Chapter 6: Running on Empty: Exhaustion and Burnout

A Letter from Hana

Dear Jiwoo, I have never written to a stranger about my feelings before, so please forgive me if this letter wanders. Seven years ago I opened a small restaurant with eleven tables, a narrow kitchen and a window that looks out on a quiet street. I cook most of the dishes myself. I also order the vegetables, pay the bills, train the young staff and wash the floor at night when everyone else has gone home.

For a long time I loved it. I loved the smell of onions in the morning and the sound of chairs being pulled out at lunchtime. I loved the old man who comes every Thursday and always orders the same soup. When people told me that I worked too hard, I laughed and said that the restaurant was my child, and that nobody complains about looking after a child.

Something has changed in the last year, and I cannot say exactly when it happened. I wake up tired, even after a day off. When the door opens and a customer comes in, I feel a small drop in my stomach instead of pleasure. Last month the old man told me that his soup was not as good as before, and I did not feel hurt. I felt nothing at all, and that frightened me more than any complaint could.

I make small mistakes that I never made before. I forget orders. Last week I burned a whole tray of bread and simply stood there looking at it, as if it belonged to someone else. At night I add up the accounts three times because the numbers will not stay in my head. My sister says that I am burned out. I do not even know what that word means, or whether it is a real thing or just something people say.

Is it possible to love your work and still be emptied by it? And if I am empty, how do I fill up again, when the restaurant still has to open at eleven o'clock every morning? With tired thanks, Hana

Dear Hana

Thank you for your letter, and for trusting me with something you have never told a stranger. Your letter did not wander at all. It described, very clearly, a person who has given a great deal for a long time and who has now reached the bottom of her reserves. I want to begin with your first question, because I think it is the one that hurts most. Yes, it is entirely possible to love your work and still be emptied by it. In fact, the people who love their work most are often the ones who find it hardest to notice when they have nothing left to give.

Your sister used a word that you are not sure about. So in this letter I will try to explain what the word "burnout" means, where it comes from, and what different kinds of sources say about it. I will also write about tiredness, because not every kind of tiredness is burnout, and about recovery, which is slower and more interesting than most people expect. I am writing to you, Hana, but I know that many other readers have stood in their own kitchens, classrooms, offices or fields and felt the same strange flatness. Some of what follows is for them as well.

Before anything else, I want to make one practical point. You wrote that you wake up tired even after rest, that you make mistakes and that numbers slip away from you. These things are worth showing to a doctor. I say this not because I think something terrible is wrong, but because lasting exhaustion can have many causes, and some of them have nothing to do with work. I will come back to this point later, because it matters.

Tired, Exhausted or Burned Out?

Everyone who works gets tired. A cook at the end of a busy evening, a farmer after a day of harvest and a student after a long exam are all tired, and this kind of tiredness is healthy. It has a clear cause and a clear cure. You rest, you sleep, you eat a good meal, and in a day or two you feel like yourself again. As I wrote to a delivery driver in an earlier letter, rest is not a reward for finishing work but a part of the work itself.

Exhaustion is something deeper. It is tiredness that does not lift when you rest. Public mental health guides often describe it as feeling drained in body and mind, as if your battery no longer charges fully even when it is plugged in all night. People who are exhausted often say that small tasks feel huge, that they have no patience left, and that even pleasant things, like seeing friends, feel like more effort than they are worth. You described exactly this when you wrote that you wake up tired after a day off.

Burnout is a word for a particular kind of exhaustion that grows out of work. The word was used in everyday speech for many years before researchers began to study it carefully. At first they studied it mostly among people in caring jobs, such as nurses, social workers and teachers, who give a lot of themselves to others every day. Later they found the same pattern in almost every kind of work, including among people who run their own small businesses, as you do.

One international classification of health conditions, used by health workers in many parts of the world, now includes burnout, but it is careful about how it does so. It does not list burnout as a medical condition or an illness. Instead, it describes burnout as a phenomenon linked to work: something that results from stress at work that has gone on for a long time and has not been managed successfully. The same classification says that the word should be used for experiences at work, and not for other areas of life.

