• You want to work—but you can’t.

• Even simple tasks feel heavy and impossible

• You feel drained, overwhelmed, numb and detached.

• This often happens after working too hard for too long on things you don't care about.

Laziness is not the same as burnout. Laziness is avoidance.

• You're bored

• You lack purpose

• You indulge in bad habits a lot

• You can act—but you don’t want to.

• It’s not a medical or psychological condition—just a lack of motivation and direction.

While both results in "time wasted" a lazy person has little to no productive time in their everyday life. A burned out person had plenty of productive time in the past and simply needs recovery.

Laziness is a lack of desire to start and burnout is a lack of capacity to continue.

I personally burn out when I work on things I hate. I can stay up late and show up even when I don't want to—for months when working on things I enjoy.

In this letter we'll dive deep into why Burnout happens and how to fix it.

5 Causes of Burnout

1) Cognitive Overload

This happens when you can't sleep or can't stop thinking about a subject, idea or a problem you need to solve—but aren't doing anything about it.

You'll feel mental pressure weighing you down every day. Your mind constantly reminds you of the work that remains undone. Your body will feel sluggish and slow.

This usually happens to developers who must think deeply about complex code, solve bugs, and fix issues—leading them to work too hard without enough rest.

How To Avoid this problem:

• Schedule time for recovery: Somewhere around the afternoon or night is good. You need to stop thinking all the time and give your mind space.

• Daily walks: Are underrated because it keeps your body moving and mind calm at the same time. Taking walks help you de-stress by not focusing on a goal and free up mental space.

• Give it a day of rest or two: When you can't solve something you need to figure out— which usually happens when your mind is clogged with information making it hard for ideas to come. Taking rest allows your mind to relax and let the answer come naturally.

• Simplify tasks: Breaking tasks into smaller chunks makes decision making easier.

2) Constant Multitasking

The human brain is designed to focus on one thing at a time.

When you break this rule—you will become distracted, unfocused and unreliable.

And when that happens you'll be stressed because you need to produce quality work.

Long hours of multitasking and always feeling on the grind is a major cause of burnout because—not only it can overload your brain—it can also cause you to make mistakes which takes even more time to fix.

Disrupting flow and productivity.

Assuming you are at least productive in your work even if you are not that consistent on self-improvement—you'll be multitasking whether you like it or not.

When that happens most people push through not realizing they are giving themselves up for future burn out.

3) Lack of Control

Usually happens when you get sick of other people making demands, scheduling and making plans for you without your consent or notice.

Is a rare in personal lives but common in workplaces especially if you work under a manager that has an attitude.

You will feel powerless to reject and deny plans which leads to frustration and emotional breakdowns.

Because people have pride. When you are being ordered around by an authority to do something you don't like—you have no choice but to do it—and when you do it your self-esteem takes a hit.

The lower your self-esteem the more prone you are to burnout and depression.

People pleasing also makes this problem worse—saying "yes" every requests will drain you.

4) Lack of Meaning

• Doing work that feels pointless or disconnected from your values.

• You might be productive, but feel empty—like you’re climbing a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall.

• You're learning but you don't care about what you're learning

A common example is going to college. You're learning but most of the time you don't really care about the subject.

Then you forget about what you learned the next day.

It's worse that it used to be because we are living in the digital age where information is abundant.

Because it's abundant we have no limits. And when without limits we stretch ourselves too thin that we end up failing to focus intensely on one subject that was suppose to work but you end up quitting out of frustration.

Watching YouTube is a perfect example. Most people do not open YouTube to learn—they go to entertain themselves and fill the inner void they have.

And because they're unaware of their emptiness—the void becomes bigger and bigger.

Especially when you numb yourself with work that you know you don't really care about.

And when you hit your limit—you enter burnout zone.

5) Neglected Recovery

• "I’m just being lazy.” While this might be true—it doesn't hurt to rest a day or 2 and continue working again.

• “Other people have it worse.” You should stop looking at how other people are doing because not everyone has the same circumstances of living life.

Skipping sleep, breaks, and vacation is a recipe for an early grave.

Rest is something you earn but also what you need for sustained performance.

Most burnout isn't caused by doing too much—it's caused by never resting.

Like a machine—if you don't let it cool down and rest—it will break and malfunction.

Like wise your body and mind functions like a machine. Deny the necessity of sleep and rest and you'll break one day.

Now that you know what causes burnout let's talk about how we can fix burnout.

