophical. Leaders who don’t address that openly leave employees to process it alone.

• Support team cohesion. Departures weaken the psychological fabric. Without added support, teams can fracture.

• Sequence changes better. Dropping a major reorg immediately after layoffs doubles the psychological hit. Timing matters.

The human cost of superhuman ambitions

Meta is betting $72 billion on AI, but the real risk isn’t technological. It’s psychological. Talent can’t thrive in sustained ambiguity. If leaders don’t address the identity shock and role confusion reorgs bring, no amount of investment will save their best teams from walking.

Zuckerberg’s vision of “superintelligence” may depend less on algorithms and infrastructure than on whether his people can find clarity, meaning, and stability in the middle of chaos.

A recent study in The Lancet sparked a rabbit hole of research about the longer-term effects of leveraging technology in our day-to-day lives. In this study, doctors used AI to spot precancerous growths during colonoscopies, seeing a marked improvement in detections (yay!). Then researchers took the tool away. After only three months of regular AI assistance, the doctors’ unassisted detection rates fell from 28% to 22%. That is a 20% drop in a life-and-death domain.

What bothered me most wasn’t the number. It was the mechanism. The doctors didn’t use AI because they felt less capable. Their skills declined because they were using AI. The tool slowly took over the mental work, and the muscle memory faded. Years of expertise dulled in twelve weeks.

If we zoom out, we know for a fact it’s not just medicine. We are running miniature versions of this experiment every day.

The GPS effect

I’ve driven to certain places in Atlanta dozens of times. (If you’ve had the pleasure of driving in Atlanta, you know how chaotic it can be and how important it is to have alternate routes.). On occasion, my GPS will go awry, and I suddenly can’t remember which street I was supposed to turn on or which exit to take from the roundabout. It isn’t charming. It’s a little scary (and a little embarrassing). I can eventually find my way out, but it can sometimes take a moment for me to regroup.

That isn’t just me being “bad with directions.” Habitual GPS use is linked to decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory. Neuroscientists say we become “passive passengers rather than active explorers” when we let the blue line on the screen do the deciding for us. The less our brains need to build mental maps, the less they bother.

Navigation is the obvious example because we all feel it. But this “I can’t do it without the tool” reflex is spreading everywhere.

The great forgetting

• Engineering. I hear this from developers all the time: after a few months of leaning on AI coding assistants, debugging instincts get dull. One engineer summed this up well: “I’ve become a human clipboard, shuttling errors to the AI and pasting solutions back into code”. When you stop tracing the problem yourself, you stop seeing the patterns.

• Writing. Ask most of us to handwrite more than a grocery list and what comes out looks like cave drawings. Years of typing will do that, but the cognitive cost is real. Handwriting isn’t just about neatness; it supports memory and idea formation.

• Math. Calculators used to be for the hard stuff. Now they do the easy stuff too, and students miss obviously wrong outputs because they have lost the gut check.

Researchers even have a name for this pattern: AI-chatbots-induced cognitive atrophy (AICICA), the deterioration that comes from over-reliance on chatbots and similar tools. The label sounds dramatic until your battery dies and you realize you can’t navigate, can’t spell “definitely,” and aren’t totally sure how to approach the bug without autocomplete holding your hand.

Why this fuels burnout

We bring tools in to reduce cognitive load so we can “focus on higher-level work.” Good intention. Wrong model. Abilities do not sit in cold storage while a tool handles them. They weaken with disuse. The less you do a thing, the harder it becomes to do that thing, and the faster your confidence plummets.

That was another finding from the colonoscopy study: once the AI was gone, doctors felt less motivated, less focused, and less responsible for their own decisions. It wasn’t only a performance dip. It was a psychological one.

Now add modern work. Every outage, wrong answer, or broken integration turns into a crisis because we no longer trust our own skills to backstop the tool. What could have been a small inconvenience becomes a spike of panic. This is the problem: we don’t just lose competence. We start to feel incompetent. That feeling is gasoline on the burnout fire.

From helpful to helpless

There’s a name for what happens when that panic becomes a pattern: learned helplessness. If you’re repeatedly in situations where you don’t control the outcome, eventually you stop trying, even when you could succeed.

