I used to wake up at 5:30 every morning. The first thing I did was make coffee. I drank so much of it that I started calling it "a bucket", and then caught the bus to the hospital where I worked. I arrived already restless, mentally running through every problem that had come up overnight.
During the day, I only stopped to refill my cup. Lunch breaks were for reading case articles. By late afternoon I was on the bus home, and by the time I walked through the door I had nothing left. Just enough energy to eat something and sleep.
The people around me had no idea, and I made sure of that. When anxiety started creeping in, I finally looked for help and found a therapist. But I wasn't looking for rest, or perspective, or even to understand what was happening to me. I wanted a way to keep going, to fix whatever was breaking so I could stay productive. At the time, that logic seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
But the bucket of coffee was slowly becoming insufficient, and switching to two buckets only gave me gastritis. The therapy that had initially helped wasn't enough anymore either.
What was happening to me was not unusual. Healthcare workers have always been among the most vulnerable to burnout, and the numbers behind that vulnerability are not subtle. According to the World Health Organization, overwork caused 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016 alone. Not burnout as a vague feeling of exhaustion, but actual deaths from working too much.
My body was sending the same message in smaller doses.
The Forced Stop
The pandemic made everything worse for most people. But for some of us, myself included, it created something unexpected: the first real pause in years. I suddenly had time, not productive time, not optimized time, just time. And for the first time in a long while, I had to sit with the life I had built.
What I saw was not encouraging. I had been earning money I had no energy to enjoy, working myself toward a diagnosis I had been ignoring, and calling all of it discipline. Going back to that routine felt less like a choice and more like a slow way to die. So I decided not to.
One More Statistic
This is not a story told for sympathy. I am using my own experience because it is the one I know best, and because it is far from unique. Forced productivity was going to make me, sooner rather than later, completely unproductive.
The system would have moved on without me, hiring someone else to fill my role while I became part of the statistics we now find alarming: stress and mental health related leaves increased by 33% in 2023, with women accounting for 69% of those absences.
I was already on that path. The difference is that a pandemic, a gastritis diagnosis, and a great deal of involuntary stillness forced me to step off it before it was too late.