We Called It Burnout. We Were Half Right.

It's 2am and my brain won't stop. 

Today was fine, more than fine if I'm objective. I checked things off my list, showed up, and did the things a person who has it together does. And yet here I am, wide awake, running through tomorrow's list, replaying a conversation, and wondering what else I could be doing better, faster, more. 

If this sounds familiar, then you probably know the second part to this 2am conversation: the shame-filled questions like: how did I end up like this? I'm doing everything right. 

I’ve heard so much about burnout, heck I coach around it often. How to spot it, how to avoid it, how to recover from it, so landing here feels like a personal failure. I should have known better. 

That darn “s” word, should. Worse than the actual “s” word we weren’t allowed to say as kids. 

But in the daylight of a 2PM conversation, I rationally remind myself that I’m not broken. And neither are you. And what we’re experiencing might not be what we think it is. 

We've been calling it burnout, and that's not wrong exactly.

But I think it's only half the story. Misalignment, in my experience, is burnout’s wing-person. I’m not sure who introduces whom, but where you find one, the other isn’t far away. 

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that isn’t caused by doing too much. It comes from doing a lot of things that aren't really yours. Good things. Worthy things. Things you can absolutely do (and likely do well) but that don't connect to what you actually want your life to look like.  

We're so socialized to fill our plates with valuable, impressive, useful things that we rarely stop to ask which of them we actually want to do. 

Every action we take is a vote for the person we want to become.

— James Clear

James Clear says every action we take is a vote for the person we want to become. I think about that a lot. Because I don't think most of us are voting carelessly. I think we're voting constantly, frantically, for all the right-looking things.  

But do we know who we're actually trying to become? 

That's what's keeping me up at 2am. A life full of good things that don't quite add up to my life. 

It’s not the first time I’ve felt this particular type of exhaustion. 

I stayed in a marriage for years before I was honest with myself about the fact that it was misaligned from the start. I've carried friendships longer than they served either of us. I've taken roles that looked right on paper but haunted me often with the Sunday Scaries. 

And then I got fired from my ‘made it’ job. You know, that job that finally makes you feel like you’ve made it, professionally. 

In the moment, it was the worst thing that had happened to me professionally. In hindsight, it was the best. Because getting fired was the thing I needed but didn't have the courage to do myself. It forced the conversation about alignment that I'd been quietly avoiding.  

Being fired gave me the opportunity to stop filling my life with things I could do and start asking what I actually wanted to build. 

The path forward was uncertain, but not once did Sunday seem scary. Uncomfortable sure. But there’s a difference between the friction of growth and the drain of misalignment. 

What I've learned, and what drives everything Sofia and I are building at The Lift Collective, is that misalignment rarely announces itself as misalignment. We call it stress. We call it burnout. We call it needing a vacation. It shows up as low-grade dread on Sunday evenings. As 2am brain. As the quiet sense that something's off, even when everything looks fine. 

A sense I refused to consider in my "made it" job. Because who would I be, if I admitted that the job I'd been working towards for years wasn't actually where I was supposed to be? 

We reach for the word burnout because it's the language we have, but sometimes what we're experiencing is our life asking us to pay closer attention. 

So, we try and fix the friction, rather than use it as a signal. 

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Sofia and I built The Lift Collective on a simple belief: that the people doing the most good in the world do it better when they're supported to elevate what actually matters, in their work, their leadership, and their life.  

Our first program, Your Alignment Edge, lives right in the heart of everything this blog is about. It's for the high achiever who is tired but can't quite name why. The one who suspects the problem isn't effort or capability, but something quieter and harder to name.

Over four weeks, we work together in community and through individual coaching to get underneath the noise and figure out what's actually yours to carry. 

Our 2am brains aren’t broken. They’re just waiting for us to listen. Really listen.

 

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Your Alignment Edge runs May 5–26, 2026. Four Tuesday sessions, 3:00–4:30 PM PT/4:00 - 5:30 PM MT. Small cohort, live sessions, individual coaching included. Early bird pricing available. Find out more: email Tiffany@Your-Edge.ca