When the default becomes “let the tool do it,” two pillars of mental health crack:

• Self-efficacy, the belief that you can figure things out.

• Locus of control, the belief that your actions influence outcomes.

Undercut those, and you don’t get peace. You get anxiety. That’s what researchers call technostress—stress driven by the demands and failures of technology at work—and it correlates with higher burnout. Studies of remote workers during the pandemic linked techno-stressors directly to burnout, which then predicted depression and anxiety symptoms.

You can probably name your own triggers:

• Your phone dies or you lose cell signal and you cannot navigate.

• Spell-check breaks and basic words suddenly look wrong.

• The AI insists on a fix you can’t validate, and you realize you don’t remember how to validate it.

Each one is a reminder that the tool holds more of your capability than you do.

What this looks like across jobs

Education research on preservice teachers found that AI dependency had significant negative effects on problem-solving, critical thinking, creative thinking, and self-confidence. These are the people preparing to teach the next generation.

In tech, where AI adoption is furthest along, nearly half of workers report depression or anxiety. It isn’t only the pace or the ambiguity. It is the cognitive dissonance of being told to be innovative while outsourcing the very skills innovation requires.

That is the double bind: use the tools or fall behind, but risk losing the capabilities that made you valuable in the first place.

What to do instead: make AI a collaborator, not a crutch

Throwing the phone in a lake and writing code on a typewriter is not the move. The goal is conscious competence: use tools to extend your reach while keeping your core skills alive.

A few practices that actually help:

Practice deliberate difficulty. Do things the harder way on purpose, regularly. Drive to a familiar place without GPS. Sketch your outline longhand before drafting. Try a debugging session without code suggestions. It is not a test of purity. It is maintenance for the neural circuits you want to keep.

Build tolerance for uncertainty. Resist the reflex to Google or ask the AI the second a question pops up. Sit with the not-knowing for a few minutes. Form a hypothesis. Then check yourself. Uncertainty tolerance is part of the job for any kind of creative or technical work.

Audit your dependencies. For a week, notice the moments you reach for a tool out of habit. Ask, “Could I do this without assistance?” If the answer is yes, try it. If the answer is no, put that skill on your practice list.

Protect the basics. Handwriting, mental math, and spatial navigation pay cognitive dividends well beyond the tasks themselves. These aren’t nostalgic hobbies. They are insurance policies for your brain. (Journaling is a great habit to have for your mental health!)

Create “manual mode” drills. Have a standing block where you operate without the usual scaffolding. For engineers, that might be reading logs and tracing data flow by hand before asking an assistant. For writers, drafting a page without autocomplete and then running edits. For managers, diagnosing a team issue without polling Slack or dropping it in an AI prompt.

Design for outages. If you lead a team, treat tool failure like a fire drill. How do we ship if the assistant is down? How do we make decisions if our analytics dashboard is broken? Write the checklist. Practice it. The point is confidence: “We can still do the work.”

Use the tool, keep the skill. Pair AI with explicit skill-keeping. If you accept an AI suggestion, explain to yourself why it works. If you take a generated outline, rewrite the structure in your own words before you draft. The tool accelerates the start; you keep the thinking.

Where this leaves us

Education researcher Amy Ko puts a fine point on it: unlike calculators, which extended math fluency, many AI tools “supplant thought itself,” short-circuiting the struggle where writing, synthesis, and reasoning live.

The fear is not that AI becomes sentient. The fear is that humans become inert.

The good news is atrophy is not permanent. Doctors can retrain their pattern recognition. We can rebuild navigation instincts, regain math fluency, and remember how to debug without autocomplete. It takes intention and a little discomfort. That’s it.

Real efficiency isn’t outsourcing every ounce of effort. Real efficiency is choosing where effort matters most and keeping our most human skills sharp.

Your GPS might know the fastest route. Do you still know the way home?

Do you see the problem here?

Here's the cruel irony of modern burnout recovery: The apps and tools designed to help us heal are often powered by the exact same psychological mechanisms that made us sick. We download meditation apps to escape the constant pressure to optimize ourselves, only to find ourselves optimizing our meditation streaks. We install habit trackers to build sustainable routines, only to feel shame when we break our "consistency score." And we turn to wellness apps to find peace from productivity culture, only to discover they've gamified our recovery.

