By Zara Wong Wellness 20.02.2026

Career Burnout? Here’s How To Overcome It – And Why Sleep Matters

Feeling overwhelmed or disconnected at work? Writer Zara Wong explores how to recognise career burnout, reset your boundaries, and prioritise sleep to rebuild a more sustainable path forward.

You know that feeling. That dread the night before a workday, the heaviness in the morning yet with the inability to press pause and step away. You might be experiencing career burnout.

It’s hard to admit while you’re in it. I’ve only been able to see it – grudgingly – with hindsight.

“Career burnout is a state of exhaustion -- physical and/or psychological – caused by chronic stress in the workplace,” explains career consultant Holly Garber. And while burnout is more commonly associated with overwork, it can just as easily stem from the opposite. “It might also be underwork – you might feel like you aren’t making a contribution, or your work doesn’t matter,” she adds.

Here’s five steps on how to understand it, and, how to move past it.

1. Is it burnout, or is it something else?

Reclaim autonomy by naming what you’re feeling. It allows you to process the emotion and decide what to do next, if anything needs to be done at all.

For people whose identities are closely tied to their careers, burnout can sometimes feel almost shameful. There’s a particular modern concoction at play: good-girl conditioning, millennial-era hustle culture and the belief that productivity equals worth. Together, they create the perfect environment for burnout to take hold and harder to acknowledge; something admittedly I need to regularly remind myself about, too.

“Often, there’s resistance to truly acknowledging how we feel,” says Garber. “We minimise our emotions until they reach a breaking point. A bad day at work isn’t burnout – but consecutive bad weeks might be.”

Whether you’re at the point of burnout – or, even just an off day – each emotional reaction is information: it tells you what you want, or don’t want, and what elements feel off to you: is it the environment, the people, how you’re receiving recognition (or not). Each of these responses are data points that can help sketch future steps.

2. Take control and make a change

Career burnout can often feel like you’ve lost control. Entrepreneur Sara Crampton recently posted: “Remember when you’re drowning that you control the tap.”

While when you’re in the thick of career burnout it may be difficult to step back, even small changes can you regain your control, sense of autonomy, or switch up your scenery – and your perspective.

“These changes will be specific to the individual but can range from adjusting workload or tasks, to making a bigger change such as moving to new organisation or type of role or an even bigger change such as transitioning to a new career,” advises Garber.”

But, it’s not changes for the sake of changes. “There needs to be a recognition of what patterns of behaviour or circumstances lead to the burnout to help avoid ending up in the same situation again.”

3. Rest in a meaningful way

As well as recognition, “underlying these changes will likely be a need for rest,” says Garber. “Career burnout is a dysregulation of the nervous system, which is going to impact sleep: having trouble falling asleep, waking in the night or even over-sleeping and waking up fatigued.”

Foundational sleep habits matter here. We all know the basics: have a consistent bedtime, a calming wind-down routine and create an environment that signals safety to the body. But sometimes deeper support is needed – therapy, coaching, massage or other restorative practices that allow the nervous system to truly settle. Especially if you are driven by work and have an identity closely intwined with career, rest can feel a bit indulgent and not productive – but remind yourself that you need to repair, too.

4. Learn the early warning signs

Ensure that you give yourself proper check-ins.

“Pay attention to how you feel,” reminds Garber. “Don't ignore feelings of overwhelm, powerlessness or an absence of meaning. If work is making you feel sluggish, your brain is cloudy, you’re having trouble doing tasks that used to not be a problem or you're experiencing physical symptoms such as anxiety or trouble sleeping then probe deeper and consider what needs to change rather than assuming it'll go away if you ignore it.”

Burnout rarely arrives suddenly; more often, it can happen gradually. Being attentive earlier can stop it in its tracks.

5. Redefine what a sustainable career looks like

Recovering from burnout isn’t just feeling better but setting yourself up for the future in a way that makes more sense. It might be clearer boundaries, work that feels purposely, or the genuine understanding that work is just a job – and it’s not necessarily the means to seek personal fulfillment or have the means to carry the full weight of identity and meaning.

If your career is deeply linked to your sense of self, reassessing and changing it can feel disorienting. Who are you outside of your career?

You need to acknowledge your ‘career identity’ through understanding that workcentrism (as NYU professor who teaches a class called ‘Becoming You’) is an important value pillar for you, but also consider your other values, as well as interests and activities to also acknowledge the different facets of your identity outside of work.

Identity isn’t built on introspection alone — it’s shaped by lived experience. Try a new hobby. Reinvest in relationships that exist outside your professional world. Spend time on interests that don’t serve your career at all.

Burnout is a signal to rest, and to recalibrate.