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5 Science-Backed Ways To Spot & Prevent Burnout That Actually Work
Author:
August 23, 2026
mbg Founder & Co-CEO
mbg Founder & Co-CEO
Jason Wachob is the Founder and Co-CEO of mindbodygreen and the author of Wellth.
Image by Elizabeth Svoboda x mbg creative
August 23, 2026
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When I was a trader on Wall Street early in my career, I had no work-life balance. Lunch was delivered to my desk so I didn’t miss a beat and, if I got up to use the bathroom, I ran there and ran back. I told myself that was work ethic, but really it was a fast track to burnout, and eventually a career change.
That’s why my conversation with journalist Elizabeth Svoboda, who has spent years reporting on pacing and burnout for her book, The Art of Pacing,landed so close to home. She says messaging most of us absorb about effort comes can be separated into two camps, and says neither one is healthy. One says go 110%, lean in as hard as you possibly can. The other says quiet quit, or lie flat, an actual movement during the pandemic, when people walked away from their jobs or took six months completely off.
Most of us aren’t in a position to lie flat, and a lot of us don’t want to be, but going 110% all the time isn’t healthy either. Svoboda says the entire range between those two poles is where the real work happens. “We need to get more comfortable at sort of ranging across the full pacing spectrum and making these more nuanced adjustments,” she told me. She argues that the skill worth building isn’t how to push yourself harder, but how to notice when you’re burning out, and make adjustments before it becomes a crisis.
Recognizing burnout
Sliding toward burnout can be gradual, but Svoboda says there are usually physical signs that something is off. Svoboda has one unmistakable sign that she’s heading toward burnout—after a long stretch of stress without enough time to recharge, she starts bolting upright in bed at 4 or 4:30am, heart rate at 90 to 100 beats a minute, unable to settle back down enough to fall asleep again.
If you’re waking up with that amount of adrenaline, it’s worth understanding what’s actually pulling you out of sleep before it becomes routine. Researchers explained to her that when your baseline stress is already more than your system can handle, the normal morning rise in cortisol, your main stress hormone, piles on top of it and tips you into overdrive.
If you wear a tracker, you may also notice changes in heart rate variability, the small variation in timing between heartbeats. A higher range means your nervous system is in a more relaxed, rest-and-digest state. “When you notice that your heart rate variability is trending downward over a period of several days or a week or two weeks, to me, that is really a signal that I need to think about pulling back,” she said. In other words, HRV has to be observed over time to see a pattern worth paying attention to.
The motivational signals deserve even more respect than the physical ones. If you’re in a field you chose and a job you once loved, but you can’t find the energy to get through the day, that’s a moment for honest self-evaluation. This is what scientists call languishing, that plodding, running-on-empty state where you force yourself through 20 things on your to-do list and count down the hours until you can rest.
For people who work with their minds rather than their bodies, languishing can go on for years, even though Svoboda says your “tanks are just as empty as the athlete that just ran a marathon.”
Athletes are a good example because they are forced to pace themselves to perform in game after game. The rest of us default to boom and bust cycles. We procrastinate, shift into superhuman mode for 24 hours, then feel depleted for days.
If all of this sounds a little familiar, it’s worth taking some steps to prevent burnout. Here are some tools Svoboda uses to bring people (including herself) back from the brink.
1.
Align your hardest work with your energy peaks
We all have natural stretches of alertness and fatigue across a 24-hour cycle. They vary from person to person—think of the early birds versus night owls in your life—and Svoboda recommends taking advantage of that cycle.
She schedules her most demanding writing between roughly 10am and noon, and says she regularly blows past the word-count goals she sets for herself in that window. When she attempts the identical task at 1 or 1:30pm, she says every second of it feels “wading through the muck.”
Fnd your own version of that window, and plan your day around it. Carve out time in your most alert window to tackle your most complex, demanding tasks.
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2.
Take intentional breaks
Taking small breaks within your work blocks is a good way to reset your brain. Research shows breaks are most restorative when they’re completely unrelated to what you do on the clock.
So if you’re at a desk, get up and move. Don’t spend it scrolling.
3.
Build recovery into your performance plan, not around it
Recovery has become a component of performance rather than a reward for it, which is a good thing. But too many people still think of recovery as sitting on the couch with Cheetos and Netflix.
Recovery should be structured and intentional, whether you’re a world-class athlete or a high performer at a desk. Svoboda spent time with high-performers to see how they structure their days, and runner Ajeé Wilson, an 800-meter specialist, is a case study when it comes to peak recovery.
When Svoboda asked what she does after her workout and lunch, Wilson said she spends about two hours napping to let her body and mind completely relax. This means a world champion gives herself more daily recovery time than most of us allow ourselves in a week.
Olympic coaches echoed this, saying intense effort isn’t a bad thing, but almost nobody matches it with intense recovery. In your daily life, recognize that a big presentation or test is a strain beyond your normal load, and take the next day or two to rest.
4.
Try “rigid flexibility”
Wilson’s own framework was my favorite concept from our entire conversation, because you don’t have to lower your standards to use it. Wilson has identified non-negotiables. For example, when she’s preparing for a major meet, she must get a two-and-a-half-hour practice in. She’s rattled if practice starts at 10:15 or 10:30 instead of 10, but everything around it is flexible.
Svoboda calls this rigid flexibility. You are rigid about the tasks that needs to get done, but flexible about what happens around them. Svoboda thinks of her own non-negotiables as beads on a wire—they always get done, but she can slide them around.
5.
Reset your nervous system with resonant breathing
Svoboda’s favorite day-to-day pacing tactic is a technique called modulation: breathing at your personal resonant pace, which for most people falls between four and six breaths per minute. At that pace, the natural swing between your heart rate is at its widest, speeding up on the inhale and slowing on the exhale, which research shows is the most calming to your central nervous system.
To find yours, Svoboda suggests trying guided breathing tracks on YouTube at slightly different rates—5 breaths per minute, 5.2, 5.4—and settling on whichever feels comfortable. You shouldn’t feel you’re neither breathing too slowly nor racing to keep up. Getting familiar with your breathing pattern this way pays off well beyond a single session.
Svoboda tested her resonant pace with psychiatrist Joe Arpaia, who clipped a heart rate monitor on her finger and guided her through five minutes of resonant breathing. She watched her heart rate tracings go from jagged to smooth. Afterward, Arpaia told her that pushing an IV sedative into her arm probably wouldn’t have relaxed her that fast.
Svoboda’s recommends sticking with the breathing for two to five minutes. If you only do it for 20 to 30 seconds, you won’t feel the shift.
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6.
Run the Maslach Burnout Inventory on yourself
If you’re not sure how close to the edge you are, get a more objective read. Svoboda points to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, a self-test of about 20 questions you can find with a quick Google search, which rates how close you are to burnout, or whether you’re already in it.
A surprising result can be the thing that finally prompts a pace shift, whether that means getting serious about restorative practices or planning a real stretch of time off.
The takeaway
Pacing is a question you keep asking, not a system you install once when you’re in crisis. Svoboda learned the simplest version of it from a coach who was formerly an Olympic athlete: “What is the next wise choice here given that I am checking in with myself and this is how I’m feeling?”
Some days the honest answer is to push. Other days it’s to call your best friend, vent for 15 minutes, and reassess from there. Start asking the question before you hit the wall, and you’ll spend far less of your life recovering from it.
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