This isn't a coincidence. It's the predictable result of applying Silicon Valley growth tactics to the very problems Silicon Valley thinking helped create.

The Same Engine, Different Fuel

Think about what drives burnout: perfectionism, the quantified self movement, the relentless pressure to optimize and improve, the fear of falling behind, the shame of not being "enough." Now look at your wellness apps. Notice anything familiar?

Research on productivity shame shows it creates "emotions of shame combined with anxiety and discomfort" when someone feels they lack enough productivity. But open your meditation app after missing a few days, and you'll find the same emotional cocktail: shame, anxiety, and the message that you're not doing enough.

The wellness industry has taken the psychological playbook of hustle culture and simply rebranded it. Instead of optimizing your work output, you're optimizing your self-care. Instead of feeling guilty about missed deadlines, you're feeling guilty about missed mindfulness sessions.

The Perfectionist's Guide to Imperfection

Consider Headspace, one of the most popular meditation apps. It tracks your "mindful minutes," maintains streaks, sends you achievement badges, and measures your "consistency." You know—all the things that meditation is supposed to help you stop caring about.

When people break streaks, research shows it's especially demotivating because they've failed at two levels: the behavior itself and the meta-goal of maintaining the streak. So your meditation app doesn't just make you feel bad about missing meditation—it makes you feel bad about being bad at being mindful about not being attached to outcomes. (Say that sentence twice.)

The psychological mechanisms are identical to what drives us to burnout in the first place:

• Loss aversion: Streak features exploit the fear of losing progress rather than celebrating present-moment awareness

• External validation: Badges and achievements train you to seek approval rather than internal satisfaction

• Quantified worth: Your meditation "score" becomes another metric of self-worth

• Comparison culture: Leaderboards and social features recreate workplace competition in your recovery space

The Monetization of Shame

Perhaps most perversely, these apps often make money from your failure to recover properly. Duolingo's "streak freeze" feature lets you pay to maintain your streak when you miss a day. They've literally monetized the anxiety about breaking commitments to yourself.

Calm lets you manually add a meditation on a missed day if you broke your streak (you don’t have to prove that you actually did meditate). Headspace has premium features to "maintain your practice." The business model depends on you feeling bad enough about your inconsistency to pay for the anxiety relief.

This is the wellness-industrial complex in action: create the problem (streak anxiety, comparison pressure, quantified self-worth), then sell the solution (premium features to manage that anxiety). It's productivity culture eating its own tail.

The Meta-Burnout Problem

What we're seeing is meta-burnout: burnout from our burnout recovery tools. One user described their productivity app as creating "a persistent digital presence that mastered the exact tone of passive-aggressive disappointment" where "every notification becomes a gentle reminder that you're not quite enough."

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly the internal voice that leads to burnout in the first place—the sense that you're always falling short, always need to do better, always need to optimize something about yourself.

The apps that promise to quiet that voice are actually amplifying it. They've taken the shame-based motivation tactics of productivity culture and applied them to the one area of life that should be free from them: your recovery.

The Research Shows These Features Don't Even Work

Here's the kicker: A meta-analysis of mental health apps found that gamification elements don't actually improve mental health outcomes any better than apps that don’t include gamification. The very features designed to keep you engaged—streaks, badges, leaderboards—don't make you feel better. They just make you use the app more.

We've optimized for engagement metrics instead of healing metrics. And in doing so, we've created recovery tools that keep you in the same psychological patterns that made you sick.

The Goal Displacement Trap

Researchers have identified "goal displacement," where proxy measures replace actual goals. In wellness apps, maintaining your meditation streak becomes more important than actually feeling peaceful. Logging your mood becomes more important than actually improving it. Tracking your sleep becomes more important than actually resting well.

This is particularly insidious for people recovering from burnout, who often struggle with perfectionism and external validation seeking. The apps designed to help them heal from these patterns end up reinforcing them.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Real recovery from burnout requires breaking free from the optimization mindset entirely. It means:

• Accepting inconsistency as human and healthy

• Valuing internal experience over external metrics

• Letting go of the need to track and measure everything

• Finding intrinsic motivation rather than external validation

• Embracing rest without productivity justification

None of these align with engagement-driven app design. A truly helpful recovery tool would probably be used less over time, not more. It would celebrate rest days, not punish them. It would help you stop tracking things, not track them better.

