You finally took the week off. The project had shipped, the hard season was over, and for once the inbox was quiet. You were still exhausted.
It wasn’t the good tiredness that follows a long hike. Your mind spent the week drafting replies to emails nobody had sent and replaying a conversation from three weeks ago to check your tone. Somewhere in the background, it was also keeping an eye on whether you were resting correctly.
If you’re neurodivergent, that kind of tiredness may feel familiar. You did too much, yes, but some part of you also kept working after the work had stopped.
That’s the idea I want to explore here. Burnout isn’t always sustained by the circumstances that caused it. Sometimes it is sustained by the cognitive adaptations we developed to survive those circumstances. The original stressor can go away while those adaptations continue. This essay focuses on that piece of the picture, which sits alongside the biological and environmental sides of burnout.
The cognitive virus
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