96 Quotes About Burnout

Be certain to limit your exposure to negative people and environments.

Choosing to laugh doesn’t undermine the serious work we have to do. It enables us to do it.

Empowerment is giving someone the authority, or the power, to prove triumphant.

I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough. And my house—my beloved home—has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it.

The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away. Time has passed so quickly while I have been raising a child and writing books, and working a full-time job that often sprawls into my weekends, that I can’t quite account for it. The preceding years are not a blank exactly, but they’re certainly a blur, and one that’s strangely devoid of meaning, except for a clawing sense of survival.

I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record.

Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you’re already doing everything?

Työn alle hukkuva hokee itselleen, että pitää vain ottaa itseään niskasta kiinni. Eikä pidä. Sen sijaan, että ottaa itseään niskasta kiinni, pitäisi ottaa itseään kädestä.

It’s not true, and the people who say it is are gaslighting you. The truth is you learned helplessness from experiences of being helpless.We unlearn helplessness by doing a thing—a thing that uses our body. Go for a walk. Scream into a pillow. Or, as Carrie Fisher put it, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” Reverse the effects of helplessness by creating a context where you can do a thing.