The Path Forward

This doesn't mean all wellness technology is harmful. Some research shows that tracking can be helpful when designed thoughtfully. But the key difference is whether the tool serves your wellbeing or whether your wellbeing serves the tool's engagement metrics.

Ask yourself: Does this app make me feel more anxious when I don't use it? Does it create shame around natural human inconsistency? Is it turning my recovery into another optimization project? If so, it might be time to recover from your recovery tools.

I know because I've fallen into this trap myself. I now find myself opening my affirmations app just to see the streak counter tick up to 108, 109, 110, and then closing it without actually reading the affirmations. I'm literally using a self-worth app to avoid doing the work of building self-worth.

The affirmation I really need isn't "I am enough" or "I am worthy"—it's "I can break my streak and still be a worthy human."

The most radical act in our optimization-obsessed culture isn't finding the perfect wellness app. It's recognizing that your worth isn't measured by any metric at all—not your productivity, not your consistency, not even your progress in healing.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your burnout recovery is delete the app that's supposed to help you recover.

We were promised a productivity revolution. AI tools would handle the boring stuff, freeing us to focus on creative, strategic work. We’d finally have time to think, to innovate, to maybe even leave the office before dark.

Instead, something strange is happening. We’re working harder than ever.

But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings. The 30 minutes you saved on data analysis? You’re using it to manage two more AI tools and review their outputs.

We instinctively expand our work to fill available time—it’s like a productivity version of Parkinson’s Law (work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion). AI promised to elevate us to strategic thinking, but instead we’re just doing more stuff, faster, with less mental bandwidth to actually think strategically about any of it.

I see it everywhere—in Slack channels exploring AI tool recommendations, in LinkedIn posts about “game-changing workflows,” in the exhausted faces of colleagues who’ve spent their morning cleaning up code AI wrote for them.

The promise was simple: AI saves time. The reality is messier.

The data doesn’t lie (even if we do)

A recent study of experienced software developers working on their own repositories found something shocking: when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete tasks than without AI. Even more telling: the developers estimated they were 20% faster with AI—they were completely wrong about their own productivity.

This isn’t an isolated finding. The 2024 DORA report—the gold standard for measuring software delivery performance—revealed that while 75% of developers reported feeling more productive with AI, the system-level results told a different story. A 25% increase in AI adoption correlated with a 1.5% drop in delivery throughput and a 7.2% decrease in delivery stability.

Even more striking, the DORA researchers found that “individuals are reporting a decrease in the amount of time they spend doing valuable work as AI adoption increases”—exactly the opposite of what AI tools promise to deliver.

Manufacturing research shows similar patterns—companies adopting industrial AI see immediate productivity losses before eventual gains. This article talks of a “J-curve trajectory,” indicating that a small dip in productivity is expected before gains can be seen. More established companies see a greater dip than newer companies, which is to be expected.

The pattern is consistent across studies: AI tools create an illusion of efficiency while often making systems work harder, not smarter. Individual developers feel faster, but teams deliver slower. People report saving time, but organizations see increased coordination costs.

Before I continue on, I’m not saying AI tools are bad and that you shouldn’t use them. I’m pointing out where we realistically are in this current phase of AI innovation and what it means for us moving forward.

The cognitive load nobody talks about

Here’s what I think is really happening: AI tools aren’t just saving us time—they’re shifting where we spend our mental energy. And that shift is exhausting in ways we haven’t fully recognized yet.

Instead of writing that email from scratch, you’re now crafting the perfect prompt, reviewing AI output for accuracy, and fixing the weird formatting it generated. Instead of doing research yourself, you’re fact-checking AI summaries and cross-referencing sources you don’t trust.

Researchers and practitioners increasingly describe this as a new kind of cognitive load, requiring effort just to filter and discern AI outputs, which might detract from deeper, more focused work. We’ve traded implementation work for constant quality control—and quality control is mentally draining.

For developers, AI has shifted the job from writing code to “critical specification, orchestration, and post-hoc validation” (source). The code gets written faster, but now you need entirely new meta-skills to manage AI outputs you didn’t create and can’t fully trace.

