5 Tips For Reversing Your 2025 Burnout

To live in the year 2025 is to be constantly nearing a state of burnout. Maybe you’re trying to make money in a collapsing economy, or trying to maintain relationships when political divisions run deeper than ever. Maybe you’re balancing health concerns, exercise routines, and mounting student loans while wondering if your own kids will ever afford college. Meanwhile, your phone buzzes relentlessly with texts, notifications, emails, and memes. It’s simply too much!

As Sarah Ann Macklin, the host of Live Well, Be Well, explains it, burnout happens when you’ve been overloading yourself so much that “you have to physically stop” whatever you’re doing, because “your body just wants to sleep and it wants to rest.”

Macklin came on Treated With Dr. Sara to discuss how you can use self-compassion to fight that feeling. Here are her top tips on how to deal with burnout and coach your body back into a place where it’s ready to function again.

1. Use physical calming exercises to break the burnout cycle.

When those moments of overload come, Macklin says, it’s best to literally take a moment to physically connect with yourself. “Put your hand on your heart and breathe,” she suggests. “Ask yourself what you need. That’s so powerful. And your body will tell you. That’s the best way you can communicate health to yourself.”

Macklin suggests focusing on “feeling the temperature of your hand, feeling the weight of your hand, slowing down your breath, and closing your eyes. Feeling that sensation helps us get out of the cognitive override that keeps putting us into survival mode.”

2. Find your own body’s needs instead of following trends.

Despite what you see on the internet, there is no universal approach for living well. The 6 a.m. SoulCycle class that energizes one person might drive another to burnout. 

“The biggest compassionate way to look at health is that you fluctuate. There is not one solution,” says Macklin.

“I used to be the girl that got up and did a SoulCycle at six. And I’m not a morning person.” She fell victim to the myth that high performance requires conforming to a particular lifestyle. “I would do everything at super high intensity and my body was screaming,” she says, “But I would shut it off because I thought, ‘No, this is the one way to go.’”

Eventually she realized that the pressure wasn’t helping her feel healthy. “My body was actually storing more food because it was in survival mode,” she explains. “I was also going through moments of feeling dizzy and lightheaded because the cortisol was making everything more ‘brain foggy.’ I never had a moment where I connected to my body for what I actually really needed.”

She had to completely recalibrate what was optimal for her. “I love yoga, I love pilates, I try to walk everywhere. But my mornings are now more about nourishment, as opposed to punishment, which is what I was doing. My body feels the most nourished and the most powerful and the most high performing when I actually get a good sleep and I wake up naturally at quarter past seven.”

“The biggest health message,” explains Macklin, is that “there’s not one perfect way to be. The perfect way to be is whatever your body is crying out for right now.”

3. Circumstances will change—but you can adapt.

Sometimes, of course, you don’t have the option to do what’s optimal for your health. When a new mom called Treated asking how to practice self-care when it was literally impossible to get a full night’s sleep, Macklin offered realistic advice. 

“It might be that you’re only still going to get two hours worth of sleep for the next three months,” Sarah acknowledges. That’s really hard, but it’s out of her control. “How are we going to cope with all the other things that you can do to support yourself?” If one form of self-care isn’t available to you, focus on the ones that are, she suggests. For example, “Make sure that you’ve got enough nourishing food every week in your fridge that you can grab things really quickly.”

4. Be your own biggest supporter.

Self-compassion is your best tool for fighting burnout, says Macklin. And the key to self-compassion is self-kindness. 

It’s easier said than done, though. “We’re evolutionarily wired to be more self-critical than self-compassionate,” she explains. “And we are not ever taught to accept ourselves and love ourselves. We’re always told to be better and improve and be nice to other people, but we’re very, very rarely taught how to do that to ourselves. So for me, self compassion is all about being self kind.”

Treat yourself like you would a friend or loved one, she suggests. “When you make a mistake, you reflect on it, similarly to when a friend would come to you and say, ‘I fucked up and I’ve done this.’  And you probably go, ‘Yeah, you did. You did fuck up.’” But you don’t berate friends for their mistakes—and you shouldn’t do that to yourself either.

5. Don’t be negative about your negativity.

Remember, these tips are here to help you feel better, not worse. “What I don’t want is for people to become so worried and panicked about how much they’re talking to themselves negatively that they lose the whole concept of the importance of self compassion,” Macklin says.

“You’re going to get it wrong. That’s the common humanity part. And so much about self kindness is having that forgiveness with yourself.”

 For more wellness tips and practical burnout recovery strategies, check out Treated With Dr. Sara.