Living with burnout isn’t something I expected to learn how to do. I thought burnout was something that happened, you recovered from, and then moved on. Instead, it moved in, slowly and quietly, until I found myself sharing space with it. Some days it stays in the background, barely noticeable. Other days it steps forward and demands to be seen, reminding me it’s still here. Living with burnout now means noticing it, understanding it, and responding sooner. Not with shame or force, but with support, boundaries, and honesty about what I need.
When Burnout Came to Stay
I share my house with Burnout. Most of the time, he stays in the spare room, but every now and then he ventures out, taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hello… remember me? I’m still here”.
When he comes out, he’s hungry. And it’s like he wants to consume me, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left.
So I retreat. I go back into my room, wait until he loses interest, until he wanders back into the spare room again. Then I can come out and continue my life.
That’s what living with burnout is like for me now.
He didn’t arrive all at once
When Burnout came to stay, it didn’t happen suddenly. He moved in gradually, quietly, without me really noticing.
Every time I couldn’t get clarity, or my pleas fell on deaf ears. Every time I didn’t know where to turn, or when the people who should have helped didn’t, often not through unwillingness, but through lack of understanding.
He brought a little more with him each time. A bag here. A box there. Until one day, without me realising how it happened, he was all over the house.
It took months to muster up the energy to gradually push him back into the spare room. But I got there, eventually.
I don’t know if he’ll ever leave for good
I don’t know whether I’ll ever manage to put a lock on that door. I don’t know if Burnout will ever move out completely.
For now, the best I can do is notice. Notice when the door starts to creak open. Notice when he comes looking for me, hungry as ever. Notice when he starts quietly moving things back into the rest of the house, so subtly I don’t realise until he’s everywhere again.
Living with Burnout now means staying aware. Noticing the early signs. Respecting my limits. Stepping away sooner. And closing the spare room door before it swings wide open.
What I do when I retreat into my room
When I go into my room, I grieve for the person I was before Burnout moved in.
That version of me who bounced back quickly. The me who could get up faster after being knocked down.
And I call for help. Because when burnout opens the spare-room door – even just a crack – that is not the time for me to try and handle everything alone. That’s the moment I need support most.
The voice in my head often tells me I should be able to cope on my own. That I should be stronger, more organised, and more resilient. But I’ve learned that, though the voice is loud, it’s not wise. So I reach out.
Help might look like reasonable adjustments at work, or practical support at home. It could be someone sitting with me while I talk things through, so they don’t swirl endlessly in my head.
Sometimes it’s the kind of friend who listens without judgement and without trying to fix. It might be coaching or therapy. Or asking someone to do things for me that my brain tells me I “should” be able to do, but it’s just too exhausting.
The sooner support arrives, the sooner I can guide Burnout back toward the spare room and close the door again. Because I’ve noticed that Burnout weakens when support shows up.
I’d like to change my relationship with Burnout but I think I need a bit more time to reflect, notice and practice other ways. For me, the story of When Burnout Came To Stay is to be continued…
Why Burnout and ADHD so often collide
Burnout is a risk for anyone. However, for those of us with ADHD, the ground for it can be laid over years… quietly, repeatedly, often invisibly.
For me, it’s dealing with the constant lack of clarity when I miss nuances others pick up naturally. It’s the effort of organising, prioritising, and remembering to follow routine tasks that seem simple to everyone else. Or the weight of the guild I feel when I can’t do the things I feel I “should” be able to do. The lifelong pressure to be like others when, as I now know, my brain works differently.
All of that builds, layer upon layer, until burnout becomes far more likely. Not because I’m weak, but because I’ve been compensating for so long.
I genuinely thought I’d escaped it. I thought I had a lock on my door, so Burnout could never really get in. If I’d been working too hard, at most I’d need a week off, and then I’d bounce back to my resilient, quick-thinking self, who’d mastered the art of lightning-fast transitions.
I spent years honing those strengths, maybe trying to make up for the fact that the practical stuff, the simple stuff, the routine stuff was so hard, so draining, so exhausting for me.
I leaned into what I was brilliant at. The things I loved. The energy. The creativity. The momentum. And the truth is that I wouldn’t give up my ADHD brain for anything. Because, when it works, it really works!
But Burnout has changed the reality. I now live with the fear that he’ll come out of the spare room and take over the house all over again.