According to that description, burnout shows itself in three kinds of signs. The first is a feeling of exhaustion, of having no energy left. The second is a growing mental distance from your job, which can show up as cynicism, meaning a bitter or cold attitude toward the work, or simply as no longer caring. The third is a feeling of being less effective, of not doing your job as well as you used to. Psychology textbooks describe the same three parts, because the classification grew out of many years of research that kept finding these three patterns.

When I read your letter again, Hana, I could see all three. You wake up tired: that is the exhaustion. You felt nothing when a loyal customer complained, and the opening of the door brings a drop in your stomach: that is the distance. You forget orders and lose track of numbers: that is the feeling of being less effective. I am not giving you a diagnosis, and burnout is not something that a letter can decide. But I hope it helps to know that what you describe has a shape that many people recognise, and a name that is used seriously.

Where the Sources Agree, and Where They Differ

When you compare what various sources say about burnout, the first thing you notice is how much they agree. International organizations that work on health and on work, workplace-safety agencies, psychology textbooks and public mental health guides all describe burnout as something that builds slowly, over months or years, rather than something that arrives overnight. They all connect it to long-lasting stress at work. And they all say that it is not a sign of weakness or of a bad character. People who burn out have usually been strong for too long, not weak.

The sources also agree that burnout is not only about the number of hours. Long hours matter, of course. But general explanations of research describe several other parts of working life that seem to matter just as much. These include having too much to do for the time and help available, having little say in how the work is done, receiving little reward or recognition, feeling that things are unfair, being cut off from supportive people at work, and doing work that clashes with your own values. When several of these pile up together, the risk of burnout grows.

Here the sources begin to differ, and I think the difference is important. Many popular articles and some self-help books treat burnout mainly as a personal problem. They tell you to take a long bath, to drink more water and to think more positively. Workplace-safety agencies and international organizations that work on work tend to look at it from the other side. They say that burnout is mostly caused by how work is organized, so the most important changes need to happen in the work itself: in workloads, staffing, schedules, fairness and support. Both views contain some truth, but the second one is the one that is most often forgotten.

Another difference concerns how widely the word should be used. As I mentioned, the international classification keeps the word "burnout" for work. Yet parents, people caring for sick relatives and students often say that they feel burned out, and their experience can be very real and very painful. Some public mental health guides use the word more loosely for these situations, while others prefer to speak of exhaustion, or of stress that has lasted too long. I do not think anyone needs to argue about the word. What matters is that the exhaustion is taken seriously, wherever it comes from.

There is one more point on which the sources agree, and it brings me back to my practical point. Burnout can look like other things. A low mood that lasts, which I wrote about to a teacher in an earlier letter, shares many signs with burnout, such as tiredness, loss of interest and trouble concentrating. Many physical conditions can also cause tiredness that does not go away. For these reasons, public mental health guides advise that anyone whose exhaustion lasts for weeks, or begins to affect their health, their sleep or their safety, should talk to a doctor. Working out what is going on is a job for someone qualified, and nobody should have to guess alone.

Traditional wisdom, as so often, said something similar long before research did. Farmers in many places have long let a field rest for a season after years of planting, because land that is never allowed to rest gives poorer harvests. They did not think of this as laziness. They thought of it as the only way to keep the field useful for years.

Three Mornings, Three Workplaces

I want to tell you about three people, because I think their stories may help you more than my explanations. The first is a woman who runs a small tailoring workshop in the back room of her house. For years she sewed late into the night, because she could never say no to a customer in a hurry. When she began to feel what you feel, she did something that frightened her at first. She put up a sign on her door showing the hours when she would take orders, and she raised her prices a little so that she could take fewer of them. Some customers grumbled, but most of them stayed. She told me that the sign on the door did more for her than any holiday.

The second is a nurse in an animal clinic in a farming area, where she is often the only trained person on duty at night. Her exhaustion did not improve until she sat down with the vet who owns the clinic and showed him, week by week, how many nights she had been called out. The vet had simply not noticed. Together they found a second nurse to share the night calls. She still works hard, and she still loves the animals, but now she has nights when her phone stays silent.