How this relates to burnout

This isn’t really about AI. It’s about our relationship with productivity culture itself.

The pressure to constantly optimize, to adopt every new tool, to squeeze efficiency from every moment—it’s just another version of the “grind harder” mentality that leads to burnout. We’ve taken the 996 work culture debate (working 9a-9p 6 days a week) and dressed it up in Silicon Valley clothing.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is not try to be more productive.

I keep thinking about my A- running rating and how that small drop from A+ still managed to break something inside me. We’re doing the same thing with AI—chasing perfect optimization at the expense of our mental health and actual effectiveness.

Maybe the real productivity hack is learning to recognize when tools serve us versus when we’re serving the tools. Maybe it’s giving ourselves permission to work at a sustainable pace, even if the AI influencers on LinkedIn think we’re falling behind.

Maybe being “less efficient” but more intentional is actually the win.

So what can we do about it?

The solution isn’t to abandon AI entirely—some of these tools genuinely are helpful. But we need to fundamentally change our expectations and approach.

1. Reframe “productivity” entirely

Stop measuring success by time saved. Start measuring by cognitive energy preserved. The real question isn’t “how fast can I do this?” but “can I actually absorb, process, and act effectively on what’s being produced?”

If an AI tool saves you 30 minutes but leaves you mentally drained and second-guessing everything, that’s not productivity—that’s cognitive debt. And if you’re just filling those saved 30 minutes with another 30 minutes of less valuable work, you’re going to eventually resent your work.

2. Give yourself permission to be selective

You don’t have to adopt every AI tool that promises efficiency. You don’t have to optimize every workflow. You don’t have to keep up with every “game-changing” prompt strategy your colleagues are sharing.

Even experienced professionals are wrong about which AI tools actually help them. Trust your own experience over the hype. If a tool makes you feel more scattered, more anxious, or more exhausted—even if it technically saves time—you have permission to stop using it. Exploration is healthy; forced adoption of tools that don’t feel right to your workflow only increases stress.

3. Plan for the adjustment period (and that it might be long)

As stated earlier, AI adoption follows a “J-curve”—temporary productivity decline followed by eventual gains, but only after significant organizational adjustment. Maybe we’re all in that dip right now, and that’s… normal.

The companies that eventually see gains? They’re the ones that invested in complementary changes—new processes, training, infrastructure. They didn’t just bolt AI onto existing workflows and hope for magic.

But here’s what the research really shows: even when productivity gains do happen “accomplishing twice as much work in the same amount of time”—not working less, just cramming more into the same hours.

And that’s what we really need to be wary of. We shouldn’t be trying to do more work in the same amount of time; we shouldn’t be aiming to be more efficient with our time so we don’t have to work 60+ hour weeks.

Then on Sunday, I was supposed to run 7 miles. I made it to 4 before the heat and humidity said, “you sure about that?” And I wasn’t. So I stopped and got some iced coffee with my dad instead.

Here’s what my training app had to say about that:

Hal’s feedback? Still working on not taking it personally.

Until this week, I had an A+ rating for both overall training and the past 9 days. I hit every run perfectly. Now, thanks to two small decisions that were objectively good for me, I’ve got an A-.

And yes, I know that’s still an A. I’m not failing. Nothing is on fire.

But if you’re wondering how much unlearning it takes to break free from perfectionism, let me tell you: this single notch drop still managed to break a little something inside me. That’s how deep it goes.

A+ me would’ve pushed through both runs. Maybe tacked on extra mileage Sunday just to prove a point to… myself? The ghost of my high school gymnastics coach who used to punish us with runs whenever we’d fall off the beam during a meet? I don’t even know.

But I’m not trying to be A+ me anymore. I’m trying to be present me. The version of myself that listens to her body, even when her brain is screaming “but the plan!”

It still stings a little. Not gonna lie. But healing isn’t clean. It doesn’t come with a letter grade.

So I’ll take the A-, and I’ll keep going. Because I’d rather be a well-rested B+ human than an overworked and injured A+ wreck.

I was in San Francisco this week, and like most visits out west, it came with catch-ups. Some planned, some spontaneous. Some with people I still talk to regularly, some I hadn’t spoken to since the day I left Spot.

