When you’ve been in bed for eight hours, you still feel a certain kind of tired. When you wake up, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t coffee or a morning stretch. It’s things that you meant to do yesterday but didn’t get around to. The tab in your mind is still open. It was never shut.
In this case, burnout doesn’t stop when a person goes to bed, but instead continues into the hours that are supposed to be for rest. This is what some researchers and psychologists are starting to call “sleep-working.” This is not sleepwalking. Not as loud and, in some ways, more unsettling.
Even when you’re on the edge of being awake or asleep, your mind is still practicing. Replaying the meeting in the afternoon. Making drafts of answers to emails that haven’t arrived yet. Going over tomorrow’s plans at 2 a.m. as if an invisible boss is waiting for an update. For people who are really burned out, this isn’t just a bad night once in a while. It’s just the norm.
A psychologist named Dr. Bijal Chheda who studies stress and occupational exhaustion says that thinking too much at night is one of the easiest signs of burnout to ignore. People often think it’s just their personality—”I’m just a worrier”—but it’s actually a sign of something that has been building up for months or even years. When you’re under a lot of stress, your brain really struggles to disconnect. It’s not a flaw in their character. It looks more like a system that was never told to turn off.
The worst thing about the relationship between burnout and sleep is that it keeps going. Burnout makes it hard to sleep. Lack of sleep makes burnout worse. Researchers have found that the two conditions tend to get worse together over time. This means that as your burnout gets worse, so does your sleep, and the less well you can handle the stress that caused your burnout in the first place, the worse your sleep gets. There isn’t a clear way out of the loop.
The World Health Organization says that burnout is an occupational phenomenon. It includes feeling emotionally and mentally tired, becoming less interested in your job, and feeling like you’re not good at what you used to be good at. A rough guess is that about 65% of workers in the UK will be affected. Still, the part about sleep is often seen as a side effect rather than an important part of it. The way you put it could be part of the problem. You can’t get better if you don’t get enough sleep. Also, if you’re not getting better, you won’t really be leaving your job.
Sitting with the idea that rest itself has become dirty is a good thing to do. Not surprisingly, a generation of workers who were raised with the idea that always being available is a professional virtue has led to a population whose nervous systems no longer see downtime as safe. The brain is in the office, but the body is lying down.
It’s not hard to deal with in theory, but it is hard to do in practice. Psychologists recommend creating real rituals to help you transition from the workday to the evening. These aren’t drastic changes to your lifestyle, but rather regular reminders to your brain that something has changed. Less bright lighting an hour before bed. Getting away from screens. An intentional break in the flow of thought. That’s likely why so many people skip it: it sounds almost too easy.
The underlying problem—the constant stress, the unfinished work, and the culture of urgency that sees rest as being lazy—is harder to fix. A playlist to help you relax won’t help with that. But if you notice that you’re sleep-working and call it what it is, you might at least start to take it seriously.
