We talk about how to prevent burnout, but what do you do when you're already in the burn-up?
Sharing some things that have helped when your brain has the structural integrity of a cheese toastie
I knew when I agreed to write two books at the same time, that future Poorna would not thank me for it. I was writing away her weekends off, time with loved ones and pushing her to the edge of burnout. Writing one book, let alone two, often carved out so much of me it took months to recover, and this was uncharted, dangerous territory.
I could say I ‘didn’t have a choice’ but I did. It’s just that it didn’t feel like I had many at the time. 2024 was a bad year for work, and 2025 was looking worse. With a main source of income drying up - public speaking for corporations thanks to Trump - there wasn’t anything immediate to replace it, and I worried about being able to pay my bills.
Although income from book writing is mostly terrible, it felt as if this was better than nothing, and besides, I really wanted to write this second book - the book that is now out on the shelves, called She Wanted More. It felt urgent and timely - and neither myself nor the publisher felt we could wait another year. That being said, there have been too many times to count, when I haven’t regretted the choice I made - mainly because it didn’t allow any flexibility and give for when things went wrong. Which they did.
The fiction manuscript I was due to hand in, needed two significant rewrites (I pretty much wrote new manuscripts) which meant that in 2025, I essentially wrote four books. And, because of the way advance book payments work, I was paid £17.5K to do so, which meant that in addition to the crushing work load, I worried about money every single minute, of every single day. Small wonder then, that by the end of 2025, I was such a greatly reduced version of myself, running on fumes and spying burnout at the end of a long corridor.
I’ve experienced burnout once before, and I have no wish to do so again. Ever. As anyone who has experienced it will know, rebuilding yourself from a state of burnout doesn’t just take months, it can take years to feel normal again. Often, you may have to create parts of yourself entirely from scratch.
When burnout hits, it can sometimes feel like an immediate shutdown. Unlike the slow crawl of depression which feels like the lights in a house winking out one at a time, for me, burnout is a switch being pulled. One minute you’re able to walk down the street and get milk from the local shop, the next you cannot physically move or leave the house. Your friends’ concerned texts go unanswered - messaging to let them know how you are feels Herculean, and it seems incomprehensible you could ever pull together full sentences again. Because of the immediacy of it, we sometimes believe it came on suddenly, when the lead-up to proper burnout is actually very long, and there are some very specific signs from stress to social isolation to irritability to exhaustion that have been taking place for a while. It is allowed to continued either because we tell ourselves we are fine, or because we believe that stopping or taking a break is not an option.
I’m sure someone somewhere in the self-help world has coined a better phrase for it, but at the end of last year, I realised that I was in what I call the burn-up. If we imagine ourselves as a satellite hurtling to earth, this is the point at which we are on fire and things are falling off us. The burnout is when we have crash-landed on earth, a husk, an empty shell that requires a significant rebuild.
At some point at the end of last year, I realised that burnout wasn’t inevitable. That even being aware of it was a medicine of sorts. But due to the pace at which I was approaching it, I would have to execute some emergency measures. There were some things that were fixed, such as the deadline of my first manuscript and edits for the second, but I did have flexibility and give around certain things. I’m going to share what I think worked.