As I sat there, catching up over coffee or a cocktail, I realized something strange—I felt calm. Not performative-calm, not “I’m fine” calm. Actual, grounded calm. I hadn’t felt that in a work setting in years. That’s when it hit me just how much had changed.

And it hit me.

You don’t realize how burned out you are until you’ve been out long enough to feel like yourself again.

Leaving a job doesn’t instantly fix burnout. I know that firsthand. I left Spot months ago and still needed time—real time—to unlearn urgency, rebuild trust in my own pace, and stop defining my worth by how many fires I could put out.

But there’s a reason recovery didn’t start until I walked away.

When you’re deep in it, you normalize everything. The Sunday Scaries. The Slack anxiety. The request for an innocuous conversation when you’ve made it up in your mind that you’ve done something wrong. The calendar that gaslights you into thinking you should have time. The way your brain flatlines the second you open your laptop in the morning.

And the worst part? You think it’s you.

You think you’re the problem for not being able to handle it better. You think if you could just get a little more efficient, a little more focused, a little tougher, you could survive it.

But you weren’t meant to survive it.

I can confidently say this now: you were meant to get out.

That doesn’t mean you quit tomorrow. But it does mean you need distance. Whether that’s a real vacation (not the “I'll check Slack once a day” kind) or just time spent talking to people who’ve made it to the other side.

Burnout doesn’t just come from doing too much. It comes from staying in the wrong thing too long.

And you won’t always know it until you leave.

—
Would you want a deeper dive on how to know when it’s time to go, or what early recovery actually looks like? I’m thinking about writing more on this—let me know.

No offline Google Docs. No queued-up emails. No slide deck edits.

Just an aisle seat and a mind that hasn’t quite made peace with being still.

For years, plane time meant productivity. It was sacred. Nobody could message me. There were no meetings to attend. Just focused, uninterrupted work. And I loved that feeling—because when you’re used to being stretched thin, those pockets of time felt like a gift you had to earn.

So now, sitting here, doing nothing, feels… wrong.

There’s a part of me that keeps whispering:

“You’re wasting time.”
“You have so much to do.”
“This is focus time. Why aren’t you using it?”

That voice used to drive everything. It pushed me through burnout, even when my body was screaming for rest. It rewarded me for being “disciplined,” for being the person who could always squeeze in one more task, one more hour.

But here’s the truth I’ve been learning the hard way:

You don’t have to fill every empty space with productivity.

The plane doesn’t have to be a second office.

The quiet doesn’t have to be a guilt trip.

Rest doesn’t always look like a nap or a day off—sometimes, it’s a flight where you just don’t open your work laptop.

(To be honest, I’m typing this out on my personal laptop so I do have my laptop out. But so far I have written this post and spent $85 on Delta swag I most definitely didn’t need.)

And yes, it’s uncomfortable. Especially when you’ve tied your identity to being the one who always gets things done. But sitting with that discomfort is part of healing, too.

So I’m letting this moment be what it is. A plane ride. Not a sprint. Not a catch-up session. Not a performance review.

Just time. Unstructured. Unearned. Still valuable.

If you need it: You’re allowed to just sit on the plane.

Cute title. Exuberant chicken. Big exclamation point energy.

But as I read it to my nephew for the fifth time, I realized:
“Oh no. This isn’t for him. This is for me.”

Because here’s where I’m at right now:

✅ I’m 2.5 months into a new role.
✅ Everyone is smart and competent and uses acronyms I don’t understand (though I’m slowly learning).
✅ Half the time I feel like a potato with a Slack account.

Sometimes I catch myself just… moving my cursor around the screen like I’m waiting for my hands to remember how to work. For whatever I’m looking for to click again.

Honestly, it usually ends up with my browser tabs looking like this:

This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve led teams. I’ve built products. I’ve run two companies.

But when you’re new—or coming back after burnout—there’s this weird middle phase.

You’re not flailing, exactly. But you’re also not settled. You’re somewhere in between, hovering a bit off the ground.

The confidence you used to have? Gone.
The instincts? Rusty.
Your inner voice? Mostly just saying things like:

“Everyone’s going to figure out I’m a fraud,”
“Why did I open Slack again?” and
“Maybe I should buy a chicken-themed motivational book for my desk.”