The third is a man who repairs cars in a small family garage that he took over from his parents. He told me that his worst year was the year he tried to do everything exactly as his father had done it, at his father's pace, while also learning to keep the accounts on a computer and to answer customers' messages late into the evening. When he finally let a young mechanic take over the simpler jobs, such as changing tyres and oil, he gave up a little control and gained back two hours of every day. He says that the young mechanic does not do things quite the way he would, and that none of his customers have noticed.

I tell you these stories, Hana, not because any of them is a recipe for you, but because they share something. In each case, the person first tried to recover only through personal effort: sleeping a little more, being more organized, trying harder to feel grateful. And in each case, the real turning point came when something about the work itself changed. This matches what workplace-safety agencies and international organizations say. Rest and self-care help, and I will write about them. But burnout rarely heals completely while the conditions that caused it stay exactly the same.

Filling Up Again

You asked how you can fill up again when the restaurant still has to open at eleven o'clock every morning. I will be honest with you: recovery from burnout usually takes time, and often more time than people hope. Psychology textbooks describe recovery as something that happens over weeks and months, not over a weekend. This is not bad news. It simply means that you can stop expecting yourself to feel better by next Monday, and that every small step counts, even when you cannot yet feel it.

The first step is often to look honestly at the load. You might take a sheet of paper and write down every task you do in a normal week, from cooking and ordering to cleaning and accounts. Then you might mark the tasks that only you can do, the tasks that someone else could learn, and the tasks that could be done less often or not at all. Many people who run their own businesses discover that they are doing several jobs at once. Some of these jobs grew onto them slowly, without anyone ever deciding it.

The second step is to find real breaks, not only in the year but in the week and in the day. A day off is only a day off if you are not doing the accounts on it. Some restaurant owners close for one extra half-day a week. Some ask a trusted member of staff to lock up twice a week. Some simply sit down for a quiet meal in the middle of the afternoon, away from the kitchen, with their phone in another room. None of these changes is grand, but all of them tell your body and mind that the work has edges.

The third step concerns the distance and the flatness that frightened you. When people are burned out, the part of work that once gave them joy often becomes hard to reach. Public mental health guides suggest gently reconnecting with what mattered to you, without forcing it. You might remember why you opened the restaurant in the first place. You might cook one dish only for the pleasure of it, not for the menu. You might ask the old man about his week instead of asking about the soup. Meaning tends to come back slowly, often when you have rested enough to notice it.

The fourth step is support. Many people who burn out have grown used to being the one who holds everything together, so they find it very hard to tell anyone how they feel. You have already taken that step by writing to me and by listening to your sister. You might also speak to other people who run small businesses, who will understand your situation without long explanations. And, as I said at the beginning, I hope you will talk to a doctor about the tiredness that does not go away, so that you can be sure nothing else is adding to it.

Finally, a word about the ordinary basics, which are easy to forget when you are exhausted. Sleep, regular meals, a little movement and some time outdoors do not cure burnout, but they help your body carry the load while you make other changes. I wrote about sleep at length in an earlier letter, so here I will only say this: a cook who feeds others all day sometimes forgets to sit down and eat. Please feed yourself, Hana, as carefully as you feed your guests.

I want to add something for every reader who recognises themselves in Hana's letter. If your exhaustion comes from a job where you do not decide the workload, the changes I have described may not be in your hands alone. In that case, it can help to speak to a manager, a supervisor or someone responsible for staff, and to describe clearly what is happening. Workplace-safety agencies in many places say that employers have a part to play in preventing long-lasting stress at work. Asking for change is not complaining. It is giving the people around you the information they need.

Your restaurant was built with love, and it can still be a place of love, including love for the woman who runs it. Take one small step this week, and let it be enough for now. With warm wishes, Jiwoo

A Question to Think About

If you looked honestly at your own work, which parts of it fill you up, and which parts slowly empty you? Try to answer for your working life as it really is today, not as it was when you started or as you wish it were.

You might start by thinking about a recent week. Which moments gave you energy, even small ones, like a kind word from someone or the satisfaction of finishing a task well? Which moments left you drained? Did that come from the amount of work, from having little say in how it is done, from unfairness, or from something else?

You might also ask yourself what one change, however small, would tip the balance a little. Is it a change you can make on your own, or one you would need to ask someone else for? Who could you ask, and what would you say to them?