When Burnout Turns Small Things Into Big Decisions
There was a stretch of time when I spent part of my workday lying on the floor under my desk.
Not crying.
(Okay, sometimes crying.)
Not having a dramatic breakdown.
(Okay, occasionally a very pointed “what the actual hell am I even doing with my life” moment.)
Just… horizontal. Breathing. Staring at the carpet tiles like they might whisper some ancient wisdom.
They did not.
This felt like a reasonable professional choice at the time.
For the record: this happened in early 2020. Things were going great. 👍🏼
On paper, my life was extremely impressive.
High-responsibility role.
Important meetings.
The kind of role where people say things like, “Wow, you’re really doing meaningful work,” and you nod politely while your soul quietly exits your body.
Meanwhile, my nervous system was toast.
By the time I got home most days, my brain had fully powered down. No thoughts. No opinions. Sometimes no words. Someone would ask me a completely normal, low-risk question—“Do you want pasta or tacos?”—and my mind would respond with the Windows 95 dial-up noise.
I was tired in a way sleep absolutely refused to fix.
(Which, in hindsight, was maybe worth flagging.)
But, in the moment, things felt, if not totally amped up, "fine.”
Burnout is sneaky because it doesn’t show up like, hello, I am Burnout, here to ruin your life.
It just quietly adjusts your internal definition of “normal.”
Lying on the floor at work? Sure.
Being unable to form a coherent sentence after 6pm? That’s adulthood, baby.
Feeling weirdly disconnected from your own instincts? Probably just stress. Or Mercury in retrograde. Or capitalism.
At some point, I stopped trusting myself entirely—which is extra funny, because I was still being paid to make “strategic decisions” and “high-level calls.”
My body was sending increasingly aggressive signals.
My brain was like, no thank you, I have decided this is fine.
At a certain point, burnout stops being subtle and starts being… rude.
All the reasonable options quietly disappear.
There’s no:
“maybe I’ll take a few days off”
“I should rearrange my workload”
“have you tried a boundary”
Those buttons simply vanish. Like they were never installed.
Instead, your nervous system narrows the menu to exactly two choices:
Keep performing.
Get out.
That’s it. Those are the options.
So I left. I quit my job. I blew the whole thing up and called it a career pivot.
Very zen. Extremely intentional. A masterclass in regulation.
People love to narrate moments like this as bold or brave or “following your calling.” But honestly? It wasn’t a calling. It was an escape hatch. The only one left unlocked.
I didn’t burn everything down because I was craving a fresh start.
I burned everything down because staying was no longer an option.
Once I could think in complete sentences again, something became painfully obvious.
I didn’t need a new life.
I needed an earlier exit.
Before the floor-under-the-desk stage.
Before my nervous system escalated straight to DEFCON 1 and started making executive decisions on my behalf.
What I needed was a middle option.
Something—anything—between “pushing through” and “burning everything to the ground.”
Which, at the time, did not feel like a choice at all.
Later—once my nervous system stopped treating every minor inconvenience like a five-alarm fire—it became pretty obvious what I’d been missing.
Not a new life.
Not a dramatic exit.
Just a way to interrupt the spiral earlier.
That’s how I ended up making thing called Vibebooks™—a name that sounds kind of cheerful, but was born entirely out of “there has to be a better way” energy.
They exist because at some point I realized it would’ve been nice to have literally anything between “white-knuckling through my days” and “dramatically quitting my job with a nervous system on fire.”
And if I can save even one person from lying on the floor at work wondering what their long-term plan is?
Frankly, that feels like a public service.
If you want to check out my Vibebooks, you can take a peek here.
And if what you actually want right now is something faster—something that helps in about a minute—I made that, too.
If You Need Me, No You Don’t
A Tiny Pocket of Time That’s Off-Limits to Everyone But You
It’s a free, one-minute reset for adults who are technically fine but absolutely maxed out.
No tasks.
No questions.
No “hey, can you just—?”
Just sixty seconds that belong to you.
