Why Resilience Alone Won’t Fix Burnout
Written by Elisha May, Intuitive Energy Alchemist & Coach
Elisha May is an intuitive energy alchemist and transformation specialist, and the founder of Freedom of Self®. She works with high-functioning and empathic individuals to remove the energetic and emotional blocks that strategy and hard work alone cannot reach.
“Just get on with it.” Most of us have heard those words from a parent, a manager, or our own inner voice. They can be a way of surviving a hard day or a difficult period. But what if they are also a way of asking people to carry more without ever asking whether the load itself could change? Here is why that question matters and what a more human pace could look like in practice.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover when we face stress, adversity, or change. It matters because it allows us to face uncertainty, ask for help, and try again after a setback.
The trouble begins when resilience is treated as the whole answer. If it only means tolerating more, it becomes another way of telling people to adapt alone. The better question is not how much a person can endure, but what conditions they are being asked to endure.
What does “just get on with it” really mean?
I understand the spirit behind those words. They can mean doing what needs doing, helping one another, and keeping moving through a difficult day. In families shaped by war, hardship, or loss, getting on with it may have been a way to survive. It deserves respect, but it still came at a cost.
The phrase can also hide something. Sometimes it asks people to carry pain quietly without asking whether the load could be changed. Strength and silence are not the same thing, and a culture that confuses them stops seeing the cost of staying silent.
Why I am asking this question now
I am asking in a very personal season. I am in the early stages of perimenopause, living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), and working through some grief. I am also trying to understand why my capacity feels particularly different at the moment. I do not have an explanation yet, though I am recovering from some stress I’ve experienced this year, and a hormonal imbalance may be a factor. What I do know is that I need to investigate what is happening rather than simply demand that I push through or push harder.
That instinct to look at the conditions before demanding more effort is the one I believe we need more of at work and in public life.
Is stress at work really a resilience problem?
The evidence suggests resilience is only part of the picture. The Health and Safety Executive’s work-related stress, depression and anxiety statistics for Great Britain show that 964,000 workers were affected in 2024/25, with 22.1 million working days lost. That is around 62% of all working days lost to work-related ill health.
The World Health Organization describes burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. In other words, it locates the problem in the working environment, not in a personal shortfall. Research summarised by the World Economic Forum points to the same, listing overwhelming workload, limited control, unrewarding or unfair work, conflicts with values, and a lack of community among the main risk factors.
When the numbers keep rising while wellbeing programmes multiply, it is worth asking whether we are treating the right problem. Others in the Brainz community have made a similar case that burnout is an organisational responsibility, not a personal failure, and that we should stop telling people to be more resilient. Resilience helps, but it cannot carry a load that keeps growing.
Why self-care is not enough
Self-care has become a familiar phrase, and rightly so. We need rest, boundaries, and ways to manage the demands placed on us.
But the goal cannot be simply to restore people so they can return to the same exhausting pace. We also need to ask what kind of life they are being restored for. That is where I want to add another idea: self-nourishment.
Self-nourishment asks different questions. What feeds you as a person? What brings you back to yourself? What gives your life texture, meaning, or pleasure beyond the tasks that keep it running? For one person, it might be music, gardening, or a walk. For another, it might be making something with their hands or spending time with someone who lets them be unguarded. Self-nourishment is not a cure-all. It is a reminder that a life should contain more than maintenance.
What does a more human pace look like in practice?
A more human pace does not mean giving up ambition or avoiding every challenge. It means building working lives with some room in them. In practice, that could include:
Planned recovery after intense periods of work, rather than hoping people will find time to recover on their own
Support that is easy to access, starting with the simple question “What kind of support would help?”
Flexibility in how people organise their energy across the day, the week and the month
Technology that respects attention instead of fragmenting it
Space to pause before answering without a slower response being read as a lack of care
None of this removes pressure, and meaningful work will always involve some. The point is to stop treating the ability to hide distress while continuing to perform as the measure of someone’s strength.
Who carries the load: The individual or the system?
Both. We still need personal resilience: the ability to face uncertainty, seek help, and try again. But adaptation has to go both ways. We can ask how people might adapt to the world, and we can also ask how our workplaces, businesses and public messages might better respect the people living in it.
Perhaps the conversation can move beyond “Why can’t people cope?” and towards “What would help people meet life without having to abandon themselves?” The question I keep returning to is this: When people are struggling, how much of the answer belongs to the individual, and how much belongs to the world we have built around them?
Start a different kind of conversation
If you are someone who keeps performing while privately running on empty, you may not need another productivity strategy. You may need space to understand what is actually driving the strain. If that sounds familiar, book a conversation with me, and we can explore what a more human pace could look like for you.
Read more from Elisha May
Elisha May, Intuitive Energy Alchemist & Coach
Elisha May is an intuitive energy alchemist and transformation specialist, empowering high-functioning, driven, and empathic individuals to stop hitting the same wall and claim the level and life they know is theirs. She works at the energetic root, reading and alchemizing what others cannot see, creating rapid, permanent shifts that nothing else has. Her authority is not academic. It is lived. A natural-born gift for energetic transformation, consciously refined across decades of practice. When the internal shifts, the external follows. It always does.
