How do you handle burnout, especially when you’re working long hours and feeling exhausted?
I was feeling really tired that day, barely sleeping and having to wake up at 4 am, so I thought about burnout. I believe burnout is mostly a story we tell ourselves. Humans are great storytellers, and we internalize the narrative that burnout is a real, inevitable condition. Historically people worked in dangerous jobs—coal mines, for example—and kept going despite extreme hardship. The idea that we’re somehow uniquely vulnerable is a myth. If you keep telling yourself that burnout is a looming catastrophe, you’ll feel it more. I try to remind myself that nothing I do matters on a cosmic scale, which helps put the pressure in perspective. I also avoid short‑form content that trains the brain for instant gratification; instead, I focus on longer, deeper work that builds patience and real growth. By rejecting the burnout narrative and reshaping the stories we tell ourselves, I stay more resilient.
I think a lot of the struggle comes from the story you tell yourself about the work. If you frame it as a massive challenge you create a mental monster that makes it harder to show up. Instead, zoom out and remind yourself that you’re living in a relatively blessed time – you can turn on a button and talk for an hour, which is a privilege compared to many jobs. Treat daily tasks as simple by‑products of life rather than monumental obstacles. By changing the narrative to something straightforward, you reduce the mental resistance and burnout tends to disappear. I’m not a motivational guru, just sharing the story I tell myself, which seems to work for me.
I think the problem you describe is common. The key for me is not seeing work and breaks as opposites. The most important thing is momentum—making sure I always put in some small daily effort toward an actionable goal, regardless of what I’m doing. Starting small and gradually increasing effort works like progressive overload at the gym: your ability and resiliency grow over time. Most people view work as always on or always off, but I fluctuate—some days I work many hours, other days just a few, while avoiding extreme swings from top to bottom. I always do some amount of work toward my goals because momentum matters; when you get a ball rolling, lead generation, outreach, or content production will eventually yield results if you don’t stop. I avoid all‑or‑nothing thinking—I might work at 40% one day, 100% another, then drop to 30%, 80%, 60%, etc.—and that’s my typical workday. This approach helps reframe work so it doesn’t have to be all on or all off. Books like Atomic Habits and The Compound Effect reinforce this: start with a tiny habit (e.g., run for one minute) and build up gradually; by the end of a month you’ll have a solid habit. This method is far more effective and economically sensible than the all‑or‑nothing approach.
You have a bunch of goals, and for the most part, the biggest thing that will ever stop you from achieving those goals is yourself. So I guess you're starting to work on these early. What you need to do is make it less of a big deal. The way all of this works—mental friction, stress, burnout—are self-fulfilling prophecies. If you believe in them and take them seriously, constantly looping them in your head, the probability of them occurring goes way up. I'll give you an example: our forefathers, 200-ish years ago, were working-aged men crammed into mines, stooping over with a crusty loaf of bread and maybe another 300-calorie meal, working 12 to 16 hours a day, mining, blowing things up, many dying. If you asked them if they were super stressed or about burnout, they'd have no idea what you meant. For them, life was just get up, go to work, come home, and spend whatever few hours with family. The point I'm trying to make is that the only reason you're even thinking about this is because our culture has been overloaded with these concepts recently. We've really given in to therapy culture—which I'm not knocking; I know many people who go to therapy, and I've tried it myself, though I found it mostly useless. We've just been overloaded with the propensity to dwell on the negative things in our lives over and over, to the point where 17-year-olds now worry about overthinking, procrastination, and doing bad things they shouldn't. At the end of the day, just live your life. Work on the stuff you want to work on. If you don't allow these negative concepts to enter your mind, you'll go a lot further than if you constantly feel bogged down by them. So just don't go through those negative loops. Don't worry too much about mental friction. Obviously try to optimize your life, but if you think about stuff like this all the time, it will just hurt you. I'm sorry I couldn't give more concrete advice, but I think if you took even 1% of what I said, you'd find yourself much more successful. Also, anybody who has ever achieved massive crazy outcomes—or at least the vast majority of them—typically ascribes to some sort of mentality like this. I could spend my entire life hustling right now, trying to spend the most effort ever, but it wouldn't really matter all that much because the world is way bigger than anything I could ever hope to aspire to. So why not just take it day in day out, try my best to show up, and treat it like a video game? I think you'll go pretty far.
No, I don’t have a specific routine to shut off work on weekends. I’ve struggled with this too, and I think the idea of strict work‑mode vs. relax‑mode is a false dichotomy. In reality, effort exists on a gradient—some days I’m at 20% effort, other days at 80%. On low‑effort days I still do a little work that moves the business forward, like client fulfillment, community management, or content creation, then I rest the rest of the day. I often unwind early in the morning (around 5–6 a.m.) so the rest of the day is free for whatever I want. Other days I work most of the time and still carve out some unwind or play time, like playing League of Legends. I don’t follow a strict on/off schedule; I accept shades of gray. Financially, metrics are useful for business but shouldn’t be the only measure of life success. I’ve gotten ahead financially by sacrificing other areas—relationships, fun, experiences—but I’ve recently started prioritizing family and personal time. Others may be ahead of me in emotional intelligence or life experiences, reminding me that business performance isn’t life performance.