So here’s what I’m trying to remember (and maybe you need this too):

→ Everyone knows you’re new.
→ Nobody expects you to nail it right away.
→ It’s normal to feel lost before you find your footing.

Recovery from burnout isn’t linear. Neither is your confidence.

Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is show up anyway. Even if you’re just… doing your best shouting chicken impression. (My nephew enjoys it, anyway.)

Woohoo! You’re doing great.

P.S. If you enjoy this writing and want to support my work, you can become a paid subscriber.

In theory, it’s a beautiful goal. In reality? My Spanish is passable at best, and my French… let’s just say I’d be insulting a French 5-year-old if I claimed we were on the same level.

It’s not for lack of trying. I do want to learn French. I’ve studied the grammar, downloaded the apps, and I’ve paid for more than one course. Meanwhile, my husband has essentially become fluent over the past two years. Watching him carry on full conversations with ease is both inspiring and, if I’m honest, a little deflating.

Because I know I’m capable of it. So what gives?

Here’s the truth: My goals are not aligned with my present-day values.

Six months ago, I would’ve told you French was a priority. But looking at my life lately, the values that actually show up day to day are:

1. Minimizing stress and finding stability at work (hello, new job)

2. Recovering from my eating disorder (six months in!)

3. Committing to fitness—marathon training and Pilates

4. Reigniting my side projects like Connect with Me

5. Then—language learning

It is there. Just... lower on the list.

And that’s why I keep skipping my lessons. It’s not laziness. It’s not a lack of discipline. It’s misalignment.

When your goals and values don’t match, follow-through gets hard. You’ll feel stuck or guilty, or both. You’ll keep writing “study French” on your to-do list and rescheduling it three days in a row.

So here’s the reframing that helped me:

It’s not that I can’t learn French. It’s that right now, it’s not high enough on my values list to compete with everything else I care about more.

And that’s okay.

I’ll come back to it. I’ll keep at it, but perhaps with less intensity. Less room for me to feel like I’m going to let myself down. I can set a smaller goal. But for now, I’m letting go of the guilt and choosing to prioritize what matters most to me right now, not what I said would matter six months ago.

It felt like a fun challenge. Enough structure to keep me motivated, enough novelty to keep things interesting. I was going to make a shadow box of all 12 medals I collected throughout the year. That’s also how I ended up running Birmingham’s toughest 5K last month.

But this month, I'm intentionally breaking the streak.

I could’ve run a 10K race this weekend. It was local. It lined up perfectly with my training schedule. But instead, I ran 6 miles on the treadmill upstairs.

Why?

Because I’m just getting reacquainted with longer distances—this was my longest run since January—and I wanted to control for as many variables as I could. No heat. No hills. No race-day nerves, worrying about how I’d rank compared to others. Just a consistent pace, a fan aimed at my face, and the ability to stop if something didn’t feel right.

This is what training looks like now.

And it made me realize: the race-a-month goal no longer serves me. Not because I’m slacking off. Not because I can’t do it. But because I’m focused on something bigger—marathon training. Marathon training is as much mental as it is physical. I’m listening to my body. Focusing on my food intake. Building consistency, not chasing checkboxes. (Okay, I’m checking off my runs in the Run with Hal app, but that’s the extent of my checkboxes.)

Sometimes we hold onto goals because we don’t want to “quit.” I have a strong tendency to push myself to follow through on anything, even if it’s no longer serving me. Even if it’s actively harming me. (Ask my husband how long he was telling me to quit my job.)

But this isn’t quitting.

This is growth.

It’s easy to forget that goals are tools, not obligations. They’re meant to guide us, not guilt-trip us. And the version of me who made that race-a-month rule wasn’t training for a marathon. She just wanted to love running again.

I still do. Which is exactly why I’m letting go.

As an added bonus, marathon training is forcing me to slow down. Both literally and figuratively.

Training runs are meant to be slower than your race pace. But it’s hard not to fight that. My pride wants to push. My body wants to build steadily. 12:46/mi isn’t a fast pace by any means, but running 6 miles without diverging from that pace is what I’m celebrating. Learning to honor the latter and embrace my pace has been its own form of growth.

So here’s your gentle reminder: you’re allowed to change the plan. Especially when the new version of you needs something different.