When my strategies stopped working
One of the most frightening things that Burnout brought was that the strategies I’d relied on my whole life suddenly stopped working.
The systems and coping mechanisms that helped me survive in a neurotypical world. The lists, the adrenaline, the overcompensating, the masking, the pushing through. I’d spent decades perfecting these. Not because they were easy to implement, but because I had to. And for a long time… they worked. Until Burnout.
Burnout didn’t just make things harder. He took away access to the very tools I’d always used to cope. The adrenaline disappeared, my quick thinking slowed, transitions felt heavy, I could no longer manoeuvre my brain into motivation, and the strategies I’d built my life around fell away.
That was terrifying. Not just because I was exhausted, but because the identity I’d built around being capable and resilient didn’t feel available to me anymore. It felt like losing myself.
What I understand now is that my environment changed. My strengths weren’t gone, but they were no longer enough to compensate for my differences. I was running a marathon without support, and my nervous system was saying, “I can’t keep surviving like this anymore”.
The pressure to change who I was
I’ve come to realise it wasn’t just about pressure to do things differently; it was pressure to be different. To soften who I was, be less disruptive, less intense, less direct or confronting, less “too much”, in order to ‘fit’ and make other people comfortable.
But I couldn’t adjust any more than I already had, and I’d masked as much as I possibly could. I wasn’t just required to reshape how I worked, but who I appeared to be, and I had nothing left to give.
The mask began to slip more often; my energy dropped, stress increased, and my capacity for anything beyond the task in hand completely disappeared. I hadn’t changed, but I felt like the bad guy, and it was exhausting. Over a period of just a few months, I lost sight of myself and what I had to give. And I opened the door to Burnout.
Do I resent it?
Do I resent that Burnout happened to me? When I’m back in my room, grieving for the super-resilient person I used to be, I resent him more than words can say. I resent that something that felt preventable still happened. That he took away parts of me I relied on, and dimmed strengths I’d spent a lifetime building.
There are moments when I feel angry. Not at individuals. Because, when I look back, the people I reached out to often didn’t understand what was happening or where to start. It wasn’t unwillingness; it was lack of understanding, or maybe lack of authority to make the difference that I needed at the time.
What I feel angry about is bigger than any one person. It’s the expectation that being me wasn’t enough. That doing good work wasn’t enough, and that being ultra-productive still wasn’t enough. Because it was never going to be enough in systems built around sameness.
I wasn’t failing those systems. They were never designed with difference in mind, and that’s the part that needs to change.
Early signs Burnout might be moving in
Everyone’s Burnout will be different. But they have similarities. Burnout rarely arrives overnight and may move in gradually.
Some of the early signs to look out for include:
- Losing clarity
- Routine tasks becoming overwhelming
- Increased guilt and self-criticism
- Struggling to start even small things
- Emotional exhaustion from coping and masking
- Withdrawing from people
- Losing access to strengths that usually feel natural
- Taking much longer to recover after effort
For ADHDers, these signs can be easy to miss because they often feel so familiar. However, when they intensify, that could be Burnout knocking at the door.
Why I do this work
Living with Burnout changed me. It slowed me down, it made me notice, and it made me ask for help sooner. In addition, it made me aware of the kind of help I can offer more openly. I don’t do this work because I’ve mastered burnout; I do it because I live alongside it.
I know what it’s like when clarity disappears, when routine things feel impossible, when your strengths are still there, but harder to reach. I know how it feels to be exhausted from trying to function in environments that don’t quite fit how your brain works. And I know how powerful the right support can be at the right time.
Everyone one of us is different, and burnout will bring its own challenges, so appropriate support can look very different. For others, support might look like space to think, or practical strategies that actually fit. It could be reasonable adjustments at work, supportive conversations, or rebuilding trust in self.
Because burnout doesn’t mean you’re broken; it often means you’ve been strong for too long without the right support. And that’s what my work is about. I’m here to help people notice sooner, adjust earlier, recover more gently, and keep more of the house for themselves – even if burnout still has a room.
Because, even if we live alongside burnout, we still deserve to live lives that we love.
Burnout doesn’t mean you’re broken. It often means you’ve been strong for too long without the right support.
If you’re living with burnout, or worried it’s moving in, let’s work out what needs adjusting before it takes over the whole house.
Book a free discovery call and we’ll explore what support, clarity, and sustainable change could look like for you.
