How Long Will it Take to Recover From Burnout?

Burnout: the word is everywhere these days. Reporters are flooding our feeds with articles on the rise in burnout rates among all generations in the workforce — even among high schoolers. Podcasts and coaches are offering hundreds and thousands of opinions on whether burnout is real or all in your head, how to cope with it, recover from it, push through it — we’re swimming in opinions and hot takes and statistics about burnout each and every day.

But what is burnout, exactly? And if we’re suffering from burnout, how long will recovery take?

Understanding Burnout

The Causes of Burnout

Put simply, burnout is the result of a prolonged stress response in your body. The symptoms are severe and concrete enough that in 2019, the World Health Organization added burnout to the ICD-11, its database of diseases. The cause? “Chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Basically, our bodies are champions of stress responses — it’s what helped keep us alive when lion showed up at the camps of our prehistoric ancestors. Digestion stops in order to send blood to the big muscles of the body, the heart rate increases, and stress hormones flood our bodies in order to heighten our senses, quicken our reflexes, and put us in prime physical condition to escape…