Burnout Doesn't Always Look Like Falling Apart (Sometimes It Looks Like a Very Full Diary)

Let me give you the numbers first, because I still find them slightly alarming in hindsight.

Before Covid, I was teaching in a pilates studio. Six days a week, over 35 classes. If you're doing the maths, that's most of my waking life spent cueing other people's bodies through their next rep.

At the time, I wore it as a badge of honour. Fully booked. In demand. Clearly good at my job. What I didn't clock was that I'd quietly stopped being able to answer a much simpler question, which was whether I actually wanted to be there.

Loving the Work, Loathing the Idea of Moving Again

Here's the bit that still makes me laugh, in a slightly grim way. I taught movement for a living, and the last thing on earth I wanted to do after an eight-hour day of teaching it was practise it myself.

I loved the people. That part was never in question, the studio was full of genuinely wonderful humans and I don't regret a minute spent with them. But by the time I'd cued my last class of the day, I had nothing left over for my own body. The idea of rolling out my own mat felt less like self-care and more like a second shift.

It turns out this isn't just me being dramatic. A study of nearly 300 fitness instructors found the same pattern showing up again and again: instructors describing a sense of giving out far more than they were getting back, alongside widespread misconceptions, even among instructors themselves, about how demanding the job actually is (Prochnow, Oglesby et al., 2020). Turns out "just teaching a few classes" was never quite the whole story.

None of this is unique to fitness studios, either, it's just the version I happen to know from the inside. Christina Maslach, the researcher whose name is basically synonymous with burnout science, identified six things that predict it across professions, not one: an unmanageable workload, a lack of control, insufficient reward, a breakdown in community, a sense of unfairness, and a mismatch of values (Leiter & Maslach, 1999). For me, it mostly came down to the first one, workload, and how much I said yes to without ever building in a way to top myself back up. You might recognise a different combination entirely: a desk, a classroom, a ward, or an inbox that never quite empties.

Turns Out, There's a Word for This

For a long time I didn't have a name for what I was feeling. Just tired, mostly, and a bit flat, and quietly convinced I wasn't as good at my job as I used to be.

Then I learned the actual definition, and a few things clicked into place. The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon with three specific components, not just "tired": exhaustion, growing mental distance or cynicism towards your work, and reduced professional efficacy, essentially, a creeping doubt in your own competence (WHO, 2019).

Read that middle one again. It's specifically about starting to doubt your own effectiveness. Which is exactly what was happening. I wasn't just tired. I'd started quietly wondering whether I had anything left to offer as a teacher, or as the kind of role model I wanted to be for the people in my classes. Turns out that particular flavour of doubt has an official name, and I definitely wasn't the first person to feel it.

Why More Effort Made It Worse

There's a well-known curve in performance psychology (you may recognise a gentler version of it as the Yerkes-Dodson law) that maps pressure against performance. Too little pressure, and you get boredom. A moderate, well-matched amount, and you get your best work. Push past that sweet spot, though, and performance doesn't plateau, it falls. There's even a name for the bit right before the fall: the zone of delusion, where you're technically still functioning but convinced you're doing better than you are.

I was living in that zone. More classes felt, at the time, like the responsible answer to feeling behind or not good enough. Yours might look like more back-to-back meetings, more overtime, or one more thing squeezed into an already full evening. Same curve, different job title. It wasn't the answer. It was the thing quietly making it worse.

The One Thing I Wasn't Doing: Nothing

This is the part I actually find most interesting, now that I understand it properly.

My work life existed in a genuinely intense bubble. Teaching, more teaching, and not much else. What I was missing wasn't more rest exactly, it was psychological distance, time spent somewhere my brain wasn't even slightly thinking about cueing or correcting or planning a class. For me that meant theatre, art, travel, evenings with friends who had never heard of a pelvic tilt.

