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How to Prevent Burnout in a Busy Season
September always brings a lot, and for most of us, October doesn't bring much relief. The rushed mornings, drop-offs and pickups, and extracurriculars have settled in. Teachers are a month into a new classroom, and students are into the first real wave of deadlines. The start-of-season energy has worn off, but the pace hasn't slowed.
I’m not a parent, student, or teacher, but fall is always a busy season in private practice as well. Things start to feel full very quickly, and that fullness doesn't really let up until the holidays.
That's fall for a lot of us: the demands go up, but the hours in a day stay the same. While you can't do much about that, you can take a look at what you're still expecting of yourself through it all, which is usually more than any one person can reasonably do.
Your schedule changed, but your expectations didn’t
Most people walk into a busy season holding the same standards they held during a slower one. Same workout routine, same tidiness, same response times. Same assumptions of what a person who ‘has it all together’ manages in a day.
Your capacity goes down, but the bar stays exactly where it was. And sometimes we actually raise the bar. September often has a fresh-start feeling to it, and a lot of people treat it as the moment to finally get into all the goals they've been putting off. There's nothing wrong with that. But taking on a bunch of new, ambitious goals all at once, right when life is at its busiest, is often how an already full season gets fuller.
That distance between standards and capacity is where the pressure builds, and it often matters more than how much is actually on your plate. Burnout, clinically, shows up as emotional exhaustion, a growing detachment from things you used to care about, and a sense that nothing you do makes a difference. It builds slowly, under sustained demand, in people who keep meeting the demand. Which is to say it tends to find the people who look like they're managing well and never drop the ball.
The good news is that you don't have to wait for the season to end to feel some relief. It starts with getting honest about how much you can actually carry right now without it costing you your well-being.
Start by naming what's actually on your plate
Before you decide what to cut, you need to see the whole thing. Most people never really do, because they're too busy getting through the day to stop and look at it.
And I want to name something: sitting down to map out everything you're carrying can feel like one more thing on an already long to-do list, but it's worth the time. It's what makes real, lasting change possible, instead of another round of pushing through until the season ends. A small investment of time and energy now ends up saving you a lot more of both later.
It's easy to only count the things that feel ‘official’, like paid work. But the rest of it takes up real space too:
Work. The specific things: the extra project you took on in March, the meetings you run, the person you're covering for.
Home and family. Meals, laundry, drives, and the endless little logistics that no one notices until they don't get done.
Care and admin. Appointments, forms, insurance, aging parents, the mental load of holding everyone's schedule in your head.
Commitments to others. The committee, the volunteering, the favours, the book club you're the organizer of.
The standards you hold yourself to. How the house looks before someone comes over, how quickly you reply, what you think a good parent, partner, friend, or employee does.
That last one is usually the heaviest, and the one we're least likely to question.
Not everything you’re juggling is glass
Here's something I tell my clients a lot: when there are too many balls in the air, remember that some of them are glass and some of them are plastic. The glass ones need both hands. The plastic ones bounce, and you can pick them up in a quieter period.
The catch is that in the middle of a hard season, everything feels like glass, so you need a way to tell them apart.
Four questions:
Is this a matter of safety? Does something genuinely unsafe happen if it doesn't get done?
Is this a matter of daily functioning? Does the day stop working without it? Do people eat, get where they need to go, have clean clothes?
Is this a matter of your well-being? Is this one of the few things actually keeping you upright, like sleep, food, movement, or the people who fill you back up?
Is this a matter of your core values? This one's the trickiest, because we can't live out all of our values equally at once. Some will take priority over others depending on the season you're in. It's also easy to mistake a standard for a value. Being a good friend is a value; hosting a perfect dinner is a standard. But if not doing something would genuinely feel like going against what matters most to you, it may be worth keeping.
And for anything work-related, one more:
Is this connected to the core responsibilities of your job?
For a lot of high-achievers, the honest answer is that a good chunk of their work list isn't. It's the committee you joined three years ago, the thing you're good at so it keeps landing on your desk, the little extra tasks that have added up to a lot of weight.
One clarification, because this can be where people get stuck: important and glass are not the same thing. Plenty of genuinely good, worthwhile things on your list may be plastic this season. Being plastic doesn't mean it needs to leave your life entirely. It means it can wait, and it will still be there when you're ready to pick it back up.
Four things you can do with the rest
Once you can see what's on your plate, you can sort it in two steps.
Step one: Does this actually need to happen?
Run each item through the glass questions above: safety, daily functioning, well-being, values, and core job responsibilities. Then you've got two options:
Pause it
If it doesn't need to happen right now (meaning the answer to all those questions is ‘no’), set it down. A surprising amount of what we carry was never required in the first place. We picked it up somewhere along the way and never questioned it.
Lower the bar
If it does need to happen, ask whether it needs to happen at the standard you're holding. Would it be fine at 70%? Done quickly, store-bought, or imperfectly?
This is where people tend to fall into all-or-nothing, and this pattern can really throw us off. Can't meal prep from scratch this week, so lunches get skipped. No time for the gym, so the walk doesn't happen either. Can't reply properly, so you don't reply at all. Try to notice and name this pattern if it comes up, and see if you can find a realistic middle ground.
Step two: Does all of this need to be you?
For whatever's left, the things that really do need to happen and can't be scaled down, there are two options:
Share it
Could any part of this be someone else's, even imperfectly?
Not necessarily the whole task. It could be any part of it. The Wednesday pickup, the half of the list you don't have to be the one to remember. The groceries, bought by someone who won't pick the same brands.
Imperfectly is key in that question. Most things stay on one person's plate not because nobody else could do them, but because nobody else would do them the same way. If you're going to hand something over and then redo it, you haven't shared it, you've added a step.
Sharing doesn't have to mean asking someone in your life, either. Paying for support is another great option. Ordering from a meal service, booking a cleaner once a month, or having a babysitter help out on a few busy mornings are all ways of taking something off your plate. If it's within your budget, I'd argue that trading money for time and energy is one of the better things you can spend it on.
And if the honest answer is that there's nobody to share it with, and paid help isn't an option, which is true for a lot of people, go back to step one. Pausing and lowering the bar are still available.
Keep as is
If it truly needs to happen, at this level, and it needs to be you, it stays. Notice this isn't a judgment call about what's important. It's what's left after you've sorted everything else, and it's usually a much shorter list than people expect.
Why this is harder than it sounds
If it were only a scheduling problem, you'd have solved it already.
For most people, the reluctance to lower any of it is protective. Holding a high standard has worked before. It's been the thing that kept you safe, or approved of, or ahead of criticism. Some part of you knows that and is understandably reluctant to see what happens without it.
One way through it is to try it in low-stakes situations and gather evidence. Order the pizza and leave the house a bit messy when you'd normally be the ‘perfect’ host, and see whether anyone actually cares. In my experience, the people who belong in your life do not notice the state of your kitchen or the simple meal.
Where to start
Pick one thing this week and lower the bar on it. Not five - just one.
If you want to do the whole sort properly, I made a free worksheet for exactly this. It walks you through getting everything out of your head and onto paper, sorting each item through the two steps, and seeing what's actually left. It takes about twenty minutes and most people are surprised by how little survives step one.
And if you notice that the thought of lowering the bar or asking for help brings up too much anxiety to navigate alone, it may be worth seeking support. This is exactly the kind of thing therapy can help with: getting to know the part of you that's working so hard to hold it all together, and what it might need to ease up.
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