High-Functioning Burnout: The Tiredness That Sleep Won't Fix

What I'd like to talk with you about today is tiredness, and not the tiredness that we're all used to. It's the kind that doesn't make sense on paper and that an enormous number of people who look entirely fine are walking around inside of right now. And I'll explain to you what that tiredness is. It's the sort of tiredness that a full night's sleep doesn't touch. The tiredness that survives the weekend and the holiday and the eight hours in the dark room and the supplements and the biohacking.

And you wake up and you're already depleted and you can't point to a reason because by every external measure, your life is going well. And that's the most disorientating part that you're this worn down by a life that from the outside isn't even that hard. And I'd like to start with what is strange about this because it's what's strange that's the clue. This isn't the honest tiredness of a hard day's physical work. The kind of tiredness that feels almost good, that sleep fixes.

This is something else. It's more like a fatigue that lives underneath the activities, not in the activities. You can have a perfectly fine day, nothing especially draining in it and still come home feeling like you've been running a current through yourself all day long. And the detail that gives this whole thing away is that a lot of people find they're not even tired during the thing they'd assume was tiring. They're tired of the in-between in the commute, in the moment the door closes and they're finally alone in the flatness of the evening.

And the exhaustion isn't coming from the tasks. It's coming from something that was running the whole time under the tasks and nobody taught you to notice. Now the conversation about this is everywhere and it has a name now, burnout, quiet burnout, high functioning burnout. I want to acknowledge the advice that comes from this because it does come from a caring place. And the advice is broadly that you're depleted and you need to refill the tank.

Rest more, set boundaries, practice self-care, take the leave, book the massage, learn to say no, protect your downtime, develop standards, don't let people in your life who are toxic. And underneath all of it is a model of what's actually wrong with you. And the model is essentially a battery model. It says you're a battery that's been drained by output and the fix is to reduce the output and increase the recharging.

Do less, rest more and the tiredness lifts. The trouble is that people are doing exactly this, they're resting, they're setting boundaries, they're taking self-care seriously and the tiredness isn't lifting, which should tell us the battery model is describing the wrong machine. Let me take you to what I think is actually running because I don't think you're tired from your life. You're actually tired from performing a version of it.

There's a self most of us learned very early and very thoroughly to construct and present to the world a version of us that's acceptable, competent, agreeable, impressive, fine. Whatever the particular shape of acceptable was in the world you grew up needing to survive. And we got so good at constructing and maintaining that version that the construction went underground and it became automatic and it ran without our noticing.

But automatic is not the same as free, maintaining a self that isn't quite the real one takes energy. It's a constant low level ceaseless energy. Every time you smooth your real reaction into the acceptable one, every time you perform the okay that you don't actually feel. Every time you manage the gap between what you actually are and the version you've decided you have to present, all of that costs something. And because it runs all day underneath everything, you never see the bill arrive.

You just feel at the end of the day like you ran a current through yourself because that's exactly what you did. So here's what I'd ask you to consider about that burnout of full night sleep never touches the kind where you wake up already drained by a life that on paper isn't even that hard. There are two of you running at once, the one actually having your day and the one you perform at the meeting at the dinner table in the text where you type I'm good when you know damn well you're not.

And keeping those two in sync smoothing your real reaction into the acceptable one all day every day is the most expensive thing a human being can do. It runs underneath everything and never sends you an itemized bill. It just quietly empties you and then you blame your job or your mattress or your pillow or your age or your children or your partner for an exhaustion that's actually coming from the gap between who you are and who you keep pretending to be.

This is why rest doesn't fix it and why the failure of rest to fix it is so confusing because rest addresses output but the performed self doesn't switch off when you stop being productive. In fact for a lot of people it runs hardest exactly when they're not around others because then they're performing relaxation performing being fine performing the well rested person of the dinner. You can take a whole week off and come back just as empty because you spent the week performing a person on holiday instead of actually resting and the performance is the thing that was costing you all along.

The tank was never the problem. There's a second engine running behind the first one and no amount of refilling the first tank touches the fuel the second engine is burning. So the question that actually matters when you're burned out isn't how do I rest more. It's where in my life am I performing a version of myself instead of just being myself and what is that performance costing me by the hour because the most exhausted people I meet are rarely the ones doing the most.

They're the ones who have traveled the furthest from themselves to stay acceptable to the world who have built the most convincing version to show the office and the group chat and the in-laws and now have to keep that whole performance powered every waking minute. The tiredness is the running cost of the disguise and that's why the spa day and the long weekend doesn't fix it. You can't rest your way out of a disguise.

You can only slowly take it off. Now there's something that I want to say about this because saying just be yourself is one of the emptiest things anyone ever says and that's not what I'm offering you here. The performed self wasn't a mistake or a vanity. For most of us it was a brilliant and very necessary survival solution built by a younger version of you who correctly understood that being fully real in your circumstances wasn't safe.

So it earned its keep. Problem is that it kept running long after the danger passed and now it's a survival mechanism that's quietly starving the person it was built to protect. So the work isn't to rip the mask off and demand authenticity by force. The work is gentler and far more interesting. It's to start noticing in small ordinary moments the difference between when you're actually present and when you're performing presence.

To catch the instant the second engine kicks in to find even briefly the relief of one room, one person, one corner of your day where you let the gap close and just are what you are. People describe that closing of the gap as restful in a way no holiday has ever been and that's not a coincidence. It's the second engine finally switching off. Now I'll tell you something because this episode's whole subject, the performed self, the running cost of the image, the exhaustion of maintaining a version of yourself happens to be the spine of a book that I've just released and I don't bring it up lightly.

It's called How to Be Michael Jackson, a pattern beneath the performance and it takes the most extreme most public example of a constructed self that the modern world has ever produced in public and reads it all the way down. This is not gossip. It's a mirror held up to the much quieter version of the same thing that most of us are doing every day. If anything in this episode puts its finger on a tiredness that you recognize within yourself, that book goes the whole way into exactly this and it's out now on Amazon and I'll leave a link in the show notes of this episode.

So if you take one thing from this, let it be permission to stop blaming your sleep and start asking about a question and the question is not why am I so tired, but instead who am I so tired of being because the burnout that no holiday and no early night ever fixes is almost never a verdict on your own body or your calendar. It's the running cost of a performance you've been giving for so long you forgot you were giving it the competent one at work, the fine one at the party, the version that's never quite the real you the way out was never more rest.

It's finding the places however small to start where you're allowed to set the performance down one room one person and let just being yourself stop costing you everything. And I don't say any of this to add another thing to fix to your list because the whole point is that the list and the fixing was never the problem. Things are changing in how we live more watched, more performed, more curated than any humans before us have ever had to be and the tiredness so many people carry is the honest cost of all that performing finally coming due.

But it's not a life sentence and it's not a flooring you. It's a signal pointing at the gap asking you to come home. The people that get their energy back won't be the ones who optimized their sleep. They'll be the ones who stopped paying the running cost of being someone they're not. If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you've just heard I've made it very easy for you to do so in the show notes there's a link to access a book called before approaching the threshold which is the gateway to this work and alongside that you'll also receive free 14 day access to the atlas and intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work and it's there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes.

This was Michael Loria and you're listening to the architect speaks.