This time, it’s the second.

This past week I hosted a stage at RenderATL. I walked into it a little nervous—not about speaking. I love that part. I thrive on stage.

I was nervous about the pace. The energy. The everything of it. I wasn’t sure how I’d hold up. This was my first major event since accepting how burned out I was, and I was about to be “on” for 3 days.

What I didn’t expect was just how energizing it would feel to be in motion again. Not performative, not hustling—just…present. Moving through a few full days of connection, laughter, reflection, and celebration. Reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. Engaging with the audience. Making jokes where they made sense and giving hugs when needed.

I came home tired, yes. But not brittle.

Not the kind of tired where your body feels like it’s trying to escape itself. Not the “don’t talk to me for three days” kind. Not the kind where joy feels like another thing you have to fake.

This time, I came home feeling full. Grateful. Like I’d given something my whole heart, and had enough of it left for myself.

That’s new for me.

For a long time, burnout made everything feel dimmed. I had to hunt for joy. Grasp at it in small, fleeting moments—a good meal, a quiet walk, a brief pause. I still believe in those micro-joys. They honestly saved me on my most difficult days. But it feels good to be reaching for the macro ones again, too.

I’m starting to feel like myself.

Not the hyper-productive version. Not the shiny, put-together one.

The real one. The soft, open-hearted, joyful one I forgot I missed. The one who enjoys building but doesn’t feel pressured to do so. The one who can show up to an event and be present in a way that doesn’t feel performative.

I’m healing.

And I can feel it.

344 feet of elevation gain. A steep climb before you even hit mile two. And I hadn’t really been running much lately.

Back in January, I set a goal: run 12 races in 12 months.

And by the time I realized I hadn’t signed up for anything in May, I was about to be out of town for the weekend, sore from Pilates, and staring down a hill I didn’t want to climb — literally and figuratively.

I laughed when I saw the name. Then immediately spiraled.

I almost didn’t sign up.

I talked to my therapist about it. Told her I felt ridiculous even considering it.

She asked me a seemingly obvious question that honestly melted my brain a little: What would happen if you didn’t run the whole thing?

My brain had other opinions:

“You need to run the whole thing.”

“You should be getting faster by now.”

“You’re going to look like you don’t belong out there.”

(Shoutout for that unhelpful feedback loop.)

My therapist reminded me that as a high performer, I tend to create all these rules that no one else actually expects me to follow. And she was right. Once I accepted that I could walk if I needed to, it changed the entire decision.

A slow, messy 5K is still a May race.

So I signed up.

It was hard. I don’t know how else to describe it.

I had ChatGPT break down the course and analyze the elevation changes by mile, because of course I did. I overprepared out of pure anxiety.

The race had maybe 90 people in it. Probably because the name scared most folks off. Honestly, just showing up was my first win.

I started off feeling strong. I knew it would be challenging so I paced myself. I leaned into the early hills—they weren’t too steep yet—and kept running.

Then I hit a corner, looked up, and saw a steep incline straight out of a nightmare.

I could’ve run it. Maybe part of it. But I hadn’t even hit the halfway mark yet and I knew if I pushed too hard now, I’d blow up later.

So I walked. And that was my second win.

Burnout for me used to look like constantly raising the bar. Nothing I did was ever enough. Every hill needed to be sprinted. Every task needed to be exceptional.

Slowing down? That felt like failure.

But walking up that hill? It felt like trust. Like, for once, I actually believed I’d still be proud of myself even if I didn’t push through everything.

And the cool part is I actually paced it well. I had enough left in the tank to pick it up near the end. I ran a negative split on a hilly course!

And I enjoyed the last stretch. (Listening to Defying Gravity as I dramatically ran downhill definitely helped.)

It reminded me of something my manager told me recently. I’m new in this role, and he said:

“This is the only time you get to really learn without being buried in tactical work. Enjoy it.”

And yeah. That’s the same mindset I brought to this race.

I’m still showing up. Still doing hard things. But I’m not sprinting every hill just to prove I can. I’m choosing how I want to run them.

Success isn’t always faster or better than last time.

Sometimes it’s just being proud of how you got through the hard parts—and still had enough left to enjoy the rest.

That’s not quitting.

That’s recovery.