There's decent research behind why that specific kind of switching off matters so much. Psychologists studying recovery from work stress have consistently found that genuinely detaching, mentally, not just physically, from work during your off hours is one of the strongest predictors of lower exhaustion and better resilience over time (Sonnentag, 2015). Not "productive" downtime. Not a slower version of the same thing. Actually somewhere else entirely.

Worth being precise about what actually counts as rest here, too, because I got this wrong for years. Positive rest looks like reading, time with people you love, a yoga class, a massage, anything that quietly restores you. It isn't necessarily more sleep, and it's very rarely the thing most of us default to: collapsing onto the sofa for an evening of scrolling. One study comparing ordinary work breaks with smartphone breaks found that people who scrolled came back just as drained as people who'd taken no break at all, while those who did something else entirely, walking, chatting, simply staring into space, actually felt better afterwards (Rhee & Kim, 2016). Scrolling still asks something of your attention. Real rest doesn't.

There's a neat business-world version of this same idea too, from a Harvard Business Review piece that's stuck with me: the suggestion that high performers don't manage time, they manage energy, deliberately oscillating between periods of full output and genuine recovery, the same way an athlete trains (Loehr & Schwartz, 2001). I was doing all output. Zero oscillation. You don't need a physiology degree to guess how that ends.

Breaking Out of the Bubble

Eventually, something had to give, and it did. Stepping back from that schedule turned out to be one of the most freeing things I've done professionally, which wasn't remotely how I expected it to feel at the time.

What came out the other side was a genuine, personal love of movement again, not the version I performed for a room, but the version that's just mine. I built an exercise and wellness routine I actually stick to, rather than one I preach. And, perhaps predictably for someone who apparently cannot simply relax, I went back to studying, adding a yoga teacher training, a breath coach certification, and a myofascial release practitioner qualification to the mix. Most recently, I completed Yoga Medicine's Burnout Resilience Program, largely out of professional curiosity about the very thing this article is about, and partly, I'll admit, because it turns out even people who've climbed out of burnout can always learn to climb better.

I also genuinely love learning from other instructors now, which sounds obvious but wasn't always true. When you're running on empty, other people's expertise can feel like one more thing you're failing to keep up with. When you're not, it's just interesting again.

It's also, if I'm honest, why this particular course mattered to me beyond my own recovery. I didn't take it just to fix myself a second time over, I took it because I wanted something proper to offer the people I teach privately, most of whom have nothing to do with the fitness industry. Lawyers, parents, people running their own businesses, people simply trying to get through a demanding year. Burnout doesn't check your job title before it shows up, so the tools for heading it off shouldn't either.

A Few Things Worth Watching For

If any of this sounds familiar, a few things I'd genuinely flag, not as a diagnosis, just as things worth paying attention to:

Feeling flat or cynical about work you used to love, even when nothing obvious has changed.
Quietly doubting your own competence, especially if you're the one other people come to for expertise.
Struggling to switch off, or noticing that your "rest" still has one foot in work.

None of these mean you're broken. They mean it might be worth building in some actual distance, sooner rather than later.

Here's My Honest Take

After 25 years teaching movement, here's where I've landed. Burnout rarely announces itself. It looks like a very full, very impressive timetable, and someone who's quietly stopped believing their own value, whatever field that value is meant to show up in. It crept up on me disguised as commitment.

Breaking out of it wasn't one dramatic decision. It was theatre trips and terrible amateur travel photos and time with friends who couldn't care less about my class numbers, and, eventually, a slow rebuild into a working life I actually recognise as mine. I wouldn't trade the years since for anything, mostly because I'm actually present for them now.

If you're reading this from inside your own version of that bubble, packed timetable and all, I'd gently say the same thing I wish someone had said to me: the answer probably isn't one more class.

If any of this sounds a little too familiar, whatever your job actually is, I've started weaving what I learned on this course into my private sessions: proper, restorative movement and breath work for people whose professional lives are currently asking a lot of them. You don't need to work in fitness for it to be relevant, you just need a working life that's asking more than it's giving back. Get in touch if that sounds like you.

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