Is there more to burnout than working too hard?

Gift Link. I found this article a good read and was helpful to differentiate between being busy and doing a lot of things versus patterns that will result in burnout.

You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.

I've had a couple of times where I really did hit burnout. For me it showed up as really struggling with decisions. I think this point of burnout not just coming from work but also from the stuff that we willingly pull ourselves into. The constant texts, alerts, notifications, etc.

But it is not just our jobs that overwork our minds. Electronic communication and social media have come to dominate our daily lives, in a transformation that is unprecedented and whose consequences we can therefore only guess at. My consulting room hums daily with the tense expectation induced by unanswered texts and ignored status updates. Our relationships seem to require a perpetual drip-feed of electronic reassurances, and our very sense of self is defined increasingly by an unending wait for the verdicts of an innumerable and invisible crowd of virtual judges.

I loved this callout.

Burnout is not simply a symptom of working too hard. It is also the body and mind crying out for an essential human need: a space free from the incessant demands and expectations of the world.

A regular meditation practice can help identify those signals of your body and mind "crying out".