You stopped answering emails after 7 pm, or maybe 9 pm when no one’s looking, but you definitely slowed down. You pushed back on a project plan that minimized the toll it would take on your team. You had the conversation with your boss about making space in the budget for two more heads, the one you pressure-tested with your spouse for three nights before you delivered it.
And you’re still dragging.
Not “I need a vacation” tired. The kind of tired where you sit in your car in the garage for five minutes before walking in the door because you need to pull yourself back into someone who can be present for your family and respond to a simple question without snapping.
People are talking about boundaries all over the internet, and the logic makes sense. Setting them should work. So why are you still so tired?
The advice wasn’t wrong. It just didn’t reach the actual problem.
LinkedIn posts and therapy memes love a clean fix. That’s easy to market. Real life is harder to make viral. And the advice isn’t wrong exactly: boundaries can restructure your calendar. But a restructured calendar doesn’t quiet a nervous system that’s been running at high alert for years.
What’s draining you isn’t just the hours. It’s what your brain and body are doing during those hours. It’s the three-move-ahead chess game you’re running before a meeting with a peer you suspect is working against you behind your back. It’s tracking who’s aligned, who’s threatened, who just got tapped for the reorg committee, and what that means for your team. It’s parsing a two-line email from your CEO for twenty minutes because the tone felt off and you need to know if you’re about to have a problem.
You’re running a parallel operating system underneath every interaction. Monitoring, calculating, adjusting. And that system doesn’t shut down when you close Outlook. It doesn’t care that it’s Saturday.
No amount of logging off early can touch that.
Your nervous system didn’t get the memo
When you spend years in environments where strong performance doesn’t guarantee respect or safety, where decisions get made in conversations you’re not invited to, where you carry responsibility for outcomes you don’t fully control, your body adapts. It learns that resting is a liability. It remembers the last time you let your guard down and got ambushed in a board review, or found out a direct report had been having side conversations with your boss for weeks.
So even when you close your laptop, clear your calendar, and do everything right, your system stays hot. You’re “relaxing” on the couch but mentally mapping Monday’s political landscape. You’re on a beach in Turks and Caicos running scenarios about the restructuring. You’re awake at 2am composing responses to a confrontation that may never happen.
A boundary changes your external structure. It doesn’t touch what’s running underneath. And what’s running underneath is where all the energy is going.
In certain workplaces, boundaries carry their own political cost
In most corporate environments, setting a boundary isn’t a neutral act. You know this.
You say no, and now you’re watching your VP’s face for the micro-expression that tells you whether you’ve been mentally reclassified. You’re tracking whether the person who picked up the project you declined is getting the airtime you used to have. You’re recalculating your exposure, your capital, your positioning.
The boundary you set to protect your energy just generated a whole new layer of surveillance work. That’s not recovery.
The exhaustion accumulates
If you’ve been operating in pressurized environments for ten, fifteen, twenty years, what you’re feeling right now isn’t the result of one bad quarter. It’s what happens when you spend years being a functional person inside a dysfunctional space.
If you’re the person who reads every subtle emotional shift in a room, who sees problems three months out and starts quietly solving them before anyone else notices there’s a fire, your nervous system feels that. It’s working constantly. And that debt doesn’t get paid off by a long weekend in the Berkshires or a firmer out-of-office message.
This is what makes burnout this stubborn. It’s not a surface problem, so surface interventions don’t move it. The hypervigilance, the over-functioning, the inability to rest even when rest is available: these are deeply wired patterns. They probably made sense when they first showed up. They may have been the smartest strategy you had at the time. But they’re running on autopilot now, burning energy whether you need them or not.
So what does help?
Not another productivity framework. Not a breathwork app. Not learning to “communicate your needs more assertively,” because you probably do some version of all of those things already.
What moves the needle here is slower and less glamorous. It involves helping your nervous system learn, at a body level, that it can stand down without everything falling apart. Gradually rewiring the habitual responses, so you can stop scanning every room and your body starts to trust that rest isn’t as risky as it feels.
That kind of shift requires someone who understands both the physiology of what’s happening in your body and the specific pressure of navigating organizations where the stakes are real, the politics are layered, and the margin for error feels razor-thin. This is what burnout recovery looks like when it goes deeper than coping strategies.
Work will always be work
That’s something I say a lot. Your job is never going to be effortless, and it shouldn’t be. Boredom causes burnout too. You’ll continue to have hard weeks, work with difficult people, and face stretches that demand more energy than you’re comfortable expending.
But there is a real and recognizable difference between effort that’s sustainable and effort that’s slowly hollowing you out. There’s an enormous chasm between what it feels like to be challenged and what it feels like to be consumed. You know which one you’re in. If you’re honest, you’ve probably known for a while.
If you’re reading this from somewhere in Fairfield County, maybe between back-to-back calls, maybe at 10pm because this is the first quiet moment you’ve had since the alarm went off at 6am, I want to be clear with you. The fact that boundaries haven’t solved this doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It means the problem runs deeper than scheduling. And deeper problems respond to deeper work.
I also want you to know that it doesn’t have to be like this for the next twenty years.