How To Recover From Burnout

1) Stop Overcommitting

• Say no to any new task, meeting, favor, or deadline unless it’s life-or-death.

• Stop being the hero in everyone's lives.

• Stop shouldering everything.

• Learn to delegate.

• Decline non-essential invites.

• Cancel what’s optional.

You need to create space, fast.

The "yes" trap is juggling a ton of tasks that leads to exhaustion, anxiety and the eventual desire to do nothing but waste time.

When you keep saying "yes" when the answer should be "NO" you willingly put more pressure in yourself and your mind.

The more pressure you carry the lesser your emotional resilience you have. And the stronger your emotions get the weaker your decision making skills become.

No one has infinite stress tolerance. Sooner or later you will hit your limit if you don't know how to be selfish.

Not in the "selfish type" that everyone else doesn't not matter—but in a way you're strong enough to say "no" without feeling guilty.

2) Fix Your Sleep

It's a sarcastic quote however the point remains.

The less you sleep—the uglier, dumber and older you look.

It's my own version of the quote "the less you sleep the less you live".

If you have acne or keep getting a lot of acne—chances are your sleep schedule is fucked. If it isn't—then it's probably your diet.

Anyways back to topic.

Sleeping has tons of science stuff behind it and if I explained it all, this letter wouldn't be enough.

So instead of telling you the list of benefit from of a long sleep—let's talk about common beliefs that makes people neglect sleep.

Sleep Time Bargain

Instead of sleeping you tell yourself: "just 1 hour of Tiktok and I'll sleep" or "I'll sleep at 11:30" or "I'll finish this episode and sleep"

and of course you don't.

Making promises and breaking them is your brains specialty.

This happens because said person keeps idealizing entertainment. You don't have anything useful or enjoyable going on your life so you settle by feeling it from a movie or series.

"I Have Insomnia"

Most people do not have insomnia "they have fucked up sleep schedules".

Today they'll sleep at 11:30pm and tomorrow they'll sleep at 2am.

Then next week they'll sleep at 1 am.

And I'm not joking with these numbers. It's common for adults today to neglect their sleep like their life doesn't depend on it.

When you keep messing up your sleep schedule and sleep beyond 11pm—your cortisol (the stress hormones) spikes.

When you keep sleeping like this over the course of a year or months. Your mind and body will feel like a zombie:

• Brain fog

• Constant sluggishness

• Low energy

• Very low attention span

No wonder people in the modern world are so stressed.

"You Can Catch up on Sleep"

Once sleep is lost you never get it back.

People think they can sleep late on weekdays and get the sleeping time they lost by waking up late on weekends.

You can't.

Not only you are training yourself to become lazier and inconsistent—you are also treating sleep like a luxury and when health problems starts popping up—you'll realize avoiding medical bills is he real luxury

3) Learn To Chill

This is not a joke or a sarcastic point.

In today's world where information is being bombarded to you in all angles 24/7 we often forget to stop consuming information.

Our brain isn't built for constant stimulation and our nervous systems need recovery if we want to function normally.

Ways to chill:

• Go out into nature (touch grass)

• Get away from screens

• Take daily walks

• Read books

• Journal

The reason why so many people are stressed is because they keep consuming and consuming without creating.

When your brain is overloaded with ideas or thoughts it cannot produce—it gets stuck.

And when it gets stuck you become stressed. Because executing ideas is an outlet for creativity and stress management.

Our brains need to chill aka "unplug and reset". Because constant staring at our phones, computer screens, TV, and 24/7 news report means all of this information on our brain doesn't get processed.

Then we wake up and repeat the pattern.

Then we do it again and again till we collapse from stress or burnout.

If you don't believe me then you can keep burning out till you realize you wasted all of your time figuring out what's the problem when I already told you what it is.

What I recommend you do everyday is you take daily walks.

Walking makes your mind calm and easier to stress.

Natural sunlight and motion reduces cortisol (stress hormones) This works whether you like it or not.

A simple 5 minute walk can calm your 1 hour long anxiety if you allow it to process.

That's all for this letter.

See you next time

-Noat

When you’re ready, here’s how I can help you out:

• Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program By Harsh Strongman. Over 10k+ sold. Get rid of your bad habits and addiction fast and build discipline in 90 days.

• The Chad Mindset: Forge an Unbreakable Mental Framework. Learn how to stop being mentally weak and learn to assert dominance.