I Didn’t Mean to Build a Burnout Machine
Sitting all day, back-to-back meetings, and remote work nearly pushed me into burnout, and the 5-minute break that helped me reset.
Honestly, I didn’t.
But somewhere along the way, that’s exactly what I built. And, perhaps even more embarrassing, it took two years of a global pandemic, several uncomfortable pairs of trousers for me to realise what I’d done, and more than a few warning signs of remote work burnout before I realised what I’d done.
Like most bad habits, it started quietly. Innocently. Almost professionally.
One day back in my 20s, I ate lunch at my desk. You know, just for today. There was something urgent, I was being efficient, and besides, it wasn’t like I was skipping lunch entirely. I was just... multitasking. A sandwich in one hand, emails in the other. Productive. Responsible. Adulting.
I called it multitasking. My digestive system called it hostile working conditions.
But that was the start of it. The slow, steady accumulation of sedentary work habits I didn’t even know I was collecting.
Endurance Sitting: The Slippery Slope
Fast forward twenty years.
Covid arrives. Offices close. We all move home.
Suddenly, I’m working full-time from a folding table crammed into the corner of my boat kitchen. The lighting was questionable, the stool was the most uncomfortable thing a person could sit on, but I managed. Adapting a little too well.
The uncomfortable truth is, I had unknowingly spent the past two decades training for this moment.
My workday routine, stripped of commutes, coffee breaks, or any minor reason to stand up, became brutally efficient:
Nine hours sitting at my laptop for work.
Five hours sitting through dinner and evening screen time.
Eight hours lying in bed.
That’s twenty-two hours a day of physical inactivity. Day after day. Week after week.
I wasn’t just sitting. I was unknowingly participating in an extended experiment called How Long Can One Human Sit Before Morphing Into a Houseplant? Except no one was watering me.
And here’s the kicker: at the time, I didn’t see anything alarming about it. I was doing what needed to be done. Staying on top of things. Keeping up. Being “productive.”
What I failed to see, and what I now know all too well, is that always-on productivity and physical inactivity can be an incredibly effective mask for slow-motion burnout.
From Bed to Laptop: The Covid Acceleration
Some Covid mornings, I would roll out of bed, put a jumper on and join my first call before my brain had fully caught up with the fact that the day had started.
Streamlined, the morning routine was efficient. Possibly too efficient.
The sacrifices I knew I was making were breakfast and my mid-morning coffee because often once I was at my desk there wasn’t time between meetings to stop and get something to eat or drink. But this was the trade I was making for an extra snooze on the alarm clock.
The calls rolled into one another, filling every available slot in my calendar. At one point, my schedule contained so many overlapping meetings it resembled a badly played game of Tetris. Back-to-back virtual meetings became the new normal.
It didn’t feel extreme. It felt like I was being responsible. Productive. Organised.
The Problem with “Keeping Up”
At no point did I feel like I was falling behind. Quite the opposite: I was coping. I was getting through the work. That felt like success.
I wasn’t burned out. I was high-functioning tired. Which is like being technically awake but spiritually horizontal.
But here’s the very specific flavour of burnout while working from home most people don’t recognise at first:
You can feel exhausted and still believe you’re coping. You’re functioning. You’re delivering. You’re not dropping balls. So, obviously, you’re fine.
Except, of course, you’re not fine. You’re just very efficient at suppressing the warning signs.
The Physical Signals (That I Pretended Weren’t Signals)
The weight started creeping up first. A pound here. A few pounds there. Nothing dramatic, just enough that my jeans started to protest, so I switched to lycra. After all, working from home it was only the neighbours that could see my legs.
The logical part of my brain saw the scale tick upwards almost daily. The equally logical part of my brain responded with: "I’ll get on top of it when things calm down."
Spoiler: sometimes things never calm down.
As the weight climbed, so did my irritability. I was constantly short-tempered in the afternoons. Colleagues I normally enjoyed working with became inexplicably frustrating. (They hadn’t changed. I had.)
One kind friend eventually pointed it out gently. “You’ve seemed… a bit stressed lately.”
Which is a polite way of saying: “Do you need a time-out?”
The Effect on Everyone Else: The Leadership Ripple
The worst thing about thinking about this now is not just the effect my grumpy self was inflicting on my colleagues it is thinking about what my behaviours and habits were doing to them.
Because while I was quietly normalising these habits for myself, I was also unintentionally setting expectations for my colleagues, role-modelling a culture of burnout in remote work:
Scheduling back-to-back meetings suggested that constant availability was standard.
Sending emails late at night made it seem like quick responses were expected at any hour.
Working through lunch gave the impression that stepping away wasn’t really something we did.
This culture of always on, always working, always available wasn’t increasing productivity. It was stifling it.
When we’re not feeling good in ourselves it’s hard to be the most productive version of yourself. When I say good, I mean, well rested, have energy, calm attitude.
Learning the Hard Way
What I’ve learned (the hard way) is that burnout doesn’t arrive as a dramatic crash. It sneaks in slowly, for me it was disguised as “coping efficiently”.
It's mostly about taking walks, not answering emails after 9pm, and trying to remember how to function as a semi-upright mammal.
Balance, I’ve learned, mostly involves standing up occasionally and reintroducing my legs to circulation.
The change for me started small: ring-fencing an hour for myself at lunchtime, stepping away from my desk, and going for a walk.
I wasn’t perfect. I’m still not. But it definitely helped.
If You’re Reading This...
If any part of this feels uncomfortably familiar, the back-to-back meetings, the disappearing lunch breaks, the growing suspicion that your desk chair now qualifies as a long-term relationship, here’s your gentle nudge:
Start making wellbeing part of your 9 to 5.
What helped was starting ridiculously small: five-minute interruptions to my sitting habit.
Five minutes to stand up between meetings.
Five minutes to stretch before the next call.
Five minutes to walk a few laps around the boat before opening the inbox again.
Short enough to start. Small enough to repeat. Simple enough to stick.
And strangely, five minutes made a bigger difference than I expected.
I wasn’t snapping at colleagues quite so much.
My brain didn’t feel quite as foggy by mid-afternoon.
My body felt a little less like I was being slowly fossilised into my chair.
It didn’t fix the workload. But it did change how I faced it.
I call them active breaks now, tiny, intentional pauses to give my body and brain a reset.
Even short movement breaks help improve circulation, release tension, and restore enough energy to keep going without running myself into the ground.
Start today. Not next week. Not once this next project is finished. Better yet, start right now.
Because it doesn’t take a grand reinvention to stop the burnout machine. It takes one small interruption. Five minutes between meetings. A walk at lunchtime. Standing up before your legs apply for redundancy.
This isn’t about chasing some perfect work-life balance. It’s about inserting tiny moments of recovery inside the workday, before exhaustion and burnout while working at home becomes your default setting.
Enrol today and unlock the key to a more dynamic and engaging workday.
