Burnout Isn’t About Being Overworked
Updated: Sep 23
Written by Nanthi, Corporate Professional
Nanthi is a corporate professional who writes about burnout, alignment, and simple habits for feeling energized, grounded, and fully alive. Still working in corporate after 18+ years across Sydney, London, and New York, she shares what she's learned about gut health, movement, stress, and coming home to yourself.
Burnout can run deeper than a demanding schedule. In this article, the author reflects on how living out of alignment led to exhaustion and how meditation, self-awareness, and conscious choices helped her reconnect with what she truly wanted.
Living an unconscious life
I almost wrote a different article. It was going to be about burnout, chronic stress, a dysregulated nervous system, and the tools I had used for 18 years across Sydney, London, and New York. I knew I could help people with it. But when I sat down to write, something didn’t feel right. It felt generic. On paper, it felt like what I should be talking about, what would be expected given my background. Instead, I’m writing about what’s true to me.
Burnout is deeper than being overworked and overscheduled. It comes from living an unconscious life. A life that you’re grateful for but that is limited by your thoughts, beliefs, and fears. A life that you’ve worked hard for but that is not the life you want.
You can be doing all the regulating you want, but if you’re spending so much of your time doing things that don’t energize you, don’t light you up, and don’t excite you, you’re going to be depleted.
Living unconsciously is wanting to say the thing but being fearful of what people will think of you. It’s about being walked all over and not being able to set boundaries. It’s daydreaming about a different version of you in a different life, a different career, or a different city. It’s the whispers from within that say you’re not living to your fullest potential, drowned out by the louder voice that tells you to be grateful, stay put, and play safe.
This was me, and no matter what I was doing, whether it was meditation, breathwork, or sitting in nature, I still felt depleted. I still felt drained. While meditating and practising breathwork, I’d feel incredible, at peace, centered, and calm. But then I’d spend hours a day using my energy in ways that weren’t aligned with me, and I would crash in the evenings and on weekends.
It changed for me in the park. I was meditating. I had stopped optimizing, stopped doing, and stopped overscheduling. I simply sat in the park and meditated. In those moments, I was inspired to write and realized that my burnout came from not living in alignment. The tools I used for burnout, meditation, breathwork, writing, and being in nature, helped me go deeper, drown out the external noise, observe my thought patterns, and reconnect with what I truly wanted.
The hardest part is confronting the stories I’ve told myself for years about not being good enough, worrying about what people think, and living with a sense of lack. While I’m still working through this, it is where my biggest learnings and growth have come from.
I used to think that living consciously and being able to show up in the most authentic way possible were just for certain people, not me. But it’s honestly about changing the stories we’ve inherited and absorbed since childhood, and even before birth. It’s about writing new stories.
If any of this resonates, it might be worth asking yourself: is the life you've built the one you actually want? You don't have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to listen for it. I write more about this – burnout, alignment, and coming home to yourself – on my Substack, Messages from my Soul.
Read more from Nanthi
Nanthi, Corporate Professional
Nanthi is a corporate professional who writes about burnout, alignment, and building simple, sustainable habits that help you feel energized, grounded, and fully alive. Still working in corporate after 18+ years across Sydney, London, and New York, she learned that a life that looks successful on paper can still leave you depleted. After years of illness and, later, stress-driven migraines, she rebuilt her health from the ground up – nourishing food, daily movement, meditation, and a deep respect for bio-individuality. Born in Malaysia and having lived in Sydney and London, she now calls New York home, where she writes about gut health, stress, movement, mindset, and coming home to yourself.
